PJC: Helen Meyer: "Big Bang Nucleosynthesis as a laboratory to constrain BSM physics"

Thursday 15 Jan 2026, 13:00 → 14:30 Europe/Rome

Sala Direzione INFN

Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) provides a fine laboratory for testing theories beyond the standard model. I present recent work on finding constraints on the variation of the strange quark condensate from BBN, using input from Nuclear Lattice Effective Field Theory (NLEFT). In order to match the precision set by experiment for primordial abundances, we need to further improve our theoretical understanding of BBN. The biggest source of uncertainty are the nuclear reaction rates, mainly for the deuteron-deuteron reactions. I motivate my on-going work of calculating these reaction rates in the ab-initio framework of NLEFT and present preliminary results.