Speaker
Description
In this talk I will discuss the dependence of the primordial nuclear abundances as a function of fundamental physical constants like the electromagnetic fine-structure constant $\alpha$ and the Higgs VEV $v$. We updated the leading nuclear reaction rates and used more recent results for the electromagnetic and strong contribution to the neutron-proton mass difference. For the $\alpha$-dependence of the light element primordial abundances we included the temperature-dependence of the leading nuclear reactions rates and assessed the systematic uncertainties by using four different publicly available codes for Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). I will present bounds on the $\alpha$-variation that we derived from comparing our results to measurements.
The Higgs VEV variation was studied using the newly published PRyMordial code. I will explain how we improved existing methods to treat a possible variation of the Higgs VEV in BBN and derive new (stricter) constraints.
Finally, I will give an outlook on work in progress, e.g. computing dd reaction rates within the nuclear lattice effective field theory (NLEFT) framework.
