Speaker
Dr
Davide Trezzi
(Università degli Studi di Milano / INFN)
Description
The abundance of primordial light nuclei at the beginning of the Universe, during the so called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis era (BBN), can be estimated by means of Cosmology, Particle and Nuclear Physics. The first two give the environmental conditions and information about nucleons present at that time. The last one describes how those primordial nucleons fused themselves in order to produce the first light elements: helium, lithium and beryllium.
The measurement of the nuclear fusion cross sections at energies of interest for BBN are thus very important. These cross sections are generally very low (from pb to fb and even smaller) and often impossible to be measured at laboratories on the Earth’s surface due to the presence of cosmic rays. The only possibility is going deep underground where this kind of background is suppressed. Today, the only facility in the world able to do this is LUNA (Laboratory for Underground Nuclear Astrophysics), located in the LNGS (Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Italy) laboratory. Thanks to the background suppression provided by about 1400 meters of rock and to the high current 400 kV accelerator, LUNA is able to investigate cross sections at energies of astrophysical interest (< 400 keV in the lab system), giving us the unique possibility to reproduce reactions that, in the past, produced the primordial elements now visible in astrophysical environments such as metal poor stars. In this talk an overview on nuclear astrophysics and BBN will be given, focusing on the latest measurements obtained at LUNA.
Primary author
Dr
Davide Trezzi
(Università degli Studi di Milano / INFN)
