Papers › Updated BBN constraints on electromagnetic decays of MeV-scale particles
Updated BBN constraints on electromagnetic decays of MeV-scale particles
Paul Frederik Depta, Marco Hufnagel, Kai Schmidt-Hoberg
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
In this work, we revise and update model-independent constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis on MeV-scale particles ϕ which decay into photons and/or electron-positron pairs. We use the latest determinations of primordial abundances and extend the analysis in arXiv:1808.09324 by including all spin-statistical factors as well as inverse decays, significantly strengthening the resulting bounds in particular for small masses. For a very suppressed initial abundance of ϕ, these effects become ever more important and we find that even a pure 'freeze-in' abundance can be significantly constrained. In parallel to this article, we release the public code ACROPOLIS which numerically solves the reaction network necessary to evaluate the effect of photodisintegration on the final light element abundances. As an interesting application, we re-evaluate a possible solution of the lithium problem due to the photodisintegration of beryllium and find that e.g. an ALP produced via freeze-in can lead to a viable solution.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections