# Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: Deuterium Production in the Early Universe

- Institution: CERN
- Department: Summer Student Lecture Programme General
- Speaker: Fatih Zgalj
- Year: 2025
- Language: English
- Source: [CERN](https://videos.cern.ch/record/3023275)
- Licence: [CERN](http://copyright.web.cern.ch)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

Through the concordance model of cosmology, it is possible to predict the primordial abundances of light elements within the framework of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). These predictions agree remarkably well with observations of the primordial abundances of helium-4 and deuterium. Specifically, the deuterium abundance is strongly sensitive to nuclear reaction rates, such as $\text{D}+\text{D}\rightarrow\, ^3\text{He}+n$ or $\text{D}+\text{D}\rightarrow\text{T}+p$. By understanding in what energy ranges more precise measurements of these rates are needed, we hope to improve our knowledge of these rates to allow stronger cosmological inferences to be made from deuterium observations. These in turn allow us to make important improvements in estimating cosmological parameters such as $N_\text{eff}$, the effective number of neutrino species..

0:00:00 Slide 1

0:02:09 Slide 2

0:03:29 Slide 3

0:05:38 Slide 4

0:07:06 Slide 5

0:08:08 Slide 6

0:10:27 Slide 7

## Lectures

1. [Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: Deuterium Production in the Early Universe](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/cern/3023275/914b2997aa77), 15 min (CERN's player)