The Baryon Budget from BBN and the CBR

Abstract

A key pillar of modern cosmology, Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) offers a probe of the particle content and expansion rate of the Universe a mere few minutes after the beginning. When compared with the BBN predictions, the observationally inferred primordial abundances of deuterium and helium-4 provide an excellent baryometer and chronometer respectively. Several hundred thousand years later, when the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) photons began progagating freely, the spectrum of temperature fluctuations imprinted on them also encoded information about the baryon density and the expansion rate. Comparing the constraints imposed by BBN with those from the CBR reveals a consistent picture of the Universe at these two very widely separated epochs. Combining these probes leads to new, tighter constraints on the baryon density at present and on possible new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics.