Resonance Excitations in Be 7 (d,p) Be∗ 8 to Address the Cosmological Lithium Problem

6 pags., 5 figs., 3 tabs.The anomaly in lithium abundance is a well-known unresolved problem in nuclear astrophysics. A recent revisit to the problem tried the avenue of resonance enhancement to account for the primordial Li7 abundance in standard big-bang nucleosynthesis. Prior measurements of the Be7(d,p)Be∗8 reaction could not account for the individual contributions of the different excited states involved, particularly at higher energies close to the Q value of the reaction. We carried out an experiment at HIE-ISOLDE, CERN to study this reaction at Ec.m.=7.8 MeV, populating excitations up to 22 MeV in Be8 for the first time. The angular distributions of the several excited states have been measured and the contributions of the higher excited states in the total cross section at the relevant big-bang energies were obtained by extrapolation to the Gamow window using the talys code. The results show that by including the contribution of the 16.63 MeV state, the maximum value of the total S factor inside the Gamow window comes out to be 167 MeV b as compared to earlier estimate of 100 MeV b. However, this still does not account for the lithium discrepancy.D. G. acknowledges research funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 654002 (ENSAR2) and ISRO, Government of India under Grant No. ISRO/RES/2/378/ 15–16. O. T. would like to acknowledge the support by the Spanish Funding Agency (AEI/FEDER, EU) under the project PID2019–104390GB-I00. I. M. would like to acknowledge the support by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities of Spain (Grant No. PGC2018-095640-B-I00). J. C. acknowledges grants from the Swedish Research Council (VR) under Contracts No. VR-2017-00637 and No. VR-2017-03986 as well as grants from the Royal Physiographical Society. J. P. would like to acknowledge the support by Institute for Basic Science (IBS-R031-D1). S. S. acknowledges support by the Academy of Finland (Grant No. 307685)