Is it possible to reproduce BBN in the lab?

[alemsalem]

Do accelerators collide at energies high enough to reproduce the big bang nucleosynthesis, if they are producing quark-gluon plasmas shouldn't it be possible, or is the time too small for such a thing to happen?

 

[Vanadium 50]

Well, you can only have BBN during the Big Bang - by definition. However, one can see anti-nuclei form in collider experiments. You need anti-nuclei, because you can't tell if a nucleus was produced in the collision or was knocked off the detector. I think the biggest nuclei seen so far are tritons and He-3, although it's possible there is an anti-alpha result that I haven't heard of.

 

[bcrowell]

Interesting question. I think the energies are plenty high enough, but I don't think you get anything like thermodynamic equilibrium in an accelerator question, so you don't reproduce the same processes.

 

[evilcman]

There are similarities, and there are nuclei produced in heavy ion collisions from the recombination of nucleons, but the processes are still quite different. I think one way to
look at this is to think about interaction rates (number of interactions per second per
particle) compared to the expansion rate. If the expansion rate is higher than the
typical interaction rates there is just no way for thermal equilibrium to be true.
These rate ratios are quite different for the two cases.