Search for new resonant states in 10C and 11C and their impact on the cosmological lithium problem

Understand

The observed primordial 7Li abundance in metal-poor halo stars is found to be lower than its Big-Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) calculated value by a factor of approximately three.

• Some recent works suggested the possibility that this discrepancy originates from missing resonant reactions which would destroy the 7Be, parent of 7Li.
• The most promising candidate resonances which were found include a possibly missed 1- or 2- narrow state around 15 MeV in the compound nucleus 10C formed by 7Be+3He and a state close to 7.8 MeV in the compound nucleus 11C formed by 7Be+4He.
• In this work, we studied the high excitation energy region of 10C and the low excitation energy region in 11C via the reactions 10B(3He,t)10C and 11B(3He,t)11C, respectively, at the incident energy of 35 MeV.