Hadronic Decay of Late-Decaying Particles and Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis

Abstract

We study the big-bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) scenario with late-decaying exotic particles with lifetime longer than $\sim 1$ sec. With a late-decaying particle in the early universe, predictions of the standard BBN scenario can be significantly altered. Therefore, we derive constraints on its primordial abundance. We pay particular attention to hadronic decay modes of such particles. We see that the non-thermal production process of D, ${}^3\mathrm{He}$ and ${}^6\mathrm{Li}$ provides a stringent upper bound on the primordial abundance oflate-decaying particles with hadronic branching ratio.

Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures. We corrected the ionization energy-loss rate. As a result, the constraint on Li6 becomes milder by a factor of O(10)