Experimental Study of the Key Reaction to the Nucleosynthesis in the Inhomogeneous Big Bang Models

Abstract

Inhomogeneous Big Bang models^1-4), which introduced inhomogeneities in baryon density in the quark-hadron phase transition, have succeeded in predicting synthesis of finite metallicity. Among the postulated dominant flow path³), which bypasses the A = 8 gap in the inhomogeneous models, the most unknown process is ⁸Li(α,n)^{1 1}B. An experiments) for this process was recently reported which used the reverse reaction ¹¹B(n,α)⁸Li. Some resonances were clearly observed, although crucial physical parameters such as total level widths and the spin-parities were not determined for the resonances. We have studied the property of these resonant states in ¹²B by using the direct reaction ⁹Be(α,p)¹²B.