Physics Colloquium: Deuterium, the First Element in the Universe
Main content
Consisting of a proton and a neutron, deuterium is the first element in the Universe to form and thereby the most important. I will discuss how the tiny fraction of deuterium that is left over from the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis can tell us about the conditions when it formed. I will also demonstrate two new high-precision measurements of the deuterium abundance in high-redshift gas clouds. The increased precision calls for improved theoretical nucleosynthesis predictions. For that I present an updated version of the public AlterBBN code including new reactions, updated rates, and the possibility of adding new physics such as dark matter.
About the Speaker
Signe Riemer-Sørensen is a postdoc at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. She obtained her PhD on "X-ray characterisation of dark matter" from the Dark Cosmology Centre in Copenhagen in 2009. Later she held a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark to measure neutrino masses using the WiggleZ Galaxy Survey while being a postdoc at University of Queensland, Australia. Her research interests range from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis to late time chemical evolution of galaxies, but always with some connection to dark matter or neutrinos.
