Speaker
Description
I’ll discuss an Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach to the deuterium burning nuclear processes that are responsible for the primordial deuterium produced during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. The EFT approach accurately describes low energy physics below the size of the nuclei, and makes manifest structural features and relationships between observables. It allows for estimates of theoretical uncertainties due to the EFT truncation via power counting, with its parameters calibrated from a mixture of experimental data and nuclear theory calculations. It is constructed using on-shell amplitude methods which identify all tree-level interaction structures, including factorized pieces and higher order boundary terms without need for an explicit Lagrangian. The success of the methodology suggests that amplitude-constructed EFTs are a useful tool to describe low energy nuclear reactions.