NUCLEAR-REACTIONS IN INHOMOGENEOUS COSMOLOGIES

This paper presents revised and additional nuclear reaction rates originally published in [G.R. Caughlan and W.A. Fowler, At. Data Nucl. Data Tables 40 (1988) 283; W.A. Fowler, Baryonic Dark Matter (Kluwer, Deventer, 1990) pp. 257-264]. Also presented are the reaction rates associated with these new reactions. The use of these rates may help remove the ambiguity of whether results reported by different groups are, to some extent, an artifact of the different reaction networks employed. It is stressed that many of these reactions play important roles in the nucleosynthesis, but their rates are poorly determined and thus deserve further experimental study. Using the reaction network of Malaney and Fowler supplemented by the reactions presented here, it is shown that the production of Be-9 in inhomogeneous models is strongly dependent on the density contrast R, and on the high-density volume fraction f(v). Consequently, observations of Be-9 in stars could lead to vital information on the value of these crucial, but poorly determined, parameters. It is concluded that Be-9 may be used as a possible indicator of inhomogeneity at the time of nucleosynthesis only for a certain range of f(v) R. For an OMEGA(b) = 1 universe the appropriate range would be f(v), R greater than or similar to 10. Omega(b) is the ratio of the universal baryon (b) density to the ''critical'' density between an open and closed universe which can be calculated from Hubble's constant (H0). For H0 = 58 km s-1 Mpc-1 the critical density now is 6.3 x 10(-30) g cm-3 [W.A. Fowler, Q. J. R. Astr. Soc. 28 (1987) 87].