Next Contents Previous

4. CONFRONTATION OF THEORETICAL PREDICTIONS WITH OBSERVATIONAL DATA

As the discussion in the previous section should have made clear, the attempts to use a variety of observational data to infer the BBN abundances of the light nuclides is fraught with evolutionary uncertainties and dominated by systematic errors. It may be folly to represent such data by a "best" value along with normally distributed errors. Nonetheless, in the absence of a better alternative, this is what will be done in the following.

As discussed earlier, the stellar and Galactic chemical evolution uncertainties afflicting 3He are so large as to render the use of 3He to probe or test BBN problematic; therefore, I will ignore 3He in the subsequent discussion. There are a variety of equally valid approaches to using D, 4He, and 7Li to test and constrain the standard models of cosmology and particle physics (SBBN). In the approach adopted here deuterium will be used to constrain the baryon density (eta or, equivalently, OmegaB h2). Within SBBN, this leads to predictions of YP and [Li]P. Indeed, once the primordial deuterium abundance is chosen, eta may be eliminated and both YP and [Li]P predicted directly, thereby testing the consistency of SBBN.

Next Contents Previous