Photodisintegration at High Temperature

Abstract

The conventional method of calculating rates for photodisintegration reactions treats the photon as a classical particle and therefore is missing a correction due to the quantum statistics of the photon energy distribution. Here we show that the correction is important for those reactions in which a loosely bound particle is photo-ejected from a nucleus. We also show that the correction always speeds up the photodisintegration. For illustration, we examine those photodisintegration reactions which are relevant to big bang nucleosynthesis. We find that at temperatures kT similar to 1-0.5 MeV, some reaction rates are slightly modified but there is little effect on the final calculated primordial abundances.