TABLE OF CONTENTS H.Oberhummer 1 , A.Patk s 2 , T.Rauscher 3
1 Atominstitut of the Austrian Universities, University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
2 Department of Atomic Physics, E tv s Lor nd University, Budapest, Hungary
3 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
This chapter provides the necessary background from astrophysics, nuclear and particle physics to understand the cosmic origin of the chemical elements. It reflects the year 2002 state of the art in this extremely quickly developing interdisciplinary research direction. The discussion summarizes the nucleosynthetic processes in the course of the evolution of the Universe and the galaxies contained within, including primordial nucleosynthesis, stellar evolution, and explosive nucleosynthesis in single and binary systems.
Chemical elements are central for the existence of life and the richness and variety of our environment. Therefore, one of the basic questions concerns the origin of the chemical elements. The answer is complex because it relies on dynamical processes from elementary particles and nuclei to stars and galaxies. An interdisciplinary effort of various fields of science achieved considerable progress in this direction of research. The present review summarizes the state of knowledge obtained mainly from particle and nuclear physics, astrophysics and astronomy.
In Sections 2 and 3 we concentrate on the two most important information sources concerning the earliest history of the Universe, i.e. the cosmic microwave background radiation and the primordial synthesis of the nuclei of the lightest chemical elements. Our aim is to describe, in the simplest qualitative terms, the empirical facts...
