Reappraising the Spite Lithium Plateau Extremely Thin and Marginally Consistent with WMAP.pdf

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 0 4 0 9 3 8 3 v 1 1 5 S e p 2 0 0 4 Submitted to the The Astrophysical Journal Reappraising the Spite Lithium Plateau: Extremely Thin and Marginally Consistent with WMAP Jorge Mele?ndez1 and Iva?n Ram??rez2 ABSTRACT The lithium abundance in 62 halo dwarfs is determined from accurate equiv- alent widths reported in the literature and an improved infrared flux method (IRFM) temperature scale. The Li abundance of 41 plateau stars (those with Teff 6000 K) is found to be independent of temperature and metallicity, with a star-to-star scatter of only 0.06 dex over a broad range of temperatures (6000 K Teff 6800 K) and metallicities (?3.4 [Fe/H] ?1), thus imposing stringent constraints on depletion by mixing and production by Galactic chemi- cal evolution. We find a mean Li plateau abundance of ALi = 2.37 dex ( 7Li/H = 2.34 ×10?10), which, considering errors of the order of 0.1 dex in the absolute abundance scale, is just in borderline agreement with the constraints imposed by the theory of primordial nucleosynthesis and WMAP data (2.51 AWMAPLi 2.66 dex). Subject headings: cosmology: observations - stars: abundances - stars: Popula- tion II 1. Introduction The Li plateau was discovered by Spite Spite (1982), who showed that the 7Li abun- dance obtained from the Li doublet at 6708 A? in F and early G halo dwarfs is independent of temperature and metallicity, suggesting that the Li abundance determined in halo stars represents the primordial abundance from Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). The standard 1Department of Astronomy, Caltech, M/C 105-24, 1200 E. California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125; jorge@astro.caltech.edu 2Department of Astronomy, University of Texas at Austin, RLM 15.306, TX 78712-1083; ivan@astro.as.utexas.edu – 2 – theory of BBN predicts the abundance of light elements, in particular 7Li, as a function of the baryon-to-photon ratio η. Thus, if the plateau is primordial, an inverse analysis could be used to determine η (S