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present in the early universe, they would start
to bind with positively charged beryllium-7
after the first 15 minutes. This bizarre bound
state tends to capture protons to make a
hybrid stau-boron-8 state that decays to
two helium-4 nuclei instead of lithium-7.
The presence of staus doesn’t just reduce
the abundance of lithium-7; it also boosts the
amount of lithium-6, Pospelov claims. Nearly
3 hours after the big bang, a fraction of
helium-4 nuclei would bind with the staus
to make a new state that can fuse tens of
thousands of times more efficiently with
deuterium to produce lithium-6 than
conventional helium-4. Asplund says a
particle physicist has even mentioned to him
that the lithium-6 observations “may be
the strongest empirical argument for
supersymmetry that exists today”.
But without hard and fast evidence for
supersymmetry, such models have failed to
win round the sceptics. “Mixing effects in
stars are inevitable, while the particle
physicists’ solutions are currently sheer
speculation,” says Korn.
We may not be in the dark for much longer.
“Arguing over whether the solution to the
lithium problem lies in particle physics or
astrophysics is moot,” says Jonathan Feng of
the University of California, Irvine. “We’ll
know the answer in a year.”
All eyes are now on the Large Hadron
Collider, which is nearing completion at the
CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva,
Switzerland. One of its main targets is to find
evidence of supersymmetry. Feng might be
overly optimistic about progress on this front,
given that gravitinos interact too weakly and
staus are too heavy to be created directly in the
LHC’s collisions. But by the time astronomers
have either confirmed or ruled out the crucial
lithium-6 results, cosmic history may already
have been rewritten in the lab. ●
Matthew Chalmers is a writer based in Bristol, UK
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www.newscientist.com/archive.ns

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