Thirty years of primordial deuterium abundances: A provenance-aware statistical reanalysis
Abstract
(ABRIDGED:) Primordial deuterium provides one of the most precise observational tests of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, yet the published literature is built on a comparatively small number of high-redshift absorption systems. We construct a provenance-aware database of 957 published primordial-D/H values from 247 publications spanning 1994--2026 and trace observational entries, wherever possible, to their underlying physical absorbers. Of the 795 observational entries, 80.1 percent represent reused individual or compilation values; only 11.4 percent correspond to new determinations of individual absorption systems. Although 52 distinct absorbers are identified overall, the eight most frequently represented systems account for 62.0 percent of all identifiable absorber mentions. An inverse Herfindahl--Hirschman measure applied to our full database gives an effective representation equivalent to only 16.28 equally represented absorbers, demonstrating that the published literature is strongly concentrated around a much smaller effective subset. Despite this strong internal dependence, the modern consensus value of 105(D/H)≃2.5 is robust to alternative absorber-level treatments and survives removal of the eight dominant systems. However, the apparent precision of literature-level compilations is more sensitive to repeated representation than a simple count of published values implies. We also identify a synchronised transition in the compilation literature around 2013--2014, associated with increasingly selective and homogeneous analyses while older individual values continued to circulate. The modern D/H consensus is therefore robust in central value, but the underlying literature is less statistically independent than its publication density suggests. This thus highlights the importance of provenance-aware analysis in precision cosmology.
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BibTeX
@misc{grijs2026thirty,
title = {{Thirty years of primordial deuterium abundances: A provenance-aware statistical reanalysis}},
author = {Richard de Grijs and Giuseppe Bono},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.02289},
eprint = {2611.02289},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02289},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Thirty years of primordial deuterium abundances: A provenance-aware statistical reanalysis
AU - Richard de Grijs
AU - Giuseppe Bono
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.02289
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.02289
AB - (ABRIDGED:) Primordial deuterium provides one of the most precise observational tests of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, yet the published literature is built on a comparatively small number of high-redshift absorption systems. We construct a provenance-aware database of 957 published primordial-D/H values from 247 publications spanning 1994--2026 and trace observational entries, wherever possible, to their underlying physical absorbers. Of the 795 observational entries, 80.1 percent represent reused individual or compilation values; only 11.4 percent correspond to new determinations of individual absorption systems. Although 52 distinct absorbers are identified overall, the eight most frequently represented systems account for 62.0 percent of all identifiable absorber mentions. An inverse Herfindahl--Hirschman measure applied to our full database gives an effective representation equivalent to only 16.28 equally represented absorbers, demonstrating that the published literature is strongly concentrated around a much smaller effective subset. Despite this strong internal dependence, the modern consensus value of 10^5(D/H)≃2.5 is robust to alternative absorber-level treatments and survives removal of the eight dominant systems. However, the apparent precision of literature-level compilations is more sensitive to repeated representation than a simple count of published values implies. We also identify a synchronised transition in the compilation literature around 2013--2014, associated with increasingly selective and homogeneous analyses while older individual values continued to circulate. The modern D/H consensus is therefore robust in central value, but the underlying literature is less statistically independent than its publication density suggests. This thus highlights the importance of provenance-aware analysis in precision cosmology.
ER -