The physics of the standard hot big bang cosmology ensures that the early Universe was a primordial nuclear reactor, synthesizing the light nuclides (D, 3 He, 4 He, and 7 Li) in the first 20 minutes of its evolution. After an overview of nucleosynthesis in the standard model (SBBN), the primordial abundance yields will be presented, followed by a status report (intended to stimulate further dis...

Using a functional formalism, we investigate the effect of radiative corrections on the possibility of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that in some models, in particular, massless gauge theories with scalar mesons, the radiative corrections can induce spontaneous symmetry breaking, even though the classical approximation indicates that the vacuum is symmetric. Among the consequences of t...