Weak Interaction Rate Coulomb Corrections in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
  We have applied a fully relativistic Coulomb wave correction to the weak
reactions in the full Kawano/Wagoner Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) code. We
have also added the zero temperature radiative correction. We find that using
this higher accuracy Coulomb correction results in good agreement with previous
work, giving only a modest 0.04 percent increase in helium mass fraction over
correction prescriptions applied previously in BBN calculations. We have
calculated the effect of these corrections on other light element abundance
yields in BBN and we have studied these yields as functions of electron
neutrino lepton number. This has allowed insights into the role of the Coulomb
correction in the setting of the neutron-to-proton ratio during the BBN epoch.
We find that the lepton capture processes' contributions to this ratio are only
second order in the Coulomb correction.
