Deuterium Production in an Effective Field Theory Constructed from On-Shell Amplitudes

Abstract

We compute the deuterium-production reaction $n+p \to d+\gamma$ in an effective field theory whose degrees of freedom are the nuclear states themselves: the amplitude is assembled from on-shell three-point vertices, glued across its factorization channels, and completed by the contact terms consistent with the symmetries. The deuteron enters through the $d$-$n$-$p$ vertex, normalized to the measured asymptotic normalization coefficient. Rescattering of the nucleon pair is resummed dispersively, leaving two short-distance constants, an isovector magnetic and an electric dipole contact interaction. A joint Bayesian fit to the thermal capture measurements and the SLEGS photodisintegration data finds both of natural size and determines the thermonuclear rate to 0.22-0.24% across the nucleosynthesis window, including systematics spanning the defensible treatments of the SLEGS data and of the $P$-wave rescattering. Truncating the expansion is bounded separately at 0.12%, of which the next order of contact terms -- degenerate with the two fitted constants -- supplies 0.03%, for a total theory uncertainty of 0.25-0.27%. Propagated through a BBN network, the rate shifts the predicted primordial deuterium by -0.06% and cuts this reaction's contribution to the D/H uncertainty from 0.089% to 0.050%, retiring it from the primordial D/H error budget for practical purposes.