Conditional Resonant Recirculation of ⁷Li Near the 441.4 keV Resonance: White Paper v4.4, A Conceptual Framework

This manuscript develops a narrowed framework for lithium depletion through the known 441.4 keV resonance in the reaction ⁷Li(p,α)2α. The secure result is not a claim of a completed solution, but a quantitative reduction of the problem to a transport threshold. While pure-target thick-target estimates provide a finite resonance yield, dilution into primordial hydrogen–helium plasma drives the one-pass astrophysical depletion probability to a negligibly small value. Consequently, any astrophysically relevant depletion through this channel must proceed through repeated effective resonance encounters, leading to a cumulative requirement of order N_eff ~ 10¹⁰. The principal contribution of this work is therefore the identification of the decisive bottleneck: the problem shifts from nuclear reaction availability, which is known, to transport sustainability in a driven nonequilibrium proton population. The paper does not claim that such recirculation occurred. It argues instead that the 441.4 keV channel remains conditionally viable if early magnetized primordial environments could sustain confinement, return, and re-energization strongly enough to maintain repeated access to the resonant window while preserving the broader successes of standard light-element abundances. This work is intended as a constraint framework that provides a quantitative benchmark for future plasma and cosmological transport modeling. Related work (conceptually parallel but microphysically distinct):Partin, W. T. (2026). Curvature-Driven Reconstruction: A Local GR/QFT Mechanism Study. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19101894