Conditional Resonant Recirculation of 7Li Near the 441.4 keV Resonance: A Quantitative Bottleneck Framework for Post-BBN Lithium Depletion

This manuscript develops a quantitative bottleneck framework for post-BBN lithium depletion through the known 441. 4 keV resonance in the ⁷Li (p, ) 2 reaction. The central result is not a claim of a completed lithium solution, but a reduction of the problem to a transport threshold. While the resonance provides a real nuclear destruction channel, primordial dilution suppresses the one-pass astrophysical depletion probability to a negligible level. In the dilute rare-event regime, any astrophysically non-negligible depletion through this channel requires repeated effective resonance returns corresponding to an effective recurrence burden of order Nₑff ~ 10¹0. The work therefore reframes the limiting issue from reaction availability to transport sustainability in a driven nonequilibrium proton population. Its principal contribution is the explicit identification of this transport bottleneck and the associated recurrence benchmark as a baseline quantitative condition for future models of primordial plasma transport. Related companion work: Partin, W. T. (2026). Curvature-Driven Reconstruction: A Local GR/QFT Mechanism Study. Zenodo. doi: 10. 5281/zenodo. 19101894. Version 5. 7: Minor revision including updated conceptual-source citation (White Paper v4. 4) and clarification of transport non-substitutability, failure conditions, and scope discipline. No changes to the core derivation or threshold result.