Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 434, Issue 1, Pages 352-357Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stt1025
Keywords
cosmology: observations; cosmology: theory
Categories
Funding
- Canada Foundation for Innovation under Compute Canada
- Government of Ontario
- Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence
- University of Toronto
- DoE [SC-0008108]
- NASA [NNX12AE86G]
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Energy release in the early Universe leads to spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which in the future might allow probing different physical processes in the pre-recombination (z greater than or similar to 10(3)) epoch. Depending on the energy-injection history, the associated distortion partially thermalizes due to the combined action of Compton scattering, double Compton scattering and Bremsstrahlung emission, a problem that in general is hard to solve. Various analytic approximations describing the resulting distortion exist; however, for small distortions and fixed background, the cosmology Green's function of the problem can be pre-computed numerically. Here, we show that this approach gives very accurate results for a wide range of thermal histories, allowing fast and quasi-exact computation of the spectral distortion given the energy-release rate. Our method is thus useful for forecasts of possible constraints on early-universe physics obtained from future measurements of the CMB spectrum.
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