Abstract
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provides a remarkable window onto the early universe, revealing its composition and structure. In these lectures we review and discuss the physics underlying the main features of the CMB.
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Notes
- 1.
After these lectures were given, full-mission data was released in 2015 (Adam et al 2015), with final polarisation data still to come.
- 2.
If a species decouples from this thermal bath, but remains relativistic, it can contribute with a different temperature in the above equation. This is what happens for neutrinos. They decouple relativistically from the primordial soup, at T ≈ 1 MeV and their temperature today is expected to be (4∕11)1∕3 times that of the photons because photons are heated by e −-e + annihilation.
- 3.
The full cross-section describing the process e − +γ → e − +γ is given by the Klein-Nishina formula (Klein and Nishina 1929), which displays not only the dependence on the photon energy but also on its polarization and the scattering angle. Since the energies involved in the recombination process are much smaller than the electron mass, we can safely use Thomson cross-section.
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Acknowledgements
DW is grateful to the organisers of the second José Plínio Baptista school for their warm hospitality. The authors are grateful to Rob Crittenden for helpful comments. This work is supported by STFC grants ST/K00090/1 and ST/L005573/1.
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Wands, D., Piattella, O.F., Casarini, L. (2016). Physics of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. In: Fabris, J., Piattella, O., Rodrigues, D., Velten, H., Zimdahl, W. (eds) The Cosmic Microwave Background. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44769-8_1
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