English

The Damping Tail of CMB Anisotropies

Astrophysics 2009-08-18 v1

Abstract

By decomposing the damping tail of CMB anisotropies into a series of transfer functions representing individual physical effects, we provide ingredients that will aid in the reconstruction of the cosmological model from small-scale CMB anisotropy data. We accurately calibrate the model-independent effects of diffusion and reionization damping which provide potentially the most robust information on the background cosmology. Removing these effects, we uncover model-dependent processes such as the acoustic peak modulation and gravitational enhancement that can help distinguish between alternate models of structure formation and provide windows into the evolution of fluctuations at various stages in their growth.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9609079,
  title  = {The Damping Tail of CMB Anisotropies},
  author = {Wayne Hu and Martin White},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9609079},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

24pgs, aaspp4, 10 figs. included; supporting material (e.g. color figures) at http://www.sns.ias.edu/~whu/pub.html