Matter temperature after cosmological recombination
Douglas Scott, Adam Moss
TL;DR
This paper investigates the cooling of atomic matter after cosmological recombination, highlighting how the matter temperature decouples from the Cosmic Background radiation and the role of Compton coupling in modeling this process.
Contribution
It introduces a numerical method using the derivative of the Compton coupling equation to accurately follow the matter-radiation decoupling process.
Findings
Matter cools faster than radiation after decoupling
Without feedback, matter would be around 20mK today
The derivative approach improves modeling of decoupling
Abstract
The temperature of the atomic matter in the Universe is held to that of the Cosmic Background radiation until decoupling at z~100. After this it cools faster than the radiation (\propto(1+z)^2 rather than (1+z)) and would have fallen to about 20mK today if astrophysical feedback processes had not heated up the interglactic medium. We show how the derivative of the Compton coupling equation helps numerically to follow the decoupling process.
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