Stability of small-scale baryon perturbations during cosmological recombination

TL;DR

This study investigates the evolution of small-scale baryon perturbations during cosmological recombination, incorporating radiative transfer effects, and finds that the instability growth is negligible across relevant scales.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed radiative transfer model for photon transport during recombination, showing that the predicted instability growth is minimal.

Findings

Growth factor less than 1.2 at k ≈ 10^3 Mpc^{-1}

Instability growth is negligible due to short recombination duration

Radiative transfer significantly alters small-scale perturbation dynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we study small-scale fluctuations (baryon pressure sound waves) in the baryon fluid during recombination. In particular, we look at their evolution in the presence of relative velocities between baryons and photons on large scales ($k \sim 10^{-1} \ {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$), which are naturally present during the era of decoupling. Previous work concluded that the fluctuations grow due to an instability of sound waves in a recombining plasma, but that the growth factor is small for typical cosmological models. These analyses model recombination in an inhomogenous universe as a perturbation to the parameters of the homogenous solution. We show that for relevant wavenumbers $k\gtrsim 10^3\ {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$ the dynamics are significantly altered by the transport of both ionizing continuum ($h\nu>13.6$ eV) and Lyman-$\alpha$ photons between crests and troughs of the density perturbations. We solve the radiative transfer of photons in both these frequency ranges and incorporate the results in a perturbed three-level atom model. We conclude that the instability persists at intermediate scales. We use the results to estimate a distribution of growth rates in $10^{7}$ random realizations of large-scale relative velocities. Our results indicate that there is no appreciable growth; out of these $10^7$ realizations, the maximum growth factor we find is less than $\approx 1.2$ at wavenumbers of $k \approx 10^{3} \ {\rm Mpc}^{-1}$. The instability's low growth factors are due to the relatively short duration of the recombination epoch during which the electrons and photons are coupled.