Cosmology with Recombination Spectrum

TL;DR

This paper develops a new computational approach to analyze the cosmological recombination spectrum, demonstrating its potential to constrain cosmological parameters with high precision if future experiments achieve significantly improved sensitivity.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel code based on previous algorithms to extract information from the recombination spectrum, highlighting its potential for precise cosmological measurements.

Findings

Detection of recombination lines requires 25 times more sensitive experiments than PIXIE.

Future experiments could measure baryon density with high precision.

Recombination line shapes encode information about hydrogen recombination rates.

Abstract

Precision measurement of the cosmological recombination spectrum can provide an entire new window to look at the early universe. We aim to quantify the information hidden in the cosmological recombination spectrum and for this purpose we have developed a new code following the algorithm proposed in Ali-Haimoud and Hirata (2010), Ali-Haimoud (2013). Our code is closely based on the COSMOSPEC code [Chluba and Ali-Haimoud (2016)]. We find, using Fisher information matrix and assuming that the foregrounds can be subtracted by using higher or lower frequency channels and spatial information, that going beyond the detection will need an experiment with sensitivity $25$ times better compared to the proposed experiment PIXIE. Such an experiment will be able to measure the cosmological parameters with a precision that is competitive with the CMB anisotropy experiments. The best constrainted parameter is baryon energy density, $\Omega_{\rm b}$, which can be nailed down with incredible precision in principle. We also show that the shape of the hydrogen lines is connected to the speed of the hydrogen recombination, with the peaks of the recombination lines coinciding with the peak of the recombination rate. In general, the shape of the lines encodes information about the rate of recombination as a function of redshift.