Cosmic Recombination in the Presence of Primordial Magnetic Fields

TL;DR

This paper presents a detailed analysis of how primordial magnetic fields influence cosmic recombination, affecting the ionization history and baryon clumping, with implications for CMB observations and the Hubble tension.

Contribution

It introduces an extended simulation code combining magneto-hydrodynamics and recombination physics, providing the first realistic predictions of PMF effects on cosmic recombination.

Findings

Mixing of Lyman-alpha photons accelerates recombination.

Peculiar flows have minimal impact on recombination rates.

Ultra-violet magnetic modes significantly influence results.

Abstract

Primordial magnetic fields (PMFs) may explain observations of magnetic fields on extragalactic scales. They are most cleanly constrained by measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) anisotropies. Their effects on cosmic recombination may even be at the heart of the resolution of the Hubble tension. We present the most detailed analysis of the effects of PMFs on cosmic recombination to date. To this end we extend the public magneto-hydrodynamic code {\sl ENZO} with a new cosmic recombination routine, Monte-Carlo simulations of Lyman-$\alpha$ photon transport, and a Compton drag term in the baryon momentum equation. The resulting code allows us, for the first time, to realistically predict the impact of PMFs on the cosmic ionization history and the clumping of baryons during cosmic recombination. Our results identify the importance of mixing of Lyman-$\alpha$ photons between overdense- and underdense- regions for small PMF strength. This mixing speeds up recombination beyond the speed-up due to clumping. We also investigate the effects of pecuilar flows on the recombination rate and find it to be small for small PMF strengths. For non-helical PMFs with a Batchelor spectrum we find a surprising dependency of results on ultra-violet magnetic modes. We further show that the increase in the ionization fraction at low redshift by hydrodynamic baryon heating due to PMF dissipation is completely compensated by the faster recombination from baryon clumping. The present study shall serve as a theoretical foundation for a future precise comparison of recombination with PMFs to CMB data.