Radiative transfer effects during primordial helium recombination

Details Radiative transfer effects during primordial helium recombination Radiative transfer effects during primordial helium recombination

2011-10-03

arxiv.org/abs/1110.0247v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics

14 pages, 21 figures, 1 table, submitted to MNRAS

Scientific paper

In this paper we refine the calculation of primordial helium recombination, accounting for several additional effects that were neglected or treated more approximately in previous studies. These include consideration of (i) time-dependent radiative transfer interaction between the 2^1 P_1 - 1^1 S_0 and 2^3 P_1 - 1^1 S_0 resonances; (ii) time-dependent radiative transfer for the partially overlapping n^1 P_1 - 1^1 S_0, n^1 D_2 - 1^1 S_0 and n^3 P_1 - 1^1 S_0 series with 3 \leq n \leq 10; (iii) electron scattering within a kernel approach. We also briefly discuss the effect of electron scattering and HI quadrupole lines on the recombination of hydrogen. Although the physics of all the considered processes is interesting and subtle, for the standard cosmology the overall correction to the ionization history during helium recombination with respect to the previous treatment remains smaller than |DeltaNe/Ne| \sim 0.05%. For models with a large helium fraction Y_p \sim 0.4, the difference can reach |\DeltaNe/Ne| \sim 0.25% at z \sim 1800, however, the overall correction to the CMB power spectra is only marginally important. The new processes are now included by the cosmological recombination code CosmoRec and can be activated as needed for most settings without affecting its runtime significantly.

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