Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
Scientific paper
2008-09-18
Class. Quant. Grav. 26 (2009) 065006
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology
62 pages, typos corrected
Scientific paper
10.1088/0264-9381/26/6/065006
This article investigates the full Boltzmann equation up to second order in the cosmological perturbations. Describing the distribution of polarized radiation by a tensor valued distribution function, we study the gauge dependence of the distribution function and summarize the construction of the gauge-invariant distribution function. The Liouville operator which describes the free streaming of electrons, and the collision term which describes the scattering of photons on free electrons are computed up to second order. Finally, the remaining dependence in the direction of the photon momentum is handled by expanding in projected symmetric trace-free multipoles and also in the more commonly used normal modes components. The results obtained remain to be used for computing numerically the contribution in the cosmic microwave background bispectrum which arises from the evolution of second order perturbations, in order to disentangle the primordial non-Gaussianity from the one generated by the subsequent non-linear evolution.
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