Abstract
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the third cornerstone of the Standard Model of cosmology, after Hubble’s Law and the primordial abundance of light elements. As the Universe expanded, at a certain point photons in the primordial plasma decoupled from protons and electrons and started freely propagating through the Universe. These are the photons we observe today in the CMB. The spectrum is extremely close to that of a black body with a temperature of about 2.7 K. Removing a dipole component interpreted as the result of our relative motion with respect to the CMB reference frame, we find that the temperature anisotropies are at the level of one part in \(10^5\). The accurate measurement of these anisotropies is a powerful tool for the determination of the cosmological parameters with very high precision. For the study of these anisotropies, the last 20 years have been a sort of golden age for CMB physics.
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Notes
- 1.
The spatial curvature \(^3R\) is the scalar curvature computed from the 3-metric \(\gamma _{ij}\). In terms of the line element of the FRW metric, \(ds^2 = dt^2 - \gamma _{ij} dx^idx^j\).
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- 3.
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Problems
10.1
Derive \(n_{CMB}^0\), \(\rho _{CMB}^0\), and \(\varOmega _{CMB}^0\) in Eq. (10.19).
10.2
Compute \(n_{CMB}\), \(\rho _{CMB}\), and \(\varOmega _{CMB}\) at the time of photon decoupling.
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Bambi, C., Dolgov, A.D. (2016). Cosmic Microwave Background. In: Introduction to Particle Cosmology. UNITEXT for Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48078-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48078-6_10
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