CMB spectroscopy at third-order in cosmological perturbations [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1808.10517


Early energy injection to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from dissipation of acoustic waves generates deviations from the blackbody spectrum not only at second-order but also at third-order in cosmological perturbations. For the first time, we compute this new spectral distortion $\mathcal \kappa$ based on third-order cosmological perturbation theory. We point out that $\kappa$ arises from heat conduction and shear viscosity of spectral distortions and temperature perturbations. The ensemble average of $\kappa$ can be directly sourced by primordial non-Gaussianity, being an integral of the primordial bispectrum and thus depending on its shape. For local non-Gaussianity we roughly estimate the signal and find $\kappa=f^{\rm loc.}_{\rm NL}\times \mathcal O(10^{-18})$. The signal is incredibly tiny; however, we argue that it carries a specific frequency dependence different from other types of CMB spectral distortions. Moreover, we comment on other possible applications of our results.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Ota and N. Bartolo
Mon, 3 Sep 18
23/54

Comments: 6 pages, 3 figures