paper

Non-Gaussianities from Perturbing Recombination

arXiv:0812.3658 · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2009/09/038

Abstract

We approximately compute the bispectrum induced on the CMB temperature by fluctuations in the standard recombination epoch. Of all the second order sources that can induce non-Gaussianity during recombination, we concentrate on those proportional to the perturbation in the free electron density, which is about a factor of 5 larger than the other first order perturbations. This term induces some non-Gaussianity by delaying the time of recombination and by changing the photon diffusion scale. We find that the signal is not scale invariant, peaked on squeezed triangles with the smaller multipole around the scale of the first acoustic peak, and that its size corresponds to an effective f_NL ~ -3.5, which could be marginally detected by Planck if both temperature and polarization are measured.

37 pages, 13 figures. v2: Corrected algebraic mistake, numerical results marginally affected; added references

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