Concepts in CMB Anisotropy Formation

Abstract

These lecture notes form a primer on the theory of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy formation. With emphasis on conceptual aspects rather than technical issues, we examine the physical foundations of anisotropy evolution in relativistic kinetic and perturbation theory as well as the manifestation of these principles in primary and secondary anisotropies. We discuss gauge choice and gauge invariance and their use in understanding the CMB. Acoustic, gravitational redshift and ionization effects have robust signatures in the CMB spectrum and may allow determination of classical cosmological parameters as well as reveal general distinctions between models for structure formation. We develop the tight and weak coupling approximations as analytic tools to help understand these effects and the robustness of their signatures.

34 pgs, TeX + 11 uuencoded figures, also available at ftp://ftp.sns.ias.edu/pub/hu/concepts, to appear in ``The Universe at High-z, Large Scale Structure and the Cosmic Microwave Background'', eds. E. Martinez-Gonzalez & J.L Sanz (Springer Verlag)

References in corpus (3)

• Toward Understanding CMB Anisotropies and Their Implications
• From Microwave Anisotropies to Cosmology
• The Imprint of Proper Motion of Nonlinear Structures on the Cosmic Microwave Background

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The High-Z Supernova Search: Measuring Cosmic Deceleration and Global Cur vature of the Universe Using Type Ia Supernovae
• Cosmological parameter estimation using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)
• Peaks in the Cosmic Microwave Background: flat versus open models
• Effects of initial state fluctuations in the final state elliptic flow measurements using the NeXSPheRIO model