Cosmological recombination: feedback of helium photons and its effect on the recombination spectrum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we consider the reprocessing of high-frequency photons emitted by He ii and He i during the epoch of cosmological recombination by He i and H i. We demonstrate that, in comparison to computations which neglect all feedback processes, the number of cosmological recombination photons that are related to the presence of helium in the early Universe could be increased by ∼40–70 per cent. Our computations imply that per helium nucleus ∼3–6 additional photons could be produced. Therefore, a total of ∼12–14 helium-related photons per helium atom are emitted during cosmological recombination. This is an important addition to cosmological recombination spectrum which in the future may render it slightly easier to determine the primordial abundance of helium using differential measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) energy spectrum. Also, since these photons are the only witnesses of the feedback process at high redshift, observing them in principle offers a way to check our understanding of the recombination physics. Here, most interestingly, the feedback of He ii photons on He i leads to the appearance of several additional, rather narrow spectral features in the He i recombination spectrum at low frequencies. Consequently, the signatures of helium-related features in the CMB spectral distortion from cosmological recombination at some given frequency can exceed the average level of ∼17 per cent several times. We find that in particular the bands around ν∼ 10, ∼35, ∼80 and ∼200 GHz seem to be affected strongly. In addition, we computed the changes in the cosmological ionization history, finding that only the feedback of primary He i photons on the dynamics of He ii→ He i recombination has an effect, producing a change of ΔNe/Ne∼+0.17 per cent at z∼ 2300. This result seems to be ∼2–3 times smaller than the one obtained in earlier computations for this process, however, the difference will not be very important for the analysis of future CMB data.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".