Improved frequency hierarchy treatment for anisotropic spectral distortions

Abstract

Spectral distortion anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provide a new probe of the early Universe that can be accessed using traditional CMB imaging techniques. It is possible to compute the creation and evolution of anisotropic signals for various scenarios using the frequency hierarchy method recently developed for CosmoTherm. However, the current treatment is not perfect and some approximations had to be made. Here, we carefully construct a modified form for the evolution equations that has the full equilibrium solutions built into the formulation. We improve the formalism to account for i) additional stimulated scattering effects, ii) kinematic corrections to the thermalization terms, iii) corrections to the standard perturbation variables and iv) direct photon sources. These effect could not be captured with the original formulation of the frequency hierarchy method but are indeed important for cleanly separating real distortions from temperature signals. However, we show that previous results are not altered significantly when compared to the improved formulation presented here. As a new worked example, which could indeed not be treated before, we also illustrate how possible changes in the temperature-redshift relation would create spectral distortion anisotropies in the pre-recombination era. The theoretical methods presented here are also an important step towards being able to consistently predict the CMB spectral distortion anisotropies in photon-dark photon and photon-axion conversion scenarios.