Early Reionization in Cosmology

Abstract

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have turned out to represent one of the most stringent 'bottle necks' for scenarios of large scale structure formation. As a possibility to relax this constraint, it has been proposed that early reionization can damp CMB fluctuations on small scales due to photon diffusion in the ionized plasma. As an example, I investigate the recently proposed scenario with cold dark matter (CDM) and texture seeds. There, an analysis of CMB anisotropies shows that early reionization is a crucial ingredient for this scenario. Without damping, the small scale anisotropies would dominate and exceed observed limits. In this paper I present analytical and numerical results for the amount of damping due to early reionization for CMB perturbations induced by a collapsing texture. Furthermore, the spectral distortion of the CMB due to Compton scattering of the hotter plasma electrons is calculated. Next I discuss the physical processes which lead to a system of coupled ordinary differential equations for the degree of ionization, the electron temperature and the evolution of the ionizing radiation.