CMB Anisotropies in the Weak Coupling Limit

Abstract

We present a new, more powerful and accurate, analytic treatment of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in the weakly coupled regime. Three applications are presented: gravitational redshifts in a time dependent potential, the Doppler effect in reionized scenarios, and the Vishniac effect. The Vishniac effect can dominate primary anisotropies at small angles even in late and minimally reionized models in flat dark-matter dominated universes with Harrison-Zel'dovich initial conditions. The techniques developed here refine previous calculations yielding a larger coherence angle for the Vishniac effect and moreover can be applied to non-trivial ionization histories. These analytic expressions may be used to modify results for the standard cold dark matter model to its cosmological constant and reionized extensions without detailed and time consuming recalculation.