Rayleigh Scattering and Microwave Background Fluctuations
Rayleigh Scattering and Microwave Background Fluctuations
During the recombination epoch, cosmic background photons coupled not only to free electrons through Thompson scattering, but also to neutral hydrogen through Rayleigh scattering. This latter is a ~2% effect for photons near the peak of the photon energy distribution at z = 800 and a ~0.2% effect at z …