 Compton cooling by the cosmic microwave background

Hot electrons can transfer energy to cosmic microwave background photons through Compton scattering. For a fixed electron fraction $x_e$ and electron temperature well above the radiation temperature, the optically thin gas cooling time scales approximately as $(1+z{)}^{-4}/x_e$. Its volume loss scales with electron density, not with $n_H^2$, because the radiation density is independent of local gas density. The process tends toward the radiation temperature; it heats rather than cools electrons colder than that radiation.