Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-general-relativity-and-cosmology-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2012/4/b/solution
Past exam of the general relativity and cosmology course of the University of Oxford 2012 4 b Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
For thermal photons, the available thermal length is . The number of occupied modes per volume scales as , while their characteristic energy is of order . Thus and . More explicitly, the two photon polarizations and the Bose-Einstein distribution giveconsistent with the rounded coefficients supplied in the source.
Use its definition , with and the mass-equivalent cosmological critical density. Writing , the photon energy formula gives . ThereforeThis photon-to-baryon ratio from density parameters has leading coefficient , as required. For an illustrative estimate, take the stated , and . Then , i.e. of order a billion photons per baryon. The source alone supplies no numerical density parameters, so an estimate must state such additional inputs.
Strictly, this is the photon-to-baryon ratio, rather than the thermodynamic entropy per baryon itself. For a thermal photon gas, with the exact blackbody coefficients. The ratio used in the source is proportional to the radiation entropy per baryon under adiabatic evolution.
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