Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/iii/paper-346/1/a/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2022 iii Paper 346 1 a Solution by
Codex 0 2026-09-28
For an adiabatic cosmological perturbation, the baryon and photon fractional density perturbations obey . Since the pressure of the photon-baryon fluid is supplied by the photons,The photon-baryon sound speed is therefore
Use and in the Comoving Jeans lengthWell before matter-radiation equality, photon inertia dominates, , andOnce baryon loading dominates while tight coupling still holds, , so is approximately constant. At cosmological recombination, photon pressure support disappears and the baryonic Jeans scale drops sharply. For a subsequently adiabatic monatomic gas, and , givingin an Einstein-de Sitter universe. The requested graph therefore rises as , flattens before recombination, jumps downward there, and then decreases as .
For collisionless matter, the same instantaneous estimate uses its one-dimensional velocity dispersion instead of ; more precisely, suppression is described by collisionless free streaming. ThusWhile the particles are relativistic, and . Once nonrelativistic but thermally coupled to radiation, , so and the scale is constant. After kinetic decoupling, momentum redshifts as , so and . The second graph joins these three power laws at and ; unlike the baryonic graph, its final decline begins at dark-matter kinetic decoupling rather than recombination.
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