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 length
Well before matter-radiation equality, photon inertia dominates, , and
Once 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 , giving
in 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. Thus
While 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.
Warm dark matter 2026-09-28
Warm dark matter has a primordial collisionless free streaming length large enough to suppress the formation of low-mass haloes, while remaining nonrelativistic early enough to cluster on galactic and larger scales.