Figure 1.
Schematic cosmic microwave background temperature power spectrum and source contributions
. The Sachs-Wolfe contribution controls the low-multipole plateau, acoustic physics produces the peaks, the Doppler contribution is phase shifted, and photon diffusion suppresses the spectrum in the high-multipole damping tail.
The conventional vertical variable is in , plotted against the dimensionless angular multipole . The Sachs-Wolfe effect supplies a nearly flat large-angle plateau for . The total spectrum has its first acoustic peak near with of order , followed by further Cosmic microwave background acoustic peaks; the Doppler CMB anisotropy is phase shifted relative to the photon-density oscillation. At , Cosmic microwave background diffusion damping lets photons random-walk across perturbations during recombination and produces the rapidly falling damping tail.
Along the unperturbed photon path, combine the temperature and gravitational-redshift terms and use :
The integrating factor is , and . Neglecting the exponentially hidden initial boundary term gives the Cosmic microwave background line-of-sight solution
For instantaneous recombination, , and the observer potential contributes only an unobservable monopole. Therefore
The first two terms form the ordinary Sachs-Wolfe effect, the velocity term is the Doppler CMB anisotropy at last scattering, and the integral is the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect produced by evolving potentials.