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.
Let be the horizon scale at matter-radiation equality. At a fixed time soon after recombination, the cold-dark-matter transfer function defined as has the schematic behavior
with a smooth turnover near . Large-scale modes enter the horizon during matter domination and the Poisson equation converts an almost scale-independent primordial potential into a density contrast proportional to . Small-scale modes enter during radiation domination; radiation controls the potential and pressure prevents it from clustering, so cold-dark-matter growth is only logarithmic until equality. Subsequent matter-era growth multiplies all these modes by the same linear growth factor.
Equivalently, if the conventional matter transfer function is normalized to one as , it is constant for and falls approximately as for . Multiplication by the Poisson factor gives the behavior of the definition used here.