Write and . Under the stated matter-era growing-mode approximation, , and ignoring velocities removes the Doppler CMB anisotropy. The two peaks of the cosmological visibility function give the Cosmic microwave background line-of-sight solution
Apply the same solution with observation time , just before the thin reionization screen. Between recombination and that screen there is no further scattering, so free propagation gives
A direction-independent potential commutes with the angular average. Thus the incoming photon monopole plus the potential at the screen is
Substitution gives
This derivation inherits the neglected scattering quadrupole and polarization assumptions of part (ii); the screen is an idealized isotropizing approximation.
For a plane Fourier mode , the angular average is explicit:
where is the zeroth Spherical Bessel function. The mode's observed transfer is
If , the rescattered monopole is suppressed by at least , because the incoming directions sample incoherent phases. If , and the two propagation phases agree to leading order. The two weights then sum to one. Consequently
These are the small-scale damping and large-scale coherence limits of reionization damping of cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropy.
Each small-scale primary temperature amplitude is multiplied by , so its Cosmic microwave background power spectrum is multiplied by . Holding transfer parameters fixed,
Many measured high- modes determine this combination accurately. Their derivatives and are degenerate: a change leaves the leading temperature spectrum unchanged. The undamped large-scale modes can distinguish the parameters, but there are few of them and cosmic variance gives fractional full-sky uncertainty per multipole. This explains the primordial-amplitude–optical-depth degeneracy. Polarization from reionization, lensing, and more complete late-time effects partly break it. The TeX's final is a transcription mismatch; the PDF uses consistently.