1994/06/28 by Wayne Hu, Hu, Wayne
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #FOS: Physical sciences #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Scientific Research and Discoveries #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/9406071
25 pages including 10 figures, uuencoded tarred postscript, to appear in the Proceedings of the Case Western CMB Meeting, CfPA-TH-94-31
arxiv created 1994/06/28 · openalex publication_date 1994/06/28 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the rapidly growing number of cosmic microwave background measurements on various scales, there is real hope that the number of acceptable models for structure formation will be limited to a very few in the near future. Yet any given model can always be saved by introducing and tuning extraneous free parameters. To better understand this question of ``nature versus nurture'' for temperature fluctuations, it is useful to know not only the general features of anisotropy predictions but also their causes. Extracting the physical content of our other works, we present here a \it simple account of cosmic microwave background anisotropies on all scales. In particular, we show that analytic approximations can trace the structure of the so-called ``Doppler peaks,'' which arise due to the \it adiabatic oscillations in the photon-baryon fluid. We also show how the finite thickness of the last scattering surface and the Silk damping mechanism can be described in a unified way by photon diffusion. In order to present a specific example, we focus on comparing the primordial isocurvature baryon (PIB) model with the standard cold dark matter model (CDM). In particular, we explain why PIB generically predicts larger \it non-oscillatory anisotropies from the 1^∘ to 10^∘ scale which may already be in conflict with experiments.