Large energy release
Spectral distortion measurements allow us to constrain energy release at high redshifts. Usually, one assumes that the distortion remains small at all times. In Figure 1, we show the distortion limits obtained with both small and large distortion computations. For large energy release, the thermalization efficiency is greatly reduced and the distortion limit is significantly tightened over the small distortion limits. The data used in this figure can be downloaded below. It is taken from Chluba, Ravenni & Acharya, 2020, arXiv:2005.11325 and the computations are based on CosmoTherm.
Fig. 1: Constraints on single large energy release. Existing limits from COBE/FIRAS already place stringent constraints on cosmologies with significant early energy release. In the future, these limits could be greatly improved with spectrometer concepts such as PIXIE and SuperPIXIE. This will provide valuable information for decaying particle scenarios and PBHs.
You can download the distortion data used for Figure 1 here:
For comments or questions please email:
Jens Chluba.
The results presented here were produced as part of the ERC consolidator grant CMBSPEC (grant agreement No 725456)
under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
