Three-body recombination of hydrogen in the early Universe

Flower, DR

doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slad047

Three-body recombination of hydrogen in the early Universe

Flower, DR

Authors

DR Flower

Abstract

It has been suggested recently that three-body recombination of two protons and an electron might be significant in the formation of atomic hydrogen in the early Universe. We demonstrate that this process is completely negligible in the primordial plasma and that the value of the redshift, at which the transition from ionized to atomic hydrogen occurs, is determined by an equilibrium between the rates of two-body radiative recombination of a proton and an electron and its inverse, namely photoionization of atomic hydrogen.

Citation

Flower, D. (2023). Three-body recombination of hydrogen in the early Universe. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 523(1), https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slad047

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Apr 5, 2023
Online Publication Date	Apr 25, 2023
Publication Date	2023
Deposit Date	May 16, 2023
Publicly Available Date	May 16, 2023
Journal	Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
Electronic ISSN	1745-3933
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	523
Issue	1
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slad047

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Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2023.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.