2.3. Mészáros effect

What about the case of collisionless matter in a radiation background? The fluid treatment is not appropriate here, since the two species of particles can interpenetrate. A particularly interesting limit is for perturbations well inside the horizon: the radiation can then be treated as a smooth, unclustered background that affects only the overall expansion rate. This is analogous to the effect of , but an analytical solution does exist in this case. The perturbation equation is as before

(30)

but now H² = 8 G(_m + _r) / 3. If we change variable to y _m / _r = a / a_eq, and use the Friedmann equation, then the growth equation becomes

(31)

(for k = 0, as appropriate for early times). It may be seen by inspection that a growing solution exists with " = 0:

(32)

It is also possible to derive the decaying mode. This is simple in the radiation-dominated case (y << 1): - ln y is easily seen to be an approximate solution in this limit.

What this says is that, at early times, the dominant energy of radiation drives the universe to expand so fast that the matter has no time to respond, and is frozen at a constant value. At late times, the radiation becomes negligible, and the growth increases smoothly to the Einstein-de Sitter a behaviour (Mészáros 1974). The overall behaviour is therefore similar to the effects of pressure on a coupled fluid: for scales greater than the horizon, perturbations in matter and radiation can grow together, but this growth ceases once the perturbations enter the horizon. However, the explanations of these two phenomena are completely different. In the fluid case, the radiation pressure prevents the perturbations from collapsing further; in the collisionless case, the photons have free-streamed away, and the matter perturbation fails to collapse only because radiation domination ensures that the universe expands too quickly for the matter to have time to self-gravitate. Because matter perturbations enter the horizon (at y = y_entry) with > 0, is not frozen quite at the horizon-entry value, and continues to grow until this initial `velocity' is redshifted away, giving a total boost factor of roughly ln y_entry. This log factor may be seen below in the fitting formulae for the CDM power spectrum.