Jens Chluba, Geoffrey Vasil, Richard Battye

In this work, we develop a novel formalism to include the effect of electron density fluctuations at ultra small scales (well below the sound horizon at last scattering) on the observed anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We treat the electron field as an independent stochastic variable and obtain the required ensemble-averaged photon Boltzmann equations using Ito calculus. Beyond changes to the average recombination history (which can be incorporated in the standard approach) our work identifies two new effects caused by the clumpiness of the medium. The first is a correction to the Thomson visibility function caused by correlations of the electron fluctuations along the line of sight, leading to an additional broadening of the visibility towards higher redshifts which causes extra damping and smearing of the CMB anisotropies. The second effect is a reduction of the effective scattering rate in the (pre-)recombination era that affects the photon transfer functions in a non-trivial manner. These new effects are subdominant in LCDM but can be significant in cosmologies with an early onset of structure formation (e.g., due to generation of enhanced small-scale power) as suggested by a number of indicators (e.g., the abundance of high redshift galaxies observed by JWST). We discuss the relevance of these new effects to the Hubble tension, finding that corrections which cannot be captured by simple modifications to the average recombination history arise. This highlights how important an understanding of the recombination process is in cosmological inference, and that a coordinated simulation and analysis campaign is required as part of the search for the origin of the various tensions in cosmology.