Speeding Up Cosmological Boltzmann Codes

We introduce a novel strategy for cosmological Boltzmann codes leading to an increase in speed by a factor of ∼ 30 for small scale Fourier modes. We (re-)investigate the tight coupling approximation and obtain analytic formulae including the octupoles of photon intensity and polarization. Numerically, these results reach optimal precision. Damping rapid oscillations of small scale modes at later times, we simplify the integration of cosmological perturbations. We obtain analytic expressions for the photon density contrast and velocity as well as an estimate of the quadrupole from after last scattering until today. These analytic formulae hold well during re-ionization and are in fact negligible for realistic cosmological scenarios. However, they do extend the validity of our approach to models with very large optical depth to the last scattering surface.