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Cosmological hydrogen recombination: The effect of extremely high-n states

Calculations of cosmological hydrogen recombination are vital for the extraction of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations, and for imposing constraints to inflation and re-ionization. The Planck} mission and future experiments will make high precision measurements of CMB anisotropies at angular scales as small as l~2500, necessitating a calculation of recombination with fractional accuracy of ~10^{-3}. Recent work on recombination includes two-photon transitions from high excitation states and many radiative transfer effects. Modern recombination calculations separately follow angular momentum sublevels of the hydrogen atom to accurately treat non-equilibrium effects at late times (z<900). The inclusion of extremely high-n (n>100) states of hydrogen is then computationally challenging, preventing until now a determination of the maximum n needed to predict CMB anisotropy spectra with sufficient accuracy for Planck. Here, results from a new multi-level-atom code (RecSparse) are presented. For the first time, `forbidden' quadrupole transitions of hydrogen are included, but shown to be negligible. RecSparse is designed to quickly calculate recombination histories including extremely high-n states in hydrogen. Histories for a sequence of values as high as n_max=250 are computed, keeping track of all angular momentum sublevels and energy shells of the hydrogen atom separately. Use of an insufficiently high n_max value (e.g., n_max=64) leads to errors (e.g., 1.8 sigma for Planck) in the predicted CMB power spectrum. Extrapolating errors, the resulting CMB anisotropy spectra are converged to 0.5 sigma at Fisher-matrix level for n_max=128, in the purely radiative case.