Rees-Sciama effect in a cold dark matter universe

The Rees-Sciama (R-S) effect produces fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through the time-dependent gravitational potential in the nonlinear stages of evolution. I investigate the R-S effect on the CMB angular power spectrum C-l for several cold dark matter (CDM) models by combining the results of N-body simulations with second-order perturbation theory. The amplitude of the R-S fluctuations peaks at l similar to 100-300, where it gives Delta T/T similar to 10(-7)-10(-6) for a wide range of models. This is at least an order of magnitude below the COBE normalized primary contribution. R-S fluctuations could be a dominant source of anisotropies only on subarcminute scales (l approximate to 5000) and are below the present-day observational sensitivities on all angular scales.