The damping tail of cosmic microwave background anisotropies

By decomposing the damping tail of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies into a series of transfer functions representing individual physical effects, we provide ingredients that mill aid in the reconstruction of the cosmological model from small-scale CMB anisotropy data. We accurately calibrate the model-independent effects of diffusion and reionization damping, which provide potentially the most robust information on the background cosmology. Removing these effects, we uncover model-dependent processes, such as the acoustic peak modulation and gravitational enhancement, that can help distinguish between alternate models of structure formation and provide windows into the evolution of fluctuations at various stages in their growth.