Primordial helium recombination. II. Two-photon processes

Interpretation of precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will require a detailed understanding of the recombination era, which determines such quantities as the acoustic oscillation scale and the Silk damping scale. This paper is the second in a series devoted to the subject of helium recombination, with a focus on two-photon processes in He i. The standard treatment of these processes includes only the spontaneous two-photon decay from the 2¹S level. We extend this treatment by including five additional effects, some of which have been suggested in recent papers but whose impact on He i recombination has not been fully quantified. These are: (i) stimulated two-photon decays; (ii) two-photon absorption of redshifted He i line radiation; (iii) two-photon decays from highly excited levels in He i (n¹S and n¹D, with n≥3); (iv) Raman scattering; and (v) the finite width of the 2¹P^o resonance. We find that effect (iii) is highly suppressed when one takes into account destructive interference between different intermediate states contributing to the two-photon decay amplitude. Overall, these effects are found to be insignificant: they modify the recombination history at the level of several parts in 10⁴.