Paper 4 , Section I, D
Part II, 2020
At temperature and chemical potential , the number density of a non-relativistic particle species with mass is given by
where is the number of degrees of freedom of this particle.
At recombination, electrons and protons combine to form hydrogen. Use the result above to derive the Saha equation
where is the number density of hydrogen atoms, the number density of electrons, the mass of the electron and the binding energy of hydrogen. State any assumptions that you use in this derivation.