Silk damping at a redshift of a billion: a new limit on small-scale
  adiabatic perturbations
  We study the dissipation of small-scale adiabatic perturbations at early
times when the Universe is hotter than T ~ 0.5 keV. When the wavelength falls
below the damping scale 1/kD, the acoustic modes diffuse and thermalize,
causing entropy production. Before neutrino decoupling, kD is primarily set by
the neutrino shear viscosity, and we study the effect of acoustic damping on
the relic neutrino number, primordial nucleosynthesis, dark-matter freeze-out,
and baryogenesis. This sets a new limit on the amplitude of primordial
fluctuations of DeltaR^2 < 0.007 at 10^4/Mpc< k < 10^5/Mpc and a model
dependent limit of DeltaR^2 < 0.3 at k < 10^{20-25}/Mpc.
