Mixing of blackbodies: Increasing our view of inflation to 17 e-folds
  with spectral distortions from Silk damping
  Silk damping in the early Universe, before and during recombination, erases
anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) on small scales. This
power, which disappears from anisotropies, appears in the monopole as y-type,
i-type and \mu-type distortions. The observation of the CMB spectral
distortions will thus make available to us the information about the primordial
power spectrum on scales corresponding to the comoving wavenumbers $8< k < 10^4
Mpc^{-1}$ increasing our total view of inflation, when combined with CMB
anisotropies, to span 17 e-folds. These distortions can be understood simply as
mixing of blackbodies of different temperatures and the subsequent
comptonization of the resulting distortions.
