Acoustic dark energy: Potential conversion of the Hubble tension

By Meng-Xiang Lin, G. Benevento, Wayne Hu, M. Raveri. Physical Review D, 2019

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the ability of a dark fluid becoming relevant around the time of matter radiation equality to significantly relieve the tension between local measurements of the Hubble constant and CMB inference, within the $\Lambda$CDM model. We show that the gravitational impact of acoustic oscillations in the dark fluid balance the effects on the CMB and result in an improved fit to CMB measurements themselves while simultaneously raising the Hubble constant. The required balance favors a model where the fluid is a scalar field that converts its potential to kinetic energy around matter radiation equality which then quickly redshifts away. We derive the requirements on the potential for this conversion mechanism and find that a simple canonical scalar with two free parameters for its local slope and amplitude robustly improves the fit to the combined data by $\Delta\chi^2 \approx 12.7$ over $\Lambda$CDM. We uncover the CMB polarization signatures that can definitively test this scenario with future data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20b03d787f9901c2d032d852a06767d1b00d640c

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Citations in the corpus

The Ups and Downs of Early Dark Energy solutions to the Hubble tension: A review of models, hints and constraints circa 2023 (2023, methodology): “, c 2 s = 1/4) can partially mimic an increase in the final equation of state to wf = 2/3, and consequently, a larger wEDE can partly compensate for the impact of greater pressure support c(2)s [78].”
H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, background): “…include an early dark energy component to the Universe that later decays (e.g. Agrawal et al. 2019; Alexander & McDonough 2019; Aylor et al. 2019; Lin et al. 2019; Poulin et al. 2019), primordial non-Gaussianity (e.g. Adhikari & Huterer 2019), decaying dark matter (e.g. Pandey, Karwal & Das…”
The Hubble tension in light of the Full-Shape analysis of Large-Scale Structure data (2020, methodology): “In this sense, there may be an artificially large volume in parameter space associated to vanishing fEDE or fRnR that might enhance the statistical weight of the ΛCDM models when using some sampling algorithms such as Metropolis-Hastings, as pointed out, for example, in [63, 91, 92].”
New physics in light of the H0 tension: An alternative view (2019, background): “[60–209] for what is inevitably an incomplete list of works examining these possibilities.”
Resolving the Hubble tension with new early dark energy (2020, methodology): “ADE was developed to mitigate the before-mentioned detrimental CMB effects by introducing acoustic oscillations in a dark fluid (rather than free-streaming particles) [35].”
Constraining early dark energy with large-scale structure (2020, background): “[30] M.”
The Hubble Tension and Early Dark Energy (2022, background): “(96) discusses characteristics of EDE potentials and also generalize to models with nontrivial kinetic terms.”
Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, background): “2) Axion interacting with a dilaton [213]; (3) Power-law potential [214]; (4) Rock ’n’ roll [215]; (5) New early dark energy [216,217]; (6) Chain early dark energy [218]; (7) Anti-de Sitter phase [219,220]; (8) Gradusted dark energy [221]; (9) Acoustic dark energy [222,223]; (9.”
Early dark energy does not restore cosmological concordance (2020, methodology): “The two-field model (Alexander & McDonough (2019)) can be qualitatively understood by considering a single-field truncation, with a piece-wise-defined potential for the EDE field, in a manner resembling the best-fit “Acoustic Dark Energy” of Lin et al. (2019).”