Early dark energy does not restore cosmological concordance

By John C. Hill, Evan McDonough, M. Toomey, S. Alexander. 2020

215 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current cosmological data exhibit a tension between inferences of the Hubble constant, $H_0$, derived from early and late-universe measurements. One proposed solution is to introduce a new component in the early universe, which initially acts as "early dark energy" (EDE), thus decreasing the physical size of the sound horizon imprinted in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and increasing the inferred $H_0$. Previous EDE analyses have shown this model can relax the $H_0$ tension, but the CMB-preferred value of the density fluctuation amplitude, $\sigma_8$, increases in EDE as compared to $\Lambda$CDM, increasing tension with large-scale structure (LSS) data. We show that the EDE model fit to CMB and SH0ES data yields scale-dependent changes in the matter power spectrum compared to $\Lambda$CDM, including $10\%$ more power at $k = 1~h$/Mpc. Motivated by this observation, we reanalyze the EDE scenario, considering LSS data in detail. We also update previous analyses by including $Planck$ 2018 CMB likelihoods, and perform the first search for EDE in $Planck$ data alone, which yields no evidence for EDE. We consider several data set combinations involving the primary CMB, CMB lensing, SNIa, BAO, RSD, weak lensing, galaxy clustering, and local distance-ladder data (SH0ES). While the EDE component is weakly detected (3$\sigma$) when including the SH0ES data and excluding most LSS data, this drops below 2$\sigma$ when further LSS data are included. Further, this result is in tension with strong constraints imposed on EDE by CMB and LSS data without SH0ES, which show no evidence for this model. We also show that physical priors on the fundamental scalar field parameters further weaken evidence for EDE. We conclude that the EDE scenario is, at best, no more likely to be concordant with all current cosmological data sets than $\Lambda$CDM, and appears unlikely to resolve the $H_0$ tension.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a317a40a4b20b286b38b7c89e14fe32cc9c65bf

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Citations in the corpus

The Hubble tension in light of the Full-Shape analysis of Large-Scale Structure data (2020, methodology): “com/mwt5345/class−ede and described in [65] (we also compared with the results obtained using AxiCLASS, publicly available at https://github.”
Resolving the Hubble tension with new early dark energy (2020, background): “We also note that we cannot reproduce the somewhat bleak picture given in [115].”
The Ups and Downs of Early Dark Energy solutions to the Hubble tension: A review of models, hints and constraints circa 2023 (2023, methodology): “Note that running MCMCs on the theory parameters can change the effective priors for the phenomenological parameters, and impacts constraints [117].”
Constraining early dark energy with large-scale structure (2020, background): “However, as shown in Hill et al. (2020) [1], the model fails to simultaneously resolve the Hubble tension and maintain a good fit to both cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure (LSS) data.”
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 maps and cosmological parameters (2020, unknown): “Two examples are introducing a self-interaction between neutrinos that delays free-streaming until shortly before recombination [15, 78], or introducing a period of early dark energy soon before recombination [16, 79].”
Hubble Tension: The Evidence of New Physics (2023, background): “Although many extensions of ΛCDM can alleviate the H0 tension, none are supported by the majority of observations [95,96].”