No Arabic abstract
In this work, we study a class of early dark energy (EDE) models, in which, unlike in standard DE models, a substantial amount of DE exists in the matter-dominated era, self-consistently including DE perturbations. Our analysis shows that, marginalizing over the non DE parameters such as $Omega_m, H_0, n_s$, current CMB observations alone can constrain the scale factor of transition from early DE to late time DE to $a_t geq 0.44$ and width of transition to $Delta_t leq 0.37$. The equation of state at present is somewhat weakly constrained to $w_0 leq -0.6$, if we allow $H_0 < 60$ km/s/Mpc. Taken together with other observations, such as supernovae, HST, and SDSS LRGs, the constraints are tighter-- $w_0 leq -0.9, a_t leq 0.19, Delta_t leq 0.21$. The evolution of the equation of state for EDE models is thus close to $Lambda$CDM at low redshifts. Incorrectly assuming DE perturbations to be negligible leads to different constraints on the equation of state parameters, thus highlighting the necessity of self-consistently including DE perturbations in the analysis. If we allow the spatial curvature to be a free parameter, then the constraints are relaxed to $w_0 leq -0.77, a_t leq 0.35, Delta_t leq 0.35$ with $-0.014 < Omega_{kappa} < 0.031$ for CMB+other observations. For perturbed EDE models, the $2sigma$ lower limit on $sigma_8$ ($sigma_8 geq 0.59$) is much lower than that in $Lambda$CDM ($sigma_8 geq 0.72$), thus raising the interesting possibility of discriminating EDE from $Lambda$CDM using future observations such as halo mass functions or the Sunyaev-Zeldovich power spectrum.
An axion-like field comprising $sim 10%$ of the energy density of the universe near matter-radiation equality is a candidate to resolve the Hubble tension; this is the early dark energy (EDE) model. However, as shown in Hill et al. (2020), 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. Here, we use redshift-space galaxy clustering data to sharpen constraints on the EDE model. We perform the first EDE analysis using the full-shape power spectrum likelihood from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), based on the effective field theory (EFT) of LSS. The inclusion of this likelihood in the EDE analysis yields a $25%$ tighter error bar on $H_0$ compared to primary CMB data alone, yielding $H_0 = 68.54^{+0.52}_{-0.95}$ km/s/Mpc ($68%$ CL). In addition, we constrain the maximum fractional energy density contribution of the EDE to $f_{rm EDE} < 0.072$ ($95%$ CL). We explicitly demonstrate that the EFT BOSS likelihood yields much stronger constraints on EDE than the standard BOSS likelihood. Including further information from photometric LSS surveys,the constraints narrow by an additional $20%$, yielding $H_0 = 68.73^{+0.42}_{-0.69}$ km/s/Mpc ($68%$ CL) and $f_{rm EDE}<0.053$ ($95%$ CL). These bounds are obtained without including local-universe $H_0$ data, which is in strong tension with the CMB and LSS, even in the EDE model. We also refute claims that MCMC analyses of EDE that omit SH0ES from the combined dataset yield misleading posteriors. Finally, we demonstrate that upcoming Euclid/DESI-like spectroscopic galaxy surveys can greatly improve the EDE constraints. We conclude that current data preclude the EDE model as a resolution of the Hubble tension, and that future LSS surveys can close the remaining parameter space of this model.
We show that the nonperturbative decay of ultralight scalars into Abelian gauge bosons, recently proposed as a possible solution to the Hubble tension, produces a stochastic background of gravitational waves which is constrained by the cosmic microwave background. We simulate the full nonlinear dynamics of resonant dark photon production and the associated gravitational wave production, finding the signals to exceed constraints for the entire parameter space we consider. Our findings suggest that gravitational wave production from the decay of early dark energy may provide a unique probe of these models.
Recently a full-shape analysis of large-scale structure (LSS) data was employed to provide new constraints on a class of Early Dark Energy (EDE) models. In this note, we derive similar constraints on New Early Dark Energy (NEDE) using the publicly available PyBird code, which makes use of the effective field theory of LSS. We study the NEDE base model with the fraction of NEDE and the trigger field mass as two additional parameters allowed to vary freely while making simplifying assumptions about the decaying fluid sector. Including the full-shape analysis of LSS together with measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) and supernovae (SN) data, we report $ H_0= 71.2 pm 1.0~textrm{km}, textrm{s}^{-1}, textrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ ($68 %$ C.L.) together with a $simeq 4 , sigma$ evidence for a non-vanishing fraction of NEDE. This is an insignificant change to the value previously found without full-shape LSS data, $ H_0= 71.4 pm 1.0~textrm{km}, textrm{s}^{-1}, textrm{Mpc}^{-1} $ ($68 %$ C.L.). As a result, while the NEDE fit cannot be improved upon the inclusion of additional LSS data, it is also not adversely affected by it, making it compatible with current constraints from LSS data. In fact, we find evidence that the effective field theory of LSS acts in favor of NEDE.
We consider the models of vacuum energy interacting with cold dark matter in this study, in which the coupling can change sigh during the cosmological evolution. We parameterize the running coupling $b$ by the form $b(a)=b_0a+b_e(1-a)$, where at the early-time the coupling is given by a constant $b_{e}$ and today the coupling is described by another constant $b_{0}$. We explore six specific models with (i) $Q(a)=b(a)H_0rho_0$, (ii) $Q(a)=b(a)H_0rho_{rm de}$, (iii) $Q(a)=b(a)H_0rho_{rm c}$, (iv) $Q(a)=b(a)Hrho_0$, (v) $Q(a)=b(a)Hrho_{rm de}$, and (vi) $Q(a)=b(a)Hrho_{rm c}$. The current observational data sets we use to constrain the models include the JLA compilation of type Ia supernova data, the Planck 2015 distance priors data of cosmic microwave background observation, the baryon acoustic oscillations measurements, and the Hubble constant direct measurement. We find that, for all the models, we have $b_0<0$ and $b_e>0$ at around the 1$sigma$ level, and $b_0$ and $b_e$ are in extremely strong anti-correlation. Our results show that the coupling changes sign during the evolution at about the 1$sigma$ level, i.e., the energy transfer is from dark matter to dark energy when dark matter dominates the universe and the energy transfer is from dark energy to dark matter when dark energy dominates the universe.
Low density regions are less affected by the nonlinear structure formation and baryonic physics. They are ideal places for probing the nature of dark energy, a possible explanation for the cosmic acceleration. Unlike void lensing, which requires identifications of individual voids, we study the stacked lensing signals around the low-density-positions (LDP), defined as places that are devoid of foreground bright galaxies in projection. The method allows a direct comparison with numerical results by drawing correspondence between the bright galaxies with halos. It leads to lensing signals that are significant enough for differentiating several dark energy models. In this work, we use the CFHTLenS catalogue to define LDPs, as well as measuring their background lensing signals. We consider several different definitions of the foreground bright galaxies (redshift range & magnitude cut). Regarding the cosmological model, we run six simulations: the first set of simulations have the same initial conditions, with $rm{w_{de}=-1,-0.5,-0.8,-1.2}$; the second set of simulations include a slightly different $Lambda$CDM model and a w(z) model from cite{2017NatAs...1..627Z}. The lensing results indicate that the models with $rm{w_{de}=-0.5,-0.8}$ are not favored, and the other four models all achieve comparable agreement with the data.