Accelerated inference on accelerated cosmic expansion: New constraints on axionlike early dark energy with DESI BAO and ACT DR6 CMB lensing

Qu, Frank J., Surrao, Kristen M., Bolliet, Boris, Hill, J. Colin, Sherwin, Blake D., Jense, Hidde T. and La Posta, Adrien 2025. Accelerated inference on accelerated cosmic expansion: New constraints on axionlike early dark energy with DESI BAO and ACT DR6 CMB lensing. Physical Review D (particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology) 111 (12) , 123507. 10.1103/xhh6-9v62

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Abstract

The early dark energy (EDE) extension to Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) has been proposed as a candidate scenario to resolve the “Hubble tension.” We present new constraints on the EDE model by incorporating new data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) survey and cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing measurements from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) sixth data release and Planck NPIPE data. We do not find evidence for EDE. The maximum fractional contribution of EDE to the total energy density is fEDE<0.091 [95% confidence level (CL)] from our baseline combination of Planck CMB, CMB lensing, and DESI BAO. Our strongest constraints on EDE come from the combination of Planck CMB and CMB lensing alone, yielding fEDE<0.070(95%CL). We also explore extensions of ΛCDM beyond the EDE parameters by treating the total neutrino mass as a free parameter, finding ∑mν<0.096 eV(95%CL) and fEDE<0.087(95%CL). For the first time in EDE analyses, we perform Bayesian parameter estimation using neural network emulators of cosmological observables, which are on the order of 100 times faster than full Boltzmann solutions. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2025-06-06
Publisher:	American Physical Society
ISSN:	2470-0010
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 June 2025
Last Modified:	18 Jun 2025 12:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179173

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