Free-streaming and coupled dark radiation isocurvature perturbations: constraints and application to the Hubble tension

DOI10.1088/1475-7516/2022/05/014MaRDI QIDQ5099290zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Subhajit Ghosh, Soubhik Kumar, Yuhsin Tsai

Publication date 31 August 2022

Published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09076

zbMATH Keywords

cosmological parameters from CMBRcosmological perturbation theoryinflation and CMBR theoryphysics of the early universe

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Methods of global Riemannian geometry, including PDE methods; curvature restrictions (53C21) Propagation of singularities; initial value problems on manifolds (58J47) Point estimation (62F10) Constrained dynamics, Dirac's theory of constraints (70H45) Classical and relativistic thermodynamics (80A10) Weak interaction in quantum theory (81V15) Quantum optics (81V80) Geometrodynamics and the holographic principle (83E05) String and superstring theories in gravitational theory (83E30) Relativistic cosmology (83F05)

Abstract: Dark radiation (DR) appears as a new physics candidate in various scenarios beyond the Standard Model. While it is often assumed that perturbations in DR are adiabatic, they can easily have an isocurvature component if more than one field was present during inflation, and whose decay products did not all thermalize with each other. By implementing the appropriate isocurvature initial conditions (IC), we derive the constraints on both uncorrelated and correlated DR density isocurvature perturbations from the full Planck 2018 data alone, and also in combination with other cosmological data sets. Our study on free-streaming DR (FDR) updates and generalizes the existing bound on neutrino density isocurvature perturbations by including a varying number of relativistic degrees of freedom, and for coupled DR (CDR) isocurvature, we derive the first bound. We also show that for CDR qualitatively new physical effects arise compared to FDR. One such effect is that for isocurvature IC, FDR gives rise to larger CMB anisotropies compared to CDR -- contrary to the adiabatic case. More generally, we find that a blue-tilt of DR isocurvature spectrum is preferred. This gives rise to a larger value of the Hubble constant $H_0$ compared to the standard $Lambda$CDM+$Delta{N}_{meff}$ cosmology with adiabatic spectra and relaxes the $H_0$ tension.

Cites work

• Effects of cosmological moduli fields on cosmic microwave background
• Generating the curvature perturbation without an inflaton
• Inference from iterative simulation using multiple sequences

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