Dark Before Light: Testing the Cosmic Expansion History through the Cosmic Microwave Background

Abstract

The cosmic expansion history proceeds in broad terms from a radiation dominated epoch to matter domination to an accelerated, dark energy dominated epoch. We investigate whether intermittent periods of acceleration are possible in the early universe -- between Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and recombination and beyond. We establish that the standard picture is remarkably robust: observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background exclude any extra period of accelerated expansion between 1 \leq z \lesssim 10^5 (corresponding to 5\times10^{-4}\ {\rm eV} \leq T \lesssim 25\ {\rm eV}).

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectrum at 148 and 218 GHz from the 2008 Southern Survey
• Axion constraints in non-standard thermal histories
• From Cavendish to PLANCK: Constraining Newton's Gravitational Constant with CMB Temperature and Polarization Anisotropy
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