Scaling solutions as Early Dark Energy resolutions to the Hubble tension

Abstract

A wide class of scalar field models including Quintessence and K-essence have the attractive property of tracker regimes, where the energy density stored in the field evolves so as to mimic that of the dominant background component for a period of time. During this evolution, for a brief period of time there is an increase in the energy density of the field as it spirals in towards it's attractor solution. We show that when the peak of this energy density occurs around the epoch of equality, we can address a key requirement of early dark energy (EDE), postulated as a solution to the Hubble tension. In particular we demonstrate how this can occur in a wide class of Quintessence, axion and K-essence models, before showing that the Quintessence models suffer in that they generally lead to sound speeds incompatible with the requirements of EDE, whereas the K-essence and axion models can do a better job of fitting the data.

26 pages, 12 figures

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• Detectable and defect-free dark photon dark matter
• Experimental targets for dark photon dark matter
• Quintessential early dark energy
• Quintessence scalar field and cosmological constant: Dynamics of a multi-component dark energy model
• Phantom scalar field cosmologies constrained by early cosmic measurements
• Geometric formulation of $k$-essence and late-time acceleration