Constraining Cosmological Physics with DESI BAO Observations

Abstract

The DESI year one observations can help probe new physics on cosmological scales. In light of the latest DESI BAO measurements, we constrain five popular cosmological scenarios including inflation, modified gravity, annihilating dark matter and interacting dark energy. Using a data combination of BICEP/Keck array, cosmic microwave background and DESI, we obtain the $1\sigma$ and $2\sigma$ constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r_{0.05}=0.0176_{-0.0130}^{+0.0070}$ and $r_{0.05}=0.018_{-0.017}^{+0.020}$ indicating a beyond $2\sigma$ evidence of primordial gravitational waves. Using the combination of cosmic microwave background and DESI, we find a $2.4\sigma$ evidence for gravitational theories beyond the general relativity, shrink the dark matter annihilation cross-section by $12\%$ relative to cosmic microwave background, obtain a $1.3\sigma$ hint of the positive interaction between dark matter and dark energy implying that energy may be transferred from dark matter to dark energy in the dark sector of the universe, and give a clue of massive sterile neutrinos via the $2\sigma$ constraint on the effective number of relativistic degrees of freedom $N_{eff}=3.16_{-0.11}^{+0.26}$ and the effective mass $m_{\nu ,sterile}^{eff}<0.52$ eV. Future DESI observations could go a step further to explore the nature of inflation, dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos, and test the validity of general relativity on cosmological scales.

9 pages, 6 figures. Inflation, modified gravity, dark matter, dark energy and sterile neutrinos considered