Resolving the Hubble tension with early dark energy
Laura Herold, Elisa G. M. Ferreira
Abstract
Early dark energy (EDE) offers a solution to the so-called Hubble tension. Recently, it was shown that the constraints on EDE using Markov Chain Monte Carlo are affected by prior volume effects. The goal of this paper is to present constraints on the fraction of EDE, ${f}_{\mathrm{EDE}}$, and the Hubble parameter, ${H}_{0}$, which are not subject to prior volume effects. We conduct a frequentist profile likelihood analysis considering data from Planck cosmic microwave background, BOSS full-shape galaxy clustering, DES galaxy clustering and weak lensing, and the cosmic distance ladder from SH0ES. Contrary to previous findings, we find that ${H}_{0}$ for the EDE model is in statistical agreement with the SH0ES direct measurement at $<1.7\ensuremath{\sigma}$ for all datasets. For our baseline dataset ($Planck+\mathrm{BOSS}$), we obtain ${f}_{\mathrm{EDE}}=0.087\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.037$ and ${H}_{0}=70.57\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1.36\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{km}/\mathrm{s}/\mathrm{Mpc}$ at 68% confidence limit. We conclude that EDE is a viable solution to the Hubble tension.