Published September 15, 2024 | Published
Journal Article Open

Cosmology of dark energy radiation

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon University of Chicago
  • 3. ROR icon Stony Brook University
  • 4. ROR icon University of Ferrara

Abstract

In this work, we quantify the cosmological signatures of dark energy radiation—a novel description of dark energy, which proposes that the dynamical component of dark energy is comprised of a thermal bath of relativistic particles sourced by thermal friction from a slowly rolling scalar field. For a minimal model with particle production emerging from first principles, we find that the abundance of radiation sourced by dark energy can be as large as ΩDER=0.03, exceeding the bounds on relic dark radiation by three orders of magnitude. Although the background and perturbative evolution of dark energy radiation are distinct from Quintessence, we find that current and near-future cosmic microwave background and supernova data will not distinguish these models of dark energy. We also find that our constraints on all models are dominated by their impact on the expansion rate of the Universe. Considering extensions that allow the dark radiation to populate neutrinos, axions, and dark photons, we evaluate the direct detection prospects of a thermal background comprised of these candidates consistent with cosmological constraints on dark energy radiation. Our study indicates that a resolution of ∼6  meV is required to achieve sensitivity to relativistic neutrinos compatible with dark energy radiation in a neutrino capture experiment on tritium. We also find that dark matter axion experiments lack sensitivity to a relativistic thermal axion background, even if enhanced by dark energy radiation, and dedicated search strategies are required to probe new parameter space. We derive constraints arising from a dark photon background from oscillations into visible photons, and find that viable parameter space can be explored with the late dark energy radiation experiment. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.

Acknowledgement

We thank Chelsea Bartram, Aaron S. Chou, David Cyncynates, Christopher Dessert, Peter W. Graham, Junwu Huang, D’Arcy Kentworthy, Ken Van Tilburg, Zachary J. Weiner, and Lindley Winslow for helpful discussions. We thank Aaron S. Chou for providing LADERA sensitivity estimates, and for extensive feedback on how to improve the sensitivity estimates to a relativistic signal for experiments that target larger axion mass ranges. Simulations in this paper use High Performance Computing (HPC) resources supported by the University of Arizona Technology and Research Initiative Fund (TRIF), University Information Technology Services (UITS), and RII and maintained by the UA Research Technologies department. The authors would also like to thank the Stony Brook Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure, and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University for access to the high-performance SeaWulf computing system, which was made possible by a $1.4M National Science Foundation grant (No. 1531492). K. B. acknowledges the support of NSF Award No. PHY2210533, and thanks the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award No. DE-SC0011632 and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics. T. K. was supported by NASA ATP Grant No. 80NSSC18K0694, funds provided by the Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania, the Simons Foundation and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago through an endowment from the Kavli Foundation. T. B. was supported through the INFN project “GRANT73/Tec-Nu,” and by the COSMOS network ([116]) through the ASI (Italian Space Agency) Grants No. 2016-24-H.0 and No. 2016-24-H.1-201. This work is partially supported by Italian Center for SuperComputing (ICSC)—Centro Nazionale di Ricerca in High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing, funded by European Union—NextGenerationEU.

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Additional details

Created:
September 27, 2024
Modified:
September 27, 2024