Hubble tension as a guide for refining the early Universe: Cosmologies with explicit local Lorentz and diffeomorphism violation

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to assessing modified cosmological settings based on the gravitational Standard-Model Extension (SME). Our analysis rests upon the Hubble tension (HT), which is a discrepancy between the observational determination of the Hubble parameter via data from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Type Ia supernovae, respectively. While the latter approach is model-independent, the former highly depends on the model used to describe the physics of the early Universe. Motivated by the HT, we take into account two recently introduced cosmological models as test frameworks of the pre-CMB era. These settings involve local Lorentz and diffeomorphism violation parameterized by nondynamical SME background fields $s_{00}$ and $s^{ij}$, respectively. We aim at explaining the tension in the measured results of the cosmic expansion rate in early and late epochs by resorting to these two modified cosmologies as potential descriptions of the pre-CMB era. As long as the HT does not turn out to be a merely systematic effect, it can serve as a criterion for exploring regions of the parameter space in certain pre-CMB new-physics candidates such as SME cosmologies. By setting extracted limits on SME coefficients into perspective with already existing bounds in the literature, we infer that none of the aforementioned models are suitable pre-CMB candidates for fixing the HT. In this way, new physics arising from the particular realizations of Lorentz and diffeomorphism violation studied in this paper does not explain the HT. Our paper exemplifies how to exploit this discrepancy as a novel possibility of refining our description of the early Universe.