Catching the Cosmic Sign Flip: Background and Growth Tests of Smooth Sign Switching Lambda_s CDM

Abstract

Recent baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), in combination with CMB and supernova data, show a mild preference for dynamical dark energy over flat $\Lambda$CDM. They can also drive the best-fit effective neutrino mass to unphysical negative values, motivating models that mimic this effect through late-time expansion physics. The sign-switching cosmological constant ($\Lambda_s$CDM) model addresses this by introducing an AdS-like negative vacuum energy density at high redshifts ($z > z^\dagger$) that transitions to a dS-like positive density at low redshifts. While original fits assumed a discontinuous step function transition, we generalise the dynamics using a smooth hyperbolic tangent parametrisation, $\Lambda(z) \propto \tanh[\Delta(z^\dagger - z)]$. We constrain the transition redshift $z^\dagger$ and smoothness parameter $\Delta$ using background distance data from DES-SN5YR (with Dovekie recalibration) and DESI 2024 BAO. We further incorporate a compact redshift space distortion (RSD) $f\sigma_8$ compilation. The joint data do not prefer the smooth sign-switching model over flat $\Lambda$CDM, yielding nearly identical $\chi^2_{\text{min}}$ values, while information criteria penalise the additional parameters. The transition smoothness remains unconstrained and dominated by the prior volume ($\Delta = 24.75^{+17.42}_{-17.48}$), indicating that current data cannot distinguish between a sharp transition and a smooth dynamical crossover. This work does not directly constrain the physical sum of neutrino masses $\sum m_\nu$; rather, it shows that current late-time background and growth data alone cannot resolve the transition details. We discuss the implications of this null detection and present projections for next-generation surveys.