2021-$H_0$ Odyssey: Closed, Phantom and Interacting Dark Energy Cosmologies

TL;DR

This paper explores a cosmological model with interacting dark energy and dark matter, non-zero curvature, and variable dark energy equation of state, showing it can resolve the Hubble tension with CMB data alone but faces challenges when including other observations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive interacting dark energy model with curvature and variable equation of state, analyzing its effectiveness in addressing cosmological tensions.

Findings

Phantom and closed universe models can alleviate the Hubble tension with CMB data alone.

Including additional data sets reduces the model's viability as a universal solution.

The model struggles to reconcile all cosmological observations simultaneously.

Abstract

Up-to-date cosmological data analyses have shown that \textit{(a)} a closed universe is preferred by the Planck data at more than $99\%$ CL, and \textit{(b)} interacting scenarios offer a very compelling solution to the Hubble constant tension. In light of these two recent appealing scenarios, we consider here an interacting dark matter-dark energy model with a non-zero spatial curvature component and a freely varying dark energy equation of state in both the quintessential and phantom regimes. When considering Cosmic Microwave Background data only, a phantom and closed universe can perfectly alleviate the Hubble tension, without the necessity of a coupling among the dark sectors. Accounting for other possible cosmological observations compromises the viability of this very attractive scenario as a global solution to current cosmological tensions, either by spoiling its effectiveness concerning the $H_0$ problem, as in the case of Supernovae Ia data, or by introducing a strong disagreement in the preferred value of the spatial curvature, as in the case of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations.