No evidence for EDE from Planck data in extended scenarios

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether anomalies in the Planck CMB data could hide evidence for Early Dark Energy (EDE) and finds that extended parameters do not affect the constraints, suggesting ACT data primarily supports EDE evidence.

Contribution

The study shows that extended cosmological parameters do not influence Planck constraints on EDE, indicating Planck anomalies are unrelated to EDE presence.

Findings

Planck anomalies are not explained by EDE.

EDE evidence mainly comes from ACT data.

Extended parameters do not impact EDE constraints.

Abstract

The latest data release from the ACT CMB experiment (in combination with previous WMAP data) shows evidence for an Early Dark Energy component at more than $3$ standard deviations. The same conclusion has been recently shown to hold when temperature data from the Planck experiment limited to intermediate angular scales ($l \le 650$) are included while it vanishes when the full Planck dataset is considered. However, it has been shown that the full Planck dataset exhibits an anomalous lensing component and a preference for a closed universe at the level of three standard deviation. It is therefore of utmost importance to investigate if these anomalies could anti-correlate with an early dark energy component and hide its presence during the process of parameter extraction. Here we demonstrate that extended parameters choices as curvature, equation of state of dark energy and lensing amplitude $A_L$ have no impact on the Planck constraints on EDE. In practice, EDE does not solve Planck angular spectra anomalies. This indicates that current CMB evidence for an EDE component comes essentially from the ACT-DR4 dataset.