Another look on the connections of Hubble tension with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether modifications to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and higher-dimensional physics can explain the Hubble tension by allowing a photon mass that could reconcile measurements, concluding that such approaches are insufficient.

Contribution

It analyzes the potential of generalized uncertainty principles and higher-dimensional effects to address the Hubble tension through photon mass modifications, finding limitations in these approaches.

Findings

GUP-based modifications do not yield the required photon mass scales.

Higher-dimensional effects can produce the needed photon mass but do not resolve the Hubble tension.

Original Heisenberg uncertainty principle remains uniquely capable of addressing the tension.

Abstract

The Hubble tension is one of the most exciting problems that Cosmology faces today. A lot of possible solutions for it have already been proposed in the last few years, with a lot of them using a lot of new and exotic physics ideas to deal with the problem. But it was shown recently that the H0 tension might not require new physics but only a more accurate discussion of measurements and interestingly it was the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which was pivotal for that revelation. Accordingly, if one observed the photon mass beyond the indeterminacy through uncertainty then one could in principle reconcile the tension. We examine this in a greater detail in this work by taking into account modifications of the Compton wavelength, which was pivotal in the initial discussion on the interconnection between uncertainty and the H0 tension. We mainly discuss two types of modifications, one based on generalized uncertainty principles (GUP) and the other on higher dimensional physics considerations. We firstly show that both minimal length and maximal momentum GUP based modifications do not provide photon mass values on the required scales and hence we cannot address the tension in this sense at all in this case. We then show that one can get the photon mass to be on the required scales even after incorporating higher dimensional effects, one cannot reconcile the Hubble Tension in the same sense as in the (3+1) space-time case. In this way, we show that certain new physics considerations cannot address the H0 tension in the same sense as one can using the original Heisenberg uncertainty principle in a (3+1) space-time.