Late-time cosmic acceleration from quantum gravity

TL;DR

This paper explores how quantum gravity effects, modeled via group field theory condensates, can explain late-time cosmic acceleration, including phantom phases and the cosmological constant, potentially addressing the Hubble tension.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of late-time cosmological evolution within quantum gravity, linking the effective cosmological constant to quantum parameters and early universe bounce scale.

Findings

Identification of a phantom-like phase followed by De Sitter expansion

Quantum gravity effects can increase the inferred Hubble parameter

Model links the cosmological constant to quantum bounce parameters

Abstract

We deepen the analysis of the cosmological acceleration produced by quantum gravity dynamics in the formalism of group field theory condensate cosmology, treated at the coarse-grained level via a phenomenological model, in the language of hydrodynamics on minisuperspace. Specifically, we conduct a detailed analysis of the late-time evolution, which shows a phantom-like phase followed by an asymptotic De Sitter expansion. We argue that the model indicates a recent occurrence of the phantom crossing and we extract a more precise expression for the effective cosmological constant, linking its value to other parameters in the model and to the scale of the quantum bounce in the early universe evolution. Additionally, we show how the phantom phase produced by our quantum gravity dynamics increases the inferred value of the current Hubble parameter based on observed data, indicating a possible quantum gravity mechanism for alleviating the Hubble tension. Our results represent a concrete example of how quantum gravity can provide an explanation for large-scale cosmological puzzles, in an emergent spacetime scenario.