Quasar cosmology II: joint analyses with Cosmic Microwave Background

TL;DR

This paper investigates the compatibility of quasars with CMB and other cosmological data, testing standard and extended dark energy models, and finds that only complex dark sector interactions can reconcile current data tensions.

Contribution

It extends previous work by analyzing quasars with CMB and BAO data within various dark energy models, including interacting dark sector scenarios.

Findings

Simple dark energy deviations do not resolve data tensions.

Complex dark sector interactions can potentially reconcile discrepancies.

Quasars are a valuable probe for testing cosmological models.

Abstract

Currently, the increasing availability of accurate cosmological probes leads to the emergence of tensions between data on the one hand and between theoretical predictions and direct observations on the other. Moreover, after 25 years since the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the Universe has elected the $\Lambda$CDM model as the reference model, resolving shortcomings of the standard cosmological model seems to be an unpostponed priority. Hence, it is key to test alternative models and investigate new cosmological probes at distances that range from the late to the early Universe, namely between the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and type Ia supernovae and baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) data. Bargiacchi et al. (2022) for the first time analysed dark energy (DE) models using quasars (QSOs) while also testing their consistency with BAO. Here, we carry on by exploring the compatibility of QSOs with both CMB data and dark energy survey measurements against the standard cosmological model and some DE extensions, such as the $w$CDM and Chevallier-Polarski-Linder parameterisations. We also consider an interacting dark matter and vacuum energy scenario, where vacuum energy perturbations affect the evolution of the matter growth rate in a decomposed Chaplygin gas model. We implement the QSO probe in Cobaya Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, using Botzmann solver codes as Cosmic Linear Anisotropy Solving System (CLASS) for the theory predictions. Our work shows that simple DE deviations from $\Lambda$CDM model do not reconcile the data and that only more complex models of interaction in the dark sector can succeed in solving the discrepancies of probes at all scales.