Multifield curved solid: Early dark energy and perturbation instabilities

Abstract

We introduce a multifield dark energy model with a nonflat field-space metric, in which one field is dynamical while the others have constant spatial gradients. The model is predictive at the background level, leading to an early dark energy component at high redshifts and a suppressed fraction of late-time anisotropy. Both features have simple expressions in terms of the curvature scale of the field-space, and correspond to stable points in the phase space of possible solutions. Because of the coupling between time and space-dependent scalar fields, vector field perturbations develop tachyonic instabilities at scales below the Hubble radius, thus being potentially observable in the number count of galaxies. Overall, the presence of a nontrivial field-space curvature also leads to the appearance of instabilities on scalar perturbations, which can impact the matter density distribution at large scales.