Gravitational particle production and the Hubble tension

Abstract

The effect of gravitational particle production of scalar particles on the total effective cosmic energy density (in the era after photon decoupling till the present) is considered. The effect is significant for heavy particles. It is found that gravitational particle production results in an effective increase in the directly measured value of the Hubble constant $H_0$ while it does not affect the value of the Hubble constant in the calculation of the number density of baryons at present time that is used to calculate recombination redshift. This may explain why the Hubble constant determined by local measurements and non-local measurements (such as CMB) are different. This suggests that gravitational particle production may have a non-negligible impact on the $H_0$ tension.