Towards primordial gravitational waves and $n_s=1$ in light of BICEP/Keck, DESI BAO and Hubble tension

Abstract

Recent observational data seem to show a $\gtrsim 3\sigma$ evidence for an evolving dark energy (DE) against the cosmological constant, so the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. In this paper, we perform the search for the primordial gravitational waves with the potential pre-recombination solutions to the Hubble tension, using recent DESI baryon acoustic oscillation measurements combined with BICEP/Keck cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization, Planck CMB and Pantheon supernova data, which reveal that the low bound of the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ is $> 1.5\sigma$ non-zero with the bestfit $r_{0.05}\sim 0.01$ and the scalar spectral index $n_s= 1$ (both $|r_{0.05}-0.01|$ and $|n_s-1|\sim {\cal O} (0.001)$). In particular, we observe the unnoticed impact of CMB B-mode polarization data for constraining the nature of DE, which together with early dark energy solutions to the Hubble tension is calling for the return of post-recombination $\Lambda$CDM.