Investigating The Effects of Early Dark Energy on Large-scale Structure Within the EDENS Suite

Abstract

Early Dark Energy (EDE) models have been suggested as a possible solution to the so-called Hubble Tension, a discrepancy of the measurement of the Hubble constant at early and late times. In this paper, we investigate the effects of EDE on large-scale structure probes of cosmology via the EDENS (Early Dark Energy N-body Simulations) suite. The EDENS suite extends the reach of available EDE simulations considerably by adding volume and resolution. We derive several key metrics, such as the halo mass function, the nonlinear power spectrum, and the concentration-mass relation. Furthermore, we implement a halo occupation distribution model to populate the simulations with synthetic galaxies. This allows us to measure the galaxy-galaxy correlation function and galaxy bias. We choose an EDE model that is consistent with observations across several probes and allows for the increase of the present day value of the Hubble constant to resolve the Hubble tension. This model adds three more parameters to the standard $Λ$CDM model. Additionally, it requires small shifts in the best-fit $Λ$CDM cosmological parameters to accommodate existing observational constraints. We find significant differences between the standard $Λ$CDM model and the EDE model, suggesting that some of our chosen metrics may allow us to distinguish EDE from $Λ$CDM, and future observations should help further constrain possible cosmological models. We release outputs from our simulations via the OpenCosmo data portal.