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Dark before light: testing the cosmic expansion history through the cosmic microwave background

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Published 1 April 2011 • Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd
, , Citation Eric V. Linder and Tristan L. Smith JCAP04(2011)001 DOI 10.1088/1475-7516/2011/04/001

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Author affiliations

1 Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics & Berkeley Lab, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.

2 Institute for the Early Universe, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea

Dates

  1. Received 17 February 2011
  2. Accepted 22 March 2011
  3. Published

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1475-7516/2011/04/001

Abstract

The cosmic expansion history proceeds in broad terms from a radiation dominated epoch to matter domination to an accelerated, dark energy dominated epoch. We investigate whether intermittent periods of acceleration (from a canonical, minimally coupled scalar field) are possible in the early universe — between Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) and recombination and beyond. We establish that the standard picture is remarkably robust: anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background consistent with ΛCDM will exclude any extra period of accelerated expansion between 1 ⩽ z≲105 (corresponding to 5 × 10−4eV ⩽ T≲25eV).

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10.1088/1475-7516/2011/04/001