Early dark energy triggered by spacetime dynamics that encodes cosmic radiation-matter transition

Abstract: Early dark energy (EDE), introduced at the epoch of matter-radiation equality to alleviate the Hubble tension, has posed a new coincidence problem: why EDE appears at matter-radiation equality when their physics are completely unrelated? To solve this coincidence problem, we propose a new EDE model based on scalar-tensor gravity with the idea that EDE is triggered by spacetime dynamics that encodes cosmic radiation-matter transition. Our model can induce EDE naturally at matter-radiation equality without unnatural parameter tuning. Compared with other EDE models, a distinguishing feature of ours is that it can also induce a new energy component during cosmic matter-dark energy transition. This is testable with low-redshift observations.