Cosmological tensions in Proca-Nuevo theory

We study the cosmological predictions of (extended) Proca-Nuevo theory. This vector-tensor theory enjoys stable homogeneous and isotropic solutions characterized by an effective dark energy fluid, with behavior that ranges from freezing quintessential to thawing phantom-like, serving as a motivated framework to scrutinize the cosmological tensions that affect the standard $\Lambda$CDM model. While the model we consider is sufficiently generic to encompass a large class of field theories, it distinguishes itself from scalar dark energy models (quintessential ones, kinetic ones and non-minimally coupled ones) by the presence of what would be classed as a vector degree of freedom which can be for instance inherited from more generic theories of gravity. We improve on previous work in several directions: we consider a general one-parameter class of background models; identify a so-called 'special' model and analyze observational constraints taking also into account perturbations and making use of wide up-to-date catalogs of datasets including recently released ones. We find that the one-parameter Proca-Nuevo model is preferred over $\Lambda$CDM at $1.5\sigma$ when fitting CMB and BAO data, and at $2.4\sigma$ when further adding low-redshift data. The Hubble tension is alleviated, dropping from $5.8\sigma$ to $2.3\sigma$ (resp. $1.5\sigma$) between CMB with (and resp. without) BAO data and local measurements. On the other hand, we find that the vector field generically introduces a significant enhancement of the effective Newton constant, so that matching the observed matter power spectrum requires a mild amount of tuning to suppress the impact of perturbations. Since, at the background level, Proca-Nuevo is degenerate with other classes of theories, our results are also relevant to a wider range of set-ups including and beyond vector-tensor models.