The Serendipitous Axiodilaton: A Self-Consistent Recombination-Era Solution to the Hubble Tension

Axio-dilaton cosmology provides a minimal benchmark model for both Dark Matter (DM) and Dark Energy (DE) that is well motivated by fundamental physics. The axion and dilaton arise as pseudo-Goldstone modes of symmetries that predict particle masses depend on the dilaton, and therefore to evolve cosmologically, leading to correlated modifications of recombination physics, the sound horizon, and late-time expansion and growth histories. We confront this model with Planck 2018 temperature, polarisation, and lensing data, SPT-3G high-$\ell$ measurements, DESI DR2 BAO, and Pantheon$+$ supernovae, assuming that the axion makes up all of the dark matter and that the dilaton plays the role of a dark energy field. We find that it fits the data somewhat better than $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, with the $\chi^2$ lowered by $\simeq 7$ for three additional parameters, and significantly raises the inferred Hubble constant to $H_0 \simeq 69.2\,\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}\,Mpc^{-1}}$, reducing the Hubble tension to $\lesssim 3\sigma$ and thereby allowing a joint fit of CMB and SH0ES data. The model fits this enlarged data set as well as the $w_0w_a$ model with an electron mass modified by hand at recombination, though it does so with calculable dynamics. Axio-dilaton self-interactions robustly fake a phantom equation of state in DESI measurements. There is a sting: cosmology prefers dilaton-matter couplings $|\mathbf{g}|\sim 10^{-2}$-$10^{-1}$, which are large enough to have been detected in solar-system tests of General Relativity. These results show how axio-dilatons can provide a viable cosmology preferred by current data at surprisingly large couplings, within a framework that links dark energy, dark matter, and time-dependent particle masses in a coherent way. They suggest both new observable signals and new theoretical directions, aimed at resolving the apparent inconsistency with non-cosmological observations.