Title: Early Dark Energy: a status update and new constraint using the profile likelihood

Abstract: A dark energy-like component in the early universe, known as early dark energy (EDE), is a proposed solution to the Hubble tension. Currently, there is no consensus in the literature as to whether EDE can simultaneously solve the Hubble tension and provide an adequate fit to the data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure of the universe. In this talk, I will give a brief overview on the status of EDE and describe the disagreement about EDE in the literature. To explore the origin of this disagreement, we deconstruct the current constraints from the Planck CMB and the full-shape clustering data of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). We use two different analyses, a grid sampling and a profile likelihood, to investigate whether the current constraints suffer from volume effects upon marginalization and are biased towards some values of the EDE fraction. We find that the amount of EDE allowed by the data strongly depends on the particular choice of the other parameters of the model and that several choices of these parameters prefer a larger fraction of EDE than in the MCMC analysis. This suggests that volume effects are the reason behind the disagreement in the literature. Motivated by this, we use a profile likelihood to compute a new robust confidence interval for the EDE fraction.