A new early-universe explanation of the DESI anomaly connecting to the predictions of our solution to the Hubble tension in collaboration with Mathias Garny and Florian Niedermann: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15870

The presence of a Dark Acoustic Oscillation (DAO) near the actual BAO may appear as a single BAO-only feature with a slightly shifted peak position, which could bias the DESI BAO measurements, thereby explaining the anomaly in the DESI DR2 data without invoking late-time-evolving Dark Energy. The DAO predicted in our model for solving the Hubble tension, Hot New Early Dark Energy (Hot NEDE) with Dark Radiation Matter Decoupling (DRMD), also meets the requirements for explaining the DESI results, as shown in the leftmost panel of the figure below. The green curve is the favoured DAO position by the DESI DR2 data on small scales, and the dotted black line is the prediction of DRMD in Hot NEDE, when solving the Hubble tension.