New early dark energy

New measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe have plunged the standard model of cosmology into a severe crisis. In this letter, we propose a simple resolution to the problem that relies on a first order phase transition in a dark sector in the early Universe, before recombination. This will lead to a short phase of a New Early Dark Energy (NEDE) component and can explain the observations. We model the false vacuum decay of the NEDE scalar field as a sudden transition from a cosmological constant source to a decaying fluid with constant equation of state. The corresponding fluid perturbations are covariantly matched to the adiabatic fluctuations of a sub-dominant scalar field that triggers the phase transition. Fitting our model to measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO, and supernovae (SNe) yields a significant improvement of the best-fit compared with the standard cosmological model without NEDE. We find the mean value of the present Hubble parameter in the NEDE model to be $H_0=71.4 \pm 1.0 ~\textrm{km}\, \textrm{s}^{-1}\, \textrm{Mpc}^{-1}$ ($68\, \%$ C.L.).
6 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, v4: corrected BOSS likelihood in MontePython, v5: matches version published in PRD Letters (selected as Editors' suggestion)