Numerical polology: towards next-generation model-building for cosmology
Will Barker, Will Handley, Michael Hobson, Anthony Lasenby, Carlo Marzo, Alessandro Santoni, Leonardo Torcellini
astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-ph, hep-th
Submitted: 2026-06-29
Comments: Journal submission with community feedback incorporated (textual/reference changes)
Code: https://github.com/wevbarker/SupplementalMaterials2607
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: The dark sector need not be restricted to simple field content.
Terminology
Abstract
The dark sector need not be restricted to simple field content. Indeed, simple bosonic configurations, such as scalar-tensor or dark photon models, contrast with the much richer picture painted by many ultraviolet scenarios. Polology is the study of propagator poles, which correspond to particle states in any given theory. We outline a numerical polology framework for discovering perturbative, ghost-free models with consistent interactions, which produces theoretical model priors by sampling the coupling space. The method is tested on tensor field theories of up to rank three. Subsequent observational constraint pipelines are illustrated for black hole superradiance (M33 X-7), dynamical dark energy (DESI DR2, Pantheon and SH0ES) and gravitational waves (GWTC-3).
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