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Sound-horizon-free measurement of the Hubble constant from DESI DR2 baryon acoustic oscillations using artificial neural networks

Gaurav N. Gadbail* and Kazuharu Bamba†

  • *Contact author: gauravgadbail6@gmail.com
  • †Contact author: bamba@sss.fukushima-u.ac.jp
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 043551 – Published 28 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/29rq-lgby

Abstract

We present a model-independent, sound-horizon-free measurement of the Hubble constant H0 using baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) tracers from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument data release 2 (DESI DR2). The function reconstructions are performed using the artificial neural network method, which is a completely data-driven approach that avoids the mild Λ cold dark matter prior dependence. Our approach is based on the distance duality relation and combines three complementary observational probes, such as type Ia supernovae (SNe), cosmic chronometer, and DESI DR2 BAO—without requiring any knowledge of the sound horizon scale rd or any assumption about the absolute luminosity of SNe Ia. We obtain a joint constraint of H0=71.5±2.2  km s−1  Mpc−1 at 68% confidence for 1000 bootstrap realizations and 4096 neurons, which is consistent with the tip of the red giant branch result and the SH0ES measurement within 0.6σ, consistent with the Planck 2020 result within 2σ. Our results favor a higher value of H0 compared to the Planck cosmic microwave background inference, adding independent support for the reality of the Hubble tension.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 043551– Published 28 August, 2026
  • Received 30 April 2026
  • Accepted 6 August 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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