Infrared sensitivity of cosmological probes in the presence of axion field fluctuations

We study the effects of long wavelength entropy fluctuations on cosmological probes such as galaxy clustering, luminosity distance, and cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies. Specifically, we consider fluctuations of a massless spectator scalar field setup in the early Universe, which later acquires mass during the radiation-dominated era. We find that there are nonvanishing effects on observables, and the amplitude of these effects peaks for observables setup at the time of equal matter and radiation, and decreases as ${\ensuremath{\eta}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ where $\ensuremath{\eta}$ is the conformal time. Hence, the backreaction effects are important for CMB anisotropies, but their impact on late-time observables is suppressed. In particular, the backreaction effects are unable to explain the Hubble tension while they might alleviate the cosmic dipole tension. In contrast to a lot of the previous work on backreaction, we work in position rather than momentum space.