Dark energy in light of the early JWST observations: case for a negative cosmological constant?

Early data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has uncovered the existence of a surprisingly abundant population of very massive galaxies at extremely high redshift, which are hard to accommodate within the standard ΛCDM cosmology. We explore whether the JWST observations may be pointing towards more complex dynamics in the dark energy (DE) sector. Motivated by the ubiquity of anti-de Sitter vacua in string theory, we consider a string-inspired scenario where the DE sector consists of a negative cosmological constant (nCC) and a evolving component with positive energy density on top, whose equation of state is allowed to cross the phantom divide. We show that such a scenario can drastically alter the growth of structure compared to ΛCDM, and accommodate the otherwise puzzling JWST observations if the dynamical component evolves from the quintessence-like regime in the past to the phantom regime today: in particular, we demonstrate that the presence of a nCC (which requires a higher density for the evolving component) plays a crucial role in enhancing the predicted cumulative comoving stellar mass density. Our work reinforces the enormous potential held by observations of the abundance of high-z galaxies in probing cosmological models and new fundamental physics, including string-inspired ingredients.