Entanglement-Driven Cosmological Expansion: Quantum Foundations of Dark Energy and the Discrete Hubble Spectrum -- Paper 2

We present a quantum mechanical formulation of the Entanglement-Driven Cosmological Expansion (EDCE) framework, in which dark energy and cosmic acceleration emerge from the saturation dynamics of quantum entanglement on holographic boundaries. The fundamental unit is a triangular Planck-scale cell comprising three 2D de Sitter surfaces (P,B1,B2), encoding exactly four qubits per cell via the Bekenstein–Hawking bound. The unobservability of the pre-temporal node P implies a local SU(nP ) gauge invariance: for the four canonical qubit partitions (3-1,2-2,1-3,0-4) this yields gauge algebras su(3), su(2)⊕u(1), u(1) and the trivial algebra, reproducing SU(3) ×SU(2) ×U(1) plus gravity without fine-tuned parameters. A cosmic saturation parameter ξpat measures the fraction of information capacity transferred from P to cosmological output B2. An evolution equation for ξpat links microscopic decoherence at the B1 interface to macroscopic expansion via a Finsler–Ricci curvature scalar R(ξpat) satisfying R(ξpat) = 12H2(ξpat) in the homogeneous limit. Stability analysis indicates a depopulation sequence 3-1 →2-2 →1-3 →0-4, valid throughout the physically realised saturation range (ξpat ≈0.48– 0.70), driving the universe toward a late-time phase dominated by the purely geometric 0-4 pattern. As gauge-active patterns depopulate the lattice’s capacity to encode non-gravitational interactions diminishes irreversibly. EDCE generically predicts an effective dark-energy equation of state w(z) <−1 (phantom-like behaviour at the coarse-grained fluid level) and a discrete set of de Sitter–like vacua labelled by ξpat,n = n/4. The same saturation dynamics that weaken gravity at microscopic scales control the large-scale expansion rate, tying the force hierarchy and dark energy to a single mechanism. The Planck-scale triangular cell provides a concrete implementation of Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology: aeon transitions occur when ξpat →1 and the Finsler metric degenerates, with a porous conformal boundary permitting limited information transfer between aeons. A Bayesian model comparison combining DESI DR2 BAO, Pantheon+ supernovae and Planck 2018 CMB data shows that ΛCDM remains statistically preferred (∆ ln Z=−3.22 for EDCE relative to ΛCDM) but the EDCE parametrisation outperforms the phenomenological CPL (w0wa) model (∆ ln Z = +1.37). The entropy-rate coupling β = 0.40 ±0.20 is non-zero at 2σ, constituting a hint rather than a detection. Falsification criteria include a primordial tensor amplitude r ∼0.01–0.05, a small positive ∆Neff, percent-level BAO-scale power-spectrum modifications, anisotropic Hawking-point features in the CMB and the absence of long-range forces beyond the four qubit patterns.