Constraining quintessence with the new CMB data

AbstractThe CMB data recently released by BOOMERANG and MAXIMA suggest that the anisotropy spectrum has a third peak in the range 800<l3<900. A combination of this result with constraints from large-scale structure permit us to differentiate between different quintessence models. In particular, we find that inverse power law models with power α>1 are disfavoured. Models with more than 5% quintessence before last scattering require a spectral index greater than 1. These constraints are compared with supernovae observations. We also show that the CMB alone now provides strong evidence for an accelerating universe