Exhaustive study of cosmic microwave background anisotropies in quintessential scenarios

Recent high-precision measurements of the CMB anisotropies performed by the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1 experiments provide an unmatched set of data allowing us to probe different cosmological models. Among these scenarios, motivated by the recent measurements of the luminosity distance versus redshift relation for type Ia supernovas, is the quintessence hypothesis. It consists of assuming that the acceleration of the Universe is due to a scalar field whose final evolution is insensitive to the initial conditions. Within this framework we investigate the cosmological perturbations for two well-motivated potentials: the Ratra-Peebles and the SUGRA tracking potentials. We show that the solutions of the perturbed equations possess an attractor and that, as a consequence, the insensitivity to the initial conditions is preserved at the perturbed level. Then. we study the predictions of these two models for structure formation and CMB anisotropies and investigate the general features of the multipole moments in the presence of quintessence. We also compare the CMB multipoles calculated with the help of a full Boltzmann code with the BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-I data. We pay special attention to the location of the second peak and demonstrate that it significantly differs from the location obtained in the cosmological constant case. Finally, we argue that the SUGRA potential is compatible with all the recent data with standard values of the cosmological parameters. In particular, it fits the MAXIMA-1 data better than a cosmological constant or the Ratra-Peebles potential.