Quintessence and the Separation of Cosmic Microwave Background Peaks

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Abstract
We propose that it should be possible to use the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to discriminate between dark energy models with different equations of state, which includes distinguishing a cosmological constant from many models of quintessence. The separation of peaks in the CMB anisotropies can be parametrized by three quantities: the amount of quintessence today, the amount at last scattering, and the averaged equation of state of quintessence. In particular, we show that CMB peaks can be used to measure the amount of dark energy present before last scattering.