Large Scale Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies and Dark Energy

In this note we investigate the effects of perturbations in a dark energy component with a constant equation of state on large scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies. The inclusion of perturbations increases the large scale power. We investigate more speculative dark energy models with w < −1 and find the opposite behaviour. Overall the inclusion of perturbations in the dark energy component increases the degeneracies. We generalise the parameterization of the dark energy fluctuations to allow for an arbitrary constant sound speeds and show how constraints from cosmic microwave background experiments change if this is included. Combining cosmic microwave background with large scale structure, Hubble parameter and Supernovae observations we obtain w = −1.02 ± 0.16 (1σ) as a constraint on the equation of state, which is almost independent of the sound speed chosen. With the presented analysis we find no significant constraint on the constant speed of sound of the dark energy component.