Quintessence and variation of the fine structure constant in the CMBR

Abstract

We study dependence of the CMB temperature anisotropy spectrum on the value of the fine structure constant $\alpha$ and the equation of state of the dark energy component of the total density of the universe. We find that bounds imposed on the variation of $\alpha$ from the analysis of currently available CMB data sets can be significantly relaxed if one also allows for a change in the equation of state.

Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures. Several references added and a few minor typos corrected in the revised version