In this work we model the quintessence potential in a Taylor series
expansion, up to second order, around the present-day value of the scalar
field. The field is evolved in a thawing regime assuming zero initial velocity.
We use the latest data from the Planck satellite, baryonic acoustic
oscillations observations from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Supernovae
luminosity distance information from Union2.1 to constrain our models
parameters, and also include perturbation growth data from the WiggleZ, BOSS
and the 6dF surveys. The supernova data provide the strongest individual
constraint on the potential parameters. We show that the growth data
performance is competitive with the other datasets in constraining the dark
energy parameters we introduce. We also conclude that the combined constraints
we obtain for our model parameters, when compared to previous works of nearly a
decade ago, have shown only modest improvement, even with new growth of
structure data added to previously-existent types of data.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures and 1 table. Version 2 with minor changes to match
Physical Review D accepted versio