What's Behind Acoustic Peaks in the Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies

Abstract

We give a brief review of the physics of acoustic oscillations in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. As an example of the impact of their detection in cosmology, we show how the present data on CMB angular power spectrum on sub-degree scales can be used to constrain dark energy cosmological models.Comment: 6 pages, proceedings to the TAUP2001 conference, LNGS, Italy, Sept. 200