Observational constraints on an interacting dark energy model
  We use observations of cosmic microwave background anisotropies, supernova
luminosities and the baryon acoustic oscillation signal in the galaxy
distribution to constrain the cosmological parameters in a simple interacting
dark energy model with a time-varying equation of state. Using a Monte Carlo
Markov Chain technique we determine the posterior likelihoods. Constraints from
the individual data sets are weak, but the combination of the three data sets
confines the interaction constant $\Gamma$ to be less than 23% of the expansion
rate of the Universe $H_0$; at 95% CL $-0.23 < \Gamma/H_0 < +0.15$. The CMB
acoustic peaks can be well fitted even if the interaction rate is much larger,
but this requires a larger or smaller (depending on the sign of interaction)
matter density today than in the non-interacting model. Due to this degeneracy
between the matter density and the interaction rate, the only observable effect
on the CMB is a larger or smaller integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect. While SN
or BAO data alone do not set any direct constraints on the interaction, they
exclude the models with very large matter density, and hence indirectly
constrain the interaction rate when jointly analysed with the CMB data. To
enable the analysis described in this paper, we present in a companion paper
[arXiv:0907.4981] a new systematic analysis of the early radiation era solution
to find the adiabatic initial conditions for the Boltzmann integration.
