Improved lower bounds or upper bounds on union-find structures since Tarjan?

Question

In 1979, Robert Tarjan published "A Class of Algorithms Which Require Nonlinear Time To Maintain Disjoint Sets", which proved an upper bound of $O(m \alpha(n))$ time on the time complexity of performing $m$ operations on a disjoint-set forest with union-by-rank and path compression, assuming there are $n$ nodes. He also proved a matching lower bound on any data structure for this problem in a pointer machine.

Since this paper was published, has anyone devised an data structure that runs in $o(m \alpha(n))$ for this problem? (Such a data structure would have to rely on techniques that don't work on a pointer machine.) Or are there any new lower bounds on non-pointer-machines?

Answer 1

There's a matching lower bound in the cell probe model (with a logarithmic number of bits per memory cell); see Fredman and Saks, "The cell probe complexity of dynamic data structures", STOC 1989.