Remaining Problems in Interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Abstract

By three independent hints it will be demonstrated that still at present there is a substantial lack of theoretical understanding of the CMB phenomenon. One point, as we show, is that at the phase of the recombination era one cannot assume complete thermodynamic equilibrium conditions but has to face both deviations in the velocity distributions of leptons and baryons from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and automatically correlated deviations of photons from a Planck law. Another point is that at the conventional understanding of the CMB evolution in an expanding universe one has to face growing CMB temperatures with growing look-back times. We show, however, here that the expected CMB temperature increases would be prohibitive to star formation in galaxies at redshifts higher than z=2 where nevertheless the cosmologically most relevant supernovae have been observed. The third point in our present study has to do with the assumption of a constant vacuum energy density which is required by the present ΛCDM-cosmology. Our studies here rather lead to the conclusion that cosmic vacuum energy density scales with the inverse square of the cosmic expansion scale R=R(t). Thus we come to the conclusion that with the interpretation of the present-day high quality CMB data still needs to be considered carefully.