V Berezinsky 2008 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 120 012001 (13pp)
INFN, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, Assergi (AQ) 67010 Italy and Institute for Nuclear Research, MoscowAbstract.
Puzzles often give birth to the great discoveries, the false
discoveries sometimes stimulate the exiting ideas in theoretical
physics. The historical examples of both are described in Introduction
and in section 'Cosmological Puzzles'. From existing puzzles most
attention is given to Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray (UHECR) puzzle and
to cosmological constant problem.
The 40-years old UHECR problem consisted in absence of the sharp
steepening in spectrum of extragalactic cosmic rays caused by
interaction with CMB radiation. This steepening is known as
Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cutoff. It is demonstrated here that the
features of interaction of cosmic ray protons with CMB are seen now in
the spectrum in the form of the dip and beginning of the GZK cutoff.
The most serious cosmological problem is caused by large vacuum energy
of the known elementary-particle fields which exceeds at least by 45
orders of magnitude the cosmological vacuum energy. The various ideas
put forward to solve this problem during last 40 years, have weaknesses
and cannot be accepted as the final solution of this puzzle. The
anthropic approach is discussed.
Source: http://www.iop.org/EJ/
