Stacked voids are too cold: composite CMB profiles behind survey-identified voids show a cold imprint exceeding the ΛCDM ISW prediction by factors of several, recurring across catalogs, maps, and methods (Granett 2010; Nadathur and Hotchkiss 2015), while the sky-averaged ISW cross-correlation simultaneously runs low. One potential-decay rate is failing in both directions.
Constant Λ fixes the rate at which void potentials decay, and the ISW amplitude follows from that rate with no freedom. A stacked imprint several times too strong has no mechanism, so the model must call the recurring detections selection flukes, even as the same fixed rate underpredicts nothing and overpredicts elsewhere in the same sector.
SCT's potential-decay rate has a geography, and voids are where it runs hottest. Inside deep underdensities the local binding term is weak, so Λ_eff = C × Λ_parent/λ_local is locally enhanced (P17, P19), and void potentials decay faster than the constant-Λ rate the standard ISW calculation assumes. Stacking selects precisely these regions, so the composite imprint reads the enhanced decay rate and comes back colder than the one-rate prediction; the sky-averaged cross-correlation, sampling the whole landscape, comes back warmer-weighted and runs low. The cold stacks and the low mean are the same field measured at two resolutions, the registered Granett pattern already carried at recid 67.
The amplitude bookkeeping is the canonical Λ_eff variability, of order one percent on 100 to 300 Mpc scales, the same field supplying the KBC void's 2 to 3 km/s/Mpc share of the Hubble tension (P19) and the Eridanus void's amplified voice toward the Cold Spot (recid 89). The expansion-side machinery is laid out in Paper 7, From Chaos To Cosmic Expansion, with the engine of potential decay in the mesh-dissipation chain (P14, P15). No additional cooling mechanism is invoked; the photons are redshifted by potentials dying faster than the model permits, nothing more exotic than that.
Two premises carry it: P17 for the ratio, P19 for where it runs hot. The stacking analyses did not find a new effect; they found the old effect's geography.
DESI void catalogs crossed with Simons Observatory and CMB-S4 maps carry the kill: if the stacked void imprint converges to the standard ΛCDM ISW amplitude, with the historical excess dissolving into catalog selection, the enhanced void decay rate is refuted. SCT requires the imprint to scale with void depth at the Λ_eff-enhanced rate and to coexist with a low sky-averaged cross-correlation; a sector where both statistics match one constant decay rate ends the M5 reading.