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# References

hep-ph/0002246

LMU-00-02

New Formulation of Matter Effects on Neutrino Mixing and $`CP`$ Violation

Zhi-zhong Xing ***Electronic address: xing@theorie.physik.uni-muenchen.de

Sektion Physik, Universit$`\ddot{a}`$t M$`\ddot{u}`$nchen, Theresienstrasse 37A, 80333 Munich, Germany

## Abstract

Within the framework of three lepton families we have derived an exact and compact formula to describe the matter effect on neutrino mixing and $`CP`$ violation. This model- and parametrization-independent result can be particularly useful for recasting the fundamental lepton flavor mixing matrix from a variety of long-baseline neutrino experiments.

Recent observation of the atmospheric and solar neutrino anomalies by the Super-Kamiokande Collaboration has provided robust evidence for massive neutrinos that mix among different flavors  Throughout this work the LSND evidence for neutrino oscillations , which has not been independently confirmed by other experiments , will not be taken into account.. It opens a convincing window for new physics beyond the Standard Model, and has important cosmological implications.

Although the non-accelerator neutrino experiments have yielded some impressive constraints on the parameter space of atmospheric and solar neutrino oscillations, a precise determination of the lepton flavor mixing angles and the leptonic $`CP`$-violating phase(s) has to rely on a new generation of accelerator experiments with very long baselines , including the possible neutrino factories . In such long-baseline neutrino experiments the earth-induced matter effects, which are likely to deform the neutrino oscillation behaviors in vacuum and even to fake the genuine $`CP`$-violating asymmetries, must be taken into account. To single out the “true” theory of lepton mass generation and $`CP`$ violation depends crucially upon how accurately the fundamental parameters of lepton flavor mixing can be measured and disentangled from the matter effects. It is therefore desirable to explore the analytical relationship between the genuine flavor mixing matrix and the matter-corrected one beyond the conventional two-flavor framework . Some attempts of this nature have so far been made , but they are subject to specific assumptions, approximations or parametrizations and need be substantially improved.

In this note we present an exact and compact formula to describe the matter effect on lepton flavor mixing and $`CP`$ violation within the framework of three lepton families. The result is completely independent of the specific models of neutrino masses and the specific parametrizations of neutrino mixing. Therefore it will be particularly useful, in the long run, to recast the fundamental flavor mixing matrix from the precise measurements of neutrino oscillations in a variety of long-baseline neutrino experiments.

First let us define the $`3\times 3`$ lepton flavor mixing matrix in vacuum to be $`V`$. It links the neutrino mass eigenstates ($`\nu _1,\nu _2,\nu _3`$) to the neutrino flavor eigenstates ($`\nu _e,\nu _\mu ,\nu _\tau `$):

$$\left(\begin{array}{c}\nu _e\\ \nu _\mu \\ \nu _\tau \end{array}\right)=\left(\begin{array}{ccc}V_{e1}& V_{e2}& V_{e3}\\ V_{\mu 1}& V_{\mu 2}& V_{\mu 3}\\ V_{\tau 1}& V_{\tau 2}& V_{\tau 3}\end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{c}\nu _1\\ \nu _2\\ \nu _3\end{array}\right).$$
(1)
If neutrinos are massive Dirac fermions, $`V`$ can be parametrized in terms of three rotation angles and one $`CP`$-violating phase. If neutrinos are Majorana fermions, however, two additional $`CP`$-violating phases are in general needed to fully parametrize $`V`$. The strength of $`CP`$ violation in neutrino oscillations, no matter whether neutrinos are of the Dirac or Majorana type, depends only upon a universal parameter $`𝒥`$ :

$$\mathrm{Im}\left(V_{\alpha i}V_{\beta j}V_{\alpha j}^{}V_{\beta i}^{}\right)=𝒥\underset{\gamma ,k}{}ϵ_{\alpha \beta \gamma }^{}ϵ_{ijk}^{},$$
(2)
where $`(\alpha ,\beta ,\gamma )`$ and $`(i,j,k)`$ run over $`(e,\mu ,\tau )`$ and $`(1,2,3)`$, respectively. In the specific models of fermion mass generation $`V`$ can be derived from the mass matrices of charged leptons and neutrinos . To test such theoretical models one has to compare their predictions for $`V`$ with the experimental data of neutrino oscillations. The latter may in most cases be involved in the potential matter effects and must be carefully handled.

In matter the effective Hamiltonian for neutrinos can be written as

$$_\nu =\frac{1}{2E}\left[V\left(\begin{array}{ccc}m_1^2& 0& 0\\ 0& m_2^2& 0\\ 0& 0& m_3^2\end{array}\right)V^{}+\left(\begin{array}{ccc}A& 0& 0\\ 0& 0& 0\\ 0& 0& 0\end{array}\right)\right],$$
(3)
where $`m_i`$ (for $`i=1,2,3`$) denote neutrino masses, $`A=2\sqrt{2}G_\mathrm{F}N_eE`$ describes the charged-current contribution to the $`\nu _ee^{}`$ forward scattering, $`N_e`$ is the background density of electrons, and $`E`$ stands for the neutrino beam energy. The neutral-current contributions, which are universal for $`\nu _e`$, $`\nu _\mu `$ and $`\nu _\tau `$ neutrinos, lead only to an overall unobservable phase and have been neglected. Transforming $`_\nu `$ from the flavor eigenbasis to the mass eigenbasis, we obtain the effective mass-squared matrix of neutrinos:

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_\nu =\left(\begin{array}{ccc}m_1^2+A|V_{e1}|^2& AV_{e1}^{}V_{e2}& AV_{e1}^{}V_{e3}\\ AV_{e1}V_{e2}^{}& m_2^2+A|V_{e2}|^2& AV_{e2}^{}V_{e3}\\ AV_{e1}V_{e3}^{}& AV_{e2}V_{e3}^{}& m_3^2+A|V_{e3}|^2\end{array}\right),$$
(4)
This Hermitian matrix can be diagonalized through a unitary transformation: $`U^{}\mathrm{\Omega }_\nu U=\mathrm{Diag}\{\lambda _1,\lambda _2,\lambda _3\}`$, where $`\lambda _i`$ denote the effective mass-squared eigenvalues of neutrinos. Explicitly one finds The expressions of $`\lambda _i`$ in Ref.  have apparent printing errors, while those given in Ref.  depend upon a specific parametrization of $`V`$.

$`\lambda _1`$ $`=`$ $`m_1^2+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}x{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}\sqrt{x^23y}\left[z+\sqrt{3\left(1z^2\right)}\right],`$
$`\lambda _2`$ $`=`$ $`m_1^2+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}x{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}\sqrt{x^23y}\left[z\sqrt{3\left(1z^2\right)}\right],`$
$`\lambda _3`$ $`=`$ $`m_1^2+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}x+{\displaystyle \frac{2}{3}}z\sqrt{x^23y},`$ (5)
where $`x`$, $`y`$ and $`z`$ are given by

$`x`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2+\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2+A,`$
$`y`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2+A\left[\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2\left(1|V_{e2}|^2\right)+\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2\left(1|V_{e3}|^2\right)\right],`$
$`z`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{cos}\left[{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}\mathrm{arccos}{\displaystyle \frac{2x^39xy+27A\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2|V_{e1}|^2}{2\left(x^23y\right)^{3/2}}}\right]`$ (6)
with $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2m_2^2m_1^2`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2m_3^2m_1^2`$. Note that the columns of $`U`$ are the eigenvectors of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\nu `$ in the vacuum mass eigenbasis. After a lengthy calculation, we arrive at the elements of $`U`$ as follows:

$$U_{ii}=\frac{N_i}{D_i},U_{ij}=\frac{A}{D_j}\left(\lambda _jm_k^2\right)V_{ei}^{}V_{ej},$$
(7)
where $`(i,j,k)`$ run over $`(1,2,3)`$ with $`ijk`$, and

$`N_i`$ $`=`$ $`\left(\lambda _im_j^2\right)\left(\lambda _im_k^2\right)A\left[\left(\lambda _im_j^2\right)|V_{ek}|^2+\left(\lambda _im_k^2\right)|V_{ej}|^2\right],`$
$`D_i^2`$ $`=`$ $`N_i^2+A^2|V_{ei}|^2\left[\left(\lambda _im_j^2\right)^2|V_{ek}|^2+\left(\lambda _im_k^2\right)^2|V_{ej}|^2\right].`$ (8)
One may check that $`A=0`$ leads to $`\lambda _i=m_i^2`$ and $`D_i^2=N_i^2`$, and then $`U`$ becomes the unity matrix.

It should be noted that the unitary matrix $`U`$ transforms the neutrino mass eigenstates in matter to those in vacuum. Therefore the lepton flavor mixing matrix in matter, denoted by $`V^\mathrm{m}`$, is a product of the lepton flavor mixing matrix in vacuum ($`V`$) and the matter-to-vacuum transformation matrix $`U`$: $`V^\mathrm{m}=VU`$. The elements of $`V^\mathrm{m}`$ turn out to be

$`V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{N_i}{D_i}}V_{\alpha i}+{\displaystyle \frac{A}{D_i}}V_{ei}\left[\left(\lambda _im_j^2\right)V_{ek}^{}V_{\alpha k}+\left(\lambda _im_k^2\right)V_{ej}^{}V_{\alpha j}\right],`$ (9)
where $`\alpha `$ runs over $`(e,\mu ,\tau )`$ and $`(i,j,k)`$ over $`(1,2,3)`$ with $`ijk`$. Obviously $`A=0`$ leads to $`V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}=V_{\alpha i}`$. This exact and compact formula shows clearly how the flavor mixing matrix in vacuum is corrected by the matter effects. Instructive analytical approximations can be made for Eq. (9), once the hierarchy of neutrino masses is experimentally known or theoretically assumed.

The result obtained above is valid for neutrinos interacting with matter. As for antineutrinos, the corresponding formula for the flavor mixing matrix in matter can straightforwardly be obtained from Eq. (9) through the replacements $`VV^{}`$ and $`AA`$.

With the help of Eq. (9) we now calculate the universal $`CP`$-violating parameter in matter, defined as $`𝒥_\mathrm{m}`$ through

$$\mathrm{Im}\left(V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}V_{\beta j}^\mathrm{m}V_{\alpha j}^\mathrm{m}V_{\beta i}^\mathrm{m}\right)=𝒥_\mathrm{m}\underset{\gamma ,k}{}ϵ_{\alpha \beta \gamma }^{}ϵ_{ijk}^{},$$
(10)
where $`(\alpha ,\beta ,\gamma )`$ and $`(i,j,k)`$ run over $`(e,\mu ,\tau )`$ and $`(1,2,3)`$, respectively. The unitarity of $`V^\mathrm{m}`$ allows us to simplify the lengthy calculation and arrive at an instructive relationship between $`𝒥_\mathrm{m}`$ and $`𝒥`$:

$$𝒥_\mathrm{m}=𝒥\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2\mathrm{\Delta }m_{32}^2}{(\lambda _2\lambda _1)(\lambda _3\lambda _1)(\lambda _3\lambda _2)}.$$
(11)
The same result has been obtained by Harrison and Scott using the Jarlskog determinant of lepton mass matrices, which is invariant for neutrinos in vacuum and in matter . Eq. (11) indicates that the matter contamination to $`CP`$\- and $`T`$-violating observables is in general unavoidable. However, $`T`$ violation is expected to be less sensitive to matter effects than $`CP`$ violation, since the former is associated only with either neutrinos ($`+A`$) or antineutrinos ($`A`$) while the latter is related to both of them.

To be more explicit we calculate the conversion probabilities of $`\nu _\alpha `$ (or $`\overline{\nu }_\alpha `$) to $`\nu _\beta ^{}`$ (or $`\overline{\nu }_\beta ^{}`$) neutrinos in matter. We obtain

$`P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\alpha \nu _\beta ^{})`$ $`=`$ $`4{\displaystyle \underset{i<j}{}}[\mathrm{Re}(V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}V_{\beta j}^\mathrm{m}V_{\alpha j}^\mathrm{m}V_{\beta i}^\mathrm{m})\mathrm{sin}^2\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}]+8𝒥_\mathrm{m}{\displaystyle \underset{i<j}{}}\mathrm{sin}\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij},`$
$`P_\mathrm{m}(\overline{\nu }_\alpha \overline{\nu }_\beta ^{})`$ $`=`$ $`4{\displaystyle \underset{i<j}{}}[\mathrm{Re}(\stackrel{~}{V}_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}\stackrel{~}{V}_{\beta j}^\mathrm{m}\stackrel{~}{V}_{\alpha j}^\mathrm{m}\stackrel{~}{V}_{\beta i}^\mathrm{m})\mathrm{sin}^2\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Delta }}_{ij}]8\stackrel{~}{𝒥}_\mathrm{m}{\displaystyle \underset{i<j}{}}\mathrm{sin}\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Delta }}_{ij},`$ (12)
where $`(\alpha ,\beta )`$ run over $`(e,\mu )`$, $`(\mu ,\tau )`$ or $`(\tau ,e)`$; $`\stackrel{~}{V}_{\alpha i}(A)V_{\alpha i}(A)`$, $`\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Delta }}_{ij}(A)\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}(A)`$, and $`\stackrel{~}{𝒥}_\mathrm{m}(A)𝒥_\mathrm{m}(A)`$; and $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{ij}1.27(\lambda _i\lambda _j)L/E`$ with $`L`$ the distance between the production and interaction points of $`\nu _\alpha `$ (in unit of km) and $`E`$ the neutrino beam energy (in unit of GeV). The probabilities of $`\nu _\beta ^{}\nu _\alpha `$ and $`\overline{\nu }_\beta ^{}\overline{\nu }_\alpha `$ transitions can be read off from Eq. (11) with the replacements $`𝒥_\mathrm{m}𝒥_\mathrm{m}`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{𝒥}_\mathrm{m}\stackrel{~}{𝒥}_\mathrm{m}`$, respectively.

One can then define the $`CP`$\- and $`T`$-violating asymmetries as

$`𝒜_{CP}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\alpha \nu _\beta ^{})P_\mathrm{m}(\overline{\nu }_\alpha \overline{\nu }_\beta ^{})}{P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\alpha \nu _\beta ^{})+P_\mathrm{m}(\overline{\nu }_\alpha \overline{\nu }_\beta ^{})}},`$
$`𝒜_T`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\alpha \nu _\beta ^{})P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\beta ^{}\nu _\alpha )}{P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\alpha \nu _\beta ^{})+P_\mathrm{m}(\nu _\beta ^{}\nu _\alpha )}}.`$ (13)
Note that $`𝒜_T=𝒜_{CP}`$ holds in vacuum (i.e., $`A=0`$), as a consequence of $`CPT`$ invariance. Any discrepancy between these two observables will definitely measure the matter effects in long-baseline neutrino experiments.

Finally let us give a numerical illustration of the matter-induced corrections to the flavor mixing matrix and $`CP`$ (or $`T`$) violation in vacuum. The elements of $`V^\mathrm{m}`$, except the Majorana phases, can be completely determined by four rephasing-invariant quantities (e.g., four independent $`|V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}|`$ or three independent $`|V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}|`$ plus $`𝒥_\mathrm{m}`$). As the solar and atmospheric neutrino oscillations in vacuum are essentially associated with the elements in the first row and the third column of $`V`$, it is favored to choose $`|V_{e1}|`$, $`|V_{e2}|`$, $`|V_{\mu 3}|`$ and $`𝒥`$ as the four basic parameters. For illustration we take $`|V_{e1}|=0.816`$, $`|V_{e2}|=0.571`$, $`|V_{\mu 3}|=0.640`$, and $`𝒥=\pm 0.020`$ for neutrinos and antineutrinos §§§This specific choice corresponds to $`\theta _{12}35^{}`$, $`\theta _{23}40^{}`$, $`\theta _{13}5^{}`$, and $`\delta \pm 90^{}`$ in the PDG-advocated parametrization of $`V`$ .. Such a choice is consistent with the CHOOZ experiment , the large-angle MSW solution to the solar neutrino problem , and a nearly maximal mixing in the atmospheric neutrino oscillation. The relevant neutrino mass-squared differences are typically taken to be $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_{21}^2=510^5\mathrm{eV}^2`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }m_{31}^2=310^3\mathrm{eV}^2`$ . To calculate the $`CP`$\- and $`T`$-violating asymmetries in the long-baseline neutrino experiments, we assume a constant earth density profile and take $`A=2.2810^4\mathrm{eV}^2E/[\mathrm{GeV}]`$ . We also choose the baseline length $`L=732`$ km, corresponding to a neutrino source at Fermilab pointing toward the Soudan mine or that at CERN toward the Gran Sasso underground laboratory. Using these inputs as well as Eqs. (9)–(12), we first take $`(\alpha ,\beta )=(e,\mu )`$ and compute the asymmetries $`𝒜_{CP}`$ and $`𝒜_T`$ changing with $`E`$ in the range $`2\mathrm{GeV}E30\mathrm{GeV}`$. Then we compute the ratios $`|V_{\alpha i}^\mathrm{m}|/|V_{\alpha i}|`$ and $`𝒥_\mathrm{m}/𝒥`$ as functions of the matter parameter $`A`$, instead of $`E`$, in the range $`10^7\mathrm{eV}^2A10^2\mathrm{eV}^2`$. The numerical results are shown in Figs. 1 and 2.

We observe that matter effects can be significant for the elements in the first and the second columns of $`V`$, if $`A10^5\mathrm{eV}^2`$. In comparison, the magnitudes of $`|V_{e3}|`$, $`|V_{\mu 3}|`$ and $`|V_{\tau 3}|`$ may be drastically enhanced or suppressed only for $`A>10^3\mathrm{eV}^2`$. The neutrinos are relatively more sensitive to the matter effects than the antineutrinos.

The magnitude of $`𝒥_\mathrm{m}`$ decreases, when the matter effect becomes significant (e.g., $`A10^4\mathrm{eV}^2`$). However, this does not imply that the $`CP`$\- or $`T`$-violating asymmetries in realistic long-baseline neutrino oscillations would be smaller than their values in vacuum. Large matter effects can significantly modify the frequencies of neutrino oscillations and thus enhance (or suppress) the genuine signals of $`CP`$ or $`T`$ violation. As for the long-baseline neutrino experiment under consideration, the matter-induced effect in the $`T`$-violating asymmetry $`𝒜_T`$ is negligibly small. The matter effect on the $`CP`$-violating asymmetry in vacuum cannot be neglected, but the former is unlikely to fake the latter completely. We confirm numerically that the relationship $`𝒜_T=𝒜_{CP}`$ in vacuum becomes violated in matter.

If the earth-induced matter effects can well be controlled, it is possible to recast the fundamental flavor mixing matrix $`V`$ from a variety of measurements of neutrino oscillations. Such a goal is expected to be reached in the neutrino factories .

In summary, we have derived an exact and compact formula to show the analytical relationship between the fundamental neutrino mixing matrix and the matter-corrected one within the framework of three lepton families. This model- and parametrization-independent result can be particularly useful for the study of flavor mixing and $`CP`$ violation in the long-baseline neutrino experiments. An extension of the present work, in which the mixing of a sterile neutrino with three active neutrinos can be incorporated, is in progress.

Acknowledgment: The author would like to thank H. Fritzsch for useful discussions.


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# The VizieR database of Astronomical Catalogues

## 1 Introduction

The Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) has a very long experience in acquiring, cross-identifying, and distributing astronomical data (Genova et al. CDS (2000)): a collaboration for the exchange of what was called machine-readable astronomical data started with the NASA-GSFC and the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut around 1970. This collaboration has been maintained over this 30 year period, and collaborations with other institutes for similar exchanges have been developed. The volume of data shared of course increased, at a rate which has been exploding in the recent years.

Compared to the late 60’s, where the bulk of the machine-readable data consisted in a set of the basic catalogues carefully keypunched, the situation has changed drastically, now that every instrument or detector is generating megabytes or gigabytes of daily output. These huge data sets are hopefully not stored in data centers, but are processed in the observing center where the expertise exists to generate the best high-quality archives and catalogues in a form usable by astronomers who are not familiar with the instrument. The Data Centers’ role is essentially to collect such “final” catalogues, or more generally high-quality data, i.e. data which either were published in the refereed scientific literature, or at least a paper describing these data and their context was accepted for publication in a refereed scientific journal.

Making an efficient usage of the data distributed by the data centers — for instance for the analysis of the statistical properties of some interesting population of stars — often requires to combine data coming from several data sets; this operation is far from simple, and this is why the first creation of CDS was SIMBAD, a data-base resulting from the cross-identification of the major catalogues, later expanded to thousands of catalogues and to published literature (see Wenger et al. simbad (2000)).

The VizieR system results from a different approach: the astronomical catalogues are kept in their original form, but homogeneous descriptions of all these data sets are provided in order to maximize their usability. In other words, VizieR relies on an homogenization of the catalogue descriptions — what is also called metadata, or data describing other data — to transform the set of machine-readable astronomical catalogues into a set of machine-understandable data. VizieR actually consists in an interface able to query this set of machine-understandable astronomical catalogues.

## 2 Astronomical Catalogues

Jaschek (cj (1989)) defined a catalogue as a long list of ordered data of a specific kind, collected for a particular purpose. What a long list means has evolved dramatically in the last decade: the new way of processing data actually resulted in a tremendous increase in both the number and the volume of the astronomical catalogues. To illustrate the evolution in the domain of catalogued surveys, one can remember that the largest catalogues in the beginning of this century, called the Durchmusterungen — the Bonner, Cordoba and Cape Durchmusterungen — provided only a position and a visual estimate of the brightness for $`1.5\times 10^6`$ stars, and required over 50 years to be completed. Today, a catalogue gathering similar parameters — with an accuracy one order of magnitude better — is well represented by the USNO-A2.0 (Monet (1998)) which contains roughly $`5\times 10^8`$ sources, almost three orders of magnitude larger. Even larger catalogues are being built: let us quote the GSC-II (Greene et al., 1998) which should contain all optical sources brighter than $`18^{th}`$ magnitude, which can be estimated to about $`2\times 10^9`$ objects.

The existence of these new mega-catalogues — which are, in fact, rather giga-catalogues — does however not mean that the old catalogues can just be ignored: virtually any astronomical object can be subject to variability, maybe over periods of several centuries, and the discrepancies between old and newer results have therefore to be analyzed.

Another important source of tabular material consists in tables published in the astronomical literature. These tables are now almost always originally in digital form, and contain highly processed data which usage can be precious; access to these electronic data is also essential for maintaining the large databases like Simbad or NED.

The potential interest of the reusability of these tables led the Editors of the leading astronomical journals to distribute the tabular material in electronic form. The first realisations for A&A started in 1993 (see Ochsenbein & Lequeux aatables (1995)), and Table 1 summarizes the frequency of the availability of electronic tabular data among the publications in some of the main astronomical journals in the recent years: not surprisingly, the Supplement Series, which were created essentially for the presentation of the observational results, show a high rate of associated electronic data.

## 3 Astronomical Catalogues in the Data Centers

### 3.1 Current Contents

The growth of the collection of astronomical catalogues managed by data centers is illustrated by Table 2: the current set of available catalogues is now around 3,000, with an annual increase about 15%. Note that the entity designated as a “catalogue” can represent a table of about 100 entries (e.g. the list of galactic globular clusters), as well as a multimillion source catalogue (e.g. the USNO-A2.0).

In Table 2, the catalogues are grouped according to categories which were defined in the 70’s, when the bulk of astronomical studies were dealing with the properties of stars in the optical wavelength domain. Rather than defining regularly a new classification scheme following the evolution of the discipline, it was decided, in agreement with the other data centers, to assign designations to electronic tables according to the published paper, and to reserve the assignment in the “traditional” categories to somewhat important catalogues or compilations. Simultaneously, it was decided to assign keywords to each catalogue, in order to allow easy retrieval of catalogues with similar contents and purposes.

Note that, if most of the catalogues contain data related to the observation of astronomical sources, other types of data are also available, generally grouped in the ‘Miscellaneous” (VI) category: catalogues of atomic data like wavelength tables or results of the Opacity Project, tabulated results of stellar evolution models, ephemeris elements, etc…

### 3.2 Usage of astronomical catalogues

One of the main goals of the CDS is to promote the usage of the reliable astronomical catalogues to the astronomical community. The “Catalogue Service” has been one of the major CDS services since the beginning of the CDS activity, and used to distribute catalogues on magnetic tapes and floppies; the service has been implemented on the network as a FTP server in March 1992, generating immediately a large increase in the number of distributed files. The FTP activity is still increasing at a high rate, as can be inferred from Table 3: the current traffic is equivalent to a copy of the whole collection every month.

It is also interesting to quote those catalogues which are the most frequently copied from the CDS archives, summarized in Table 4 for the last two years: not surprisingly, surveys, and what Jaschek (cj (1989)), in his section 5.2, designates as General Compilation Catalogues, are among the most popular catalogues. It is also interesting to note the large number of copies of the GSC catalogue (about 300 Mbytes): it was copied by over 500 nodes in the last 12 months, which is 4 times more than in the previous year; this could indicate that catalogues of this size can be quite easily managed on small computers nowadays.

## 4 Standardized Description of Astronomical Catalogues

Making use of the data contained in a set of rapidly evolving catalogues, as illustrated by Table 2, raises the problem of accessing and understanding accurately the parameters contained in catalogues which are constantly improved. Typical questions to be addressed are: does the catalogue contain colours; if yes what is their reliability; are they expressed in a well-known standard system; are they taken from other publications or catalogues; how can the associated data file be processed? All these details which describe the data — the metadata — are traditionally presented in the introduction of the printed catalogue, or detailed in one or several published papers presenting and/or analyzing the catalogued data.

Metadata play therefore a fundamental role: first the scientists have to get information about the environment of the data in order to make their judgement about the suitability of the data for their project, such as: date and/or method of acquisition, related publications, estimation of the internal and external errors, purpose of the data collection, etc.; but also a minimal knowledge of the metadata is required by the data processing system in order to merge or compare data from different origins — for instance, the comparison of data expressed in different units requires a unit-to-unit conversion which can be performed automatically only if the units are specified unambiguously.

This need for a description which is readable both by a computer and by a scientist led to a standardized way of documenting astronomical catalogues and tables, promoted by CDS from 1993 in the form of a dedicated ReadMe file associated to each catalogue (Ochsenbein readme (1994)). An example of such a file is presented in Fig. 1: it is a plain ascii file, quite easy to interpret for a scientist, and at the same time structured enough to be interpreted by a dedicated software. The ReadMe description file starts with a header specifying the basic references — title, authors, references — and contains a few key sections introduced by standard titles like Description: or Byte-by-byte Description of file:. Such a file is relatively easy to produce by someone who knows the catalogue contents. The example of Fig. 1 represents the documentation of a very simple catalogue, made of just two data tables, each with a small set of parameters. The output catalogue of the Hipparcos mission111http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/Cat?I/239 is an example of a much more complex catalogue: it is composed of two fundamental large tables (HIP with $`10^5`$ stars and TYC with $`10^6`$ stars) and includes a dozen of annex tables, but can still be described by the the same kind of simple standardized documentation.

The most important part of the ReadMe file is the
Byte-by-byte Description which details the table structures in terms of formats, units, column naming or labels, existence of data (possibility of unspecified or null values), and brief explanations. Among the conventions, some fundamental parameters are assigned fixed labels like sky coordinates (components of right ascension RA… and declination DE… in Fig. 1); a prefix convention, detailed in Table 5, is also used to specify obvious relations between a value, its mean error, its origin, etc…

This standardized way of presenting the metadata proved to be extremely useful, especially for data checking and format conversion: many errors were detected in old catalogues simply because a general checking mechanism became available. Tools have been developed for generating a Fortran source code which loads the data into memory, or for converting the data into the FITS format which is presently the most “universal” data format understood by data processing systems in astronomy — but unfortunately a data format which is not convenient outside this context (see e.g. Grøsbøl et al. fits (1988)).

During the six years since this standardized way of describing astronomical catalogue has been defined, over 2,600 astronomical catalogues have been described by means of this ReadMe file, and the same conventions have been adopted by the other astronomical data centers and journals for the electronic publication of tables. The present (October 1999) figures of the amount of standardized catalogues are summarized in the rightmost column of Table 2; previous figures were presented in an earlier paper (Ochsenbein russie (1997)).

It is expected, in the future, that the authors will supply the documentation of their data in this simple form; it is already the case for a very significant fraction of the tables mailed to the CDS, and in order to help the authors, template files as well as a few tips on how to create the ReadMe file are accessible on the Web222http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/doc/submit.htx. The ReadMe files and the data files are then checked by a specialist, who contacts the authors if errors are detected or when changes are necessary to increase the clarity or homogeneity of the description.

## 5 VizieR Organisation

VizieR333http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/ is a natural extension of the usage of the metadata stored in the ReadMe files, as an implementation of these metadata in terms of tables managed by a relational database management system (RDBMS).

The first prototype of VizieR was the result of a fruitful collaboration between ESIS (European Space Information System, a project managed by ESRIN, a department of the European Space Agency) and the CDS; VizieR has been under full responsibility of CDS since January 1996. It was presented at the 1996 AAS meeting (Ochsenbein et al., aas96 (1996)), and became fully operational in February 1996. This prototype has been significantly upgraded in May 1997, just in time for the implementation of the final catalogues of the Hipparcos mission. The number of catalogues accessible within the VizieR system has grown since that time to 2,374 catalogues (Table 6).

The core of VizieR consists in the organisation of the meta dictionary, i.e. the set of metadata extracted from the standardized ReadMe descriptions discussed in section 4. There are however two main problems which had to be solved: the access to very large catalogues (larger than a few million rows) for which RDBMS proved to be inefficient, requiring therefore dedicated search methods, and the generation of links allowing to connect two related pieces of information, like other tables in the same catalog, or spectra, images from remote services, etc.

### 5.1 META dictionary

The meta-dictionary consists in 3 main tables detailed below, and about 20 annex tables, all stored in a relational database:

1. METAcat describes the catalogues, a catalogue being defined as a set of related tables published together: typically a catalogue gathers a table of observations, a table of mean values, a table of references, a list of related images, etc…; METAcat details the authors, reference, title, explanations of each stored catalogues. This table contains currently 2,374 rows (Table 6).
2. METAtab describes each data table stored in VizieR: table caption, number of rows, how to access the actual data, the equinox and epoch of the coordinates, etc…This table contains currently 6,071 rows (Table 6) — i.e. the average catalogue is made of 2.6 tables.
3. METAcol details each of the 77,260 columns (Table 6) currently stored in VizieR: column name or label, the textual explanation of the column contents, datatypes (numeric or character) and storage mode within the database (integer or floating-point, maximal length of strings, etc), units in which the data are stored in the data-base and units in which the data are presented to the user, edition formats, and a few flags used for searches (e.g. column used as primary key) or data presentation (e.g. column to be displayed in the default presentation of the result). The average table is therefore made of $`12.7`$ columns — in fact $`11.7`$ because each table contains an identification column in addition to the original set of columns.

Note that, since the set of META tables is itself described in VizieR, the meta-dictionary can be viewed and queried like any of the catalogues stored in VizieR — allowing to locate easily e.g. tables with a large number of rows, or catalogues having the words mass loss in the description of one of their columns, etc…

The annex tables of the meta-dictionary contain some definitions, like the list of known data-types (METAtypes) and keywords (METAkwdef); or other details like the acronyms used to designate well-known catalogues like HIP, GSC(METAcro), the keywords associated to each catalogue (METAkwd), detailed notes and remarks (METAnot), or the list of those objects which are individually quoted in the ReadMe files (METAobj). A special indexing scheme (METAcell), explained briefly in section 5.5, was built to locate the existing objects in all catalogues in a single run. Details on how to generate links are stored in the METAmor table.

### 5.2 Links in VizieR

The interest of having a link, or an anchor in HTML terms, becomes obvious when a table contains a column representing a reference to an original paper, as for example in Véron and Véron’s compilation of quasars444http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/VizieR?-source=7207/table1: once the rules to transform the contents of this column into an actual link to e.g. the ADS bibliographic service555http://adswww.harvard.edu/ is set up, details about the authors and references, or even the full article, can then be displayed on the screen by a simple mouse click. Another frequent example is the possible expansion of some footnote symbol into the lengthy note detailed in some other table.

The links existing in VizieR may be classified in the following categories:

1. hard-wired links which are part of the standard description presented in section 4, like the existence of notes (stored in the METAnot table), or the r\_ prefix (Table 5) which indicates a reference which may be detailed in a table of references;
2. internal links which connect tables of the same catalogue: such links may be expressed in terms of keys in the RDBMS terminology (definitions of columns as primary and/or foreign keys), by the existence of note flags, or by more complex relations stored in the METAmor table. Another type of internal link allows one to retrieve the spectra or images which are part of the catalogue, but which are stored as separate files.
3. VizieR links which refer to another catalogue within the VizieR system;
4. external links which refer to any other service, like bibliographic services, external databases or archives, image servers, etc.

While links of the first 3 categories can easily be maintained, the maintenance of the external links depends on modifications which are completely outside VizieR’s control. These external links are maintained by the GLU system (Fernique et al., GLU (1998)), a system which (i) allows one to use symbolic names instead of hard-coded URLs, and (ii) translates these symbolic names with the help of a distributed dictionary in which the service providers keep up the descriptions of their own services only in terms of URL addresses and actual presentation of the query parameters.

### 5.3 VizieR feeding pipeline

On the average, about one new catalog – or 2.6 tables – is added daily into VizieR. Such figures imposed the following constraints on the addition of new tables into VizieR:

1. no human intervention is required to populate the database (the meta dictionary and the data tables): all meta-data related to a catalogue can be found or computed on the basis of documentation and configuration files which are read by the VizieR feeding pipe-line ;
2. we rely as much as possible on the standardized description of the catalogues presented in section 4: this means that the configuration file associated to each catalogue should be minimized, i.e. as few ad-hoc details as possible should be needed besides the ReadMe files.

The actual delay required to ingest a new catalogue into the system is currently estimated to something between a few minutes and several days for the preparation of the ReadMe description file, depending on the initial presentation supplied by the authors and on the catalogue complexity — the delay can be occasionally longer when problems are encountered, requiring interactions with the authors; and a few seconds up to an hour for the actual ingestion into VizieR from the standardized files.

### 5.4 Access to Very Large Catalogues

The second challenge is to open a fast access for querying the mega-catalogues introduced in section 2. This denomination was somewhat arbitrarily assigned to catalogues having $`10^7`$ or more rows. Such large catalogues are essentially surveys used as reference catalogues, typically to find all objects detected in some region of the sky under some conditions of wavelength, time, object structure, etc. The set of such catalogues currently implemented is summarized in Table 7, but this set will grow rapidly in the near future with the continuation of the infra-red surveys, and the emergence of surveys presently in preparation (SLOAN, GSC-II, NVSS, …).

The limit of $`10^7`$ rows corresponds to a limit in performance and time required to ingest the tables into the relational databases; the largest table, in terms of number of rows, currently stored in VizieR is the AC2000 catalog (Urban et al., ac2000 (1997)), with $`4.62\times 10^6`$ rows.

The method used to access these very large catalogues consists in grouping the objects within carefully designed groups based essentially on the location in the sky, followed by a lossless compression obtained by replacing the actual values by offsets within the group; details about the actual results and performances are described in another paper (Derriere & Ochsenbein, adass99-poster (1999)). Each very large catalogue has presently its own organisation which depends on its actual column contents, and therefore requires a dedicated program for accessing it. VizieR stores in its META dictionary (see section 5.1) which program has to be called to actually access the catalogue, and the description of the columns as they are returned from the dedicated program.

### 5.5 Accessing all catalogues from a position in the sky

In order to allow a fast answer to the question: find out all objects for all available catalogues around some target position, an indexing mechanism is necessary. The total number of object positions currently stored in VizieR, excluding the megacatalogues, is about $`32\times 10^6`$ (Table 6); a classical indexation, in terms of relational DMBS, shows very poor performances especially in the updating phase: the addition of a new catalogue can require up to 4.6 millions modifications or additions – which becomes dramatically slow.

The method adopted for this indexation consists first in a mapping of the celestial coordinates into a set of boxes using a hierarchical spherical-cubic projection similar to the techique used by Simbad (Wenger et al., simbad (2000)), but down to a level 8 which corresponds to a granularity of about $`20^{}`$, or $`6\times 4^8`$ ($`4\times 10^5`$) individual boxes. The list of catalogues which exhibit sources in the region of the sky covered by the box is then stored for each of the defined boxes, allowing therefore a fast answer to the question: “what is the list of catalogues which have a fair chance of having at least one source close to a specified target ?” The final step consists in looking successively into the matching catalogues.

The method offers the particularity of being hierarchical: 6 boxes are defined at level 0, 24 at level 1, …, and going down one step in the hierarchy consists in dividing each box into four parts. The indexing mechanism recursively groups contiguous non-empty boxes represented by a single box at the upper level, meaning that a dense survey covering the whole sky is just represented by the 6 boxes of level 0 in this index. In practice, the 1247 catalogues with positions are summarized in this index by $`3.9\times 10^6`$ elements (to be compared to the $`31.6\times 10^6`$ sources in Table 6), i.e. an average of 3,000 elements per catalogue.

### 5.6 Current Contents

The status of VizieR contents is presented in Table 6, where we distinguished those tables representing data about actual astronomical objects which can be accessed by their position in the sky. In terms of number of available records, those containing celestial positions represent over 78% even when the megacatalogs are omitted, even though only 32% of the tables are concerned. In other words, the average table dealing with actual astronomical objects contains around 16,000 rows — a theoretical mean, as can be seen from the histogram of the table populations in VizieR represented in Fig. 2 which shows a modal value around tables of 100 objects.

## 6 VizieR Interfaces

Several interfaces are currently available for an access to the data stored in VizieR: directly from a Web browser, via a construction of the query using the ASU conventions, or the developing XML  interfaces.

### 6.1 Access from a Browser

From a WWW-browser, a “standard query” in VizieR consists in a few steps:

1. Locate the interesting catalogues in the VizieR Service666http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/VizieR. This can be done in various ways illustrated in Fig. 3: from well-known catalogue acronyms like HIP or GSC, from a choice in the set of predefined keywords, from authors’ names, or from a self-organizing (or Kohonen) map constructed on the basis of the keywords attached to the catalogues (Poinçot et al. kohonen (1998)). New possibilities for locating catalogues of interest for the user are currently under development.
2. Once a catalog table – or a small set of catalog tables — is located (for instance the Hipparcos Catalog777http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/VizieR?-source=I/239/hip\_main resulting from the Hipparcos mission), constraints about what to search and how to present the results can be specified, as:

* constraints based on the celestial coordinates, i.e. location in the neighbourhood of a target specified by its actual coordinates in the sky, or by one of its name as known in Simbad (see Wenger et al., simbad (2000))
    * any other constraint on any of the columns of the table(s), like a minimal flux value, or the actual existence of some parameter (non-NULL value)
    * which columns are to be displayed, and in which order the matching rows are to be presented.

By pushing the appropriate buttons, it is for instance easy to get the list of Hipparcos stars closer than 5 parsecs to the Sun, ordered by their increasing distance888http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/VizieR?-source=I/239/hip\_main&-sort=-Plx&Plx=%3e=200.
3. Obtaining full details about one row is achieved by a mouse click in the first column of the result: for instance, the first row of the search for nearby stars described above leads to the VizieR Detailed Page with Hipparcos parameters and their explanations concerning Proxima Centauri999http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/VizieR-5?-source=I/239/hip\_main&HIP=70890.
4. Finally, there may be correlated data, like notes or remarks, references, etc…. In our example, Proxima Centauri is related to the $`\alpha `$ Cen multiple star system, which components can be viewed from the link to the double and multiple stars (CCDM)101010http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/VizieR-6?-source=1239&-corr=PK=CCDM&CCDM==14396-6050 that appears in the detailed page.

The quantitative monthly usage of VizieR is presently (October 1999) about 40,000 external requests from 2700 different nodes; mirror copies were installed recently in the US111111http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/vizier/ and in Japan121212http://z13.mtk.nao.ac.jp/vizier/ in order to overcome the transcontinental network congestions.

### 6.2 The ASU protocol

The uniform access to all catalogues is based on the so-called ASU131313http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/doc/asu.html (Astronomical Standardized URL) protocol resulting from discussions between several institutes (CDS, ESO, CADC, Vilspa, OAT). The basic concept of ASU is a standardized way of specifying queries to remote catalogues in terms of HTTP requests: the target catalogue is specified by a -source=catalog\_designation parameter, the target sky position by a -c=name\_or\_position,rm=radius\_in\_arcmin parameter, the output format by -mime=type, and general constraints on parameters by column\_name=constraint. It should be noticed that the representation of a target by the name of an astronomical object (typically a star or galaxy name, e.g. 3C 273) implies the usage of a name server converting a target name into a position in the sky, which is typically achieved by a call to Simbad.

### 6.3 The XML Interface

The output of a query to VizieR as presented in section 6.1 can hardly be used by an independent application for further data processing, such as the Aladin141414http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/ visualisation tool (Bonnarel et al., Aladin (2000)) which allows to superimpose the catalogued sources on top of actual image of the sky: the application requires an accurate interpretation of the catalogued output in terms of celestial positions in order to find out the exact location of each source. This means that Aladin has to figure out not only which are the columns representing the celestial coordinates, but also accurate definitions of the system used to express the coordinates, their accuracy, etc…— in other words the metadata about the celestial coordinates.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is an emerging standard which allows to embed markup “tags” within a document; the key advantages of this language are that the same document can either be parsed by simple-minded programs (XML uses hierarchical structuring), or can be displayed in the new generation of browsers (via an XSL style sheet which maps the markup “tags” into typographical specifications). This language presents other potential interests, especially regarding interoperability issues facilitated by the emergence of generic tools able to process XML documents.

The XML layout of astronomical tables was discussed extensively with interested collaborators, and the agreed definitions were presented at a recent ADASS meeting (Ochsenbein et al. adass99 (1999)). The output of VizieR is readily available in this format151515http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/asu-xml, currently used by the Aladin image applet; it is hoped that it will facilitate the usage of the astronomical data in new contexts.

### 6.4 Current Developments

With the large set of homogenized catalogues, VizieR plays a central role in a data-mining project currently in development as a collaboration of ESO and CDS, in two main directions: (i) make use of the VizieR large set of described columns (over 70,000 currently) to build up new methods for locating the catalogues which are the best suited to a particular research topic; and (ii) develop automatized cross-correlation tools which can take into account the largest possible set of meaningful parameters (Ortiz et al, portiz (1999)).

## 7 Conclusions

VizieR is an illustration of the benefits resulting from an homogeneous documentation of the existing astronomical catalogues, facilitating the transformation of a set of heterogeneous data into a fully interactive database, furthermore able to interact with remote services. The interoperability issues between the databases, in astronomy and problably in connected disciplines, will most likely be among the key developments necessary to allow the scientists to make use of the existing high-quality data whithout the prerequisite of being familiar with the data.

###### Acknowledgements.

The long-term exchanges of data have been fundamental for these developments; more specifically, we wish to thank Jaylee Mead, Nancy G. Roman, Wayne H. Warren and Gail Schneider at NASA/ADC for decades of collaborative work, and the present director Cynthia Y. Cheung; and Olga Dluzhnevskaya at INASAN, the Russian data center. The support of INSU-CNRS and CNES is acknowledged, as well as the contribution of ESA-ESIS for the initial developments of VizieR, and more specifically Salim Ansari and Isabelle Bourekeb. The development of VizieR also resulted from fruitful discussions with Françoise Genova, Michel Crézé and Daniel Egret; the enthusiasm of James Lequeux and its implication for the emergence of electronic tables in the A&A publication had a large impact on the accessiblity of the astronomical data. We are also grateful to those who contributed in the more tedious, although critical, part of data standardisation: Simona Mei, Joseph Florsch and Patricio Ortiz at CDS; Gail Schneider and collaborators at NASA/ADC; Koichi Nakajima at ADAC/Japan; Veta S.Avedisova and collaborators at INASAN; and we would like to thank also the authors who participated in the elaboration of the documentation about their data, and answered patiently to all our questions.


text:
# Scaling analysis of the magnetic-field-tuned quantum transition in superconducting amorphous In–O films

## Abstract

We have studied the magnetic-field-tuned superconductor-insulator quantum transition (SIT) in amorphous In–O films with different oxygen content and, hence, different electron density. While for states of the film near the zero-field SIT the two-dimensional scaling behaviour is confirmed, for deeper states in the superconducting phase the SIT scenario changes: in addition to the scaling function that describes the conductivity of fluctuation-induced Cooper pairs, there emerges a temperature-dependent contribution to the film resistance. This contribution can originate from the conductivity of normal electrons.

The scaling analysis is an important experimental tool for studying quantum phase transitions. For two-dimensional (2D) disordered superconductors, alongside with the zero-field superconductor-insulator transition (SIT) as driven by disorder change in the film, there exists a SIT that is induced by a normal magnetic field. A scenario of the field-induced SIT was proposed in Ref. : at zero temperature the normal magnetic field alters the state of a disordered film from superconducting at low fields, through a metallic one at the critical field $`B=B_c`$ with the universal sheet resistance $`R_c`$ close to $`h/4e^26.4`$ k$`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, to an insulating state at fields $`B>B_c`$. The SIT was supposed to be continuous with the correlation length $`\xi `$ of quantum fluctuations, diverging as $`\xi (BB_c)^\nu `$, where the critical index $`\nu >1`$. At a finite temperature the size of quantum fluctuations is restricted by the dephasing length $`L_\varphi T^{1/z}`$ with the dynamical critical index $`z`$, which determines the characteristic energy $`U\xi ^z`$ and

is expected to be equal to $`z=1`$ for SIT.

The ratio of these two length parameters defines the scaling variable $`u`$ so that near the transition point ($`T=0,B_c`$) all data $`R(T,B)`$ as a function of $`u`$ should fall on a universal curve

$$R(T,B)R_cr(u),u=(BB_c)/T^{1/z\nu }.$$
(1)
Although small in the scaling region, temperature dependent corrections with the leading quadratic term are expected to the critical resistance $`R_c`$ .

The above theoretical description is based on the concept of electron pair localization which has been supported by a recent publication . In that paper it is shown that for 2D superconducting films with sufficiently strong disorder the region of fluctuation superconductivity, where the localized electron pairs

(called also boson  and cooperon )

occur, should extend down to zero temperature. In this region the unpaired electrons are supposed to be localized because of disorder in a film.

So far, a theory of the field-driven 3D quantum SIT has not been created. An idea to consider the quantum SIT for 3D disordered systems in zero magnetic field in terms of charged boson localization  was not at first accepted because the fluctuation superconductivity region was regarded to be small. In fact, as was shown later in Ref. , the fluctuation region enlarges as the edge of single electron localization is approached. This gives an opportunity to apply the scaling relation deduced for 3D boson localization  also for the field-induced SIT description

$$R(T,u)T^{1/z}\stackrel{~}{r}(u),$$
(2)
where $`\stackrel{~}{r}(u)`$ is a universal function and the scaling variable $`u`$ is assumed to have the same form as defined by Eq. (1).

From Eqs. (1) and (2) it follows that in the vicinity of $`B_c`$ the isotherms $`R(B)`$ are straight lines with slopes

$$\frac{R}{B}T^{(d2+1/\nu )/z},$$
(3)
where $`d`$ is the system dimensionality. Because the behaviours of the resistance in the relations (1) and (2) are very different, the problem of the film dimensionality is of major importance.

Data obtained in experimental studies on $`a`$-In–O , $`a`$-Mo–Ge , and $`a`$-Mo–Si  followed the 2D scaling relation (1) except for the universality of the $`R_c`$ value.

This was regarded as evidence of existence of SIT. The failure in satisfying the scaling relations in ultrathin Bi films  was interpreted as indication of the absence of SIT and crossover observation between different flux-flow regimes. Studies  did not give arguments backing boson localization. At the first time such arguments are appeared by interpretation of the resistance drop at high fields observed on $`a`$-In–O films .

Here, we perform the detailed study of the scaling relations near the field-induced SIT for different states of an $`a`$-In–O film. We find that the 2D scaling relation (1) holds for film states near the zero-field SIT but progressively fails as the zero-field SIT is departed from. This failure is manifested by the appearance of an extra temperature-dependent term in the film resistance.

The experiments were performed on 200 Å thick amorphous In–O films evaporated by e-gun from high-purity $`In_2O_3`$ target onto a glass substrate .

This material proved to be very useful for investigations of the transport properties near the SIT . Oxygen deficiency compared to fully stoichiometric insulating compound In2O3 causes the film conductivity. By changing the oxygen content one can cover the range from a superconducting material to an insulator with activated conductance . The procedures to change reversibly the film state are described in detail in Ref. . To reinforce the superconducting properties of our films we used heating in vacuum up to a temperature from the interval 70 – 110C until the sample resistance got saturated. To shift the film state in the opposite direction we made exposure to air at room temperature. As the film remains amorphous during these manipulations, it is natural to assume that the treatment used results mainly in a change of the total carrier concentration $`n`$ and that there is a critical concentration $`n_c`$ corresponding to the zero-field SIT.

The low-temperature measurements were carried out by a four-terminal lock-in technique at a frequency of 10 Hz using two experimental setups: a He3-cryostat down to 0.35 K or Oxford TLM-400 dilution refrigerator in the temperature interval 1.2 K – 30 mK. The ac current was equal to 1 nA and corresponded to the linear regime of response. The aspect ratio of the samples was close to one.

We investigated three different homogeneous states of the same amorphous In–O film . We characterize the sample state by its room temperature resistance $`R_r`$. Assuming that the disorder for all states is approximately the same, we have for the carrier density $`n1/R_r`$, i.e., the smaller $`R_r`$, the deeper the state in the superconducting phase and, hence, the larger the value of $`B_c`$.

The parameters of the investigated states are listed in Table I. State 1 is the closest to the zero-field SIT and state 3 is the deepest in the superconducting phase.

Sets of the isomagnetic curves $`R(T)`$ for all studied states are depicted in Fig. 1. For each set the curves can be divided roughly into two groups by sign of the second derivative: the positive (negative) sign corresponds to the insulating (superconducting) behaviour. Henceforth, the boundary isomagnetic curve $`R_c(T)`$ between superconductor and insulator, which corresponds to the boundary metallic state at $`T=0`$, will be referred to as separatrix. While for state 1 it is easy to identify the horizontal separatrix in accordance with Eq. (1), for states 2 and 3 the fan and separatrix are ”tilted”, i.e., each of the curves in the lower part of the fan is a maximum at a temperature $`T_{\mathrm{max}}`$ which shifts with $`B`$. To determine the separatrix $`R_c(T)`$ one has to extrapolate the maximum position to $`T=0`$ for which it is good to know the extrapolation law as the accessible temperature range is restricted.

The absence of a horizontal separatrix for states 2 and 3 can also be established from the behaviour of isotherms $`R(B)`$ (Fig. 2). As seen from the figure, the isotherms of state 1 cross at the same point ($`B_c,R_c`$) whereas those of state 3 form an envelope.

To determine $`B_c`$ and $`R_c`$ for states 2 and 3 we use the simplest linear extrapolation to $`T=0`$ of the functions $`R(T_{\mathrm{max}})`$ and $`B(T_{\mathrm{max}})`$, see Fig. 3. The open symbols correspond to the maximum positions on isomagnetic curves (Fig. 1) and the filled symbols represent the data obtained from the intersections of consecutive isotherms  (Fig. 2): if two consecutive isotherms at close temperatures $`T_1`$ and $`T_2`$ intersect at a point ($`B_i,R_i`$), the isomagnetic curve at the field $`B_i`$ reaches its maximum $`R_i`$ at $`T_{\mathrm{max}}(T_1+T_2)/2`$.

As seen from Fig. 3, the dependence $`B(T_{\mathrm{max}})`$ is weak and so we believe that the linear extrapolation is good to extract $`B_c`$. In contrast, the accuracy of the determination of $`R_c`$ is poor.

The derivative $`R/B`$ near $`B_c`$ as a function of temperature is shown in Fig. 4. The exponent turns out to be the same within experimental uncertainty for the film states 1 and 3 and is in agreement with results of Refs.  where authors argued observation of the field-induced 2D SIT for states close to the zero-field SIT. This fact is in favour of 2D SIT scenario also for deeper film states in the superconducting phase.

Knowing $`B_c`$ and the scaling exponent we can replot the experimental data as a function of scaling variable $`u`$ (Fig. 5). As seen from Figs. 5a and b, for state 1 the data collapse onto a single curve whereas for state 3 we obtain a set of similar curves shifted along the vertical axis. Subtracting formally from $`R(T,B)`$ the linear temperature term $`R_c\alpha T`$ (where $`\alpha `$ is a factor) does reveal the 2D scaling behaviour for state 3 (Fig. 5c). We note that the procedure of dividing the experimental data in Fig. 5b by $`R_c(T)`$, which corresponds to the formula (2) for 3D scaling, does not lead to success.

Thus, we find that the 2D scaling holds for states near the zero-field SIT while the data for deeper states in the superconducting phase are best described by the relation (1) with an additive temperature-dependent correction $`f(T)`$

$$R(T,B)R_c[r(u)+f(T)].$$
(4)
To get a basis for the formal analysis of the experimental data we have to answer two questions: (i) whether our film is really 2D; and (ii) what is the physical origin for the temperature dependence of $`R_c(T)`$? In the first case we need to compare the film thickness $`h`$ with characteristic lengths. These are the coherence length $`\xi _{sc}=c\mathrm{}/2eB_{c2}l`$ (where $`l`$ is the mean free path in normal state) in superconducting state and the dephasing length $`L_\varphi (T)\mathrm{}^2/m\xi _{sc}T`$  that restricts the diverging correlation length $`\xi `$ in the vicinity of quantum SIT. Knowing the normal state film resistance $`R5`$ k$`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ at $`T4`$ K and assuming that we deal with the amorphous 3D metal in which the mean free path is normally close to the lowest possible value $`l1/k_F`$, we estimate the length $`l8`$ Å. If we crudely evaluate the field $`B_{c2}`$ at $`B_c=7.2`$ T as determined for state 3, we get

upper limit of

$`\xi _{sc}500`$ Å and $`L_\varphi 400`$ Å at $`T=0.5`$ K. This supports the 2D scenario of quantum SIT although in the normal state the film turns out to be 3D.

With respect to the temperature-dependent $`R_c(T)`$, at finite temperatures the conductivity of the film near $`B_c`$ should include the contribution from localized normal electrons in addition to the conductivity defined by the diffusion of fluctuation-induced Cooper pairs . It is the normal electron conductivity that explains the non-universality of the critical resistance  as well as the additional term in Eq. (4). We write this term in the general form because the linear extrapolation used is likely to break in the vicinity of $`T=0`$.

So, all of the experimental observations can be reconciled with the 2D scaling scenario. Intriguingly, the same scaling behaviour has been established in a parallel magnetic field . Although not in favour of 2D concept, this fact indicates that the restrictions imposed by the theory  may be too severe.

We would like to mention an alternative way to make up for the term $`f(T)`$ in Eq. (4): to introduce the temperature-dependent field $`B_c(T)`$ defined through the constancy of $`R_c`$. Formally both ways are equivalent and correspond to shifts of the isotherms in Fig. 2 either along the $`R`$-axis or along the $`B`$-axis so that in the vicinity of transition a common crossing point is attained. In contrast to the normal behaviour of the critical fields in superconductors, the so-defined $`B_c(T)`$ increases with temperature. This can be interpreted in terms of temperature-induced boson delocalization.

In summary, in experiments on amorphous In–O films with different oxygen content we have found a change of the field-driven 2D SIT scenario as the film state departs from the zero-field SIT. For deep film states in the superconducting phase, in addition to the universal function of scaling variable that describes the conductivity of fluctuation-induced Cooper pairs, there emerges a temperature-dependent contribution to the film resistance. This contribution can be attributed to the conductivity of normal electrons.

We gratefully acknowledge useful discussions with V. Dobrosavljevich and A.I. Larkin. This work was supported by Grants RFBR 99-02-16117 and RFBR-PICS 98-02-22037 and by the Programme ”Statistical Physics” from the Russian Ministry of Sciences.