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# Stripes in Quantum Hall Double Layer Systems

## I Introduction

Recently, it has been established that quantum Hall systems in which several Landau levels are filled may support states with highly anisotropic transport properties. High mobility two-dimensional electron systems, in perpendicular magnetic fields such that the filling factor $`\nu `$ is in the vicinity of $`N+1/2`$, with $`N`$ an odd integer greater than 7 , are found to have diagonal resistivity ratios $`\rho _{xx}/\rho _{yy}`$ as large as 3500 . ($`\nu N_e/N_\varphi `$ is the ratio of the number of electrons to the orbital degeneracy of a Landau level $`N_\varphi =AB/\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$, where $`B`$ is the magnetic field, $`A`$ is the sample area and $`\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$ is the magnetic flux quantum.) While a good deal of this anisotropy is purely geometric, the experiments clearly indicate a groundstate for the electrons of a highly anisotropic nature.

These results are very likely to be related to stripe phases that have been found in mean-field calculations  and exact diagonalization studies  of electrons with partially filled high Landau levels. When thermal and quantum fluctuations are included, it is useful to classify possible states of such systems according to their symmetries, which bear a close resemblance to those found in liquid crystals . Of particular interest is the smectic state, which, in the presence of some (hitherto unidentified) orientational ordering field, should exhibit strong macroscopic transport anisotropies as observed in experiment. Quantum fluctuations in this state have been studied, with some models  indicating the possibility of metallic behavior in the groundstate. (See, however, Ref. .) The mean-field stripe states are a natural first approximation to such smectic states.

It by now well appreciated that for smaller filling factors, the introduction of a second layer in the quantum Hall system (i.e., double quantum well systems) leads to new phenomena and a rich phase diagram . For a partially filled lowest Landau level ($`N=0`$), at total filling factor $`\nu =1`$ and for small layer separation $`d`$, a spontaneously broken symmetry can occur in which interlayer phase coherence develops in the absence of interlayer tunneling. In this state the system supports a Goldstone mode, which has a roton minimum at a wavevector $`q1.2\mathrm{}`$. For separations $`d>d_c\mathrm{}`$, this minimum goes to zero, indicating a phase transition  into a unidirectional, (interwell phase) coherent charge density wave (UCCDW). At still higher separations, there is another phase transition into a phase-coherent Wigner crystal state (CWC) with two non-collinear primitive lattice vectors.

For $`N`$=0, these states with broken translational symmetry are usually preempted by strongly correlated Fermi-liquid states in which translational invariance is restored by quantum fluctuations. However, in higher Landau levels the effective interaction among electrons in a single layer contains structure that favors such a mean field state relative to uniform correlated states. This makes the double layer electron system in higher Landau levels an excellent candidate for observation of the interesting translational broken-symmetry states described above.

In this article, we demonstrate within the Hartree-Fock approximation that such states do indeed occur for electrons systems with high filling factors. We will focus on systems with $`\nu `$=$`2\nu _L`$=$`2\times (2N+1/2)`$, where $`N`$=0,1,2,… $`N`$ is the index of the highest occupied orbital Landau level (LL) and $`\nu _L`$ is the filling factor in each layer. Unlike the situation for single layers, we find circumstances under which the system supports stripe ordering and a quantized Hall conductance simultaneously. Physically, this arises due to the development of coherence between the edges of the individual stripes, which opens up a gap in the single particle spectrum. This coherence has interesting consequences for the collective modes of the system, as well as for its low-energy charged excitations.

The results of this work may be summarized as follows:

i) For any value of $`N`$, and for small layer separation, the groundstate of this system has a uniform density and phase coherence between the layers. The system will support a quantized Hall conductance.

ii) In the limit where tunneling may be neglected, the energy spectrum of the system contains a gapless linear (Goldstone) mode due to the spontaneous interlayer coherence. This mode contains a roton minimum at wavevectors $`q1/\mathrm{}`$, which vanishes when the layer separation $`d`$ exceeds some critical value $`d_c`$. The precise value of $`d_c`$ depends on $`N`$.

iii) For $`d>d_c`$, a state with unidirectional charge density wave order and phase coherence between the layers is lower in energy than the uniform density state. For $`N1`$ and any value of the layer separation, the coherent unidirectional charge density wave has lower energy than the square or triangular Wigner crystal. For tunneling parameter $`t0`$, this state supports a quantized Hall effect.

iv) For small values of $`t`$, the linear regions in which the density has significant magnitudes in both layers – i.e., the regions between the centers of stripes in different layers – will support low energy collective modes. These excitations are analogous to spin waves of one-dimensional $`XY`$ magnets in a magnetic field. They sustain soliton excitations which carry charge $`\pm e`$, whose energy scales as $`\sqrt{t}`$.

v) For $`t=0`$, the charged excitations become gapless and no quantized Hall effect can occur. At zero temperature the system may undergo a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, in which, in the equivalent 1+1 dimensional classical XY system , vortices unbind. The bound vortex state is very unusual, similar to quantum Hall states in having a vanishing tunneling conductance, but nevertheless being gapless and not supporting a plateau in the Hall conductivity. Because of the power law correlations inherent in systems with bound vortices, we call this a critical Hall state.

vi) At higher values of the layer separation the electron system undergoes a first order phase transition to a non-coherent unidirectional charge-density wave state with a weak longitudinal modulation of the charge density. This state also can be viewed as a highly anisotropic Wigner crystal (i.e., a stripe crystal.)

This paper is organized as follows. In Section II we describe the uniform coherent state and study its charge density excitations. From the softening of this excitation we obtain a phase diagram, in tunneling versus layer separation, for which the UCS becomes unstable. In Section III we discuss in more detail the method of calculation used for studying the translational broken symmetry ground states, and introduce the different phases analyzed. In Section IV we present our numerical results. Section V is devoted to a qualitative discussion of the excitations supported by the unidirectional coherent charge density wave state, and their consequences for quantum fluctuations. We conclude in Section VI with a summary.

## II Instabilities of the Uniform Coherent State.

In what follows, we consider our double layer system at total filling factor $`\nu =4N+1`$. The $`4N`$ part of this filling refers to the fully filled Landau levels, each of which has two spin states and two “layer states”. In the large magnetic field limit, it is safe to assume these lower levels are filled and inert, and we do not explicitly include them in the calculations below. We also assume there is no spin texture  in the groundstate, which is always true if the Zeeman coupling is large. If the tunneling amplitude $`t`$ is smaller than the Zeeman coupling, then our results apply to filling factors $`\nu =4N+3`$ mutatis mutandis.

For small separations between the layers, the groundstate of the system is expected to be a uniform coherent state, with wave function of the form

$$|\mathrm{\Psi }_N>=\underset{X}{}\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left(C_{N,X,l,}^++e^{i\theta }C_{N,X,r,}^+\right)|N1>$$
(1)
where

$$|N1>=\underset{X^{};\sigma =;N^{}<N;i=l,r}{}C_{N^{},X^{},i,\sigma }^+|0>.$$
(2)
In these equations $`C_{N,X,l(r),\sigma }^+`$ creates an electron in the Landau level (LL) $`N`$, with guiding center orbital label $`X`$ and spin $`\sigma `$ in the left (right) well. $`|0>`$ is the electron vacuum and $`|N1>`$ is the wavefunction which describes the system at filling factor $`4N`$, for which all the states with LL orbital index $`N^{}<N`$ are occupied. Note that since in Eq.(1) the product runs over all the possible values of $`X`$ this state corresponds to filling factor $`\nu =4N+1`$. By construction this state has the same electronic charge in each well. Since we assume that the only active electron states are those in the highest LL with spin parallel to the field, in order to simplify the notation we drop the indices $`N`$ and $``$ in the creation and destruction operators in what follows.

The state described by Eq.(1) has long-range order in the phase difference between electrons in the two layers, $`\theta `$. In the absence of tunneling between layers, the energy is independent of $`\theta `$, and the system has a continuous broken symmetry. For $`t0`$, the ground state of the system is composed of a full LL of single-particle orbitals which are a symmetric combination of the left and right layer orbitals ($`\theta =0`$). This wavefunction is exact for non-interacting electrons, and for $`d0`$ we expect it to remain exact when interactions are included. For finite $`d`$, quantum fluctuations become important and the ground state described by Eq.(1) is only an approximation. Nevertheless, we expect  a broken symmetry ground state to survive for $`d`$ smaller that a critical value of the layer separation $`d_c`$.

In order to estimate $`d_c`$ we calculate the charge density excitations (CDE’s) of the system. The CDE’s are classified by a conserved wavevector $`𝐪`$ , and their dispersion can be obtained from the poles of the charge density response function. Neglecting mixing between LL’s, it has the form

$$\omega _{cde}(q)=\left\{[\mathrm{\Delta }^{HF}V_d(q)][\mathrm{\Delta }^{HF}V_b(q)+V_a(q)V_c(q)]\right\}^{1/2},$$
(3)
where

$`\mathrm{\Delta }^{HF}`$ $`=`$ $`2t+V_d(q=0),`$ (4)
$`V_a(q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{e^2}{ϵ\mathrm{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{q\mathrm{}}}V(q),`$ (5)
$`V_b(q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{e^2}{ϵ\mathrm{}}}{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}d(q^{}\mathrm{})J_0(qq^{}\mathrm{}^2)V(q^{}),`$ (6)
$`V_c(q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{e^2}{ϵ\mathrm{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{q\mathrm{}}}V(q)e^{qd}`$ (7)
$`V_d(q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{e^2}{ϵ\mathrm{}}}{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}d(q^{}\mathrm{})J_0(qq^{}\mathrm{}^2)V(q^{})e^{q^{}d}`$ (8)
with

$$V(q)=e^{q^2\mathrm{}^2/2}\left(L_N(q^2\mathrm{}^2/2)\right)^2,$$
(9)
where $`L_N(x)`$ is a Laguerre polynomial. In these expressions $`\mathrm{}=\sqrt{\mathrm{}c/eB}`$ is the magnetic length and $`ϵ`$ is the dielectric constant of the host semiconductor. $`V_a`$ and $`V_b`$ are the direct and exchange intrawell Coulomb interaction, while $`V_c`$ and $`V_d`$ are the direct and exchange interwell Coulomb interactions .

We have computed $`\omega _{cde}(q)`$ for different values of $`N`$, and have plotted several representative curves (with $`t=0`$) in Fig.1 for different values of $`N`$ and for a layer separation near $`d_c`$. For $`t=0`$, at small wavevector $`q`$ and any value of $`N`$, the dispersion curves increase linearly. This acoustic excitation is the Goldstone mode associated with the continuous broken symmetry; i.e., the spontaneous interlayer coherence. At intermediate $`q`$ the dispersion curves develop a dip which becomes soft at a wavevector $`q_c`$ for values of $`d`$ bigger than a critical distance $`d_c(N)`$. As discussed above, this indicates an instability of the state. We can see in Fig.1 that, in magnetic length units, the value of $`d_c`$ decreases as the LL index increases. At larger values of $`q`$ (not shown in Fig.1) the spectra corresponding to $`N>0`$ develop some structure associated with the zeros of the Laguerre polynomials appearing in the definition of $`V(q)`$.

Fig. 2 illustrates $`d_c`$ versus $`t`$ for a few values of $`N`$, and thus represents a phase diagram for the stability of the uniform coherent state (stable for small $`d`$ and large $`t`$) with respect to the formation of a density wave state (for large $`d`$ and small $`t`$). Note that the uniform state is stable for $`N=2`$ even at $`t=0`$. This is not the case for single layers, where at $`\nu =1/2`$ the system forms stripes. Evidently, the condensation energy for spontaneous interlayer coherence outweighs the gain in energy associated with stripe formation in the individual layers. For large enough $`d`$, however, the single layer tendency to form stripes must eventually become important. In order to more precisely characterize the ground state after the instability sets in, we study different broken translational symmetry states. This is the subject of the next Section.

## III Broken Translational Symmetry States

In this Section we study different translational broken symmetry states of the electron gas confined in a DQW system. We adopt the Hartree-Fock approximation in the form introduced by Côté and MacDonald ; in this method the important quantities are the expectation values of the operators

$$\rho _{j,j^{}}(𝐪)=\frac{1}{N_\varphi }\underset{X,X^{}}{}e^{iq_x(X+X^{})/2}\delta _{X,X^{}q_y\mathrm{}^2}C_{X,j}^+C_{X^{},j^{}}.$$
(10)
Here the quantum numbers $`j,j^{}`$ are layer indices. Details of the application of this method to bilayer systems may be found in Ref. .

The Hartree-Fock equations have a number of different solutions corresponding to different states of the electron gas in the DQW system. Each solution is characterized by a set of order parameters $`<\rho _{i,j}(𝐪)>`$; the ground state energy can be expressed solely in terms of these quantities. In the following calculations we consider a limited number of physically interesting solutions and compare their energies, and consider situations when transitions among these different states may occur.

### A Uniform Coherent State (UCS).

This state is described by Eq.(1); it is characterized for $`\theta =0`$ by $`<\rho _{l,l}(0)>=<\rho _{r,r}(0)>=<\rho _{r,l}(0)>=<\rho _{l,r}(0)>=1/2`$, and all other order parameters zero. As discussed above, translational invariance is not broken in this phase, but there is interwell coherence which, at $`t=0`$, breaks a $`U(1)`$ symmetry of the Hamiltonian. In Eq. 1, this arises because the energy of the state is independent of $`\theta `$ . The UCS has always lower energy than the incoherent, $`<\rho _{l,r}(0)>=0`$, uniform state.

### B Unidirectional Coherent CDW State (UCCDW)

In this state $`<\rho _{i,j}(n𝐆_0)>0`$ , $`n=0,\pm 1,\pm 2,\mathrm{}`$; the translational symmetry in one direction is broken and interwell coherence is allowed. The value of $`G_0`$ is chosen to minimize the energy of the system. Furthermore, in order to have an energy minimum in this class of states, the CDW in the two wells must be shifted by a distance $`\pi /G_0`$ with respect to one another. For $`dd_c`$ the value of $`G_0`$ which minimizes the energy approaches $`q_c`$.

The UCCDW state may be written in the form

$$|UCCDW>=\underset{C}{}(\sqrt{\nu _l(X)}c_{X,l}^++\sqrt{\nu _r(X)}e^{i\theta }c_{X,r}^+)|N1>,$$
(11)
where $`\nu _{l(r)}(X)`$ is the occupation of the state $`X`$ in the left (right) well, and $`\nu _l(X)+\nu _r(X)=1`$. The local occupation factors $`\nu _i(X)`$ are periodic functions of $`X`$ with period $`2\pi /G_0`$. With an appropriate choice of origin, the charge density is an even function of $`X`$, so the state may be constructed with only odd Fourier components of $`<\rho _{i,i}(nG_0)>`$. The local coherence between wells is given by the quantity $`\sqrt{\nu _l(X)\nu _r(X)}e^{i\theta }`$, which is even in $`X`$ and periodic with period $`\pi /G_0`$; thus $`<\rho _{l,r}(nG_0)>0`$ only when $`n`$ is even.

From the order parameters it is easy to obtain the band structure of the UCCDW phase. The eigenvalues depend on the guiding center coordinate $`X`$, and (up to an unimportant constant) are given by

$$ϵ(X)=\pm \sqrt{A(X)^2+B(X)^2},$$
(12)
where

$`A(X)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{n0}{}}e^{inG_0X}[V_a(nG_0)V_b(nG_0)V_c(nG_0)]<\rho _{i,i}(nG_0)>,`$ (13)
$`B(X)`$ $`=`$ $`t{\displaystyle \underset{n}{}}V_d(nG_0)<\rho _{l,r}(nG_0)>.`$ (14)
Since the total filling factor of the $`Nth`$ Landau level is 1, only the lowest energy band is occupied. In the UCCDW phase we define the gap, $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{UCCDW}`$, as the difference in energy between the highest occupied state and the lowest empty state. In the coherent solution, $`<\rho _{l,r}(0)>`$ is always different from zero, so that $`B(X)0`$ for all $`X`$; in this case $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{UCCDW}>0`$. It is important to recognize that the Hartree-Fock approximation overestimates the actual gap to create well-separated particle-hole pairs above the UCCDW state, in particular because the groundstate band structure does not reflect the possible existence of soliton quasiparticles. As we discuss below, for $`t>0`$, a magnetic field-dependent gap is always present and a quantized Hall conductance will be observed ; for $`t=0`$ we shall that the quantized Hall effect is absent.

In the limit $`d\mathrm{}`$, $`\nu _l(X)\nu _r(X)=0`$ and the coherence between wells is lost; $`\nu _i(X)`$ can only be zero or one. This limit corresponds to two uncoupled 2DEG’s each supporting an independent stripe state.

### C Coherent WC state (CWC)

In this state $`\{<\rho _{i,j}(𝐆)>\}0`$, translational symmetry is broken along two non-collinear vectors, and interwell coherence is allowed. The reciprocal lattice vectors $`\{𝐆\}`$ define a two-dimensional lattice containing one electron per unit cell.

At intermediate values of $`d`$ the square lattice has lower energy than the triangular lattice, because the interstitial regions in a square lattice are larger than those of a triangular lattice, allowing a particularly low interwell Hartree energy . At larger values of $`d`$ there will necessarily be a first order phase transition into a triangular lattice, since its intralayer Madelung energy is lower than that of the square lattice. However, because the Madelung energies of the two states are very close , this only occurs at a very large value of $`d`$. We thus do not further consider the triangular lattice for the purposes of this work; the Wigner crystals we discuss are square lattices, with unit cell lattice parameters $`a_x=a_y=2\sqrt{\pi }\mathrm{}`$.

As in the case of the UCCDW, in order to minimize the interwell electrostatic energy, the lattice in the two wells are shifted by a vector $`(a_x/2,a_y/2)`$.

For systems modulated in two directions, such as the CWC phase, there are gaps in the excitation spectrum, but the densities at which they occur are not $`B`$ dependent and the Hall conductance is not expected to be quantized.

### D Modulated Unidirectional CDW state. (MUCDW)

In this state the electron gas has modulations in the charge density along the direction of the stripes. Such modulations are known to significantly lower the energy of stripes in a single layer . While the two-dimensional long-range order that appears in such a state may not survive in the groundstate due to quantum fluctuations , the appearance of such modulations within Hartree-Fock reflects the tendency of the stripes to look like one-dimensional crystals at short length scales.

In the calculation we use either an oblique or a rectangular lattice with one electron per unit cell. In either case, the primitive lattice vectors have the form

$`𝐚_1`$ $`=`$ $`(X_0,Z_0)`$ (15)
$`𝐚_2`$ $`=`$ $`(0,Y_0),`$ (16)
with $`X_0=2\pi /G_0`$ and $`Y_0=4\pi \mathrm{}^2/X_0`$. The parameter $`Z_0=Y_0/2`$ for an oblique lattice, and $`Z_0=0`$ for a rectangular lattice. In single layer systems, it is found  that the energy is extremely insensitive to the parameter $`Z_0`$, but there is a very shallow minimum for $`Z_0=Y_0/2`$. This turns out to be the case of the present system as well.

For the two layer system under consideration here, to minimize the interwell Madelung energy the charge in the two wells is shifted with respect to one another by a vector

$$(\frac{a_1^2}{2X_0},0).$$
(17)
This particular shift vector is the analog of what one finds in hexagonal close packed structures.

In this class of solutions we have never found a coherent state. Whenever $`<\rho _{i,i}(G_x,G_y)>0`$ for $`G_y0`$, we always find $`<\rho _{l,r}(𝐆)>=0`$ for all set of $`𝐆^{}s`$. Physically, this arises because formation of modulations competes with interwell coherence. The latter lowers the energy by introducing admixtures of single particle states near the Fermi surface in different wells. Modulations, by contrast, destroy the Fermi surface: modulated stripes essentially represent a highly anisotropic Wigner crystal state, with gaps everywhere in the band structure between occupied and unoccupied states. Thus, there are no low-energy states that may be admixed between wells. The MUCDW is a solution without coherence between the wells and we find that it is not possible to change continuously from the UCCDW phase to the MUCDW phase.

As in the CWC phase, the gap in the excitation spectrum which appears in the MUCDW phase is present over a range of densities. This phase does not exhibit a quantized Hall effect.

## IV Results.

We now present our numerical results for the states discussed in the last Section. In Fig.3 we plot the energy difference $`E_{CWC}E_{UCCDW}`$ as a function of the layer separation for different values of $`N`$. A negative (positive) value of this quantity implies that the CWC has lower (higher) energy than the UCCDW state. Because the transition at $`d_c`$ is continuous, both energies, $`E_{CWC}`$ and $`E_{UCCDW}`$, tend to the energy of the UCS at $`d=d_c`$. For any value $`d`$ near but higher than $`d_c(N)`$, we find the UCCDW phase has lower energy than the CWC, indicating the instability at $`d_c`$ is a transition from the UCS to the UCCDW state. The driving energy for this transition comes from the difference between intra- and inter-well interactions, which increases with layer separation. For small $`d`$, interwell and intrawell interactions are rather similar; at larger layer separations lower energies can be attained by improving intrawell correlations via $`<\rho _{i,i}(G_0)>`$ taking on a non-zero value. This can be accomplished only by allowing the phase relationship between electrons in different wells to fluctuate, i.e., by lowering the expectation value of $`<\rho _{l,r}(0)>`$ (cf. Eq. 7).

For $`N=0`$ a second transition occurs from the UCCDW state to the CWC state at $`d1.65\mathrm{}`$. As commented above in the $`N=0`$ case the fluctuations will probably melt this CWC state, forming two non-coherent highly correlated Fermi liquids . For $`N1`$, the situation is different: there is no UCCDW$``$CWC transition. We find that the UCCDW phase always has lower energy than the CWC state. The difference in energy between these states increases with $`N`$. Obviously this is closely related to the fact that for $`N1`$, in the HF approximation the stripe phase is lower in energy than the WC state .

We now discuss the properties of the UCCDW state in more detail. For concreteness, we focus on the case $`N=2`$, $`d=1.2\mathrm{}`$ and $`t=0`$. Most of the qualitative results, however, apply to all the UCCDW states for other parameters.

Fig. 4 illustrates the local filling factor in the left well $`\nu _l(X)`$ and the local coherence factor $`\sqrt{\nu _l(X)\nu _r(X)}`$ as a function of $`X`$. For this case $`G_0\mathrm{}^1`$, and the width of a unit cell is $`2\pi \mathrm{}`$. Note that $`\nu _l(X)`$ is the particle-hole conjugate of $`\nu _r(X)`$, i.e., $`\nu _r(X)=1\nu _l(X)`$. The coherence between the wells is maximum in the region where the charge density is shared by both wells. Note that, as commented above, the interwell coherence order parameter has periodic $`\pi /G_0`$. For smaller values of $`d`$, the oscillations of the density between wells decreases until, at $`d_c`$, the charge density becomes uniform, with $`\nu _l(X)=\nu _r(X)=1/2`$. At this point the coherence factor becomes constant and takes on its maximum value of $`1/2`$. For larger values of the layer separation, $`\nu _{l(r)}(X)`$ changes more rapidly, and the coherence is significantly different from zero in thinner regions. As $`d\mathrm{}`$, the width of the coherent regions tends to zero, and the local occupation is just zero or unity.

In Fig. 5 we plot the band structure, Eq.(9), in the UCCDW case. For the parameters used in the calculations the Hartree-Fock results show a gap for the charged excitations. The gap is maximum in the regions where the charge is localized in one of the wells and minimum in the regions where the charge is shared by both wells. For small values of $`d`$, the band structure becomes flatter and the energy gap increases until, at $`d_c`$, the gap is constant in the Brillouin zone and takes its maximum value $`2(t+V_d(0))`$. For larger values of $`d`$ the gap decreases, reaching its minimum value $`2t`$ when $`d\mathrm{}`$. In the UCCDW phase, $`<\rho _{l,r}(0)>0`$, so that there is always a finite energy gap, although in some circumstances this gap is much smaller than the typical experimental temperatures. It should be noted that the spatial structure of this gap suggests that charged quasiparticles, either due to thermal fluctuations or to doping away from total filling factor $`\nu =4N+1`$, will be much more mobile along the direction of the stripes than perpendicular to them. It would be most interesting if such anisotropy in double well transport could be observed experimentally.

It should be noted that in Eq. 6, the wavefunction for the UCCDW has a free parameter $`\theta `$, whose value for $`t=0`$ does not affect the energy. This implies that the UCCDW supports gapless modes (beyond phonons), due to the spontaneous coherence. The interesting aspect of this system is that, for large enough $`d`$, the coupling between the coherent regions will become negligible, and each linear region may support its own gapless mode. As discussed below, the resulting system is similar to a collection of one-dimensional $`XY`$ ferromagnets. The fluctuations of this degree of freedom greatly reduces the charge gap for any value of $`t`$ compared to what is found in the band structure, and for $`t=0`$ we predict that such fluctuations will drive the gap to zero.

Returning to the Hartree-Fock results, the physical origin for the existence of a CDW in DQW systems is easy to understand. For $`d`$ near $`d_c`$ the Hartree-Fock one body potential has a minimum at a wavevector smaller than the reciprocal lattice vector associated with a WC, and the electron gas can attain a lower energy by forming a UCCDW. As $`d`$ increases, the minimum in the effective potential moves to larger wavevectors. Because of this, for $`N=0`$ the WC becomes more stable than the unidirectional CDW. For $`N1`$, by contrast, the effective two-dimensional Coulomb interaction, $`V(q)`$, contains Laguerre polynomials that have zeros at decreasing wavevectors when $`N`$ increases. This produces a zero in the repulsive Hartree potential where the exchange interaction is strong, making the UCDW more stable than the WC at larger layer separations.

In Fig.6 we plot the order parameter $`<\rho _{l,r}(0)>`$ and the energy gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{UCCDW}`$ as a function of the layer separation. Note that in the UCCDW phase the coherence is non-zero even for large values of $`d`$. As $`d`$ increases the charge energy gap goes to its minimum value, but this is not so much due to the decrease in the interwell coherence as it is to the increase of the intrawell coherence $`<\rho _{i,i}(G_0)>`$.

Finally, we address the question of the value of the layer separation for which the two electron layers become decoupled, forming at $`N>0`$, a pair of noncoherent MUCDW states. To find this, one must compute the energies of the MUCDW and the UCCDW as functions of the layer separation. These may be found in Figs. 7 and 8 for the cases $`N=2`$ and $`N=1`$, respectively. As commented above, as a function of $`d`$, there is a crossing (first order phase transition) in energies between the MUCCDW and the UCCDW phases. The transitions occurs at $`d1.6\mathrm{}`$ in the $`N=2`$ case and at $`d1.4\mathrm{}`$ in the $`N=1`$ case, indicating that the UCDW phase becomes more stable as the LL index increases. From the value of the charged excitation gap, we expect that the QHE in double layer systems for $`t0`$ will disappear for large enough $`d`$ due to the UCCDW$``$MUCDW transition and not the UCS$``$MUCDW transition.

## V Collective Modes and Solitons in the UCCDW State

As mentioned above, the UCCDW state contains an interesting degree of freedom, the phase of the coherence factor in the regions where there is significant occupation of both the left and right wells (cf. Fig. 4). As in the case of the UCS, this phase may be thought of as a function of position, and from it low energy excitations may be constructed . Interesting new physics emerges from this degree of freedom in the limit of large $`d`$, when the linear coherent regions become very narrow, and the magnitude of the coherence factor nearly vanished between these regions. In this situation we may view the coherent regions as a collection of one-dimensional systems which are, in a first approximation, uncoupled . Each coherent region thus has its own phase, $`\theta _i(y)`$, where $`i`$ labels the individual coherent region, and we assume the stripes are parallel to the $`\widehat{y}`$ direction.

Once we adopt a model in which the $`\theta _i`$’s are uncoupled, the low energy statics and dynamics become identical to those of a domain wall between spins of opposite orientation in a filled Landau level. This system has been studied in Ref. , and we may use those results to understand what will happen in the double layer system. At long wavelengths, the energy functional for the phase takes the form

$$E_i=𝑑y\left[\frac{1}{2}\rho _s\left(\frac{\theta _i}{y}\right)^2gt\mathrm{cos}\theta _i\right].$$
(18)
In the above equation, $`\rho _s`$ is a stiffness for the effective $`XY`$ spin degree of freedom, and $`g`$ is analogous to a Landé $`g`$ factor, with $`t`$ playing the role of a magnetic field. The values of both $`\rho _s`$ and $`g`$ depend on the precise form the UCCDW wavefunction, and require a microscopic calculation to evaluate. Note both $`\rho _s`$ and $`g`$ remain finite in the limit $`t0`$.

Eq. 18 has the form of a sine-Gordon model, and a number of interesting properties immediately follow. Of special importance is the fact that the system supports soliton excitations, where $`\theta _i`$ changes by $`2\pi `$ in $`y`$ going from $`\mathrm{}`$ to $`\mathrm{}`$ . The energy of these excitations have the form $`\epsilon _s=8\sqrt{\rho _sgt}`$. For reasons very similar to what occurs in double layer quantum Hall systems near $`\nu =1`$ , or analogously for systems with spin , the sine-Gordon model solitons carry a net charge of $`\pm e`$ . This means the linear coherent regions support charged excitations much lower in energy than predicted by the Hartree-Fock theory for small $`t`$: as discussed above, the energy to create a well-separated particle-hole pair tends to a constant as $`t0`$, while the soliton energy vanishes as $`\sqrt{t}`$. For small $`t`$, at finite temperature the solitons should dominate the transport properties of the system.

In the limit of vanishing tunneling amplitude, a very interesting possibility arises for behavior of the linear coherent regions. As stated above, the system will have gapless modes associated with the spontaneously broken symmetry; these lead  to a set of collective modes dispersing linearly: $`\omega (q)=Aq`$ . The action consistent with this has the form

$$S=𝑑\tau 𝑑y\left[\frac{1}{2}\rho _\tau \left(\frac{\theta _i}{\tau }\right)^2+\frac{1}{2}\rho _s\left(\frac{\theta _i}{y}\right)^2\right],$$
(19)
where $`\tau `$ is imaginary time, and $`\rho _\tau `$ is an effective moment of inertia that depends on the precise form of the UCCDW wavefunction. At zero temperature, Eq. 19 may be reinterpreted as an energy functional in a 1+1 dimensional classical system . This system will undergo a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition if $`\sqrt{\rho _s\rho _\tau }`$ passes through $`2/\pi `$. Above this value, vortices in the $`\theta _i`$ field are bound in pairs; below it, they are unbound.

The meaning of this phase transition may be understood by examining what happens for small but non-vanishing $`t`$. In this case, vortices are bound by a linear potential, and there will be a “string” attaching them in which $`\theta _i`$ rotates by $`2\pi `$ . bFrom the spin-charge coupling inherent in such multicomponent systems, this means the vortices “cap” a region in spacetime in which the total charge in the $`ith`$ linear coherent region fluctuates away from the average by $`\pm e`$. For $`t>0`$ the vortices always remain bound, and these fluctuations are controlled. Thus, fluctuations in the charge density of the 2DEG are suppressed, and the system exhibits a quantized Hall conductance.

For $`t=0`$ and $`\sqrt{\rho _s\rho _\tau }>2/\pi `$, the vortices also remain bound, albeit logarithmically. This suggests that the charge density fluctuations are still suppressed, and the system bears a resemblance to a quantum Hall phase. However, since charged excitations are not gapped at $`t=0`$, the Hall conductance should not exhibit a plateau. The difference between states with bound and unbound vortices would be most directly probed by a tunneling experiment: in the bound-vortex phase, one expects a tunneling current $`I`$ that vanishes as a power of the voltage $`V`$ that is greater than one, so that the tunneling conductance vanishes. In the unbound state, the presence of free vortices means charge may be injected into the system, resulting in a finite tunneling conductance. Note that for a quantized Hall state, the tunneling current should vanish as $`Ie^{V_0/V}`$, where $`V_0`$ is proportional to the quasiparticle gap . The differing behaviors of the low-voltage $`IV`$ characteristics indicates that the bound vortex state is qualitatively different than either a conducting state or a quantum Hall state. We tentatively call this new state a critical Hall state.

In closing this Section, we note that in real systems, the true groundstate of the DQW can never be a critical Hall state, because the tunneling amplitude can never be made to completely vanish in practice. In addition, there may be small but relevant gradient couplings among the different linear coherent regions, driving the system away from the critical Hall state at low enough temperature. In practice, both these perturbations may be made very small, so that at experimentally realizable temperatures their effects might be unimportant. It is important to evaluate whether the system parameters (i.e., $`t`$, $`N`$ and $`d`$) can be adjusted so that properties of a critical Hall state may be observed in practice. This will be the subject of a future study.

## VI Summary

In this paper, we studied double layer quantum Hall systems in which each layer has a high-index Landau level that is half-filled. Hartree-Fock calculations revealed that for small layer separations, the groundstate is a uniform coherent state (UCS). Above a critical layer separation $`d_c(N)`$, we found a continuous phase transition to a unidirectional coherent charge density wave (UCCDW), which is related to stripe states in single layer systems. This UCCDW state supports a quantized Hall effect when there is tunneling between layers ($`t0`$), and is always stable against formation of a coherent Wigner crystal (CWC) for Landau indices $`N1`$. The state does become unstable to the formation of a modulated unidirectional charge density wave (MUCDW) state for large enough layer separation, which should lead to the destruction of the quantum Hall effect.

The UCCDW state supports interesting low-energy modes associated with interlayer coherence, which become gapless in the limit $`t0`$. For relatively large layer separations, in a model where the Coulomb interaction is screened, the regions of coherence may be treated as independent one-dimensional systems with an $`XY`$ degree of freedom. The resulting effective Hamiltonian is a sine-Gordon model, which supports charge soliton excitations, whose energy vanishes in the zero tunneling limit. At zero temperature, the equivalent 1+1 dimensional system may be in a state with either bound or unbound vortices. Finally, we argued that the former possibility is an unusual situation which we call a “critical Hall state”, and is characterized by a power law tunneling $`IV`$ characteristic.

We thank A.H.MacDonald, C.Tejedor, L.Martín-Moreno and J.J.Palacios for useful discussions. This work was supported by the CICyT of Spain under Contract No. PB96-0085, and by the NSF under Grant No. DMR98-70681.

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# Dynamics of Excited Electrons in Copper: Role of Auger Electrons

## I Introduction

Two-photon photoemission (2PPE) has been applied intensively to study the electron-electron interaction in alkali, noble and transition metals. The experimental results are often compared with the Fermi-liquid theory (FLT), but such a comparison is only valid if the influence of secondary-electron generation and transport of excited carriers is negligible. Indeed, a series of 2PPE experiments involving photoexcitation of electrons from the $`d`$ band in Cu have shown an unusual non-monotonic behavior of the relaxation time. The relaxation time shows a broad peak at energies just above the $`d`$-band threshold which shifts linearly with photon energy. Both the non-monotonic behavior and the dependence on photon energy are incompatible with FLT description or with recent calculations based on Green’s-function formalism. There is currently a controversy in the literature on the origin of the peak and especially on the role of secondary electrons. One of the key questions concerns the amount of Auger electrons contributing to the hot-electron distribution in the region of the peak. On the basis of simple model calculations, Petek et al. have estimated that the Auger contribution is less than 10%, while Knoesel, Hotzel, and Wolf could reproduce their correlation measurement by assuming that the hot electron population above the $`d`$-band threshold was entirely generated via the Auger process. Note that the experiments were performed using different pulse durations (12 and 70 fs, resp.).

In a previous work, we have developed a theory for the dynamics of excited electrons in metals, which includes both the effects of secondary electrons and transport. We used a Boltzmann-type equation in the random-k approximation for the calculation of the distribution function of excited electrons. A detailed description is given in Ref. . The calculations have shown a peak in the relaxation time at the right energy reflecting the $`d`$-band threshold and a linear shift with photon frequency, in agreement with experiments. However, the height of the peak $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{th}10`$ fs calculated using $`\tau _h=9`$ fs was smaller than the observed one $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{exp}17`$ fs. Furthermore, a simplified procedure was used to extract the relaxation time which also led to an overestimate of the peak height. Indeed for simplicity, the relaxation time was extracted by fitting the distribution of excited electrons, $`f(t)`$, which was very sensitive to the influence of secondary electrons causing a deviation from a simple exponential decay. To make our results more reliable, in this work we use the same fitting procedure as the one used by experimentalists, i.e. we fit $`I^{2\mathrm{P}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{E}}(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$, given by the convolution of the probe laser profile with the distribution of excited electrons.

In this paper, we will analyze in detail the structure and height of the peak and the role of secondary electrons, especially focussing on the Auger contribution and the $`d`$-hole lifetime. In order to shed light on the contribution of Auger electrons, we have started by analyzing their weight in the total hot-electron distribution. For this purpose we have performed calculations for different hole lifetimes ($`\tau _h`$) and laser pulse durations ($`\tau _l`$) and found that their relative contribution can be expressed in a simple way as a product of a function of $`\tau _l/\tau _h`$ and a phase space function which is energy-dependent. In addition, we show that the height of the peak in the relaxation time depends mainly on the hole lifetime and surprisingly not on the amount of Auger electrons. It will be shown that the relaxation time for energies above the $`d`$-band threshold scales linearly with $`\tau _h`$ and its structure is determined by the same phase space function as mentioned above. Finally, we study how the height of the peak depends on the optical transition matrix elements and on the laser pulse duration.

## II Results and discussion

As said in the introduction, the composition of the hot-electron distribution in terms of different contributions ($`f(E)=_if_i(E),i=P,A,OS`$ for primary, Auger, other secondary electrons) is an open question. We determine their respective weight and compare the distribution of hot electrons for different cases in Fig. 1. We especially focus our attention on the variation as function of the hole lifetime at the top of the $`d`$ band, $`\tau _h`$. The hole lifetime plays an important role, since it determines the generation rate of Auger electrons which may strongly influence the dynamics of excited electrons above the Fermi energy. Note that in our model, the hole lifetime is the inverse of the Auger scattering rate, thus we cannot vary independently the hole lifetime and the amount of Auger electrons generated. One should mention that experimentally, lower bounds of 24 fs and 26 fs have been reported for the hole lifetime at the top of the $`d`$ band in Cu. Since there is up to now no clear consensus on the value of $`\tau _h`$, in our calculation we will consider it as a free parameter. In absence of a $`d`$ band, the electron-hole symmetry would hold, and our calculation gives then $`\tau _h=9`$ fs for the hole lifetime at $`EE_F=2.2`$ eV. Due to the localized nature of the $`d`$-wave functions, the $`d`$-hole lifetime is expected to be significantly larger than the $`s`$-hole lifetime, which will hence be considered as a reasonable lower bound. We start with the case of a laser pulse of photon energy $`h\nu =3.3`$ eV and duration $`\tau _l=70`$ fs (FWHM) as used in Ref. . Later, we will discuss the effect of changing the laser pulse duration.

In Fig. 1(a) we show results of the distribution of hot electrons for different cases: with and without secondary electrons and for different hole lifetimes. We observe a peak in the primary electron distribution at $`EE_F=1.1`$ eV which is due to the sharp feature in the $`d`$-band density of states; at this energy, primary electrons are dominating. To simplify the discussion, in Fig. 1(b), we plot $`f_i/f_P`$ for $`i=A,OS`$. In the region of the peak in $`f`$, the primary electron contribution is dominating, which appears now as a dip in $`f_i/f_P`$. Below the peak, there is a continous rise of both the Auger and other secondary electron contribution. On the other hand, just above the peak, there is a sharp increase of the weight of the secondary electrons, largely dominated by the Auger contribution, with a maximum at $`EE_F=1.3`$ eV. We observe that a change of the hole lifetime leads to a significant variation of the Auger contribution. For example, for $`\tau _h=35`$ fs, $`f_A/f_P=2.2`$, whereas for shorter lifetime $`\tau _h=9`$ fs, $`f_A/f_P=3.6`$. In our model, a shorter hole lifetime corresponds to a larger Auger scattering rate and therefore to a larger amount of Auger electrons. Note that $`f_A/f_P`$ has the same shape for any given $`\tau _h`$, only the relative amplitude is changing. This will be analyzed further when discussing the effect of the laser pulse duration. Furthermore, we find that for $`EE_F>2.5`$ eV, the contribution of secondary electrons is always negligible.

In Fig. 2, we show the relaxation time as function of energy for different cases (see Fig. 1). The relaxation time is determined by a fit to the 2PPE signal as discussed in connection with Fig. 6. It will be interesting to see how the peak in the relaxation time depends on both $`f_A/f_P`$ and on the hole lifetime. First, we observe that when considering only primary processes ($`\tau (E)=\tau _P(E)`$), the relaxation time is a monontonic function, as it can be expected on the basis of FLT. However, when including other secondary processes (but no Auger process), we immediately observe some significant changes for $`EE_F<2.3`$ eV and some new structure at intermediate energy. When comparing with Fig. 1(b), the changes in $`\tau (E)`$ due to the presence of other secondary electrons coincide with the variation of $`f_{OS}/f_P`$ discussed previously. Indeed, at $`EE_F=1.1`$ eV (dip in $`f_{OS}/f_P`$), $`\tau `$ is almost unchanged. Then a small peak appears at $`EE_F=1.3`$ eV (region where the secondary contribution is the highest), and for $`EE_F>2.5`$ eV, $`\tau (E)=\tau _P(E)`$ (negligible secondary electron contribution). This picture remains qualitatively unchanged when including the Auger process.

Let us now comment on the quantitative aspect. First of all, a clear and well-defined peak is observable when $`\tau _h`$ gets sufficiently large (typically $`\tau _h>17`$ fs). It is also interesting to note that for small $`\tau _h`$ (large Auger scattering rate), the effect is very weak, in spite of the fact that the Auger contribution to the electron distribution is large \[see Fig. 1(b)\]. This is a clear indication that the amplitude of the peak in $`\tau `$ is mainly controlled by the hole lifetime. This is indeed illustrated in the inset of Fig. 2, where $`\tau `$ at $`EE_F=1.3\mathrm{eV}`$ is plotted as function of the hole lifetime. We see clearly that $`\tau `$ scales linearly with $`\tau _h`$.

It is important to mention that we have found that this linear scaling behavior is also valid for other energies. This suggests that $`\tau (E)`$ could be expressed as a sum of two terms, $`\tau _0(E)`$ (including primary and other secondary processes), and a term proportional to $`\tau _h`$ (Auger contribution), where the coefficient is a phase space factor depending on the DOS only. To be more explicit, we suggest that the relaxation time can be written as $`\tau (E)\tau _0(E)\tau _hF(E)`$, where $`F(E)`$ is a phase space factor defined as the ratio between a) the available phase space for Auger scattering and b) the phase space for the optical excitation.

To test the validity of this expression, in Fig. 3, we have plotted in the same figure $`[\tau (E)\tau _0(E)]/\tau _h`$ as function of $`EE_F`$ and the calculated $`F(E)`$. Clearly, for $`EE_F>1.3`$ eV, one can see that the values for $`[\tau (E)\tau _0(E)]/\tau _h`$ lie almost on the same curve, which depends only on the energy. A deviation is observed for smaller energy, where Auger electrons are no longer the dominant contribution to the hot-electron distribution \[see Fig. 1(b)\]. However, the position of the dip is always found at 1.1 eV. Within some deviations at high and low energy, we observe a fair agreement between $`F(E)`$ and $`[\tau (E)\tau _0(E)]/\tau _h`$. Note that a peak appears in $`F(E)`$ at $`EE_F1.7`$ eV, whereas in $`[\tau (E)\tau _0(E)]/\tau _h`$, one finds only a shoulder at this position. This can be attributed to the fact that by definition $`F(E)`$ contains the explicit details of the DOS, whereas the relaxation time is not so sensitive to the details of the DOS.

To summarize this discussion, the important result is that the amplitude of the broad peak in $`\tau (E)`$ is controlled by $`\tau _h`$ and its shape by the phase-space factor $`F(E)`$ (in random-k approximation, it depends only on the DOS). When comparing Fig. 3 and Fig. 1, we find that $`f_A/f_P`$ is also proportional to $`F(E)`$, which will be commented later.

As was shown in Fig. 3, the shape of the peak in the relaxation time is determined by the function $`F(E)`$ which contains the information on the optical transition matrix elements. Therefore, in Fig. 4 we analyze how sensitively the relaxation time $`\tau (E)`$ depends on the optical transition matrix elements. Till now, we have presented data for the case of equal matrix elements, $`M_{dsp}=M_{spsp}`$. However, on the basis of the different degree of localization of the $`d`$ and $`sp`$-type wave functions, it is expected that $`M_{dsp}`$ should be larger than $`M_{spsp}`$. For example, in the calculation of the dielectric function for Ag, a ratio $`|M_{dp}|^2/|M_{ps}|^2=2.21`$ was estimated.

In Fig. 4, we have plotted $`\tau (E)`$ for different values of the ratio $`R=|M_{dsp}|^2/|M_{spsp}|^2`$. If we define the height of the peak as $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau =\tau (1.3\mathrm{eV})\tau (1.2\mathrm{eV})`$, we find that when changing $`R`$ from 1 to 2, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau `$ varies significantly from 9 fs to 14 fs (increase by 60%). However for a further increase of $`R`$ from 2 to 4, the change is much weaker (14 fs to 17 fs, increase by only 30%). Assuming that for Cu, $`R`$ is of the same order of magnitude as for Ag, one can get an estimate of the hole lifetime required to get fair agreement with the observed height of the peak for polycrystalline Cu, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{exp}17`$ fs. We have found that for $`R=2`$, $`\tau _h=35`$ fs gives $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{th}=14`$ fs. Note that our results obtained in the random-k approximation are most suitable for comparison with experiments performed on polycrystalline material. Measurements on single crystals for different orientations have provided values ranging from $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{exp}=15`$ to 40 fs, which is the same order of magnitude. It is interesting to note that $`\tau _h=35`$ fs coincides with the value used by Knoesel, Hotzel, and Wolf in their simulation.

Note that our conclusions are not restricted to the case of Cu only, but hold also in the case of other noble and transition metals. Indeed, let us discuss the case of Ag, Au and the 3$`d`$ transition metals Fe, Co and Ni. In the case of Ag, no peak is observed in the relaxation time, due to the fact that the $`d`$ band threshold is approximatively at 4 eV below the Fermi level and no $`d`$ electrons are excited for the photon energies widely used in 2PPE experiments ($`h\nu <4`$ eV). The case of Au is more intriguing, since the location of the $`d`$-band threshold is very similar to the one in Cu. Indeed, a very weak structure in the relaxation time was also observed for Au. The fact that the peak in Au is so weak can be attributed to the small degree of localization of the of the $`d`$ hole. It is expected that a 5$`d`$ hole in Au should be less localized and therefore have a larger Auger scattering rate than a 3$`d`$ hole in Cu. Thus one expects $`\tau _h^{\mathrm{Au}}<\tau _h^{\mathrm{Cu}}`$ and thus in accordance with our result that the peak is governed by $`\tau _h`$, a less pronounced structure in Au than in Cu. Another possible explanation is the fact that the peak in the $`d`$-band DOS in Au is much less pronounced than in Cu (again due to the less localized $`d`$ electrons in Au), leading to a less sharp separation between excitations from the $`d`$ and $`sp`$ bands and therefore to a weaker peak. Let us now comment on the fact that in the ferromagnetic transition metals Fe, Co and Ni, no peak is observed. There are two main reasons for the absence of this feature. (i) A threshold for $`dsp`$ transitions is not observable due to the band structure. The majority $`d`$ band extends to energies above $`E_F`$ and a $`dsp`$ threshold does not exist. The upper minority $`d`$ band edge is located very closely to $`E_F`$ and the threshold occurs only at the highest excitation energies where secondary (Auger) electron contributions are not important. (ii) The $`d`$ holes have a large available phase space for decay within the $`d`$ band which leads to a very short $`d`$-hole lifetime.

All the results presented up to now were for $`\tau _l=70`$ fs. However, experiments were performed with laser pulse durations ranging from 70 fs down to 12 fs. Hence, it is interesting to calculate how $`\tau (E)`$ depends on $`\tau _l`$. First, let us show that the relative weight of the Auger contribution to the hot electron distribution is indeed strongly sensitive to the laser pulse duration. In Fig. 5, we have plotted $`f_A/f_P`$ as a function of $`1/\tau _h`$ for laser pulses varying from 12 to 120 fs duration. The first observation is that when reducing the laser pulse duration for a given $`\tau _h`$, $`f_A/f_P`$ is strongly reduced. For instance, for $`\tau _h=35`$ fs, $`f_A/f_P`$ goes from 3 to 0.5 (6 times smaller) when reducing the laser pulse from 120 to 12 fs. This might already explain the origin of the controversy about the amount of the Auger electron contribution mentioned before. It is clear that in experiments with very short laser pulses (12 fs in Ref. ), the Auger electron contribution is much smaller than in experiments with longer laser pulses (70 fs in Ref. ). At this level, one can conclude that the laser pulse duration $`\tau _\mathrm{l}`$ is a new relevant time scale. However, we have found that the only relevant parameter for the variation of $`f_A/f_P`$ is in fact $`\tau _\mathrm{l}/\tau _h`$. In the inset of Fig. 5, we have plotted $`f_A/f_P`$ as function of $`\tau _\mathrm{l}/\tau _h`$ and we see that all the data points lie to a very good approximation on the same curve, i.e. $`f_A/f_P(\tau _\mathrm{l},\tau _h)g(\tau _\mathrm{l}/\tau _h)`$. In this figure, the data are plotted for $`EE_F=1.3`$ eV, however, it has to be stressed that this scaling is also found for higher energies. The ratio $`f_A/f_P`$ can be reduced to an expression of the form $`f_A/f_P(E,\tau _\mathrm{l},\tau _h)g(\tau _\mathrm{l}/\tau _h)F(E)`$, where $`F(E)`$ is again the phase factor discussed in the previous section.

Since the relaxation time is determined from $`I^{2\mathrm{P}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{E}}(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ which contains explicitly the information about the laser pulse, let us now analyze how $`\tau `$ is affected by changing the pulse duration. In Fig. 6, we show the dependence of the relaxation time $`\tau (E)`$ on the pulse duration for durations varying from 120 to 12 fs. We observe a significant effect in the region of the peak. Interestingly, the peak gets higher for the shorter pulses, although the amount of Auger electrons is much smaller, see Fig. 5. Note that the dependence on the pulse duration disappears for high energies, where the secondary-electron contribution is negligible. In order to understand the sensitivity to the pulse duration, in the inset of Fig. 6, we present the calculated $`I^{2\mathrm{P}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{E}}`$ and the fit by an exponential model function used to extract the relaxation time. We see that the agreement is very good for pulses of 120 and 70 fs duration, while there is a clear deviation from the single-exponential fit for shorter pulses of 40 and 12 fs. Indeed, for the 12 fs pulse, there is a delayed rise in $`I^{2\mathrm{P}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{E}}`$ which is due to the delayed generation of Auger electrons. Such a delayed rise for very short laser pulses was recently observed experimentally. As an additional remark, the observed deviations underline the difficulties in extracting a relaxation time in the limit of very short pulses and indicate that maybe an improved definition of the relaxation time would be appropriate in this case.

## III Conclusion

To conclude, this work presents a detailed analysis of the role of secondary electrons in 2PPE experiments on Cu. The $`d`$-hole lifetime plays a crucial role. Our conclusions are more general and can also be applied to other noble and transition metals as discussed. We have found that in the case of Cu, the secondary-electron distribution is dominated by the Auger contribution (for $`\tau _h35`$ fs) for longer laser pulses ($`\tau _l>40`$ fs), but not for a very short laser pulse of $`\tau _l=12`$ fs. For a given $`\tau _h`$, the Auger contribution is much larger for a longer laser pulse duration than for a shorter one. The parameter which controls the variation of $`f_A/f_P`$ is $`\tau _l/\tau _h`$. Concerning the structure in the relaxation time, we have shown that the relaxation time at the peak depends linearly on $`\tau _h`$, but surprisingly not on the amount of secondary electrons generated. The shape depends on a phase-space factor (in random-k approximation, on the DOS). We provided an expression for the relaxation time $`\tau (E)`$ as a sum of two terms: the first for primary (and other secondary) electrons and the second for the Auger contribution. We have also found that the height of the peak depends sensitively on the optical transition matrix element ratio, $`R=|M_{dsp}|^2/|M_{spsp}|^2`$, and on the laser pulse duration. For a value of $`R=2`$ and $`\tau _h=35\mathrm{fs}`$, the calculated height of the peak is $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{th}=14`$ fs in fair agreement with a measurement on polycrystalline Cu giving $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau _{exp}17`$ fs. Note, preliminary results indicate that transport changes the magnitude of the relaxation time, but not the structure and height of the peak. The influence of transport will be studied in detail in a separate publication. In view of the importance of the $`d`$-hole lifetime, it would be highly desirable to perform further experiments as well as theoretical calculations on the $`d`$-hole lifetime in both Cu and Au.

###### Acknowledgements.

We would like to thank M. Aeschlimann, M. Wolf and E. Matthias for interesting discussions. Financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sfb 290 and 450, is gratefully acknowledged.


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# A Search for Resonant Structures in the Zodiacal Cloud with COBE DIRBE: The Mars Wake and Jupiter’s Trojan Clouds

## 1 Introduction

A planet interacting with a circumstellar dust cloud can produce a variety of dynamical structures in the dust. Planets can clear central holes and create large-scale asymmetries, such as arcs and warps (Roques et al. 1994). Planets can also detain dust in mean motion resonances, forming structures such as the circumsolar ring and wake of dust trailing the Earth in its orbit (Jackson and Zook 1989; Dermott et al. 1994) and clouds of dust at the planet’s Lagrange points (Liou and Zook 1995).

Understanding the structures of circumstellar debris disks is vital to the search for extra-solar analogs of our solar system. Concentrations in circumstellar dust clouds may confuse planet-finding interferometers like the Keck Interferometer or the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder (Beichman 1999). Smooth exo-zodiacal clouds can be identified by their symmetry and subtracted from the signal of a Bracewell interferometer (MacPhie and Bracewell 1979), but cloud asymmetries can be difficult to distinguish from planets (Beichman 1998). On the other hand, planet-induced asymmetries can serve to reveal the presence of a planet that is otherwise undetectable (Wyatt et al. 1999).

If we understand the inhomogeneities in our own zodiacal dust cloud, we will be better prepared to interpret observations of other planetary systems. The Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) aboard the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite has provided detailed, revealing images of the zodiacal cloud (eg. Spiesman et al. 1995, Reach et al. 1997). It surveyed the entire sky from near-Earth orbit in 10 broad infrared bands simultaneously with a $`0.7^{}`$ by $`0.7^{}`$ field of view over a period of 41 weeks (Boggess et al. 1992), and imaged the Earth’s ring and wake (Reach et al. 1995). We investigated the COBE DIRBE data set as a source of information about structure in the solar zodiacal cloud associated with planets other than Earth.

## 2 The Data Set

We worked with a version of the DIRBE data set which contains the sky brightness with a model for the background zodiacal emission subtracted: the zodi-subtracted weekly data set from the DIRBE Sky and Zodi Atlas (DSZA). The DIRBE team created the DZSA by fitting an 88-parameter model of the zodiacal dust emission to the observed sky brightness (Kelsall et al. 1998). The model includes a smooth widened-fan component, three pairs of dust bands near the ecliptic plane, and the Earth’s ring and trailing wake, but no structures associated with Mars, Jupiter, or any other planets. The zodi-subtracted weekly data set contains 41 files for each DIRBE band, spanning a period from 10 December 1989 to 21 September 1990, covering 10 bands, centered at 1.25, 2.2, 3.5, 4.9, 12, 25, 60, 100, 140, and 240 microns.

Galactic emission dominates the zodi-subtracted maps in the mid and far-infrared near the galactic plane. Near the ecliptic plane, the zodi-subtracted maps are dominated by residuals from the subtraction of the dust bands that are associated with prominent asteroid families (Reach et al. 1997; Kelsall et al. 1998). The presence of these bands makes searching for smooth, faint heliocentric rings of dust near the ecliptic plane impossible. However, we could hope to distinguish a blob of dust following a planet across the sky from other cloud components and from the galactic background by the apparent motion of the blob during the COBE mission.

The COBE satellite orbited the Earth near the day/night terminator and repeatedly mapped a swath of the sky extending about 30 degrees before and behind the terminator (see the COBE DIRBE Explanatory Supplement (1997) for details). Each weekly map contains a robust average of all the week’s data and covers a region a little larger than the daily viewing swath. This weekly averaging tends to exclude transient events that would contaminate our final maps, but should not otherwise significantly affect a search for large features that move only a few degrees per week. Figure 1 is a schematic view of the solar system during week 34 of the mission (9–16 July 1990) showing the positions of Earth, Mars and Jupiter, and the DIRBE viewing swath for that week.

Because DIRBE never imaged the sky within $`60^{}`$ of the sun, the orbits of Mercury and Venus, for instance, do not appear in the data. Mars appeared in the DIRBE viewing swath for 25 weeks of the mission, and moved $`111^{}`$ in ecliptic longitude during those weeks. Jupiter moved only $`40^{}`$ in ecliptic longitude during the entire mission, but this is sufficient to allow some crude background subtraction. More distant planets moved less. Based on these constraints, we decided to search the weekly maps for dust features following the orbital paths of Mars and Jupiter. Figure 2 shows the intersection of the DIRBE viewing swath with the ecliptic plane throughout the 41 weeks of the mission, and the ecliptic longitudes of Mars, Jupiter and the Sun during those weeks.

## 3 The Mars Wake

A ring of zodiacal dust particles detained in near-Earth resonances follows the Earth around the sun (Jackson and Zook 1989; Dermott et al. 1994). This ring consists mainly of dust in mean-motion resonances where the particles orbit the sun $`j`$ times every $`j+1`$ Earth years (j is a whole number). Smaller trapped particles experience greater Poynting-Robertson acceleration, so the equilibrium locations of their orbital pericenters shift closer to the Earth on the trailing side, where the component of Earth’s gravity that opposes Poynting-Robertson drag is stronger. The result, averaged over many particles, appears as a density enhancement in the ring behind the Earth—a trailing dust wake. The Earth’s wake was detected by by IRAS (Dermott et al. 1988, Reach 1991), and later, by DIRBE as an asymmetry in the near-Earth dust brightness of $`1.1`$ MJy ster-1 at 12 microns and $`1.7`$ MJy ster-1 at 25 microns (Reach et al. 1995). We searched the DIRBE data set for a similar wake of dust trailing Mars.

Blackbody dust at the heliocentric distance of Mars has a typical temperature of $`220`$ K; it emits most strongly in the 12 and 25 micron DIRBE bands. We restricted our exploration to data from these two bands. We began by assembling a composite map of the emission from beyond the solar system, mostly due to stars and dust in the Galactic plane, by averaging together all the zodi-subtracted weekly maps in their native COBE quadrilateralized spherical cube coordinates, a coordinate system that is stationary on the celestial sphere. We subtracted this composite map from each of the zodi-subtracted weekly maps, effectively removing most of the galactic emission and any other stationary emission except within a few degrees of the galactic plane, where the emission is so high that detector and pointing instabilities make our linear subtraction method ineffective.

The remaining maps, with outlying data removed, had surface brightness residuals in the range of -1.7 to +1.0 MJy ster-1 at 12 microns, and -1.6 to 2.1 MJy ster-1 at 25 microns. For comparison, the typical total zodiacal background near Mars during the mission is $`35`$ MJy ster-1 at 12 microns and $`66`$ MJy ster-1 at 25 microns. The most prominent remaining features were the stripes parallel to the ecliptic plane within a few degrees of the ecliptic plane that are associated with the asteroidal dust bands. The next most prominent remaining features were wide bands extending $`\pm 30`$ degrees from the ecliptic that appeared to follow the sun. The $`1225`$ micron color temperature of the wide bands was $`280`$ K; they are probably residuals resulting from imperfect subtraction of the Earth’s ring and wake. We assembled a crude map of the residual near-Earth flux by averaging together the galaxy-subtracted maps in geocentric ecliptic coordinates referenced to the position of the Sun. Subtracting this from the weekly maps cancelled most of the signal in the wide bands. Mars moved $`87^{}`$ with respect to the Sun during the mission, allowing us to subtract this composite map without subtracting a significant flux from a wake moving with Mars. Figure 3a shows our map of the galactic background; Figure 3b shows the near-Earth residuals.

Next we chose subframes of each weekly map centered on the ecliptic coordinates of Mars in the middle of the week, and inspected them visually. No structure in the data appeared to move with Mars from week to week.

In order to understand the data better, we constructed a simple model of the Mars wake from the empirical model of the Earth’s trailing wake fit to the DIRBE data by Kelsall et al. (1998). The model has the following form:

$$n=n_0\mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{(rr_0)^2}{2\sigma _r^2}\frac{|z|}{\sigma _z}\frac{(\theta \theta _0)^2}{2\sigma _\theta ^2}\right]$$
(1)
where $`n`$ is the local average of particle number density times particle cross section, and $`r`$,$`z`$, and $`\theta `$ are cylindrical coordinates in the plane of the orbit of Mars centered on the sun. Mars is located at $`r=r_0`$, $`z=0`$, $`\theta =0`$. The parameters of the model, $`\theta _0`$, $`\sigma _r`$, $`\sigma _z`$, $`\sigma _\theta `$, and $`n_0`$, are the same as the corresponding parameters for the Earth’s wake: $`\theta _0=10^{}`$, $`\sigma _r=0.10`$ AU, $`\sigma _z=0.091`$ AU, $`\sigma _\theta =12.1^{}`$. The shaded area trailing Mars in Figure 1 shows how this model would appear viewed from above the ecliptic plane. The Kelsall et al. (1998) Earth wake has $`n_0=1.9\times 10^8\mathrm{AU}^1`$, but we chose $`n_0=1.08\times 10^8\mathrm{AU}^1`$ so that the density of the model would be proportional to the local background dust density at the orbit of Mars. The model represents what the Earth wake would look like if it were trailing Mars instead of Earth.

We evaluated the model’s surface brightness by computing the line-of-sight integral

$$I_\lambda =E_\lambda n(r,z,\theta )B_\lambda (T)𝑑s$$
(2)
where $`B_\lambda (T)`$ is the Planck function and $`E_\lambda `$ is an emissivity modification factor prescribed by the COBE model to account for the deviation of the Earth wake’s spectrum from a blackbody; $`E_{12\mu \mathrm{m}}=1.06`$, $`E_{25\mu \mathrm{m}}=1.00`$. The temperature of the dust varies with heliocentric distance, $`R`$, as $`T=286\mathrm{K}R^{0.467}`$, following the DIRBE model. This expression is similar to what you would expect for grey-body dust ($`T=278\mathrm{K}R^{0.5}`$).

In Figure 4, we compare a synthesized image of the model wake with a background-subtracted image of the infrared sky around Mars. The image shows the flux in the 25 micron band averaged over weeks 26–34 (14 May 1990 to 15 July 1990) in ecliptic coordinates referenced to the position of Mars. The subset of the weekly 25-micron data used in this image is indicated by the horizontal stripes labeled “M” in Figure 2. Mars moved 40 degrees in ecliptic longitude over this period. The DIRBE team blanked the data within a square about $`2.5^{}`$ on a side centered on Mars, and within a $`1.5^{}`$ radius circle centered on Jupiter. A software mask in Figure 4 covers the region around Mars affected by this processing. This whole region, up to $`40^{}`$ behind Mars, shows no sign of a brightness enhancement that we would associate with a wake of dust trailing Mars.

Maps from the later weeks suffer from an oversubtraction due to imperfections in the Kelsall et al. (1998) zodi model, visible as the dark region to the lower right. Weeks earlier in the mission suffer from a similar undersubtraction. These artifacts, our primary source of noise, appear to arise from dust bands at latitudes of $`\pm 10^{}`$, where bands associated with the Eos asteroids are prominent in the raw DIRBE data (Reach et al. 1997). As the dust from the asteroid belt spirals towards the sun, perturbations from planets deform the bands. The Kelsall et al. model includes a simple model of this dust band which could not take these perturbations into account. We chose the span of weeks used to create Figure 4 to minimize these artifacts, which are easily discernible by their extent in latitude and longitude.

To better compare the model with the data, we focused on a narrow strip with a height of $`3^{}`$ in ecliptic latitude, extending from $`8^{}`$ ahead of Mars to $`39^{}`$ behind Mars in ecliptic longitude. This strip contains most of the flux in the model wake. We averaged together maps from weeks 26–34 prepared as described above to produce an image of this strip. In Figure 5, we plot a cut through this strip, and we compare it with the model, processed in the same manner as the data. The data are dominated by residuals from the ecliptic bands and the Earth’s ring, smeared out in the ecliptic plane by the orbital motion of Mars. The standard deviation of the data is 0.54 MJy ster-1; although the distribution of the residuals is not Gaussian, based on this comparison we can place a rough 3-$`\sigma `$ upper limit on the central peak of the Mars wake of 18% of the flux expected from our simple model.

The empirical model of the Earth’s wake we have used for comparison to the Mars dust environment is not an ideal model for the Mars wake. It may not even be a good representation of the Earth’s wake. Since COBE viewed the Earth wake from near the Earth only, the observations constrain the product $`n_0\sigma _\theta `$ for the Earth wake, but do not provide good constraints on either of these parameters alone. Kelsall et al. (1998) quote a formal error of 28% on the determination of $`\sigma _\theta `$. Calculations for 12 micron particles suggest that $`\sigma _\theta `$ for the Earth wake might be 40% lower than the Kelsall et al. (1988) number; this figure is based on Figure 5 in Dermott et al. (1994). Since we are sensitive to the wake’s surface brightness peak as seen from the Earth, not Mars, using a more compact wake model affects our upper limits. Holding $`n_0\sigma _\theta `$ constant and decreasing $`\sigma _\theta `$ by 40% translates into a decrease of our upper limit to 11% of one Earth wake.

Mars has 11% of the mass of the Earth, so we expect it to trap less dust than the Earth, but not simply 11% as much dust. In fact, there is no simple scaling law that describes how the density of a dust ring relates to the size of the planet that traps it. The density of the Mars ring is proportional to the capture probability times the trapping time for each resonance summed over all relevant resonances and the distribution of particle sizes. In the adiabatic theory for resonant capture due to Poynting-Robertson drag, the capture probabilities depend on the mass of the planet compared to the mass of the star and on the eccentricity of the particle near resonance and (Beauge and Ferraz-Mello 1994). So one complicating factor is that the orbits of the dust particles are slightly more eccentric when they pass Mars than when they pass the Earth; a particle released on the orbit of a typical asteroid, at 2.7 AU with an eccentricity of 0.14, will have an eccentricity of 0.07 as it passes Mars, and an eccentricity of 0.04 when it passes the Earth (Wyatt & Whipple 1950). The higher eccentricity makes them harder to trap.

The trapping time scale is proportional to the time it takes for the resonant interaction to significantly affect the eccentricity and libration amplitude of the particle. When the planet has a circular orbit, these time scales are on the order of the local Poynting-Robertson decay time (Liou and Zook 1997), which scales as $`r_0^2/\beta `$, where $`\beta `$ is the ratio of the Sun’s radiation-pressure force on a particle to the Sun’s gravitational force on the particle. Compared to the P-R drag at the heliocentric distance of the Earth, the Poynting-Robertson drag force at the orbit of Mars is less for a given particle by a factor of $`1.52^2=2.31`$. The small mass of Mars and the higher eccentricities of the orbits of the incoming particles work against the formation of a dense ring, but the greater heliocentric distance of Mars compared to the Earth works in favor of the formation of the ring.

So far our discussion has assumed that the trapping is adiabatic— that the orbital elements of the particles change on time scales much longer than the orbital period. This approximation may not be as good for trapping by Mars as it is for trapping by the Earth. Mars has a greater orbital eccentricity ($`e=0.093`$) than the Earth ($`e=0.017`$). This increases the widths of the zones of resonance overlap, and makes a larger fraction of dust orbits chaotic (Murray and Holman 1997).

Predicting the density of the Mars wake is another step more complex than predicting the density of the Mars ring. Compared to the Earth wake, the Mars wake may form closer to the planet and have a smaller $`\sigma _\theta `$. Since Mars is less massive than the Earth, a given particle would need to have a closer interaction with Mars than with the Earth to receive an impulse from the planet’s gravity that would balance the Poynting-Robertson drag on the particle (Weidenschilling and Jackson 1993). For this reason, we expect the trapped particles which form the Mars wake to prefer resonant orbits with higher $`j`$ and lower $`\varphi `$ than similar particles trapped by the Earth, where $`\varphi `$ is the angle between the perihelion of the orbit of a particle and the longitude of conjunction of the particle and the planet. Our upper limit shows that the Mars wake is less dense than the Earth wake by more than the simple factor of the mass ratio times the square of the ratio of the semimajor axes $`=0.11\times 2.31=0.25`$. However, a thorough numerical simulation which includes the effects we mentioned and others such as resonant interactions with Jupiter may be the only good way to relate our upper limit to the dynamical properties of the dust near Mars.

## 4 Trojan Dust

While the Earth and Mars can collect abundant low eccentricity particles from all different orbital phases spiraling in from the asteroid belt, Jupiter orbits in a distinctly different dust environment. Outside the asteroid belt, the dust background probably consists mainly of small particles with high orbital eccentricities: submicron particles released by asteroids or comets that are kicked by radiation pressure into more eccentric orbits than their parent bodies (Berg and Grün 1973; Mann and Grün 1995). There is also a stream of submicron particles from the interstellar medium (Grün et al. 1994, Grogan et al. 1996) and there are probably a few particles near Jupiter that originated in the Kuiper belt (Liou et al. 1996). Jupiter probably traps many of the small particles in 1:1 mean motion resonances (Liou and Zook 1995). However these small trapped particles should occupy both “tadpole” and “horseshoe” orbits, without a strong preference for either, and the locations of their Lagrange points vary with $`\beta `$ (Murray 1994). They probably form large, diffuse ring-like clouds which are difficult for us to detect.

But there is another potential source of dust that could form concentrated clouds we could hope to detect against the asteroid bands in the DIRBE data: the Trojan asteroids. This population of asteroids orbits the Sun at $`5.2`$ AU in 1:1 resonances with Jupiter, librating about Jupiter’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points, roughly $`60^{}`$ before and behind the planet. They number about as many as the main-belt asteroids.

Marzari et al. (1997) have simulated the collisional evolution of the Trojan asteroids, and concluded that collisions in the L4 swarm produce on the order of 2000 fragments in the 1–40 km diameter range every million years. If we simplisticly assume a equilibrium size distribution for the produced particles, $`dna^{3.5}da`$, where a is the particle radius (Dohnanyi 1969), we find that there are roughly $`10^{23}`$ particles in the 10–100 micron diameter size range produced every million years. These large particles are likely to stay in roughly the same orbits as their parent bodies, trapped by Jupiter in “tadpole” orbits—orbits that librate around a single Lagrange point. They could conceivably form detectable clouds at L4 and L5.

Liou and Zook (1995) calculated that 2-micron diameter particles will stay trapped in 1:1 resonances for $`5000`$ years. A 20-micron diameter particle at Jupiter’s orbit experiences $`1/10`$ of the Poynting-Robertson acceleration of 2 micron particles, and will typically stay trapped for 10 times as long (Schuerman 1980). Assuming a trapping time of $`5000`$ years $`\times `$ the dust grain diameter/2 microns, and emissivity appropriate for amorphous icy grains (eg. Backman and Paresce 1993), the 10–100 micron diameter particles in the Trojan cloud will emit a total flux, as viewed from the Earth, of $`3\times 10^4`$ MJy at 60 microns, a few orders of magnitude below our detection limit.

However, this is a drastic extrapolation and probably a poor guess at the actual cloud brightness; the size-frequency distribution of the Trojan asteroids is not well known and dust cloud is probably not near collisional equilibrium. Moreover, the total amount of trapped dust is subject to severe transients, such as the events that produced the dust bands associated with main belt asteroid families (Sykes and Greenberg 1986). For example, a 20-km diameter Trojan asteroid ground entirely into 10-micron diameter dust corresponds to a transient cloud which, as viewed from the Earth, would produce a 60 micron flux of $`6`$ MJy. A similarly enhanced cloud might be visible a few percent of the time.

Unfortunately, Jupiter’s Lagrange points do not move far with respect to the galactic background during the COBE mission; L4 moves 10 degrees and L5 moves 50 degrees, as shown in Figure 2. Only L5, the trailing Lagrange point, moves far enough during the mission to make subtracting the galactic background feasible. There are about half as many L5 Trojans known as L4 Trojans, but this is probably because the L5 region has been searched less intensely than the L4 region, not because the L4 and L5 populations are significantly different (Shoemaker et al. 1989).

To make a background-subtracted image of the L5 region, we chose two subsets from the zodi-subtracted data set. The first, subset A, is from the beginning of the mission (weeks 5-10) when L5 was in the viewing swath and approximately stationary on the sky. The second, subset B, is the same region of sky, but contains data from half a year later in the mission (weeks 33–38), when L5 has moved 45 degrees away, out of the viewing swath. The average distance from Earth to L5 is approximately the same during each time period. These data sets are depicted in Figure 2. We focused on data in the 60 micron band, the band which contains the emission peak for dust at the local blackbody temperature at 5.2 AU. To minimize the residuals from the zodiacal dust model, we used only data from solar elongations between 65 and 115 degrees, (or between 245 and 295 degrees). Figure 6 shows an image constructed from data set A and an image constructed from data set B, and the difference, A$``$B, which is dominated by residuals from dust bands associated with asteroid bands and shows no obvious evidence of enhanced emission at L5.

We made a simple model for a Trojan cloud of large dust particles by assuming that they occupy the same dynamical space as the Trojan asteroids themselves, following Sykes (1990). Sykes modeled the asteroidal dust bands by showing how particles constrained to orbits with a given inclination, eccentricity, and semimajor axis form a cloud when the remaining three orbital elements are randomized. He then convolved the shapes of these clouds with the distributions of orbital elements of the asteroids. In our case, however, the distribution of orbital elements is much broader and more important in determining the shape of the final distribution of particles. Since there are only about 70 Trojan asteroids whose orbits are well studied, the distributions of Trojan asteroid orbital parameters have severe statistical uncertainties. Therefore we settle for a simple Gaussian model for the Trojan cloud, using the orbital parameters as a guide to the parameters of the Gaussian. In the following calculations, we will neglect the inclination of Jupiter’s orbit relative to the the Earth’s orbit ($`1.305^{}`$).

A typical Trojan asteroid librates around its Lagrange point with a period of 148 days. The mean longitude of the asteroid with respect to Jupiter, $`\varphi `$, oscillates within limits $`\varphi _{min}`$ and $`\varphi _{max}`$, which can be calculated, according to Yoder et al. (1983), from

$$\mathrm{sin}\frac{\varphi _{min}}{2}=\frac{\mathrm{sin}(\alpha /3)}{B}\mathrm{sin}\frac{\varphi _{max}}{2}=\frac{\mathrm{sin}(\alpha /3+120^{})}{B}$$
(3)
where $`B=\eta _0(3\mu /2E)^{1/2}`$, $`\mathrm{sin}\alpha =B`$, $`\mu =\mathrm{M}_{\mathrm{Jupiter}}/\mathrm{M}_{}=0.000955`$ and $`\eta _0`$ = mean motion of Jupiter = 0.01341 rad yr-1. These limits are set by $`E`$, which is a constant of the motion in the absence of Poynting Robertson drag:

$$E=\frac{1}{6}\left(\frac{d\varphi }{dt}\right)^2\frac{\mu \eta _0^2}{2x}(1+4x^3)$$
(4)
where $`x=|\mathrm{sin}(\varphi /2)|`$. The libration amplitude, $`D`$, is $`\varphi _{max}\varphi _{min}`$. We find that the energy constant is approximately

$$E\frac{3}{2}\mu \eta _0^2\left(10.0133D+0.2266D^20.0392D^3\right)$$
(5)
for $`D1.3`$.

The fraction of time a particle spends at a given phase, or equivalently, the distribution in phase of an ensemble of particles is given by

$$P_\varphi \frac{1}{d\varphi /dt}.$$
(6)
We can evaluate this as a function of $`D`$ with the aid of equations (4) and (5). For the distribution of dust libration amplitudes, $`P_D`$, we used a simple analytic function that approximates the distribution of libration amplitudes for Trojan asteroids shown in Figure 5 of Shoemaker et al. (1989). When we average $`P_\varphi `$ over $`P_D`$, we find that the L5 dust cloud is distributed in orbital phase roughly as a Gaussian centered at $`\theta _0=59.5^{}`$ behind Jupiter with a dispersion $`\sigma _\theta =10^{}`$.

The distribution of the dust in heliocentric latitude can be approximated in a similar way. If particle in an orbit of given inclination, $`i`$, with small eccentricity, spends a fraction of its time, $`f`$, at latitude, $`\beta `$, an ensemble of particles with small eccentricities and evenly distributed ascending nodes will have a distribution, at a fixed orbital phase, of

$$P_\beta f(\mathrm{cos}^2\beta \mathrm{cos}^2i)^{1/2}.$$
(7)
We takes the inclination distribution of the particles, $`P_i`$, to be a simple analytic function that approximates the data for “independently discovered Trojans” shown in Figure 3 of Shoemaker et al. (1989). When we average $`P_\beta `$ over $`P_i`$, we find the distribution in latitude is roughly a Gaussian with dispersion $`\sigma _\beta =10^{}`$, and the distribution in height above the ecliptic has a dispersion $`\sigma _z=0.94`$ AU.

The radial distribution of Trojans is more complicated to model, since both librations and epicycles include radial excursions. The average L5 Trojan eccentricity is 0.063; a particle with this eccentricity orbits at a range of heliocentric distances, $`\mathrm{\Delta }r`$ 0.66 AU. In the course of its librations, a particle with a typical Trojan libration amplitude, $`D=29^{}`$, oscillates in semi-major axis over a range of $`\mathrm{\Delta }a`$0.14 AU. We are not sensitive to the radial structure of the Trojan clouds, so we simply model the radial distribution as a Gaussian with a full width at half maximum of 0.66 AU, or a dispersion $`\sigma _r=0.24`$ AU.

Our final model has the form:

$$n=n_0\mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{(rr_0)^2}{2\sigma _r^2}\frac{z^2}{2\sigma _z^2}\frac{(\theta \theta _0)^2}{2\sigma _\theta ^2}\right]$$
(8)
where $`r`$, $`z`$, and $`\theta `$ are cylindrical coordinates in the plane of the orbit of Jupiter, and the parameters are: $`r_0=5.203`$ AU, $`\sigma _r=0.24`$ AU, $`\sigma _z=0.94`$ AU, $`\theta _0=59.5^{}`$, and $`\sigma _\theta =9.7^{}`$. We calculated the surface brightness in the same way as we calculated the surface brightness of the model Mars wake, using an emissivity $`E_{60\mu \mathrm{m}}=1`$ because we are not considering small grains. The shaded region at L5 in Figure 1 represents this model as viewed from above the ecliptic plane.

In Figure 6, we compare the difference image A$``$B to a synthesized image of our model cloud. For this image, $`n_0`$ is $`3.4\times 10^8\mathrm{AU}^1`$, corresponding to an effective emitting surface area at 60 microns of $`3.3\times 10^{18}`$ cm2, or one 3-km diameter asteroid ground entirely into 10-micron diameter dust. Figure 7 compares the difference image A$``$B and the model image in a different way; it shows the region within $`\pm 10^{}`$ of the ecliptic plane averaged in ecliptic latitude. The 1-$`\sigma `$ noise in the data in Figure 7 is 0.09 MJy ster-1. Based on this, we can place a rough 3-$`\sigma `$ upper limit on the effective surface area of the large dust grains at L5 of $`6\times 10^{17}\mathrm{cm}^2`$.

## 5 Conclusions

The zodiacal cloud near the ecliptic plane is a complex tapestry of dynamical phenomena. We could not detect the Mars wake or Jupiter’s Trojan clouds among the asteroidal dust bands in the DIRBE maps, despite the efforts of the DIRBE team to subtract these bands from the maps. We would have detected the Mars wake if it had 18% of the overdensity of the Earth wake, based on our empirical model for the Earth wake. This upper limit illustrates the complexity of relating resonant structures in circumstellar dust disks to the properties of perturbing planets. For instance, we would have detected the Mars wake if the surface area of the dust in the wake scaled simply with the mass of the planet times the Poynting-Robertson time scale.

The Trojan clouds, by our crude estimation, would have been a few orders of magnitude too faint to detect if the dust concentration in these clouds were at its mean levels. However, a transient cloud created by a recent collision of Trojan asteroids might have been detectable. We measured that the total 60-micron flux from large (10–100 micron diameter) dust particles trapped at Jupiter’s L5 Lagrange point is less than $`30`$ kJy.

We thank Antonin Bouchez, Eric Gaidos, Peter Goldreich, Renu Malhotra and Ingrid Mann for helpful discussions, and our referees for their thoughtful comments.