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# I Introduction

## I Introduction

Diverse nonperturbative phenomena characterize the infrared regime of QCD. The basic degrees of freedom in terms of which the theory is formulated, quarks and gluons, are confined into color singlet hadrons. Chiral symmetry is realized in the Goldstone mode, which decisively influences low-energy hadronic physics. The $`U_A(1)`$ part of the flavor symmetry on the other hand is affected by an anomaly  which is tied to the topological properties of the Yang-Mills fields, and manifests itself e.g. in the mass of the corresponding flavor singlet pseudoscalar $`\eta ^{}`$ meson .

An in principle exact theoretical tool allowing to investigate all these phenomena is available, namely lattice gauge theory. Nevertheless, it is important to concomitantly develop simplified models of the infrared sector, in order to facilitate exploratory forays into problem areas which have proven difficult to access by conventional lattice theory e.g. due to the numerical effort implied. Simplification can be achieved by restricting the set of degrees of freedom and concentrating on selected collective variables. The choice of variables should be guided on the one hand by the question whether one can expect the corresponding effective dynamics to be well represented by a simple, e.g. weakly interacting, ansatz; on the other hand, it should be possible to tie the collective degrees of freedom to the nonperturbative phenomena highlighted above in a straightforward fashion.

An important example of such an approach is the instanton liquid model ,. Instantons are chosen as collective degrees of freedom, which by construction introduces the topological properties of the Yang-Mills fields into the model description. By virtue of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, the corresponding topological winding number implies the existence of zero modes of the Dirac operator; this zero mode spectrum is perturbed by instanton interactions into a band of near-zero modes, which by the Casher-Banks formula  is related to a chiral condensate. In this manner, instanton models are very successful at also describing the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry and the associated low-energy hadronic phenomena. On the other hand, instanton models have hitherto failed to provide for confinement . Presumably, a strongly interacting dynamics with intricate instanton correlations would be necessary to achieve the latter.

This example highlights that, in general, there is a conflict between the different aims to be taken into account in formulating a model for infrared QCD dynamics. Also in models which have been proposed to explain confinement, e.g. the dual superconductor ,, the connection to topological properties conversely has remained tenuous; at most, correlations have been empirically detected  between, on the one hand, the Abelian monopole degrees of freedom of the dual superconductor, and, on the other hand, instantons.

A possible exception which recently has shown promise of transcending these difficulties is the so-called center vortex picture, which originally was also designed to explain confinement -. Recent progress in the understanding of this picture - has, among other developments, yielded insight into the manner in which topological properties are encoded in the vortex degrees of freedom ,. Also first evidence has been gathered that center vortices indeed subsume gauge field topology ; namely, an ensemble of Yang-Mills configurations, modified such as to remove all vortices from each configuration, was found to be concentrated on the trivial topological sector.

In a companion paper to the present work , a simple model dynamics for $`SU(2)`$ center vortices was introduced, based on a representation of vortex world-sheets as random surfaces. The reader who wishes to consult a more detailed introduction to the center vortex picture in general, and to the physics of the aforementioned model in particular, is referred to this companion paper. The model was treated in  on a hypercubic lattice, the random surfaces being composed of elementary plaquettes on the lattice, and it was shown to reproduce the confinement phenomenology of Yang-Mills theory. While it is not trivial that a simple random surface dynamics is able to qualitatively reproduce the confinement features (including the finite-temperature deconfinement transition), it should be noted that the quantitative predictive power of the model was not tested very stringently in . The confinement properties essentially served to fix the parameters of the model; merely a prediction of the spatial string tension in the deconfined phase was possible, which turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

In the present paper, this same model, fitted to the confinement properties, will be used to evaluate the topological susceptibility. On the one hand, this represents a more solid test of the predictive power of the model. On the other hand, from a physical point of view, the result will provide a further piece of quantitative evidence supporting the conjecture that a picture based on center vortex collective degrees of freedom indeed is able to comprehensively and consistently capture the entire spectrum of nonperturbative effects characterizing the infrared regime of Yang-Mills theory.

## II Pontryagin index of lattice vortex configurations

### A Continuum definition vs. lattice configurations

In order to make the aforementioned test possible, it is first necessary to give a workable definition of the Pontryagin index for $`SU(2)`$ vortex world-surfaces composed of plaquettes on a hypercubic lattice. This construction can be based on the result for general center vortices in the continuum, discussed in detail in , which can be summarized as follows: The Pontryagin index $`Q`$ of an $`SU(2)`$ center vortex world-surface configuration $`S`$ is given, up to a multiplicative constant, in terms of its oriented self-intersection number,

$$Q=\frac{1}{16}ϵ_{\mu \nu \alpha \beta }_Sd^2\sigma _{\alpha \beta }_Sd^2\sigma _{\mu \nu }^{}\delta ^4(\overline{x}(\sigma )\overline{x}(\sigma ^{}))$$
(1)
where $`\overline{x}(\sigma )`$ denotes a parametrization of the two-dimensional surface $`S`$ in four space-time dimensions, i.e. for any two-vector $`\sigma `$ from a two-dimensional parameter space, the four-vector $`\overline{x}`$ gives the corresponding point on the vortex surface in space-time. This parametrization furthermore implies an infinitesimal surface element

$$d^2\sigma _{\mu \nu }=ϵ_{ab}\frac{\overline{x}_\mu }{\sigma _a}\frac{\overline{x}_\nu }{\sigma _b}d^2\sigma $$
(2)
on the vortex surface. The normalization of (1) is such that a self-intersection point in the usual sense generates a contribution $`\pm 1/2`$ to the $`SU(2)`$ Pontryagin index, where the sign depends on the relative orientation of the two intersecting surface segments . It should be noted, however, that (1) not only includes contributions from intersection points in the usual sense, but from all singular points of a surface configuration; singular points in this more general sense are all points at which the tangent vectors to the surface span the entire four space-time dimensions.

This result can be understood more clearly by recalling how it comes about physically. A vortex surface is associated with a field strength $`F_{\mu \nu }`$ localized on the vortex, where the space-time directions labeled by $`\mu `$ and $`\nu `$ are the directions which are locally orthogonal to the surface. Therefore, a nonzero topological density $`ϵ_{\mu \nu \kappa \lambda }F_{\mu \nu }F_{\kappa \lambda }`$ is generated precisely at singular points in the above general sense. When the surface is represented by a set of plaquettes on a lattice, such points can occur at any site of the lattice. Note that for infinitely thin vortices, i.e. true two-dimensional surfaces, the field strength $`F_{\mu \nu }`$ has a singular space-time dependence. Nevertheless, the integral over the topological density is regular . One can e.g. check this by considering an intersection between two thickened vortices with a regular transverse profile and a corresponding regular field strength. The resulting topological charge is independent of the profile (as it should be for a topological quantity) and the idealized limit of an infinitely thin vortex surface is therefore smooth and finite.

Note also that, via the sign of $`F_{\mu \nu }`$, the orientation of the surface enters the Pontryagin index; this is a crucial new feature compared with the evaluation of Wilson loops . Wilson loops are insensitive to the orientation of vortex surfaces; by contrast, to determine the Pontryagin index, one needs to give not only the location of the vortex surfaces, but also their orientation. This is manifest in (1) in view of the appearance of the oriented self-intersection number. Furthermore, globally oriented surface configurations have vanishing self-intersection number, and thus are associated with vanishing Pontryagin index; non-vanishing Pontryagin index requires that the surfaces consist of patches of alternating orientationThe center vortex world-surfaces extracted from Yang-Mills theory via center projection have indeed been found to be non-orientable  in the confined phase.. The edges of such patches can be associated with monopole loops in Abelian projections of the gauge field representing the vortex configuration .

In view of this, the following discussion of the lattice implementation of (1) will have to be based on more specific lattice vortex configurations than the treatment of confinement properties ; namely, it will be necessary to additionally introduce the notion of an orientation for the lattice plaquettes making up the lattice vortex surfaces. A suitable convention can be specified as follows. An orientation is associated with a plaquette by specifying a sense of curl, i.e. by specifying one of two possible cyclical orderings of the links bounding the plaquette. Formally, this can be implemented by associating a lattice plaquette extending from the lattice site given by the four-vector $`n`$ into the positive $`\mu `$ and $`\nu `$ directions with a valueNote that the superscripts $`\{\mu ,\nu \}`$, where always $`\mu \nu `$, are unordered sets, i.e. there is no distinction between $`\{\mu ,\nu \}`$ and $`\{\nu ,\mu \}`$. $`p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}`$, just as in the companion paper , with a slight modification: If the plaquette is not part of a vortex surface, $`p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}=0`$. Otherwise, $`p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}=1`$ if the curl on the plaquette is given by the ordering of links $`l_n^\mu l_{n+e_\mu }^\nu l_{n+e_\nu }^\mu l_n^\nu `$, whereas $`p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}=1`$ for the opposite curl. As an illustrative example, the following represents an oriented vortex in the shape of a three-dimensional elementary cube surface extending into the $`1,2`$ and $`3`$ directions:

$`p_n^{\{1,2\}}=1`$ $`p_n^{\{1,3\}}=1`$ $`p_n^{\{2,3\}}=1`$ (3)
$`p_{n+e_3}^{\{1,2\}}=1`$ $`p_{n+e_2}^{\{1,3\}}=1`$ $`p_{n+e_1}^{\{2,3\}}=1`$ (4)
Whether a link shared by two vortex plaquettes carries a monopole line can be decided by considering in which direction that link is pursued in the two link orderings associated with the two plaquette orientations. If the two directions are the same, there is a monopole line; if the two direction are opposed, the associated magnetic flux cancels.

Before proceeding to discuss how the Pontryagin index of lattice surfaces can be defined, a note is in order concerning how ensembles of such surfaces, containing all the necessary information, can be generated. If the vortex surfaces are extracted from lattice Yang-Mills configurations, e.g. via the maximal center gauge ,, then in view of the above discussion, one needs to additionally determine the locations of Abelian monopole lines on the vortex surfaces§§§The Abelian monopoles of the maximal Abelian gauge have empirically been determined to lie on the vortex surfaces of a subsequent (indirect) maximal center gauge ; alternatively, in the Laplacian center gauge introduced in ,, Abelian monopoles are located on vortex surfaces by construction.. Then, by associating an arbitrary orientation with some initial vortex plaquette on the dual lattice (this choice does not influence the Pontryagin index), one can recursively determine the orientations of all other (connected) vortex plaquettes by taking into account that vortex surface orientation is inverted precisely at monopole lines. Alternatively, if the vortex configurations are supplied by a random surface model , one additionally needs to generate orientations for the plaquettes making up the random surfaces; the monopole density implied by orientation changes on the surfaces can be viewed as an additional free parameter of such a model. This issue will be discussed in detail in section III.

Given such oriented vortex surface configurations on a space-time lattice, the question of evaluating their self-intersection number may at first sight seem straightforward. In practice, however, one reencounters many of the problems which also plague the determination of the Pontryagin index from full lattice Yang-Mills configurations. Surfaces made up of plaquettes on a lattice merely provide coarse-grained representations of continuum surfaces. Accordingly, some of their features contain ambiguities as to their precise continuum interpretation. For one, lattice surfaces in general intersect along whole intersection lines, as opposed to the continuum, where they intersect at points (up to a set of configurations of measure zero). Likewise, on the lattice, monopole lines hit singular points of the surfaces with a finite probability; by contrast, in the continuum, they pass by singular points at a distance (again, up to a set of configurations of measure zero, if one assumes monopoles to be randomly distributed on vortex surfaces, as will be done in the following). Some more detailed remarks on the physical meaning of the monopole trajectories will be made in section II C 2. The sections subsequent to the present one discuss in detail how the aforementioned ambiguities in the lattice configurations can be given a meaningful and consistent resolution, thus yielding a workable definition of the Pontryagin index associated with lattice surfaces. The resulting algorithm is summarized again in section II D.

### B Removing intersection lines

Surfaces made up of plaquettes on a hypercubic lattice generically intersect not at isolated points like in the continuum, but along whole lines consisting of lattice links. Along such an intersection line, even the question which plaquettes belong to which surface is at best a nonlocal question and, in general, cannot be settled unambiguously. This should be contrasted with intersection points, which occur at lattice sites; at such points, there is no ambiguity in identifying disjoint surfaces.

This ambiguity results from looking at the vortex surfaces on too coarse a scale; if one could attain the continuum limit, one would of course expect two-dimensional surfaces in four dimensions generically to intersect at points. Thus, to resolve the meaning of intersection lines, it is necessary to specify a new surface configuration on a finer lattice, from which the original configuration results by coarse-graining. This means that, on the finer lattice, the surfaces may deviate from the original surfaces by distances up to one-half of the spacing of the original lattice. This freedom can be used to construct the new configuration on the finer lattice in such a way that intersection lines are eliminated.

From the physics point of view, such a procedure is consistent. Center vortices represent infrared degrees of freedom of Yang-Mills theory, and are associated with a certain inherent thickness; it is not meaningful to give their location to a higher accuracy than this thickness. In this sense, the locations of the thin vortex surfaces furnished e.g. by center projection in Yang-Mills theory only carry physical meaning up to arbitrary ultraviolet fluctuations within the thick profile of the physical vortex they represent . Therefore, slight deformations of the thin vortex surfaces should not change the infrared physical content of a configuration.

To implement the above idea in practice, it is useful to introduce the notion of an elementary cube transformation. Such a transformation, carried out on an elementary three-dimensional cube of the lattice, means transforming

$$p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}(1|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|)\overline{p}_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}$$
(5)
for all 6 plaquettes making up the surface of the three-dimensional lattice cube in question, where $`\overline{p}`$ describes an oriented vortex in the shape of that cube surface, such as given in (3). Note that this transformation preserves the closedness of vortex surfaces; furthermore, this is precisely the operation carried out in an elementary Monte Carlo update of a vortex configuration in the random vortex model , except that there, in general, $`\overline{p}`$ does not need to be oriented. In the present context, the specification that $`\overline{p}`$ be oriented has to do with the fact that it will be desirable to preserve the monopole content of a configuration as much as possible in the course of a transformation.

In practice, the ambiguities in lattice surface configurations implied by intersection lines are now resolved as follows: Transfer the original surface configuration onto a lattice with $`1/3`$ of the original lattice spacing. Identify and make a list of all links which are part of intersection lines; these are all those links to which more than two vortex plaquettes are attached. Subsequently, sweep once through the lattice, updating the configuration by applying elementary cube transformations to all cubes containing links from the aforementioned list. Accept an update if it lowers the total number of intersection line links; it has furthermore proven to be efficient to also accept with probability $`1/2`$ transformations which leave the number of intersection line links unchanged. Lastly, the orientation of the corresponding cube surface $`v`$ should be chosen such as to least change the number of links carrying monopoles. Note that the new surfaces deviate from the original ones at most by $`1/3`$ of the original lattice spacing, in accordance with the requirements formulated further above.

In practice, it has proven sufficient to carry out this procedure twice, i.e. one ends up with a lattice with $`1/9`$ the spacing of the original lattice. Already after the first step, residual intersection lines are so sparse that the second step can be carried out on local sublattices; in this way, it is easily possible to treat $`12^4`$ lattices (at the initial lattice spacing) without exceeding the memory of a workstation. Typically, this procedure increases the vortex density as well as the monopole density by 15% as compared with the original configuration, which can be taken as an indication of the uncertainty introduced by the procedure into measurements of topological properties. The author has furthermore investigated alternative procedures such as immediately going to a lattice with $`1/9`$ the lattice spacing and applying several sweeps of elementary cube transformations. These alternative procedures all distorted the vortex and monopole densities more strongly.

### C Singular points

The procedure described in the previous section furnishes surface configurations containing the following types of singular pointsAs already mentioned further above, singular points are all those points at which the tangent vectors to the surface configuration span all four dimensions. which potentially contribute to the self-intersection number and, consequently, to the Pontryagin index:

* Touching points of two surface segments
* Intersection points
* Other singular points (writhing points)

The latter class of singular points is distinguished from the former two as follows: At intersection points and touching points, two distinct surface segments share one point, but one cannot reach one surface segment from the other by proceeding along plaquettes which share a link. Writhing points on the other hand are characterized precisely by the opposite; all plaquettes attached to such a point can be connected by proceeding along plaquettes which share a link. In this sense, there is only one surface segment at such a singular point, which writhes such that a contribution to the self-intersection number is generated. An explicit example of a writhing point is depicted in Fig. 1 below.

Also, intersection points have a very specific form. They consist of all four plaquettes attached to the point in question and extending into a particular pair of space-time directions, together with all four plaquettes attached to the point and extending into the other pair of space-time directions. All other configurations at which two distinct surface segments meet at one point constitute touching points.

All of the contributions mentioned above happen at sites of the lattice, which in general can also be visited by monopole lines. This represents an additional ambiguity which needs to be resolved in a manner similar to the intersection lines in the previous section. As before, in the continuum limit, monopole lines will generically not precisely hit the singular points of the vortex surfaces mentioned above, but pass them by at some distance which cannot be resolved as long as the lattice spacing is finite. Thus, a probabilistic procedure analogous to the one for intersection lines is necessary, and will be specified in detail further below for each type of singular point.

#### 1 Interplay of intersection points and writhing points

The following discussion will repeatedly refer to the configuration depicted in Fig. 1, which is helpful in illustrating the interplay of intersection points and writhing points, and thus aids in establishing a viable definition of the self-intersection number for lattice configurations.

The surface in Fig. 1 is closed, orientable, has one genuine self-intersection point (precisely at the center of the configuration), and is devoid of intersection lines. Additionally, it has writhing points, at $`n_0=1`$ and $`n_0=3`$ in Fig. 1, as well as at $`n_0=2`$ at the front and back edges of the configuration (from the viewer’s perspective).

The fact that the surface is orientable implies that, when in fact oriented, i.e. in the absence of monopole lines, it can be represented by a gauge field  which is nonzero only on a compact region of space-time (namely a three-dimensional volume of which the depicted surface is the boundary). This implies that the existence of this configuration does not depend on any special boundary conditions induced by the underlying space-time manifold and it therefore also exists e.g. on a four-dimensional sphere. On the latter, the Pontryagin index is integer-valued. At first sight, if one naively considered only the lone genuine intersection point to contribute to the oriented self-intersection number, one would have a contradiction, since each intersection point gives a contribution of modulus $`1/2`$ to the Pontryagin index . This underscores the importance of also taking into account the writhing points.

A more complete definition of the Pontryagin index can be constructed as follows: Taking eq. (1) literally, a certain unit $`\gamma `$ of topological charge should be associated with every pair of plaquettes which share a site and are completely orthogonal to one another, i.e. their combined tangent vectors span four dimensions. In terms of the plaquettes attached to a site $`n`$, the topological charge $`q_n`$ generated at that site is

$$q_n=\gamma \frac{1}{2}\underset{i,j=1}{\overset{4}{}}\underset{\mu <\nu }{}\underset{\kappa <\lambda }{}ϵ_{\mu \nu \kappa \lambda }p_{(i)}^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}p_{(j)}^{\{\kappa ,\lambda \}}$$
(6)
where, for each pair of space-time directions, the indices $`i,j`$ label the four different plaquettes touching the site $`n`$ and extending into those directions. The prefactor $`1/2`$ stems from the fact that the sums in (6) count every pair of mutually orthogonal plaquettes twice. Furthermore, the magnitude of $`\gamma `$ must be given by

$$\gamma =\frac{1}{32}$$
(7)
in order to be consistent with the fact that a genuine intersection point of two oriented surface segments yields $`q_n=\pm 16\gamma `$, while it on the other hand is known to generate a contribution of $`q_n=\pm 1/2`$ to the Pontryagin index . The sign associated with each contribution is determined by the relative orientation of the two plaquettes under consideration, as specified in (6). The total Pontryagin index $`Q`$ is the sum

$$Q=\underset{n}{}q_n.$$
(8)
However, one must exercise some care in applying this prescription. For one, it is not clear what it means for a monopole line to precisely coincide with a singular point; as mentioned above, in the continuum, monopole lines will generically not precisely hit the singular points of the vortex surfaces, but pass them by at some distance which cannot be resolved at finite lattice spacing. Therefore, monopole lines on the lattice which happen to coincide with singular points must be deformed such as to circumscribe the point before applying eq. (6). There is no information contained in the configurations which would tell which way to deform the monopole lines, and one is therefore forced again to resort to a random deformation, similar to the case of the intersection lines in section II B.

In practice, this can be realized locally at, and independently for, each site. Make a copy of the $`24`$ lattice plaquettes attached to the site in question and carry out the following algorithm on this copy: Find an initial plaquette which is part of a vortex surface, and proceed to find a further such plaquette sharing a link with the previous one. Invert its orientation if the aforementioned shared link carries a monopole line. Iterate this procedure until the initial plaquette is reached again. Note that up to two independent surface segments can appear, i.e. surface segments which share nothing but the lattice site under consideration; then, the procedure described above must be carried out independently for both surfaces. The result of these plaquette reorientations is that no monopole lines reach the singular point under consideration; to this reoriented set of plaquettes one can now apply eq. (6) and thus arrive at the contribution of the site in question to the Pontryagin index.

Note that the choice of monopole line deformation above is essentially made when finding the initial plaquette at random. Adopting its orientation without change means deforming the monopole line such that it does not run across that initial plaquette. There is actually less ambiguity associated with this reorientation procedure than would first appear. In the case of writhing points, the resulting contribution to the Pontryagin index does not depend on the choice of monopole line deformation. This is due to the fact that a monopole loop encircling a writhing point implies inverting the orientations of all plaquettes attached to the point, since they are all connected via links. In other words, there are no two distinct surface segments which can have independent orientations, but there is only one surface segment. As a result, all pairs of orthogonal plaquettes retain their relative orientation, i.e. in eq. (6) both factors $`p`$ change their sign, and the Pontryagin index is unchanged. In the case of intersection points, on the other hand, the choice of deformation does matter, and in practice is determined at random by the reorientation procedure described above.

The discussion in the previous paragraphs also clarifies why eq. (6) could not have been naively applied already to the initial vortex configurations before the intersection line removal procedure of section II B. In the presence of intersection lines, the above procedure of reorienting plaquettes at a singular point such as to remove monopole links becomes ambiguous and nonlocal. The ambiguity results from the fact that intersection lines imply that there are links to which more than two plaquettes are attached. Therefore, when proceeding from plaquette to plaquette in the course of the reorientation procedure, there is an ambiguous choice with which plaquette to continue whenever an intersection line is reached. Naively, one may now think of simply making a random choice as in the case of other ambiguities before; however, one is in general not free to choose in this case. This is due to the fact that such a choice implies specifying which plaquettes belong to which surface at the intersection line. However, one then must stick to this choice all the way along the intersection line. At best, therefore, the procedure becomes nonlocal and thus unmanageable in practice. At worst, one may find at the opposite end of the intersection line that the choice was inconsistent, because there are certain classes of intersection line ends which do in fact imply an unambiguous partitioning of the plaquettes into separate surfaces.

This discussion of the conditions under which eq. (6) can lead to a sensible definition of the Pontryagin index is corroborated by the result one now obtains for the winding number of the configuration depicted in Fig. 1. If globally oriented, i.e. in the absence of monopole lines, one should obtain vanishing Pontryagin index . One can verify that this is indeed the case. Furthermore, if one additionally allows monopole loops on the surface, one obtains integer Pontryagin index. This is straightforward to understand. As explained above, monopole loops encircling writhing points do not change the contribution to the Pontryagin index generated by the point in question, since the orientations of all participating plaquettes are simultaneously inverted. On the other hand, monopole loops in general will change the sign of the contribution from the intersection point, e.g. a monopole loop located on one of the intersecting surface segments and encircling the intersection point at a small distance. Since the contribution from the intersection point has modulus $`1/2`$, the net change in the Pontryagin index is integer. This integer result is nontrivial in view of the fact that the magnitudes of the contributions from the writhing points in this configuration are as small as $`1/8`$. One can verify that the correct quantization of topological charge does not persist if one allows monopole lines to touch the singular points. Also, by considering sample configurations containing intersection lines, one finds that the quantization properties of the topological charge are not preserved if one naively applies eq. (6), even in the absence of monopole lines. This again underscores the need for the probabilistic resolution of the intersection line and monopole line ambiguities described further above, before a consistent definition of the lattice surface Pontryagin index in terms of eq. (6) can be arrived at.

#### 2 Touching points

The procedure described in the previous section accounts for the contributions from intersection points and writhing points on a unified footing. Some more attention is necessary with regard to touching points. If one naively treats touching points in the same way, they always give a vanishing contribution to the Pontryagin index (as long as monopole lines have been deformed away from the touching points). However, it is precisely in the latter caveat that a potential ambiguity lies, which calls for a more detailed discussion. The following considerations will lead to the conclusion that, even under a less naive point of view, touching points should indeed always be discarded in the calculation of the lattice surface Pontryagin index. For completeness, however, this point of view is presented here.

In the continuum, the weight of truly touching configurations is of measure zero; instead, the following three continuum cases will be described by a lattice touching point: The surfaces may intersect at two neighboring points, the surfaces may not intersect at all, or there is only one surface, exhibiting a thin bottleneck. Again, as long as the lattice spacing is finite, the configurations are too coarse-grained to allow to determine which possibility is realized; this represents an ambiguity in how surface touchings on a lattice are to be interpreted. As long as no monopole line is present at the same lattice site, the interpretation of the touching point is immaterial: The contribution to the Pontryagin index always vanishes, even in the case of a double intersection, since the two intersection points occur with opposite relative orientation of the surfaces . The situation changes, however, if simultaneously a monopole line traverses the same region. If the touching point is interpreted as a double intersection (the interpretation would again have to be probabilistic) and if the monopole line is interpreted as running between the two intersection points (again with a certain probability), then the two contributions of modulus $`1/2`$ to the Pontryagin index from the two intersection points do not cancel, but add, changing the index by an integer .

In order to discuss whether this is a meaningful interpretation, it is necessary to return to the underlying physical picture . The vortex surface collective degrees of freedom treated here are meant to represent the infrared information contained in thick physical center vortices, as already mentioned further above. To specify that such a vortex carries flux corresponding to a center element of the gauge group is a statement about the magnitude of the associated gauge field color vector, but not about its direction in color space. As one travels along a physical thick vortex, the associated gauge field will in general smoothly rotate in color space. In concentrating on the vortex surfaces treated here, consisting of patches of alternating orientation, one has idealized the vortices in two ways: For one, the flux of the physical vortex has been concentrated on thin two-dimensional surfaces. Furthermore, however, the initially smooth space-time dependence of the associated color vector has been replaced by discrete jumps, allowing the color vector to only point into the positive and negative Cartan direction(s) in color space, as encoded in the surface orientation. This can be interpreted in terms of casting the initial physical vortex into an Abelian gauge and performing Abelian projection.

In view of this physical picture, it becomes clear that the interpretation presented above, generating additional contributions to the Pontryagin index from surface touching points, overstretches the applicability of the idealized vortex surface degrees of freedom discussed here. If a vortex surface touching point is interpreted as a double intersection, then the two intersection points are very close together compared with the typical length scales of the theory on which color vectors varyA quantitative measure of this length scale is furnished by the mean monopole density.. Therefore, the color orientations of the participating physical vortex surfaces should never be considered to vary appreciably between the two intersection points; this means that monopole lines should always be deformed such as to circumscribe touching points. Otherwise, one accords their specific space-time location more physical significance than is appropriate for infrared effective degrees of freedom. The monopole lines are merely intended to encode the variation of vortex color vectors on infrared length scales.

As a result of this physical interpretation, touching points should indeed be simply discarded in the calculation of the lattice surface Pontryagin index.

### D Summary of the algorithm

The definition of the lattice surface Pontryagin index constructed above can be briefly summarized as follows:

* Transfer the given lattice surface configuration onto a lattice of $`1/3`$ the lattice spacing and sweep once through the lattice, applying elementary cube transformations such as to remove intersection lines, while conserving the number of monopole lines as much as possible. Carry out this whole procedure twice.
* For each lattice site $`n`$, make a copy of all attached plaquettes, and transform the copy as follows. After finding an initial plaquette which is part of a vortex, recursively reorient further vortex plaquettes sharing links with previously considered ones, such as to remove any monopole lines from the shared links. Do this for all independent surface segments present. Using the transformed plaquettes, obtain the contribution $`q_n`$ to the Pontryagin index from the site $`n`$ in question via eq. (6), i.e.

$$q_n=\frac{1}{64}\underset{i,j=1}{\overset{4}{}}\underset{\mu <\nu }{}\underset{\kappa <\lambda }{}ϵ_{\mu \nu \kappa \lambda }p_{(i)}^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}p_{(j)}^{\{\kappa ,\lambda \}}$$
* The total Pontryagin index is the sum $`Q=_nq_n`$.

Despite the formal similarity of the expression for $`Q`$ with the so-called field theoretical discretization of the Pontryagin index in lattice Yang-Mills theory , a fundamental difference must be emphasized. The latter definition approximates the field strength by lattice Yang-Mills plaquettes and thus contains a discretization error as long as the lattice spacing is finite; eq. (6) by contrast contains no such discretization error. While the vortex surfaces are composed of elementary squares, they can trivially be embedded into a space-time continuum, and the above definition then already represents the true continuum Pontryagin index associated with the vortex configuration. Thus, the algorithm given above is conceptually more akin to the so-called geometrical definition of the Pontryagin index . Also there, coarse-graining ambiguities in the lattice configurations have to be resolved, before then applying an in turn exact prescription of evaluating the Pontryagin index.

Applying this procedure to general surface configurations on a hypercubic lattice, i.e. a space-time torus, one obtains a Pontryagin index quantized in half-integer units. This is exactly as it should be , in contrast e.g. to a space-time sphere, on which the Pontryagin index must be an integer. To further corroborate the significance of this result, the author has empirically considered some surface configurations with Pontryagin index $`1/2`$ in detail. All of them turned out to be non-orientable, meaning that they necessarily contain monopole loops, and therefore nontrivial gauge fields at space-time infinity. Conversely, if one formally removes the monopoles and introduces double vortex surfaces (which are equivalent to Dirac string world-sheets ) spanning areas bounded by the monopole loops, then the Pontryagin index again becomes an integer. In terms of the underlying gauge fields, this operation corresponds to a gauge transformation up to singularities at space-time infinity, the neglection of which is presumably equivalent to switching twist sectors on the torus . Accordingly, it seems plausible to expect that certain classes of non-orientable vortex surfaces do not exist e.g. on a space-time sphere in the sense that one cannot construct gauge field representations for them which fulfill viable space-time boundary conditions.

These observations further corroborate the consistency of the present construction of the lattice surface Pontryagin index. It should be noted that the vortex ensembles extracted from Yang-Mills theory via center projection and Abelian projection (to locate the monopoles) in general contain all twist sectors, even if the original full Yang-Mills ensemble was constrained to a particular sector. This can happen due to the fact that the projection procedures truncate gauge-invariant information, including in general the torus twist. Also in this respect, the vortex formulation of the topological winding number has similar problems as e.g. standard cooling techniques, in which instantons can “fall through the lattice”, modifying the detected topological content.

## III Topological properties of the random vortex model of infrared Yang-Mills theory

In the following, measurements of the topological susceptibility in the framework of the random vortex model of infrared Yang-Mills theory will be presented. This model was defined in  on the basis of the unoriented plaquette degrees of freedom $`|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|`$ by the partition function

$$Z=\left(\underset{n}{}\underset{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\mu ,\nu }{\mu <\nu }}{}\underset{|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|=0}{\overset{1}{}}\right)\mathrm{\Delta }[|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|]\mathrm{exp}(S[|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|])$$
(9)
with the constraint

$`\mathrm{\Delta }[|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{n}{}}{\displaystyle \underset{\mu }{}}\delta _{L_n^\mu mod2,0}`$ (10)
$`L_n^\mu `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\nu }{\nu \mu }}{}}\left(|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|+|p_{ne_\nu }^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|\right)`$ (11)
enforcing closedness of the vortex surfaces by constraining the number $`L_n^\mu `$ of vortex plaquettes attached to the link extending from the lattice site $`n`$ in $`\mu `$ direction to be even, for any $`n`$ and $`\mu `$. This constraint is conveniently enforced in Monte Carlo simulations by allowing only updates via elementary cube transformations, cf. section II B. The action penalizes curvature in the surfaces\**\**\**In , also an action term proportional to the total vortex surface area was considered, but a good fit to the confinement properties of $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills theory was achieved by choosing the corresponding coupling constant to vanish. by considering, for every link extending from the lattice site $`n`$ in $`\mu `$ direction, all pairs of attached plaquettes whose two members do not lie in the same plane, and, if both members are part of a vortex, associating this with an action increment $`c`$:

$$S=\frac{c}{2}\underset{n}{}\underset{\mu }{}\underset{\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\nu ,\lambda }{\nu \mu ,\lambda \mu ,\lambda \nu }}{}\left(|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}p_n^{\{\mu ,\lambda \}}|+|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}p_{ne_\lambda }^{\{\mu ,\lambda \}}|+|p_{ne_\nu }^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}p_n^{\{\mu ,\lambda \}}|+|p_{ne_\nu }^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}p_{ne_\lambda }^{\{\mu ,\lambda \}}|\right)$$
(12)
The confinement properties of the $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills ensemble are best reproduced by the choice $`c=0.24`$, cf. . This to a large extent fixes the characteristics of the random surface ensemble. However, as is manifest in the above definition by the fact that the model is formulated in terms of the unoriented variables $`|p_n^{\{\mu ,\nu \}}|`$, the orientations of the surfaces remain undetermined; this is simply a consequence of the fact that Wilson loops, which encode the confinement properties, do not depend on them. By constrast, the topological properties can only be evaluated by taking the surface orientation into account. One thus needs to additionally generate orientations for the plaquettes describing the vortex configurations which make up the ensemble.

In practice, this was achieved by first assigning random orientations to the plaquettes of any given configuration from the ensemble (9); subsequently, Monte Carlo sweeps were performed through the configuration in which plaquette orientations were flipped according to a bias related to the monopole number on the links bounding the plaquette in question. In this way, different monopole densities can be generated on the given vortex surfaces. Note that this density can only be varied within certain bounds. On the one hand, the non-orientability of the surfaces implies a certain irreducible monopole density; on the other hand, the lattice spacing also provides an upper bound on the density of monopoles.

At zero temperature, the above procedure allowed to study monopole line densities in space-time within the range††††††The scale in the following is fixed by setting the zero-temperature string tension $`\sigma _0`$, measured in , to $`\sigma _0=(440\text{MeV})^2`$.

$$\frac{6.2\text{fm}}{\text{fm}^4}<\rho (T=0)<\frac{38\text{fm}}{\text{fm}^4}.$$
(13)
For comparison, the zero-temperature monopole line density measured in full $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills theory in the maximal Abelian gauge  amounts to $`\rho _{MAG}=64/\text{fm}^3`$. This latter value should certainly be regarded as too high for the purposes of the random surface ensemble, for the same reasons as the center projection vortex density in Yang-Mills theory is higher than the model vortex density, by about a factor two. This difference, discussed extensively in , is due to spurious ultraviolet fluctuations in the center projection vortices detected from the Yang-Mills ensemble. Since monopole loops are constrained to lie on vortex surfaces, their density likewise should be reduced by at least a similar factor. Indeed, the magnitude of $`\rho _{MAG}/2`$ is within the upper bound in (13).

The random surface ensemble can also be studied at finite temperatures  by varying the extension of the lattice universe in the Euclidean time direction, this extension being identified with the inverse temperature. The parameter choice $`c=0.24`$ in the action (12) in particular  induces the correct $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills relation between the deconfinement phase transition temperature $`T_C`$ and the zero-temperature string tension $`\sigma _0`$, namely $`T_C/\sqrt{\sigma _0}=0.69`$. Temperatures in the following can thus consistently be given in units of $`T_C`$. Similar to above, at high temperatures, the range of accessible monopole densities e.g. at $`T=1.66T_C`$ was

$$2/\text{fm}^3<\rho (T=1.66T_C)<14/\text{fm}^3.$$
(14)
One might a priori expect that these monopole densities can be tuned such that the random surface model reproduces the topological susceptibility of Yang-Mills theory. However, when measuring the topological susceptibility in diverse ensembles distinguished only by their monopole densities, the variation of the result turned out to be smaller than the error bars over the entire range of accessible densities. Thus, the random surface model in actual fact gives a unique prediction of the topological susceptibility independent of any additional model tuning. The main reason for this lies in the fact that writhing points are considerably more abundant than intersection points; however, as discussed in section II C 1, the contribution generated by the former can be evaluated independently, and is invariant under changes, of the monopole configuration‡‡‡‡‡‡This does not mean to say that the topological charge generated by writhings exists independently of any monopole loops. Rather, the non-orientability implied by the writhings necessarily also implies a certain irreducible monopole density, but the topological charge associated with writhings can be evaluated without explicit knowledge of these monopoles. (as far as they are topologically possible). As an example, while the full zero-temperature topological susceptibility amounts to $`\chi ^{1/4}(T=0)=(190\pm 15)`$ MeV, cf. Fig. 2, the zero-temperature susceptibility generated by taking only intersection points into account is $`\chi _{int}^{1/4}(T=0)=(110\pm 10)`$ MeV, again over the whole range (13)). This at first sight surprisingly stable result is presumably due to the additional effect that the degree of non-orientability of the vortex surfaces, which implies a lower bound on the density of monopoles, already suffices to effectively randomize the signs of the contributions $`\pm 1/2`$ from intersection points to the Pontryagin index; as a consequence, additional monopole loops do not further appreciably change the variance of the topological charge associated with these intersection points.

Similarly, at high temperatures, the topological susceptibility generated by intersection points alone e.g. at $`T=1.66T_C`$ amounts to $`\chi _{int}^{1/4}(T=1.66T_C)=(21\pm 8)`$ MeV, over the whole range (14). In this case, intersection points are very sparse; more than 95% of the configurations contain no intersection points. As evidenced by comparison with the full value of the topological susceptibility, $`\chi ^{1/4}(T=1.66T_C)=(109\pm 10)`$ MeV, writhing points also dominate in the high-temperature phase. Therefore, also in this phase, one obtains a unique prediction for the topological susceptibility.

Fig. 2 displays the topological susceptibility $`\chi `$ in the random surface model as a function of temperature. The zero-temperature value, $`\chi ^{1/4}(T=0)=(190\pm 15)`$ MeV, is compatible with other measurements in full $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills theory . The topological susceptibility persists in the deconfined phase, but drops to $`\chi ^{1/4}(T=1.66T_C)=(109\pm 10)`$ MeV at $`T=1.66T_C`$. The temperature dependence is similar to the behavior displayed in , but the error bars do not quite overlap at $`T=1.4T_C`$ and $`T=1.66T_C`$. However, as far as the author understands, the error bars in  are purely statistical, and no estimate is included of the systematic error inherent in the extraction procedure used. Thus, it is not clear at this stage whether the residual deviation at high temperature signals a genuine discrepancy between the random vortex model and full Yang-Mills theory.

The chief uncertainty in the measurements displayed in Fig. 2 indeed results from the systematic error introduced by the modification of the vortex surfaces after they have been transferred onto a finer lattice, cf. section II B. The magnitude of this error is estimated from the change induced by the aforementioned procedure in quantities such as the vortex and monopole densities. However, at high temperatures, statistical errors become comparable to the systematic uncertainties due to a stronger autocorrelation in the course of the ensemble generation.

In terms of the physical consequences, while the $`U_A(1)`$ anomaly persists in the deconfined phase, it loses its dominating character e.g. in the Witten-Veneziano estimate  for the mass of the $`\eta ^{}`$ meson. Rather, it becomes one effect among several, comparable e.g. in magnitude to the explicit $`SU(3)`$ flavor symmetry breaking via the quark masses.

## IV Conclusions and Outlook

In this work, a random surface model for $`SU(2)`$ center vortices, designed to reproduce the confinement properties of Yang-Mills theory , was shown to simultaneously predict the correct topological susceptibility. While confinement and the topological aspects of the Yang-Mills ensemble have hitherto largely been modeled on a separate footing, the vortex picture bridges this gap and the aforementioned phenomena find a unified description. The center vortex framework thus shows increasing promise of being suited to consistently capture the gamut of nonperturbative effects characterizing the infrared regime of the strong interactions.

In order to arrive at this result, a workable definition of the Pontryagin index for vortex world-surface configurations composed of plaquettes on a hypercubic lattice had to be developed, cf. section II. Similar to the so-called geometrical definition of the Pontryagin index  in lattice Yang-Mills theory, coarse-graining ambiguities in the lattice configurations must be resolved before the known continuum expression  for the Pontryagin index can be used. Work is in progress with the aim of applying these methods also to the center projection vortices extracted from the Yang-Mills ensemble. This will allow to explore the question of vortex dominance for the Pontryagin index, in analogy to the center dominance observed for Wilson loops ,,. Such an investigation constitutes a more stringent test than the converse experiment , which showed that an ensemble devoid of center vortices is concentrated in the trivial topological sector.

Besides confinement and topological properties, the vortex model will have to be confronted with the phenomenon of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking. For this purpose, fermionic degrees of freedom must for the first time be included into the description. On a technical level, it will be necessary to develop efficient methods of evaluating the Dirac operator in a vortex background. In this respect, the vortex model presents a simplification compared with full lattice QCD which may be decisive: While the random surfaces describing the model vortex ensemble (9) are composed of lattice plaquettes, there is no conceptual difficulty in embedding them in a space-time continuum; indeed, one can straightforwardly associate a continuum field strength and a continuum gauge field with the surfaces. The advantages connected with this feature to some extent already became apparent in the construction of the Pontryagin index, cf. section II, and it also opens the possibility of a continuum evaluation of the Dirac operator. From a physical aspect, the success of instanton models in generating the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry leads to the expectation that the vortex model will fare likewise, in view of its correct description of the topological characteristics highlighted in this work.

## V Acknowledgments

First and foremost, the author wishes to thank M. Faber for numerous intense and fruitful discussions during the author’s stay at TU Vienna in September 1999, where the basic ideas of the present work were developed. The hospitality of the Institute of Nuclear Physics at TU Vienna as a whole is acknowledged, as is DFG for financing the stay within grant no. DFG En 415/1-1. The author furthermore profited from insights provided by H. Reinhardt, in collaboration with whom prior work , leading up to the present one was carried out. Also, useful discussions with R. Alkofer, R. Bertle, Š. Olejník, M. Quandt and O. Schröder contributed to this investigation.


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# Structure of Growing Networks: Exact Solution of the Barabási–Albert’s Model

## Abstract

We generalize the Barabási–Albert’s model of growing networks accounting for initial properties of sites and find exactly the distribution of connectivities of the network $`P(q)`$ and the averaged connectivity $`\overline{q}(s,t)`$ of a site $`s`$ in the instant $`t`$ (one site is added per unit of time). At long times $`P(q)q^\gamma `$ at $`q\mathrm{}`$ and $`\overline{q}(s,t)(s/t)^\beta `$ at $`s/t0`$, where the exponent $`\gamma `$ varies from $`2`$ to $`\mathrm{}`$ depending on the initial attractiveness of sites. We show that the relation $`\beta (\gamma 1)=1`$ between the exponents is universal.

05.10.-a, 05-40.-a, 05-50.+q, 87.18.Sn

Recently opened intriguing scaling properties of a variety of growing networks (WWW, neural, social, citations of scientific papers, etc., see  and references therein) challenge us to find general reasons of such behavior. In fact, the studying of networks has a long story  but only now we become feel ourselves as subjects inside of the world of developing networks and start appreciate significance of the evolving network problem .

Mostly, the interest is concentrated at the distribution of shortest pathes between the different sites of a network  and at the distribution of the number of connections with a site $`P(k)`$ . The second quantity is obviously simpler to obtain but even for it, in the case of the networks with scaling behavior, no exact results are known.

A clear model of a growing networks was proposed by Barabási and Albert . The model presents the most simple mechanism of self-organization of a growing network into a free-scale structure. At each time step a new site is added and is connected with old sites of the network through $`m`$ new links. The probability of an old site to get a new link is proportional to the total number of connections with this site. It was found in  that $`P(k)k^\gamma `$ at long times and large connectivities, where $`\gamma =3`$ (the approach that seemed at first sight be approximate – “mean field” – was used). This value is close to that one observed in the network of citations , but other examples show different values of $`\gamma `$. Introduction of the aging of sites changes $`\gamma `$  and may even break the scaling behavior .

In the present letter, we generalize the Barabási–Albert’s model in natural way and solve it exactly, i. e. we find the exact form of the distribution of connectivities and some other related quantities of the network. We show also that the appearing scaling relations are valid not only for this particular model but for a wide class of growing networks.

Let us formulate the model. At each time step the new site with $`m`$ connections with some old sites appears. Hence, in each instant $`t=1,2,\mathrm{}`$, the network consists of $`t`$ sites connected by $`mt`$ directed links. Note that we consider not a total number of $`k_s`$ connections with a site but $`q_s`$, the number of incoming links, where $`s`$ is the number of a site. Therefore, for brevity, we call it the connectivity of a site but not $`k_s`$ as usually. One introduces the following rule to distribute $`m`$ new links among $`t`$ old sites in the instant $`t+1`$. Let the probability that a new link points to a given old site $`s`$ be proportional to the following characteristic of the site:

$$A_s=A^{(0)}+q_s,$$
(1)
that may be named its attractiveness. All sites are borned with some initial attractiveness $`A^{(0)}`$ but afterwards it increases because of the $`q_s`$ term. In the particular case of the Barabási–Albert’s model, $`A^{(0)}=m`$.

In fact we consider the following general problem. In each instant, $`m`$ new particles (i. e. incoming links) have be distributed between an increasing number (by one per time step) of boxes (i. e. sites) acording to the introduced rule. One has to emphasize, that in our formulation, there is no difference, from which particular site – old or new or even from outside of the network – these new links come. Indeed, we are interested only in the statistics of incoming links. Therefore, new links may also appear between old sides.

It is convenient to assume that in the initial instant $`t=1`$ we have only one site with the connectivity $`m`$. Then the total attractiveness of the network in the instant $`t`$ is $`A_\mathrm{\Sigma }=(m+A^{(0)})t=(1+a)m`$, where $`aA^{(0)}/m`$. The resulting behavior at long times is independent of the initial condition.

Let us derive the equation for the distribution $`p(q,s,t)`$ of connectivities $`q`$ at the site $`s`$ in the instant $`t`$. The probability that a new link is connected with the site $`s`$ is $`W_s=A_s/A_\mathrm{\Sigma }`$. The probability for the site to receive exactly $`l`$ new links of $`m`$ injected is $`𝒫_s^{(ml)}=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{m}{l}\right)W_s^l\left(1W_s\right)^{ml}`$. Note that we allow multiple links unlike the original Barabási–Albert’s model, i. e. the connectivity of a given site may increase by more than one in the same instant. That is inessential at long times, when probability to receive more than one link of $`m`$ introduced simultaneously is vanishingly low. Hence, the connectivity distribution of a site obeys the following master equation:

$$p(q,s,t+1)=\underset{l=0}{\overset{m}{}}𝒫_s^{(ml)}p(ql,s,t)=\underset{l=0}{\overset{m}{}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{m}{l}\right)\left[\frac{ql+am}{\left(1+a\right)mt}\right]^l\left[1\frac{ql+am}{\left(1+a\right)mt}\right]^{ml}p(ql,s,t).$$
(2)
Eq. (2) is supplied with the initial condition $`p(q,s,s)=\delta \left(q\right)`$, which means that sites are borned with zero connectivity (i. e. without incoming links in our definition).

The distribution function of connectivities in the all network is

$$P(q,t)=\frac{1}{t}\underset{u=1}{\overset{t}{}}p(q,u,t).$$
(3)
Summing up Eq. (2) over $`s`$ from $`1`$ to $`t`$, one gets

$$\left(t+1\right)P(q,t+1)p(q,t+1,t+1)=\left(t\frac{q+am}{1+a}\right)P(q,t)+\frac{q1+am}{1+a}P(q1,t)+O\left(\frac{P}{t}\right).$$
(4)
In the long-time limit, after the transition to continuous-time approximation, we obtain

$$\left(1+a\right)t\frac{P}{t}(q,t)+\left(1+a\right)P(q,t)+\left(q+am\right)P(q,t)\left(q1+am\right)P(q1,t)=\left(1+a\right)\delta \left(q\right).$$
(5)
Finally, assuming that the limit, $`P\left(q\right)=P\left(q,t\mathrm{}\right)`$, exists, we get the following equation for the stationary connectivity distribution:

$$\left(1+a\right)P\left(q\right)+\left(q+ma\right)P\left(q\right)\left(q1+ma\right)P\left(q1\right)=\left(1+a\right)\delta \left(q\right).$$
(6)
To solve Eq.(6) one may use Z-transform of the distribution function:

$$\mathrm{\Phi }\left(z\right)=\underset{q=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}P\left(q\right)z^q.$$
(7)
Then one gets from Eq.(6)

$$z\left(1z\right)\frac{d\mathrm{\Phi }}{dz}+ma\left(1z\right)\mathrm{\Phi }+\left(1+a\right)\mathrm{\Phi }=1+a.$$
(8)
The solution of Eq. (8) that is analytic at $`z=0`$ has the following form:

$`\mathrm{\Phi }\left(z\right)=\left(1+a\right)z^{1\left(m+1\right)a}\left(1z\right)^{1+a}{\displaystyle \underset{0}{\overset{z}{}}}𝑑x{\displaystyle \frac{x^{\left(m+1\right)a}}{\left(1x\right)^{2+a}}}=`$ (9)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1+a}{1+\left(m+1\right)a}}\left(1z\right)_2^{1+a}F_1[1+\left(m+1\right)a,2+a;2+\left(m+1\right)a;z]={\displaystyle \frac{1+a}{1+\left(m+1\right)a}}_2F_1[1,ma;2+\left(m+1\right)a;z],`$ (10)
where $`{}_{2}{}^{}F_{1}^{}[]`$ is the hypergeometric function. Using its expansion  in $`z`$, we obtain, comparing with Eq.(7),

$$P\left(q\right)=\left(1+a\right)\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left[\left(m+1\right)a+1\right]}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(ma\right)}\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(q+ma\right)}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left[q+2+\left(m+1\right)a\right]},$$
(11)
that is our main result (see Fig. 1). In particular, when $`a=1`$, that corresponds to the case $`A_s=m+q_s=k_s`$, studied in , we get exactly

$$P\left(q\right)=\frac{2m\left(m+1\right)}{\left(q+m\right)\left(q+m+1\right)\left(q+m+2\right)}.$$
(12)
This expression in the limit $`q\mathrm{}`$ approaches the corresponding result of  obtained in the frames of an approximate scheme, but the prefactors are different. In fact, the “mean field” approximation, used in , is equivalent to continuous-$`q`$ approximation in our discrete-difference equations. Indeed, if we replace the finite difference with a derivative over $`q`$, we get the expression obtained in .

At $`ma+q1`$, the distribution function (11) takes the form:

$$P\left(q\right)\left(1+a\right)\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left[\left(m+1\right)a+1\right]}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(ma\right)}\left(q+ma\right)^{(2+a)}.$$
(13)
Therefore, we find the scaling exponent $`\gamma `$ of the distribution function:

$$\gamma =2+a=2+A^{(0)}/m,$$
(14)
where $`A^{(0)}`$ is the initial attractiveness of a site.

Let us find the distribution function $`p(q,s,t)`$ of connectivities at the site $`s`$. At long times, $`t1`$, keeping only two leading terms in $`1/t`$ in Eq. (2), one gets

$$p(q,s,t+1)=\left[1\frac{q+am}{\left(1+a\right)t}\right]p(q,s,t)+\frac{q1+am}{\left(1+a\right)t}p(q1,s,t)+O\left(\frac{p}{t^2}\right).$$
(15)
Assuming the scale of time variation to be much larger then $`1`$, we can replace the finite $`t`$-difference with a derivative:

$$\left(1+a\right)t\frac{p}{t}(q,s,t)=\left(q1+am\right)p(q1,s,t)\left(q+am\right)p(q,s,t).$$
(16)
Finally, using Z-transform in the similar way as before, we obtain the solution of Eq. (16), i. e. the connectivity distribution of individual sites:

$$p(q,s,t)=\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(am+q\right)}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(am\right)q!}\left(\frac{s}{t}\right)^{am/(1+a)}\left[1\left(\frac{s}{t}\right)^{1/(1+a)}\right]^q.$$
(17)
Hence, this distribution has an exponentional tail. Now one may get also the expression for the average connectivity of a given site:

$$\overline{q}(s,t)=\underset{q=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}qp(q,s,t)=am\left[\left(\frac{s}{t}\right)^{1/(1+a)}1\right].$$
(18)
Thus, at a fixed time $`t`$ the average connectivity of an old site $`st`$ depends upon its age as $`s^\beta `$, where the exponent $`\beta =1/\left(1+a\right)`$. Therefore, we have the following relation between the exponents of the considered network:

$$\beta \left(\gamma 1\right)=1,$$
(19)
that was obtained in  with some particular form of $`p(q,s,t)`$.

We can show that Eq. (19) is universal and may be obtained from the most general suggestions. In fact, we assume only that the averaged connectivity $`\overline{q}(s,t)`$ and the distribution of connectivities $`P(q)`$ show scaling behavior. Then, in the scaling region, the quantity of interest, i. e. the probability $`p(q,s,t)`$, has to be of the following form: $`p(q,s,t)=(s/t)^{\mathrm{\Delta }_1}f(q(s/t)^{\mathrm{\Delta }_2})`$. Here, $`\mathrm{\Delta }_1=\mathrm{\Delta }_2`$ because of the normalization condition for $`p(q,s,t)`$ at a fixed $`s`$, $`_{q=0}^{\mathrm{}}p(q,s,t)=1`$. Then, the relation $`\overline{q}(s,t)(s/t)^\beta `$ leads to $`\mathrm{\Delta }_1=\mathrm{\Delta }_2=\beta `$ (we use the definition (18)), and finally, inserting $`p(q,s,t)`$ in such a form into the relation $`P(q)q^\gamma `$ at large $`q`$ and $`t`$, one gets the relation (19).

The particular form of the scaling function $`f(\xi ),\xi q(s/t)^\beta `$ depends on the specific model of the growing network. In the case under consideration, it follows from Eq. (17) that

$$f(\xi )=\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(am)}\xi ^{am1}\mathrm{exp}(\xi )$$
(20)
at $`s/t0,q\mathrm{}`$ and the fixed $`q(s/t)^\beta `$. (We used here that $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(am+q)/q!q^{am1}`$ at $`q\mathrm{}`$.)

In the limit of zero initial attractivity of sites ($`a=0`$) all new sites connect only with the first one, since all other sites have no chance to get a new link. In this case, Eqs. (14) and (19) give $`\gamma =2`$ and $`\beta =1`$. For $`a=1`$, i. e. for the Barabási–Albert’s model, $`\gamma =3`$ and $`\beta =1/2`$ . Finally, when $`a\mathrm{}`$, i. e. all sites have equal attractivity all time, and the scaling breaks, one sees from Eqs. (14) and (19) that $`\gamma \mathrm{}`$ and $`\beta 0`$. Note that the ranges of variation of $`\gamma `$, $`(2,\mathrm{})`$, and $`\beta `$, $`(1,0)`$, are the same as for the network with aging .

We see that the “approximate” approach of  gives the proper values for the critical exponents (see also  for the network with aging). Is that only an occasional coincidence? In fact, in these papers, some particular form of $`p(q,s,t)`$ was used (i) to derive the equation for the averaged connectivity and, therefore, for $`\beta `$, and (ii) to obtain relation between $`\gamma `$ and $`\beta `$. One can noticed, however, that (i) the equation for the averaged connectivity may be obtained for arbitrary $`p(q,s,t)`$ and (ii) the relation between the scaling exponents is universal, as we have shown above. Thus, the analytical results for the scaling exponents obtained in  turn to be exact.

A two-parameter fitting was proposed in  to describe the observed distribution of citations of scientific papers . One sees, that the connectivity distribution of the considered growing networks is of the quite different form. It seems, that the difference occurs because we study the growing structure unlike the approach  although the question is open.

In conclusion, we have found the exact form of the connectivity distribution and the averaged connectivity of sites of the natural generalization for the Barabási–Albert’s model. The considered growing network is self-organized into the free-scale structure. The input flow of the new links is distributed between the increasing number of sites. In fact we have considered the new version of a sandpile problem. The scaling exponents are determined by the value of the initial attractiveness ascribed to every new site. Depending on this quantity, the scaling exponent $`\gamma `$ of the connectivity distribution takes values from $`2`$ to $`\mathrm{}`$. We have shown that the relation between the scaling exponents $`\gamma `$ and $`\beta `$ is valid for a wide class of growing networks. Our simple solution of this problem lets hope to obtain other exact results for growing networks.

The following question remains open. We have found that the exponent $`\gamma `$ varies between $`2`$ and $`\mathrm{}`$. Why is $`\gamma `$ only in the range of $`2`$$`3`$ in real networks ?

SND thanks PRAXIS XXI (Portugal) for a research grant PRAXIS XXI/BCC/16418/98. JFFM was partially supported by the project PRAXIS/2/2.1/FIS/299/94. We also thank E.J.S. Lage for reading the manuscript and A.V. Goltsev and Yu.G. Pogorelov for many useful discussions.
Electronic address: sdorogov@fc.up.pt
Electronic address: jfmendes@fc.up.pt
Electronic address: alnis@samaln.ioffe.rssi.ru