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# 1–5 𝜇m imaging of 3CRR galaxies: The 𝐾–𝑧 relation and the geometry of the torus

## 1 Introduction

It has been proposed that powerful FR II (see Fanaroff & Riley 1974) radio galaxies and radio loud quasars are intrinsically the same objects, with all observed differences being a result of the angle between the line of sight and the radio axis (Scheuer 1987; Barthel 1989). While objects classified as “narrow-line radio galaxies” do not display obvious broad lines in their optical spectra, broad lines have been seen either in the near-infrared (e.g. Hill, Goodrich & DePoy 1996) or in polarized light (e.g. Young et al. 1996). In addition, the detection of unresolved nuclei in near-infrared observations of radio galaxies (e.g. Djorgovski et al. 1991; Simpson, Ward & Wilson 1995), where the optical depth is lower, indicates the presence of a quasar-like nucleus in the centres of these objects. Since quasars can outshine their host galaxies by factors ranging from a few (e.g. Dunlop et al. 1993; Taylor et al. 1996, hereafter T96) to more than 100 in extreme cases (e.g. PDS 456; Simpson et al. 1999), even if only a few per cent of the nuclear light is transmitted it can still make a major contribution to the integrated luminosity.

It has long been known that the brightest radio galaxies, i.e. those in the 3CRR catalogue of Laing, Riley & Longair (1983), are brighter in the near-infrared by about a magnitude at $`z1`$ than they are at low redshift. This amount of dimming as cosmic time increases is consistent with passive evolution of their stellar populations (Lilly & Longair 1984; Lilly, Longair & Allington-Smith 1985b). While some 3C radio galaxies at $`z1`$ suffer significant contamination from non-stellar radiation (Rawlings et al. 1995; Simpson, Rawlings & Lacy 1999), this does not have a significant impact on the locus of the $`K`$$`z`$ relation. However, radio galaxies from the fainter 6C and B2 radio surveys are 0.6 mag fainter at $`K`$ than the 3C objects at these redshifts (Eales et al. 1997), whereas there is no correlation between radio and host galaxy luminosities locally. Furthermore, the 6C/B2 galaxies lie below the no-evolution curve.

The possibility that there is significant non-stellar contamination at low redshift is one that therefore needs to be investigated. A study by T96 claimed that the true locus of the $`K`$$`z`$ relation at low redshift may be half a magnitude fainter than previously thought due to contamination from the non-stellar nucleus. In this paper, we perform a similar analysis to that of T96 on an unbiased sample of radio galaxies from the catalogue of Laing et al. (1983). In Section 2 we describe our sample selection and observational technique. In Section 3 we briefly describe the two-dimensional fitting procedure used to separate the nuclear and host galaxy properties in our $`J`$ and $`K`$ images, and present the results of this analysis, together with aperture photometry of the longer-wavelength images. In Section 4 we use these results to examine the nature of the stellar and non-stellar components of radio galaxies, and infer the intrinsic luminosities of the nuclear sources and the line of sight obscurations towards them. In Section 5 we attempt to infer the geometry of this obscuring material, and in Section 6 we discuss the implications of our analysis on the low-redshift end of the $`K`$$`z`$ relation and compare our results with those of T96. Finally, we summarize our results in Section 7. Throughout this paper we adopt $`H_0=50`$ km s-1 Mpc-1, $`q_0=0.5`$, and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$. Our convention for spectral index, $`\alpha `$, is such that the flux density at a frequency $`\nu `$, $`S_\nu \nu ^\alpha `$.

## 2 Sample Selection and Observations

We selected our targets from the 3CRR catalogue of Laing et al. (1983). This catalogue is essentially complete and, by virtue of being selected at low frequency, does not preferentially include sources observed close to the radio axis whose fluxes are enhanced by Doppler boosted cores. It is therefore an unbiased sample of radio galaxies, except in the sense that it consists of the most radio-luminous objects. We excluded objects with known broad H$`\alpha `$, as determined by the high-quality spectrophotometric observations of Laing et al. (1994, hereafter L94); we did not however exclude 3C 234 since the broad H$`\alpha `$ seen is believed to be entirely scattered (Antonucci 1984; Young et al. 1998). This criterion supplied an upper redshift cutoff of $`z<0.43`$, in order that H$`\alpha `$ still be present in the optical spectra. From those objects visible from the 3.8-m United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in early January, we selected only those galaxies with strong optical emission lines (Class A; Hine & Longair 1979). The reasons for this were twofold. First, the low-ionization (“optically dull”, Class B) radio galaxies may not be part of the quasar–radio galaxy unification paradigm – they are predominantly low-power objects with an FR I radio morphology. Secondly, since emission-line luminosity is a good indicator of the power of the active nucleus (Rawlings & Saunders 1991), it follows that these objects will have less luminous nuclei in the near-infrared and are therefore likely to be below our detection threshold. We were able to observe ten of the eleven objects thus selected, with 3C 123 being excluded from our programme solely because it was never at a suitable hour angle when the time came to choose the next target. We present details of the sample in Table 1, including observed 178 MHz and \[O III$`\lambda `$5007 fluxes and rest frame luminosities. Although the data of L94 is of a consistently high quality, their choice of a narrow slit necessarily meant a loss of extended emission line flux. This effect is especially pronounced in the closest radio galaxies, where the line emission can be extended over many arcseconds (see, e.g., Baum et al. 1988). We have therefore chosen not to use fluxes from L94’s data in those cases where a larger aperture measurement is available that contains a significantly larger flux. We were unable to locate large aperture measurements for 3C 42 or 3C 153, although these are the two most distant objects in our sample and we can expect the spectroscopic slit of L94 to include virtually all the line emission.

All the images presented here were obtained on UKIRT in photometric conditions, using IRCAM3 with a nominal scale of 0.286 arcsec pixel-1. Most observations were made on the nights of UT 1996 Jan 3–6, although 3C 33, 3C 153, and 3C 171 were observed during an earlier run on UT 1995 Jan 3–5 as part of a pilot study. Each target was observed through the JKLM filters, with typical on-source exposure times of 18 minutes at $`J`$ and $`K`$ and 30 minutes at $`L^{}`$ and $`M`$. Most of the radio galaxies are sufficiently compact at $`J`$ and $`K`$ compared to the size of the array that it was possible to use standard jittering techniques and therefore there was no need for “off-source” observations to produce a flatfield image. In these cases, each observation consisted of taking two sets of nine jittered frames of 60 s duration each (split into shorter, background-limited exposures). For those objects with $`z<0.1`$, however, nearby regions of sky were used to enable flatfielding and sky subtraction. The much higher background in the thermal-infrared ($`L^{}`$ and $`M`$) meant that only the central regions of the radio galaxies were detected with any significance, and even the closest objects could be jittered about the array. However, to permit accurate flatfielding given the rapid background variations, shorter exposure times were necessary and each observation was split into sets of five frames of 30 s ($`L^{}`$) or 15 s ($`M`$), each of which was again comprised of a number of shorter, background-limited exposures. Due to time constraints, we were unable to observe two of our targets (3C 42 and 3C 84) at $`M`$.

Data reduction was performed in the following manner. Each observation was split into its sets of nine (at $`J`$ and $`K`$) or five (at $`L^{}`$ and $`M`$) separate exposures, and these were dealt with as separate entities. First, an appropriate dark frame was subtracted from all the images. Then a flat field was produced by median-filtering either the sky frames (if the source was at $`z<0.1`$) or the object frames (for cases where no off-source observations were made), after scaling each frame to have the same median pixel value. Each object frame was then divided by a normalized version of this flatfield, and these images were registered, using stars and galaxies visible on the individual images where possible, or the nominal telescope offsets otherwise. An iterative technique was used to determine the DC offsets between regions of overlap in separate frames, and the images were averaged. At this stage, the separate sets were averaged together to produce the final image. The seeing was measured from stars in the individual exposures to be in the range 1.0–1.2 arcsec FWHM (about 4 pixels) and the registration uncertainties did not cause the FWHM of stars in the final coadded images to increase by a measurable amount.

Images of photometric standard stars were taken throughout the course of each night. One standard star was imaged five times in each filter for each radio galaxy. Multiple coadds were used both to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and to ensure that each observation had a similar exposure time to the individual radio galaxy observations. In this way, the point spread function (PSF) of the standard star would sample the same longer-term seeing variations as the galaxy images. Flux calibration solutions were determined separately for each night of observation, with the r.m.s. dispersion for each night typically being 4% at $`J`$ and $`K`$ and 7% at $`L^{}`$ and $`M`$. Aperture photometry from our images agrees with that of Lilly & Longair (1984) and Lilly, Longair & Miller (1985a) to within the quoted uncertainties. In Table 2 we list the photometry measured in a 3-arcsec aperture, which is more appropriate for detecting red nuclear sources.

## 3 Separation of nucleus and host galaxy

Thermal emission from the telescope is very strong longward of 2.5 $`\mu `$m, resulting in a vastly increased background and a large drop in sensitivity. In addition, the strength of the quasar nucleus relative to the host galaxy increases with wavelength due to its red colour. We therefore undertake different analyses for the short (JK) and long (LM) wavelength data.

In our $`J`$ and $`K`$ images, the host galaxies are well-detected out to large radii and are likely to dominate over the nuclei, even in fairly small apertures. Methods which attempt to estimate the flux of a nuclear source by using aperture photometry to correct small aperture measurements for starlight are prone to overestimate the strength of the source (Simpson 1994b) and it is necessary to model the galaxy in order to obtain a reliable measurement. At longer wavelengths, the host galaxy is not detected with great significance due to the bright thermal background, and simpler methods can be employed.

### 3.1 Two-dimensional modelling

To enable the most direct comparison possible of our results with those of T96, we have used an almost identical analysis technique on our data. We refer the reader to that paper for a more detailed description of the method, and for a discussion of its advantages over the more common (and simpler) one-dimensional analysis (e.g. Simpson et al. 1995).

The two-dimensional approach involves constructing a model image derived from fitting parameters and comparing this with the actual data, using an error frame to allow a quantitative $`\chi ^2`$ minimization. The assumed model was an elliptical galaxy obeying a de Vaucouleurs law (de Vaucouleurs 1948) and an unresolved nuclear source. There are five parameters used to construct the model:

1. The luminosity of the nuclear source, $`L_{\mathrm{nuc}}`$
2. The luminosity of the host galaxy, $`L_{\mathrm{host}}`$
3. The effective (half-light) radius of the host galaxy, $`r_\mathrm{e}`$
4. The position angle of the major axis of the host galaxy, $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$
5. The axial ratio of the host galaxy, $`a/b`$

The pixel location of the centre of the galaxy, ($`x_\mathrm{c}`$,$`y_\mathrm{c}`$), was determined using iterative centroiding, and construction of the model galaxy proceeded as follows. Each pixel in the image was divided into 400 subpixels, and the flux in each of these subpixels was computed based on the parameters of the galaxy model. This amount of subpixellation ensures that the flux in the central pixel is never underestimated by more than 0.14%, and any overestimation of the nuclear source flux as a result will be negligible. The nuclear source was then added by increasing the value of the central pixel ($`x_\mathrm{c}`$,$`y_\mathrm{c}`$) by the appropriate amount. This nucleus-plus-galaxy model was convolved with the adopted PSF to produce a simulated image.

The quality of fit for the simulated image was determined by the $`\chi ^2`$ statistic,

$$\chi ^2=\left(\frac{z(x,y)\zeta (x,y)}{\sigma (x,y)}\right)^2,$$

where $`z(x,y)`$ and $`\zeta (x,y)`$ are the values of the ($`x`$,$`y`$) pixel in the real data and the simulated image respectively, and $`\sigma (x,y)`$ is the uncertainty assigned to this pixel. We constructed an error frame in exactly the same manner as T96, although the sampling errors are smaller for our data due to the smaller pixel scale. This procedure results in good error estimation, and the images of the weighted residuals from the best-fit models appeared structureless. Companion objects and foreground stars were effectively excluded from the fitting procedure at this point by setting the pixel values of the error frame to some very large value in regions where a contaminating source was visible, thus giving such pixels a negligibly small weight in determining the quality of fit.

In virtually all cases, the radio galaxy occupied only a fraction of the total frame. To speed up the computational process, we therefore used only a subregion of the image for our analysis. We selected a square region which just encompassed the isophote whose intensity was 0.01% of the sky brightness, the level at which flatfielding uncertainties are expected to become important. Typically such a region was about 30 arcsec on a side. The exception was 3C 84, whose proximity meant that such an isophote was larger than the entire IRCAM3 field of view, and so we used the full array. We deviate from the method of T96 in the optimization algorithm we use. Instead of the Polak-Ribiere minimization of T96, we used a simulated annealing algorithm (Press et al. 1996). We first tested the fitting procedure on simulated galaxies to which noise had been added. After confirming that it successfully recovered the input parameters of the model, the fitting procedure was performed ten times in $`J`$ and $`K`$ for each radio galaxy, with two different starting simplexes for each of the five different PSFs. The results of the fit which produced the lowest value of $`\chi ^2`$ were used in later analysis.

We estimate the uncertainties in our fitting parameters by considering the variations in the results from the ten separate fits. However, not all PSFs were able to produce good fits, by which we mean a value of $`\chi ^2`$ close to that of the best fit, and we rejected those which did not. As expected, only the nuclear luminosity depends strongly on the PSF. Typically (for galaxies with $`a/b\mathrm{}>1.1`$), the position angle is determined to 5° or better, while the uncertainty is as large as 10° for 3C 192 (with $`a/b1.03`$, the roundest galaxy in our sample). The axial ratio is always determined to better than 5%. Although the host galaxy luminosity is generally determined to $`5`$% r.m.s., the uncertainty in the effective radius is larger, ($`10`$%), and the peak surface brightness can be uncertain by as much as $`20`$% (with there being a strong anti-correlation between effective radius and peak surface brightness). The fits we performed in the $`J`$ and $`K`$ filters for each galaxy were completely independent. However, it is expected that some quantities, such as the axial ratio and the position angle of the major axis, should be very similar in the two bands. The difference between the values of these quantities derived for each filter can therefore also be taken as a measure of the uncertainty.

For galaxies with large nuclear-to-host ratios (e.g. 3C 234) or large angular effective radii (e.g. 3C 84), the magnitude of the nuclear source was well-determined. However, for other sources it was quite sensitive to the PSF used, and in many cases, the best-fit nuclear flux was very faint and it became necessary to estimate some limit, fainter than which a source would not be considered a true detection. We estimate the uncertainty on the nuclear flux (in units of detector counts) to be $`\sigma =\overline{e}\sqrt{n}`$, where $`\overline{e}`$ is the mean value of the error image in a 3-arcsec aperture and $`n`$ is the number of pixels in this aperture. When the flux of the nuclear source is less than $`5\sigma `$, we quote an upper limit. These limits vary slightly from source to source, depending on such things as the seeing, but are typically $`J18.5`$ and $`K17.5`$, or a few per cent of the integrated host galaxy luminosity. The size of the variations in the best fit value of the nuclear flux for different PSFs and starting simplexes was broadly consistent with this level of uncertainty. Contour plots of the data and our models can be found in Figs 110. The properties of the best-fitting models are listed in Table 3.

We make a comment regarding the $`K`$-band fit for 3C 98 listed in Table 3. This fit has $`\chi ^2/\nu =25226/19876`$, but the other nine fits all have $`\chi ^2<26000`$ yet have nuclear sources as bright as $`K=14.9`$. This is in marked contrast to the other model galaxies, where large variations in the best-fitting nuclear flux compared to the value in Table 3 were accompanied by large increases in $`\chi ^2`$, and were presumably due to a poorly-matched PSF. We shall return to this point in Section 4.2.

### 3.2 Thermal images

We were able to detect the radio galaxies at $`L^{}`$ in eight out of ten cases. We were less successful at $`M`$, and only detected three sources of the eight which we observed. For most of our detections, the flux is dominated by the transmitted quasar nucleus, although the stellar contribution is not negligible. The fact that we measure larger fluxes in the larger apertures shows that we have detected starlight from the host galaxies, but the signal-to-noise ratio per pixel is far too low to allow the two-dimensional modelling used for the shorter wavelength images. Indeed, for most galaxies the extended emission is not bright enough to even permit a meaningful measurement of the flux in a circumnuclear annulus. We must therefore estimate the stellar flux by extrapolating from our shorter wavelength images.

The stellar populations of early-type galaxies are dominated in the near-infrared by stars on the red giant branch. We therefore use the observed spectrum of the M2II–III star $`\beta `$ Peg (Strecker, Erickson & Witteborn 1979) as a model for the stellar populations of our galaxies. The colours of $`\beta `$ Peg are known to match those of early-type galaxies, and the star’s spectrum has been used to compute $`K`$-corrections for elliptical galaxies (see Longmore & Sharples 1982). We correct the observed 3-arcsec $`K`$ magnitudes for the presence of the nuclear source listed in Table 3 to determine the flux from stars only in this aperture, and use the $`\beta `$ Peg spectrum to estimate the stellar contribution to the flux at $`L^{}`$ and $`M`$. If there is an excess at greater than $`3\sigma `$ significance in the 3-arcsec aperture, we attribute it to the quasar nucleus. The results of this analysis are presented in Table 4.

Although 3C 98 and 3C 192 are both detected at $`L^{}`$, the emission we observe is purely stellar in origin, as both sources have 3-arcsec aperture $`KL^{}`$ colours consistent with the $`\beta `$ Peg spectrum, although the colour of 3C 98 is redder than $`\beta `$ Peg’s and only marginally consistent with it. However, Lilly et al. (1985a) showed that even in a much larger aperture (7.5 arcsec), 3C 98 is redder than a typical early-type galaxy, which rules out a compact red source as an explanation for the colour. We note that the $`L^{}M<0.17`$ limit is also consistent with starlight, but is far too blue for a quasar (corresponding to a power law index $`\alpha <2.5`$).

### 3.3 Reality of our detections

If we examine Fig. 11, which presents the 3-arcsec aperture colours of the ten radio galaxies from Table 2, the galaxies split naturally into two groups: those with $`KL^{}`$ colours consistent with late-type stellar populations, and those which are much redder. There is also a weak, yet highly significant, correlation between the two colours, as expected from a red nuclear component which becomes increasingly significant at $`K`$. The simple colour analysis of Section 3.2 will obviously infer a nuclear source for galaxies in the second group only, but it is important to note that these are also the only galaxies for which nuclear sources were detected in Section 3.1. All nuclear sources which are reliably detected at $`K`$ in our 2D analysis should be detectable in our $`L^{}`$ images due to their red colour; this is indeed true. Similarly, any real nuclear sources we detect at $`J`$ should also be seen at $`K`$ (and therefore at $`L^{}`$ too), and this is also the case. A similar argument does not apply to our $`M`$-band data, since the reduction in sensitivity over $`L^{}`$ ($`3`$ mag) is much greater than can be compensated for by the red colour of the quasar nucleus ($`L^{}M=0.76`$ for a power law $`\alpha =1.3`$; Neugebauer et al. 1987). We are therefore convinced that we have not made any spurious detection, and that we have not failed to detect any sources which are in reality brighter than our quoted limits.

## 4 Luminosity and extinction estimates

### 4.1 Galaxies with detected nuclei

If the standard interpretation of our nuclear sources as dust-obscured quasars is correct, they should have the colours of a quasar, modified by some amount of foreground reddening. We therefore perform linear regression, accounting for upper limits in the manner of Isobe, Feigelson & Nelson (1986), on the data of Section 3. This analysis produces values for the intrinsic luminosity and extinction of each nuclear source. We adopt our own parametrization of the near-infrared interstellar extinction law, obtained by fitting a second-order polynomial to the data of Rieke & Lebofsky (1985). This parametrization,

$$A_\lambda /A_V=0.243\lambda ^2+0.184\lambda ^10.022,$$

by virtue of ignoring the optical data, provides a rather better fit to the longest wavelengths than do those of Howarth (1983) and Cardelli, Clayton & Mathis (1989). The intrinsic quasar spectrum is assumed to be that of an $`\alpha =1.3`$ power law (Neugebauer et al. 1987). Table 5 lists the extinctions and intrinsic luminosities we derive for the obscured quasars in the five radio galaxies with detected nuclear sources. These data are presented graphically in Fig. 12. For 3C 223 and 3C 234, where the nucleus was detected at all four wavelengths, we also performed regression with the spectral index as an additional free parameter. In both cases the spectral index was found to be close to 1.3 and the results were not changed significantly.

### 4.2 Galaxies without detected nuclei

The five galaxies with detected nuclei will obviously preferentially include those objects with low nuclear extinction. If we wish to reach some conclusions about the amount of obscuration in a ‘typical’ radio galaxy, we must make estimates of the extinction in the remaining five members of the sample. This requires us to calculate the intrinsic near-infrared luminosity of the quasars in these objects, which we do in the following manner.

We first estimate the unobscured optical luminosity of the quasar using the \[O III$`\lambda `$5007 emission line. Simpson (1998a) has argued that this line is a good indicator of the intrinsic luminosity of radio galaxies and lobe-dominated quasars (such as those selected at low radio frequency). It has also been shown that the \[O III\] luminosities of lobe- and core-dominated quasars are the same for a given extended radio luminosity (Jackson et al. 1989; Jackson & Browne 1991; Corbin 1997), indicating that the line is emitted isotropically.

There is no Baldwin effect in the equivalent width of \[O III\] in lobe-dominated quasars (Jackson & Browne 1991). Only when core-dominated objects are considered does such an effect appear. This can be understood as the result of an increase in the continuum luminosity at small polar angles due to an anisotropic component. However, since the near-infrared emission is believed to be produced by dust heated by the optical–ultraviolet radiation and located close to the equatorial plane of the quasar, it is the luminosity at large viewing angles, such as is seen in lobe-dominated quasars, which is of interest to us.

By virtue of the above arguments, we can use the optical–infrared properties of lobe-dominated quasars as benchmarks for the properties of the quasars within our radio galaxies. The mean \[O III\] equivalent width for the $`R<1`$ quasars from Jackson & Browne (1991) is $`\mathrm{log}\mathrm{EW}_{5007}(\mathrm{\AA })=1.66\pm 0.32`$, or 46 Å with a factor of 2 scatter. This is larger that the equivalent width of 24 Å determined by Miller et al. (1992) for low redshift ($`z<0.5`$) quasars selected from the Palomar–Green Bright Quasar Sample (BQS; Schmidt & Green 1983), because optically selected samples like the BQS preferentially contain objects oriented close to the line of sight where the optical continuum is boosted. This is supported by the large values of the 5-GHz core-to-lobe ratio, $`R`$, displayed by the radio-loud quasars in the low redshift BQS (Miller, Rawlings & Saunders 1993).

Adopting 46 Å as the rest-frame equivalent width (with respect to the non-stellar continuum) of the \[O III$`\lambda `$5007 emission line, and assuming $`\alpha =0.4\pm 0.4`$ as representative of the continuum between 5007 Å and 1 $`\mu `$m (Neugebauer et al. 1987), we find that the last two columns of Table 5 should be related by

$$\mathrm{log}L_{1\mu \mathrm{m}}\mathrm{log}L_{5007}=12.62\pm 0.34,$$

which is indeed the case, and indicates the validity of our method.

Applying this technique to the five radio galaxies without detected nuclear sources, we derive lower limits to the nuclear extinction. The non-detections of compact sources in 3C 42 and 3C 153 do not rule out unobscured nuclei with any significance, since both these sources have faint emission line fluxes and therefore are expected to have quite faint nuclei. For the other three galaxies we determine the following $`3\sigma `$ limits: $`A_V>74^m`$ for 3C 98; $`A_V>37^m`$ for 3C 171; and $`A_V>45^m`$ for 3C 192. Note that these limits are derived from the non-detections at $`M`$-band (where our sensitivity to highly obscured nuclei is greatest) and are therefore independent of the $`J`$ and $`K`$-band fits. The high extinction towards the nucleus of 3C 98 therefore clearly precludes a $`K`$-band nucleus brighter than the limit we quote in Table 3.

## 5 The geometry of the obscuring material

The core dominance parameter, $`R`$ (also called the core-to-lobe ratio), is a widely-used orientation indicator (Orr & Browne 1982) and we are therefore capable of determining the nuclear extinction to our radio galaxies as a function of viewing angle. Simpson (1994a, 1996) proposed analysing a large sample of radio galaxies in this way to distinguish between different geometries for the obscuring material, which partly provided the motivation for the study described here. The value of $`R`$ is usually determined at 5 GHz, and the properties of our sources at this frequency are listed in Table 8 of the Appendix. We omit 3C 84 since it does not possess the characteristic FR II radio morphology. The values of the nuclear extinction derived earlier are plotted against $`\mathrm{log}R`$ in Fig. 13.

Using a generalized Kendall’s rank correlation statistic (Isobe et al. 1986), we can reject the hypothesis that $`A_V`$ is uncorrelated with $`R`$ at better than 95% confidence, even if 3C 234 is excluded from the analysis. The nuclear extinction therefore increases with viewing angle (i.e. as $`R`$ decreases) and suggests a flattened distribution for the obscuring material.

Ignoring density inhomogeneities, the obscuring material’s geometry is defined by $`A_V(\theta )`$, which we can derive from $`A_V(R)`$ if we can transform the observed core dominance parameter, $`R`$, to a viewing angle, $`\theta `$. These two quantities are related by

$$R=\frac{1}{2}R_\mathrm{T}(1\beta \mathrm{cos}\theta )^2+\frac{1}{2}R_\mathrm{T}(1+\beta \mathrm{cos}\theta )^2$$

(Orr & Browne 1982), where $`R_\mathrm{T}R(90\mathrm{°})`$ and $`\beta `$ is the velocity of the beamed core component relative to the speed of light. We adopt $`\beta =0.99`$ (Orr & Browne 1982), although its exact value is unimportant except at small values of $`\theta `$, which are not relevant to our study of radio galaxies.

To convert from $`R`$ to $`\theta `$, it is necessary to know the value of $`R_\mathrm{T}`$. Orr & Browne determined $`R_\mathrm{T}=0.024`$ from a sample of 3CR quasars, but they assumed that these objects were randomly oriented with respect to the line of sight. Since it is now believed that quasars are preferentially pointed towards us, Orr & Browne’s value of $`R_\mathrm{T}`$ will be an overestimate. We therefore redetermine $`R_\mathrm{T}`$ using both quasars and FR II radio galaxies from Laing et al. (1983) with $`z<0.43`$, although we exclude 3C 236 since it possesses a steep-spectrum radio core. As described in the Appendix, a good fit to the data is obtained with $`P(\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T})=𝖭(2.54,0.51)`$. This is consistent with the distribution derived by Simpson from the radio galaxies alone, and with estimates made from other samples of radio galaxies (e.g. Morganti et al. 1997).

Since we have only determined the a priori probability distribution for $`R_\mathrm{T}`$, and not its actual value for each radio galaxy, the observed core dominance parameter, $`R`$, is transformed into a probability distribution for the viewing angle, $`\theta `$. This transformation is described in the Appendix. We list the viewing angles for the radio galaxies in Table 6 and plot the cross-section through the torus in Fig. 14. It is immediately clear from this analysis that our inability to constrain the angle at which we are viewing each object is a major limitation to the effectiveness of this technique. Doppler boosting only produces a fourfold increase in the observed luminosity of the central component for $`\theta 50\mathrm{°}`$ (the viewing angle which is believed to separate quasars from radio galaxies at low redshift; L94, Simpson 1998a, and see also Table 6), barely enough to produce a signal over the factor of three scatter in $`R_\mathrm{T}`$. Since core dominance is believed to be the best available orientation indicator, it is clear that a much larger sample of radio galaxies will be needed to produce a useful torus map.

## 6 The $`K`$$`z`$ relation at low redshift

T96 claimed that the $`K`$ magnitudes of their radio galaxy hosts are 0.5 magnitudes fainter than the currently-assumed $`K`$$`z`$ relation, with the discrepancy being caused by the contribution from the quasar nucleus. They detected nuclear sources in all twelve of their galaxies, with a mean nuclear-to-host ratio $`L_{\mathrm{nuc}}/L_{\mathrm{host}}=0.80`$. Our study, on the other hand, failed to detect a quasar contribution in five of our objects, despite a similarly faint detection threshold. What effect does our result have on the $`K`$$`z`$ locus? We find the best least-squares fit to our data that can be obtained by applying an offset, $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$, to the $`K`$$`z`$ relation of Lilly et al. (1985b),

$$K=49.87\sqrt{1092.7259.74\mathrm{log}z}+\mathrm{\Delta }.$$

For the raw data, the best offset is effectively zero ($`\mathrm{\Delta }=0.01`$), as expected given the accuracy of our photometry and the unbiased nature of our sample. If we consider instead just the host magnitudes of Table 3, we find $`\mathrm{\Delta }=0.10`$, supporting a shift of the $`K`$$`z`$ relation to fainter magnitudes, but by a much smaller amount than that proposed by T96. In addition, this should probably be considered an upper limit to any shift required in the $`K`$$`z`$ relation, since sources from fainter radio surveys (which lie on same $`K`$$`z`$ relation due to the lack of a correlation between radio and host galaxy luminosity and low redshift) will have intrinsically fainter infrared nuclei, which should therefore contribute less flux. We display our results in Fig. 15, together with the host galaxy magnitudes derived by T96, which are clearly fainter on average. We investigate this discrepancy, first by addressing the difference in the detection rates for nuclear sources between our study and that of T96, and then by looking at the difference in host galaxy magnitudes. We assume that the nuclear sources we and T96 have detected are in fact active nuclei, based on their luminosities and broad-band SEDs (T96 make a similar claim). If instead they are merely stellar cusps (albeit ones with unusual colours), then there is obviously no reason to shift the $`K`$$`z`$ relation at all, since the actual form of the radial surface brightness profile is unimportant.

### 6.1 Detection efficiency

While our sample is effectively complete (only the random exclusion of 3C 123 prevents it from being truly so), the twelve objects studied by T96 were selected to match previously-constructed samples of radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars. One criterion was a match in radio spectral index, and T96’s sample therefore included a number of radio galaxies with spectra much flatter than the typical $`\alpha 0.7`$. There are five such flat-spectrum radio galaxies in the sample of T96, and they are therefore strongly overrepresented compared to the general low frequency selected radio galaxy population (there are none in our sample). Flat integrated radio spectra are produced when the flat spectrum radio core dominates over the steep spectrum lobes in the frequency region of interest, and consequently such sources have high values of the core-to-lobe parameter, $`R`$. Fig. 13 showed the strong anti-correlation between $`A_V`$ and $`R`$, which we interpreted in terms of the geometry of the obscuring material. We should therefore expect the nuclei of T96’s radio galaxies to be less heavily obscured than those of our sample members. This should result in brighter (and hence more readily detectable) nuclei and a tendency for their sources to lie below (i.e. be brighter than) the $`K`$$`z`$ relation. Indeed, an offset of 0.14 mag to brighter magnitudes needs to be applied to the relation of Lilly et al. (1995b) in order to obtain the best fit to their raw data.

The single-filter imaging of T96 does not permit the detailed method of extinction determination we employed in Section 4.1. Instead we estimate the average extinction for T96’s radio galaxy sample as a whole, by comparing the luminosities of the nuclei detected in the radio galaxies with those detected in the radio-loud quasars. Due to the way the samples were matched, the intrinsic luminosities of the active nuclei should be the same. Their Tables 4 and 5 indicate that the mean observed luminosity of the radio galaxy nuclei is 1.77 mag fainter than that of the radio-loud quasar nuclei. A similar result is found when the $`L_{\mathrm{nuc}}/L_{\mathrm{host}}`$ ratios are compared. For a typical redshift $`z0.2`$, this corresponds to $`A_V13^m`$. By contrast, our sample has an average extinction $`A_V>23^m`$.

Our estimate appears to be more in line with the admittedly very limited previous study in this field. Simpson (1994a) studied a small, but complete, sample of nearby radio galaxies from the MS4 survey (Burgess & Hunstead 1994) which included three Class A (Hine & Longair 1979) objects. A nuclear source was detected in one object, which further study revealed to suffer an extinction $`A_V=30\pm 4^m`$ (PKS 0634$``$205; Simpson et al. 1995). The lower limits determined for the other two Class A sources implied an average $`A_V>21^m`$. The powerful radio galaxy Cygnus A has also had its quasar nucleus detected in the near-infrared (Djorgovski et al. 1991), and the most recent extinction estimates indicate very heavy obscuration ($`A_V150^m`$; Simpson 1994a, Ward 1996).

We also note that two of T96’s radio galaxies, 3C 219 (L94; Hill et al. 1996) and 3C 287.1 (Eracleous & Halpern 1994) clearly show broad H$`\alpha `$ in their optical spectra. It is therefore to be expected that these two objects possess bright nuclear sources in the near-infrared. We conclude that T96’s sample is predisposed towards sources with relatively low nuclear obscuration, and believe that our sample, being effectively complete and free from selection biases, is more representative of the radio galaxy population at large.

### 6.2 Host galaxy magnitudes

Even though T96’s sample of radio galaxies appears to be biased towards objects with low nuclear obscuration, the host galaxies should not be affected. Our multi-wavelength images allow us to compute robust upper limits to the non-stellar flux at $`K`$ (and hence an upper limit to the shift of the $`K`$$`z`$ relation required) in a relatively simple manner which does not involve a “black box” routine such as the two-dimensional fitting procedure. First, we assume that all the $`L^{}`$ flux in a 3-arcsec aperture arises from the nucleus – since there must be some starlight present, this will overestimate the true nuclear flux. In the three instances where no detection was made at $`L^{}`$, we use the $`3\sigma `$ upper limit (again, overestimating the true flux). We then determine an upper limit to the $`K`$-band flux by assuming that the spectrum is an unreddened $`\alpha =1.3`$ power law. Although there will be variations in the near-infrared spectral indices of the objects in our sample, these should average out among the ten galaxies. We compute the faintest possible host galaxy $`K`$-band magnitude by subtracting this nuclear flux from the observed 12-arcsec aperture flux. When this analysis is applied to 3C 234, the maximum nuclear strength we derive exceeds the observed 12-arcsec magnitude, which indicates the conservative nature of our approach. Obviously, we cannot merely exclude 3C 234 from the analysis, since it is the most strongly contaminated source in our sample, so we assume the host has $`K=14.2`$, as determined by our model-fitting (T96 obtain a very similar result). Even with these gross overestimates of the nuclear fluxes (and hence underestimates of the host galaxy brightnesses), the offset from the $`K`$$`z`$ relation is only $`\mathrm{\Delta }=0.35`$, somewhat less than the 0.5 mag found by T96. More realistic estimates, such as assuming that the nucleus suffers at least 5 mag of extinction (just enough to obscure broad H$`\alpha `$), imply $`\mathrm{\Delta }<0.27`$. The $`K`$$`z`$ relation followed by the host galaxies in our sample cannot therefore be the same as that found by T96 for the galaxies in their sample, unless the nuclei of our radio galaxies have intrinsic near-infrared spectral indices of $`\alpha <0.2`$. This is obviously incompatible with unification models which claim that the nuclei of radio galaxies are identical to those of quasars.

How then did T96 find such a large shift in the $`K`$$`z`$ relation? We first rule out the possibility that the galaxies in T96’s sample are genuinely fainter than ours. Although T96’s sample is generally of lower radio luminosity than ours, Hill & Lilly (1991) have shown that there is no difference in the optical magnitudes of radio galaxies over three orders of magnitude in radio luminosity, and the optical–infrared colours of the two samples cannot differ by half a magnitude. In addition, Eales et al. (1997) have shown that the $`K`$ magnitudes of radio galaxies from the 3C and 6C samples (6C is selected at a $`5`$ times fainter flux level) are similar at low redshift. Finally, if we exclude those radio galaxies from T96’s sample which do not meet the 3CRR flux limit, their result is virtually unchanged. Similarly, if we consider only FR II galaxies from T96, or only those galaxies with a steep radio spectrum, we find no significant change to their result.

We consider two likely explanations for the different $`K`$$`z`$ relations inferred. We first consider what effect the small field of view ($`35\mathrm{}`$) of IRCAM1 might have had on T96’s modelling. While the much larger field of view of IRCAM3 provides a significant amount of blank sky in our images and therefore allows an accurate determination of the background level, this was not the case with IRCAM1. As T96 explain, they may have overestimated the sky level in their images, and we discuss here why this can lead to an underestimation of the host galaxy brightness. T96’s radio galaxies have a typical effective radius of a few arcseconds. At the edge of their field of view, a de Vaucouleurs profile does not have a negligible surface brightness, but rather will have $`\mu 23`$ mag arcsec-2 (for a typical $`\mu _{1/2}20.5`$ and $`r_\mathrm{e}6\mathrm{}`$). We have investigated the effects of this on modified $`K`$-band images of some of our galaxies, by subtracting a constant value from all the pixels to simulate overestimation of the sky level.

We find that for small deviations from the true value, the effective radius of the best-fitting model does not change significantly, but the flux normalization of the stellar component is decreased. This normalization is primarily determined at $`rr_\mathrm{e}`$, since the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower at larger radii, while the sampling errors can be large near the centre, and the flux of the nuclear source can be varied to compensate for deficiencies in the quality of the fit. For a typical galaxy with an error in background determination of the level indicated above, we find an increase of $`20`$–40% increase in the flux attributed to the nucleus. The value of the $`\chi ^2`$ statistic also increases, and it is therefore worth considering whether more accurate results might be obtained if the sky level is included as an extra fitting parameter in the modelling process.

There is also evidence that T96 may have systematically overestimated the scale lengths of their galaxies. Optical imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope (Dunlop et al. 2000) produced a median scale length of 12 kpc, compared to 20 kpc determined by T96. The effect of overestimating the $`r_\mathrm{e}`$ is also to lower the contribution from the host galaxy in the central regions, and therefore to overestimate the contribution from a nuclear point source. A systematic error of $`+70`$% in the scale lengths determined by T96 would serve to produce central surface brightnesses $`1`$ mag too faint (again, the fitting procedure will tend to match the model to the data at $`rr_\mathrm{e}`$) and the model flux within a 12″ aperture will be underestimated by $`0.4`$–0.7 mag, depending on the size of the galaxy. Since this is very much in line with the shift determined by T96, it would seem to be a likely explanation for their result.

We can make a direct comparison between our results and those of T96 for the two objects which are common to both samples. We present the results of our $`K`$-band fits and those of T96 in Table 7. The agreement for 3C 234 is excellent, but it is less good for 3C 79. Optical imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope (Dunlop et al. 2000) produces an effective radius $`r_\mathrm{e}=9.4`$ kpc, somewhere between the values we determine from our $`J`$ and $`K`$-band images, and clearly indicating that T96 overestimated the true value. A visual inspection of their Fig. A2 appears to indicate that the larger effective radius is influenced by the companion source approximately 6″ north of the radio galaxy. Alternatively, there may have been additional scattered light within IRCAM1 which would artificially enhance the surface brightness at large radial distances and hence cause the scale length to be incorrectly overdetermined, although the good agreement for 3C 234 (where the bright nuclear point source would be expected to produce a large effect) seems to argue against this explanation.

It is quite possible that different effects are at work for different objects. Since we can think of no likely effect which would serve to overestimate the host galaxy brightnesses, we can expect a significant systematic error in the results of T96, even if we cannot be certain what the dominant cause of this error might be.

## 7 Summary

We have analysed near-infrared JKLM images of an effectively complete sample of ten 3CRR radio galaxies with strong emission lines, and have separated them into their nuclear and stellar components. We find that the colours of the nuclear components are well-modelled by a reddened power-law, and the derived unobscured luminosities are in excellent agreement with the values predicted from the emission-line luminosities.

We find evidence that the nuclear extinction increases with viewing angle, suggesting a flattened distribution for the obscuring material. The contributions from the nuclear components make the model host galaxy magnitudes fainter than the observed $`K`$ magnitudes, and support a shift of the $`K`$$`z`$ relation to fainter magnitudes by 0.1 mag for low-redshift 3CRR galaxies. Using our observed $`L^{}`$ magnitudes and the assumption that the nuclear sources in radio galaxies are intrinsically no bluer than quasar nuclei, we can rule out a shift of more than 0.3 mag, independent of our two-dimensional model-fitting procedure.

We have investigated possible causes of the different results obtained by Taylor et al. (1996) and ourselves. While we believe that T96’s sample is biased towards sources with low nuclear obscuration and therefore a relatively large nuclear fraction, this should not affect their host galaxy magnitudes. We believe that their fainter magnitudes are caused by overestimating the sky level in their images and/or the effective radii of their galaxies. We conclude that the magnitudes of low-redshift radio galaxy hosts have been systematically overestimated by no more than about 0.1 mag as a result of non-stellar radiation from the obscured quasar nuclei, and that conclusions drawn so far concerning the cosmic evolution of radio galaxies (e.g. Lilly & Longair 1984; Eales & Rawlings 1996) are therefore reliable.

## Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Jo McAllister for useful discussions regarding the accuracy of the 2-D fitting results, and to the referee, Jim Dunlop, for suggesting improvements to the manuscript. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of the U. K. Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, and we thank the UKIRT staff for their help. We also thank Mike Goad for providing a coded version of the simulated annealing minimization routine. This work has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

## Appendix A Core dominance and viewing angle

This Appendix describes how we have used the observed core dominance parameter of a radio galaxy to infer the viewing angle between its radio axis and our line of sight. To do this, we have compiled in Table 8 radio data for all FR II sources with $`z<0.43`$ in Laing et al. (1983). In the interests of keeping a homogeneous dataset, we use the 5-GHz flux measurements and spectral indices between 2.7 and 5 GHz from Pauliny-Toth & Kellerman (1968). Although these are not necessarily the most accurate data available, this is not a concern as our assumption of a common spectral index $`\alpha =0`$ for the core components (which may be somewhat variable) will introduce some errors in our determination of the rest-frame 5-GHz core dominance parameter. For the four non-3C sources which were not observed by Pauliny-Toth & Kellerman, we have opted to use the data from Herbig & Readhead (1992). These authors perform fits to the radio spectra of sources, which should also help to homogenize the data they compile from the literature. Herbig & Readhead list luminosities and spectral indices at a rest-frame frequency of 2.5 GHz, which we use to compute a rest-frame 5-GHz flux. However, for consistency in Table 8, we list synthetic observed-frame 5-GHz fluxes determined from their fits. Note that although we have included Hine & Longair (1979) Class B radio galaxies in this sample to improve the statistics (the published spectroscopy of the late-RA sources is too poor to make completely accurate classifications and we would therefore have to exclude all of them), their $`R`$ distribution is not significantly different from that of the Class A objects (a result also found by Morganti et al. 1997).

The first step in our procedure is to determine the distribution of the transverse core dominance parameter, $`R_\mathrm{T}`$. We construct synthetic samples of 5000 radio sources which are randomly oriented with respect to the line of sight, and have the logarithms of their transverse core dominance parameters, $`\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T}`$, drawn from a Normal distribution, whose mean and standard deviation we vary to determine the best fit to the observed data. We quantify the goodness-of-fit using the Peto-Prentice generalized Wilcoxon test (Latta 1981; Feigelson & Nelson 1985), as employed in the asurv package within iraf/stsdas. Of the various tests Feigelson & Nelson list to compare two samples of censored data, this is believed to be the least affected by differences in sample size and censoring patterns, which is important here since our synthetic sample is much larger than the real dataset and suffers no censoring. The best fit we find is when the transverse core dominance parameter is drawn from the distribution $`𝖭(2.54,0.51)`$, with the probability that the two distributions are drawn from the same population being 99.9%. Both versions of the Gehan test (also available in asurv) produce the same result, so it is not sensitive to the specific test used. Note that the underlying distribution, $`\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T}𝖭(2.43,0.50)`$, reported by Simpson (1998b) was computed using a few older core flux measurements (generally upper limits which have been superseded by more sensitive limits or faint detections), and with a different goodness-of-fit statistic. However, there is only a slight difference between the two distributions, which does not affect the results in that paper.

Having derived a distribution function for $`\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T}`$, it becomes possible to infer the probability distribution of viewing angles, $`P(\theta |R)`$. Bayes’ Theorem informs us that

$$P(\theta |R)P(R|\theta )P(\theta ).$$

Since $`R`$ and $`\theta `$ are directly related by $`R_\mathrm{T}`$, we can write the first term on the right hand side as an a priori probability that $`R_\mathrm{T}`$ lies in the appropriate range to produce the observed value of $`R`$ given that the viewing angle lies in the interval between $`\theta `$ and $`\theta +\delta \theta `$. If we define $`x\beta \mathrm{cos}\theta `$, it is trivial to show that $`R/R_\mathrm{T}=(1+x^2)(1x^2)^2`$. Hence,

$$P(R|\theta )=P(\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T}=\mathrm{log}R\frac{(1x^2)^2}{1+x^2})\frac{\mathrm{d}\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T}}{\mathrm{d}\theta },$$

and, straightforwardly,

$$\frac{\mathrm{d}(\mathrm{log}R_\mathrm{T})}{\mathrm{d}\theta }=\frac{\beta \mathrm{sin}\theta }{\mathrm{ln}10}\frac{2x(3+x^2)}{1x^4}.$$

Finally, we need to consider the a priori distribution of viewing angles, $`P(\theta )`$. A natural choice, motivated by the radio galaxy–quasar unification scenarios, would be to assume that $`P(\theta )\mathrm{sin}\theta `$ for angles greater than some critical angle, $`\theta _\mathrm{c}`$, and zero for angles less than this. In practice, the actual choice of $`\theta _\mathrm{c}`$ has little effect on the results, except for sources with bright radio cores, such as 3C 234, when the probability distribution of angles piles up at the critical angle. Rather than adopt an ad hoc formulation to create a smooth transition at $`\theta \theta _\mathrm{c}`$ and prevent this unrealistic behaviour, we choose $`\theta _\mathrm{c}=0`$. The behaviour of $`\theta (R)`$ under these assumptions is shown graphically in Fig. 16.


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# Abnormal radioactive decays out of long-lived super- and hyper-deformed isomeric states11footnote 1Contribution presented at the NS2000 conference, East Lansing, Michigan, August 15 - 19, 2000.(Version 1 is a shorter write-up of a previous talk presented in the ENS 2000 conference, Debrecen, Hungary, May 15 - 20, 2000).

## 1 INTRODUCTION

In the past several observations were made which could not be understood under the given knowledge of nuclear physics. First , evidence for the production, via secondary reactions in CERN W targets, of a long-lived superheavy isotope ∼272112 has been obtained. Fission fragments were observed in Hg sources chemically separated from the W targets, and the measured masses undergoing fission (like 308, 315 and 318) were consistently interpreted  as due to 5 different common molecules (like -Cl, -N3 and -NO2) of a superheavy isotope with Z=112 (Eka-Hg), N$``$160. There was however no understanding of the long deduced half-life of several weeks and of the large deduced fusion cross section of several mb . In a study of actinide fractions from the same W target, long-lived isomeric states were found in the neutron-deficient 236Am and 236Bk nuclei with half-lives of 0.6 y and $``$30 d, respectively . Their character was not clear, being far from closed shell nuclei, where high spin isomers are known, and living much longer than the known fission isomers. In addition, several unidentified $`\alpha `$-particle groups were found in some actinide sources. Thus, 5.14 MeV (t1/2 = 3.8$`\pm `$1 y), 5.27 MeV (t1/2 = 625$`\pm `$84 d) and 5.53 MeV (t1/2 = 26$`\pm `$7 d) groups were respectively found in the Bk, Es and Lr-No sources  (See fig. 1). Again, one could not understand their relatively low energies (e.g., 5.53 MeV in Lr-No as compared to g.s. to g.s. transitions around 8 MeV, which have about 13 orders of magnitude larger penetrability factors), and very short half-lives (105 \- 107 shorter than predicted from the systematics ). The deduced evaporation-residue cross sections , in the mb region, are also several orders larger than expected.

A number of unexplained phenomena have also been observed in nature. Po halos, produced by $`\alpha `$-particles from 210Po (t1/2 = 138.4 d), 214Po (t1/2 = 164 $`\mu `$s) and 218Po (t1/2 = 3.0 m), have been seen in mica . Hulubei and Cauchois  saw induced Po X-rays in the mineral petzite (Ag3AuTe2). In both cases the precursors Th and U were not present.

Evidence for unidentified $`\alpha `$-particles around 4.5 MeV have been seen in several minerals . According to the chemistry used they were thought  to be due to Eka-Os (element 108). It was also suggested  that 247Cm may be a descendant of this superheavy element. These results were not substantially convincing. The predicted  half-life for such low energy $`\alpha `$-particles in Z = 108 is around 1016 y, implying the existence of an impossibly large amount of material of about 0.1 g in the studied samples.

In the following a consistent possible interpretation for these phenomena will be given, based on the recently discovered  long-lived high-spin super- and hyper-deformed isomeric states.

## 2 SUPER- AND HYPER-DEFORMED ISOMERIC STATES
IN THE 16O + 197Au AND 28Si + 181Ta REACTIONS

The 16O + 197Au and 28Si + 181Ta reactions have been studied using beams from the Pelletron accelerator in Rehovot, catcher foil technique and long-period off-line measurements in Jerusalem. In the first reaction at ELab = 80 MeV , long-lived high-spin super-deformed isomeric states have been found. They exhibited themselves by decaying with relatively low energy (5.2 MeV) and very enhanced (t1/2 $``$ 90 m, 3x105 enhancement) $`\alpha `$-particles in coincidence with $`\gamma `$-rays of a superdeformed band (SDB), and also by long-lived proton decays with half-lives of about 6 and 70 h. In the 28Si + 181Ta reaction at ELab = 125 MeV , about 10% below the Coulomb barrier, a high energy (7.8 - 8.6 MeV) and long-lived (40 d $``$ t1/2 $``$ 2.1 y) $`\alpha `$-particle group was found in coincidence with SDB $`\gamma `$-rays (fig. 2), and consistently interpreted as due to production of a high-spin long-lived hyper-deformed isomeric state in 195Hg, which decays by a factor of 1013 retarded $`\alpha `$-particles to SDB states in 191Pt. (195Hg may be produced via 1p1n evaporation reaction and 3 consecutive $`\alpha `$-decays. The probability that almost all the measured $`\gamma `$-ray energies will accidentally fit the predicted energies of a SDB transitions is 4.1x10-8. (The background is zero). The high energy $`\gamma `$-rays are most probably sum events rather than single photo-peak events. Therefore the number of Compton events is relatively low ).

## 3 SUPER- AND HYPER-DEFORMED ISOMERIC STATES
IN THE ACTINIDES

Based on these results and on the predicted  excitation energies of the second and third minima in various actinide nuclei, the unidentified $`\alpha `$-particle groups from the actinide fractions (Section 1) can be consistently interpreted , both from the low energy and the enhanced lifetime points of view, as due to IImin $``$ IImin or IIImin $``$ IIImin transitions (see table 1). The 5.14 MeV group in Bk grew at the beginning (fig. 1, left, center). It therefore may be due to a IImin $``$ IImin transition from 238Am or a IIImin $``$ IIImin transition from 238Cm, which were produced from 238Bk by the EC/$`\beta `$+ process . (Fig. 6 of ref.  indicates that the first case, where a rather deep second minimum is predicted , is more likely). The 5.27 and 5.53 MeV groups in the Es and Lr-No sources are consistent with IIImin $``$ IIImin transitions from 247Es and 252No, respectively.

a Deduced from ref. .

b Calculated according to formulas given in refs. . $`\beta `$2 and $`\beta `$4 values were deduced from the $`ϵ`$2 and $`ϵ`$4 values given in ref.  using fig. 2 from W. Nazarewicz and I. Ragnarsson, Handbook of Nuclear Properties. eds. D. Poenaru and W. Greiner (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996) p. 80. The value of $`\beta `$3 was taken equal to $`ϵ`$3.

c Since the intensity of the 5.14 MeV group in Bk grew at the beginning (fig. 1, left, center), it may be due to a decay of an isotope of Cm or Am which is produced from Bk by the EC/$`\beta ^+`$ process. (Similarly to the 236Bk and 236Am cases which decay to 236Pu ).

a) Imin$``$Imin. Normal $`\alpha `$’s.

b) IImin$``$Imin. Retarded $`\alpha `$’s:

190Ir$``$186Re (Ref. ).

c) IImin$``$IImin. Enhanced $`\alpha `$’s:

210Fr$``$206At (Ref. ).

$``$238Am$``$234Np (Ref. ).

d) IIImin$``$IImin. Retarded $`\alpha `$’s:

195Hg$``$191Pt (Ref. ).

e) IIImin$``$IIImin. Enhanced $`\alpha `$’s:

∼247Es$``$243Bk (Ref. ).

$``$252No$``$248Fm (Ref. ).

f) IImin$``$Imin. Retarded protons:

198Tl$``$197Hg(?) (Ref. ).

205Fr$``$204Rn(?) (Ref. ).

Figure 3. Summary of abnormal particle decays seen in various experiments.

The long-lived isomeric states in the 236Am and 236Bk nuclei can be interpreted as due to the existence of super- or hyper-deformed isomers in these nuclei which decay by the EC or $`\beta ^+`$ processes eventually to the normal states in 236Pu .

Fig. 3 summarizes the various new and abnormal particle decays which were observed in different experiments. It should be mentioned that a high-spin long-lived super-deformed isomeric state has been predicted back in 1969 .

## 4 THE LONG-LIVED SUPERHEAVY ELEMENT WITH Z = 112

The experiments  concerning element 112 can now be understood as due to its production in a long-lived super- or hyper-deformed isomeric state, rather than in the ground state. The large deduced fusion cross section is due to two effects. a) Very little extra-push energy is needed in order to produce the compound nucleus in such a state. b) The fusion probability in the secondary reactions, where the projectile is itself a deformed fragment produced just within 2x10-14 s before interacting with another W nucleus in the target, is much larger as compared to fusion with a normal projectile, due to the much reduced Coulomb repulsion .

## 5 ISOMERIC STATES AND SUPERHEAVY ELEMENTS IN NATURE?

The discovered high spin super- and hyper-deformed isomeric states may be the source for the Po halos  (either in the 210Po, 214Po and 218Po isotopes which decay by $`\gamma `$’s to the ground states, or in the appropriate Pb or Bi nuclides which decay by $`\beta `$- to the corresponding Po isotopes), and also for the observed Po induced X-rays in petzite .

Figure 4. Predictions , and extrapolations from these predictions, of the IIImin $``$ IIImin $`\alpha `$-particle energies. The black dots are the predictions for various isotopes of Z=96 and Z=100. The straight lines are extrapolations from these predictions for Z=108 and Z=112. The open triangle shows the position of the 6.73 MeV $`\alpha `$-particles seen with the Hg sources from the CERN W targets . The open circle shows the position of 4.5 MeV $`\alpha `$-particles in Z=108.

The low energy $`\alpha `$-particles around 4.5 MeV  may consistently be interpreted as due to a very enhanced IIImin $``$ IIImin transition in Z$``$108 and A$``$271. The predicted  half-life in this case is around 109 y, which implies an amount of material of about 10 ng. This resolves the main difficulty in understanding these data where an impossible amount of 0.1 g was deduced assuming a normal $`\alpha `$-transition (see the Introduction). In addition, an extrapolation of the predictions  of $`\alpha `$-energies of IIImin $``$ IIImin transitions (see fig. 4), shows that for Z=108, E$`\alpha `$ of about 4.5 MeV corresponds to N$``$162. This is consistent with the suggestion  that 247Cm may be a descendent of the superheavy element with Z=108 which decays by the 4.5 MeV $`\alpha `$-particles, since 247Cm can be obtained from $`{}_{108}{}^{}{}_{}{}^{271}`$Hs163 by successive 6 $`\alpha `$-decays. It should however be mentioned that in principle the above 4.5 MeV $`\alpha `$-particles may also be due to a very retarded IImin $``$ Imin or IIImin $``$ IImin transition in the region of Os itself. (For normal 4.5 MeV $`\alpha `$-particles in Os the expected  half-life is about 1 y. Such short-lived nuclide can not exist in nature).

We would like to thank J. L. Weil for taking part in the measurements with the actinide sources, A. Pape for bringing the work of ref.  to our attention and N. Zeldes for very valuable discussions.


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# Meron Pairs and Fermion Zero Modes

\[

## Abstract

Merons, conjectured as a semiclassical mechanism for color confinement in QCD, have been described analytically by either infinite action configurations or an Ansatz with discontinuous action. We construct a smooth, finite action, stationary lattice solution corresponding to a meron pair. We also derive an analytical solution for the zero mode of the meron pair Ansatz, show that it has the qualitative behavior of the exact zero mode of the lattice solution, and propose the use of zero modes to identify meron gauge field configurations in stochastic evaluations of the lattice QCD path integral.

\]

Chiral symmetry breaking and confinement of color charge, the two essential features of low-energy QCD, cannot be understood perturbatively in the coupling constant. Two complementary nonperturbative approaches are analytical approximation using semiclassical analysis of the QCD path integral (analogous to the WKB approximation in quantum mechanics) and numerical solution using lattice gauge theory. Combining physical understanding from the semiclassical approximation with systematic rigor of the lattice has provided valuable insight into hadron structure  and our goal is to use this combined approach to study confinement.

Most semiclassical treatments of QCD have focused on instantons, leading to a qualitative, and in some cases even quantitative, understanding of chiral symmetry breaking and the structure of the QCD vacuum . However, simple configurations of instantons, such as a dilute gas  or a random superposition , do not confine color charges. Of alternative semiclassical mechanisms proposed for confinement, including merons , monopoles , and center vortices , we focus on merons, which are solutions to the classical Yang-Mills field equations with one-half unit of localized topological charge. They are the (3+1)-dimensional nonabelian extension of the ’t Hooft–Polyakov monopole configuration, which has been shown to lead to confinement in 2+1 dimensions . Ultimately, we seek to understand if merons generate area and perimeter laws characterizing the behavior of confined and screened color sources.

A purely analytic study of merons has proven intractable for several reasons. Unlike instantons, no exact solution exists for more than two merons , gauge fields for isolated merons fall off too slowly ($`A1/x`$) to superpose them, and the field strength is singular. A patched Ansatz configuration that removes the singularities  does not satisfy the classical Yang-Mills equations, preventing even calculation of gaussian fluctuations around a meron pair .

This letter lays the groundwork for using lattice techniques to investigate the presence and role of merons in QCD. We construct a smooth, finite action configuration corresponding to a meron pair, which with its associated quantum fluctuations, should be present in Monte Carlo lattice QCD calculations. Similar work with instantons has shown fermionic zero modes are a powerful tool for identifying topological objects on the lattice. Therefore, we also analytically derive the zero mode of the continuum meron pair Ansatz and compare with exact numerical results. For simplicity, we restrict our discussion to SU(2) color without loss of generality.

Two known solutions to the classical Yang-Mills equations in four Euclidean dimensions are instantons and merons. Both have topological charge, can be interpreted as tunneling solutions, and can be written in the general form (for the covariant derivative $`D_\mu =_\mu iA_\mu ^a\sigma ^a/2`$ and ’t Hooft symbol $`\eta _{a\mu \nu }`$)

$$A_\mu ^a(x)=\eta _{a\mu \nu }_\nu \mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Pi }(x^2),$$
(1)
with $`\mathrm{\Pi }(x^2)=1/(x^2+\rho ^2)`$ for an instanton and $`\mathrm{\Pi }(x^2)=1/\sqrt{x^2}`$ for a meron.

Conformal symmetry of the classical Yang-Mills action, in particular under inversion $`x_\mu x_\mu /x^2`$, shows that in addition to a meron at the origin, there is a second meron at infinity. These two merons can be mapped to arbitrary positions, which we define to be the origin and $`d_\mu `$. After a gauge transformation, the gauge field for the two merons takes the simple form

$$A_\mu ^a(x)=\eta _{a\mu \nu }\left[\frac{x^\nu }{x^2}+\frac{(xd)^\nu }{(xd)^2}\right].$$
(2)
Similar to instantons , a meron pair can be expressed in singular gauge by performing a large gauge transformation about the mid-point of the pair, resulting in a gauge field that falls off faster at large distances ($`Ax^3`$). A careful treatment of the singularities shows that the topological charge density is

$$Q(x)\frac{\text{Tr}}{16\pi ^2}\left(F_{\mu \nu }\stackrel{~}{F}^{\mu \nu }\right)=\frac{1}{2}\delta ^4(x)+\frac{1}{2}\delta ^4(xd),$$
(3)
yielding total topological charge $`Q=1`$, just like the instanton.

The gauge field Eq. (2) has infinite action density at the singularities $`x_\mu =\{0,d_\mu \}`$. Hence, a finite action Ansatz has been suggested

$$A_\mu ^a(x)=\eta _{a\mu \nu }x^\nu \{\begin{array}{ccc}\frac{2}{x^2+r^2},& \sqrt{x^2}<r,\hfill & \\ \frac{1}{x^2},& r<\sqrt{x^2}<R,\hfill & \\ \frac{2}{x^2+R^2},& R<\sqrt{x^2}.\hfill & \end{array}$$
(4)
Here, the singular meron fields for $`\sqrt{x^2}<r`$ and $`\sqrt{x^2}>R`$ are replaced by instanton caps, each containing topological charge $`\frac{1}{2}`$ to agree with Eq. (3). The radii $`r`$ and $`R`$ are arbitrary and we will refer to the three separate regions defined in Eq. (4) as regions I, II, and III, respectively. The action for this configuration is (with $`S_0=8\pi ^2/g^2`$)

$$S=S_0\left(1+\frac{3}{8}\mathrm{ln}\frac{R}{r}\right),$$
(5)
which shows the divergence in the $`r0`$ or $`R\mathrm{}`$ limit. Although this patching of instanton caps is continuous, the derivatives are not, and so the equations of motion are violated at the boundaries of the regions in Eq. (4).

Applying the same transformations used to attain Eq. (2) to the instanton cap solution, regions I and III become four-dimensional spheres each containing half an instanton . The geometry of the instanton caps is shown in Fig. 1 for the symmetric choice of displacement $`d=\sqrt{Rr}`$ along the $`z`$-direction. Note that the action for the complicated geometry of Fig. 1 is still given by Eq. (5). We will concentrate on this case below, and generalization to a different $`d`$ is straightforward.

The original positions of the two merons $`x_\mu =\{0,d_\mu \}`$ are not the centers of the spheres, nor are they the positions of maximum action density, which occurs within the spheres with $`S_{\mathrm{max}}=(48/g^2)(R+r)^4/d^8`$ at

$$\left(M_\mathrm{I}\right)_\mu =\frac{r^2}{r^2+d^2}d_\mu ,\left(M_{\mathrm{III}}\right)_\mu =\frac{R^2}{R^2+d^2}d_\mu .$$
(6)
However, in the limit $`r0`$ and $`R\mathrm{}`$ holding $`d`$ fixed, the spheres will shrink around the original points reducing to the bare meron pair in Eq. (2). In the opposite limit $`Rr`$, the radii of the spheres increase to infinity, leaving an instanton of size $`\rho =d`$.

An instanton can therefore be interpreted as consisting of a meron pair. This complements the fact that instantons and antiinstantons have dipole interactions between each other. If there exists a regime in QCD where meron entropy contributes more to the free energy than the logarithmic potential between pairs, like the Kosterlitz–Thouless phase transition, instantons could break apart into meron pairs . The intrinsic size of the instanton caps would then be determined by the instanton scale $`\rho `$.

The Atiyah-Singer index theorem states that a fermion in the presence of a gauge field with topological charge $`Q`$, described by the equation

$$/D\psi =\lambda \psi ,\text{with}\psi =\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\psi _R}{\psi _L}\right),$$
(7)
has $`n_R`$ right-handed and $`n_L`$ left-handed zero modes (defined by $`\lambda =0`$) such that $`Q=n_Ln_R`$. This can sometimes be strengthened by a vanishing theorem . Applying $`/`$$`D`$ twice to $`\psi `$ decouples the right- and left-hand components, and focusing on the equation for $`\psi _R`$, gives

$$\left(D^2+\frac{1}{2}\overline{\eta }_{a\mu \nu }\sigma ^aF^{\mu \nu }\right)\psi _R=0,$$
(8)
where $`\sigma ^a`$ acts on the spin indices of $`\psi _R`$ and $`F^{\mu \nu }`$ acts on the color indices. For a self-dual gauge field (like an instanton), the second term in Eq. (8) is zero; and since $`D^2`$ is a negative definite operator, there are no normalizable right-handed zero modes, implying $`Q=n_L`$. Although the meron pair is not self-dual, the second term can be shown to be negative definite as well, leading to the same conclusion.

The finite action $`Q=1`$ gauge field Eq. (1) has a fermion zero mode given by

$$\psi =\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{0}{\varphi }\right),\varphi _\alpha ^a=𝒩\mathrm{\Pi }^{3/2}\epsilon _\alpha ^a,$$
(9)
with normalization $`𝒩`$ and $`\epsilon =i\sigma _2`$ coupling the spin index $`\alpha `$ to the color index $`a`$ (both of which can be either 1 or 2) in a singlet configuration. The gauge field for the meron pair with instanton caps corresponds to

$$\mathrm{\Pi }(x)=\{\begin{array}{cc}\frac{2\xi _id^2}{x^2+\xi _i^2(xd)^2},\hfill & \text{for regions }i=\text{ I, III,}\hfill \\ \frac{d^2}{\sqrt{x^2(xd)^2}},\hfill & \text{region II,}\hfill \end{array}$$
(10)
with $`\xi _\mathrm{I}=r/d`$ and $`\xi _{\mathrm{III}}=R/d`$. The normalized solution to the zero mode is then Eq. (9) with $`𝒩^1=2\pi d^2\left[2\sqrt{r/R}\right]^{1/2}.`$ Note that the unregulated meron pair ($`r0`$, $`R\mathrm{}`$) has a normalizable zero mode itself

$$\varphi _\alpha ^a(x)=\frac{d\epsilon _\alpha ^a}{2\sqrt{2}\pi \left(x^2(xd)^2\right)^{3/4}}.$$
(11)
The gauge-invariant zero mode density $`\psi ^{}\psi (x)`$ has a bridge between two merons that falls off like $`x^3`$ in contrast to the $`x^6`$ fall-off in all other directions. This behavior can be used to identify merons when analyzing their zero modes on the lattice, similar to what was done for instantons in Ref. .

As mentioned above, the patching of instanton caps to obtain an explicit analytic solution has unavoidable and unphysical discontinuities in the action density. Therefore, in order to study this solution further, we put the gauge field on a space-time lattice of spacing $`a`$ in a box of size $`L_0\times L_1\times L_2\times L_3`$. The gauge-field degrees of freedom are replaced by the usual parallel transport link variable, $`U_\mu (x)=\mathrm{P}\mathrm{exp}\left[i_x^{x+a\widehat{e}_\mu }A_\nu (z)𝑑z^\nu \right]`$. The exponentiated integral can be performed analytically within the instanton caps, producing arctangents. Outside of the caps, the integral is evaluated numerically by dividing each link into as many sub-links as necessary to reduce the $`𝒪(a^3)`$ path-ordering errors below machine precision.

We then calculate the action density $`S(x)`$ for a meron pair with instanton caps using the improved action of Ref.  and the topological charge density $`Q(x)`$ using products of clovers. These (open circles) are compared with the patched Ansatz results (solid line) in Fig. 2 for $`r=9`$ and $`d=20.8`$ (in units of the lattice spacing) on a $`32^3\times 40`$ lattice. We use the Arnoldi method to solve for the zero mode of this gauge configuration and hence the density $`\psi ^{}\psi (x)`$, which is also compared with the analytic result in the same figure, showing excellent agreement.

Two important features of the patched Ansatz also evident with the lattice representation are the discontinuities in the action density at the boundary of the instanton caps and vanishing of the topological charge density outside of the caps as given by Eq. (3). The discontinuity in the action density is unphysical and can be smoothed out by using a relaxation algorithm to iteratively minimize the lattice action . On a sweep through the lattice, referred to as a cooling step, each link is chosen to locally minimize the action density. Since a single instanton is already a minimum of the action, this algorithm would leave the instanton unchanged (for a suitably improved lattice action). The result for the regulated meron pair after ten cooling steps is represented in Fig. 2 by the filled circles, showing the discontinuities in the action density have already been smoothed out. In Fig. 3, we also plot side-by-side the cooled $`Q(x)`$ and $`\psi ^{}\psi (x)`$ in the $`(z,t)`$-plane for three different meron pair separations. As the separation vanishes, the zero mode goes over into the well-known instanton zero mode result.

Like instanton-antiinstanton pairs, however, a meron pair is not a strict minimum of the action, since it has a weak attractive interaction, Eq. (5), and under repeated relaxation will coalesce to form an instanton. Nevertheless, just as it is important to sum all the quasi-stationary instanton-antiinstanton configurations to obtain essential nonperturbative physics , meron pairs may be expected to play an analogous role. A precise framework for including quasi-stationary meron pairs is to express the partition function as an integral over a suitable collective variable $`q`$ with a constraint $`𝒬[A]`$ as follows

$`Z`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle DA\mathrm{exp}\left\{S[A]\right\}}={\displaystyle 𝑑qZ_q},`$ (12)
$`Z_q`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle DA\mathrm{exp}\left\{S[A]\lambda \left(𝒬[A]q\right)^2\right\}}.`$ (13)
The meron pair is then a true minimum of the effective action in Eq. (13), allowing for a semiclassical treatment of $`Z_q`$. We choose $`𝒬[A]`$ to be the quadrupole moment $`3z^2x^2y^2t^2`$ of the topological charge.

The criterion for a good collective variable $`q`$ of the system is that the gradient in the direction of $`q`$ is small compared to the curvature associated with all the quantum fluctuations. In this case, we have an adiabatic limit in which relaxation of the unconstrained meron pair slowly evolves through a sequence of quasi-stationary solutions, each of which is close to a corresponding stationary constrained solution. Detailed comparison of the quasi-stationary and constrained solutions shows this adiabatic limit is well satisfied. Therefore, we will present here the action of a meron pair as it freely coalesces into an instanton. To compare with the patched Ansatz, we need the meron separation $`d`$ and radii $`r`$ and $`R`$ of the lattice configuration. We find these by first measuring the separation of the two maxima in the action density $`\mathrm{\Delta }|M_\mathrm{I}M_{\mathrm{III}}|`$ (using cubic splines) and their values (which are the same in the symmetric case, denoted by $`S_{\mathrm{max}}=48/g^2w^4`$), and then using Eq. (6) to give

$$d^2=\mathrm{\Delta }^2+4w^2,\{r,R\}=\frac{2wd}{d\pm \mathrm{\Delta }}.$$
(14)
In Fig. 4, we plot the total action of a meron pair as a function of $`d/r`$ (solid line), which for the analytic case is given by Eq. (5) with $`R=d^2/r`$. Also shown are cooling trajectories for four lattice configurations with different initial meron pair separations. Each case starts with a patched Ansatz of a given separation and the lattice action agrees with that of the analytic Ansatz.

The first few cooling steps primarily decrease the action without changing the collective variable (which is now effectively $`d/r`$), as observed above in Fig. 2. Further cooling gradually decreases the collective variable, tracing out a new logarithmic curve for the total action (dashed line in Fig. 4), which is about $`0.25`$ lower than the analytic case. This curve represents the total action of the smooth adiabatic or constrained lattice meron pair solutions. The essential property of merons that could allow them to dominate the path integral and confine color charge is the logarithmic interaction Eq. (5) which is weak enough to be dominated by the meron entropy . Hence, the key physical result from Fig. 4 is the fact that smooth adiabatic or constrained lattice meron pair solutions clearly exhibit this logarithmic behavior.

In summary, we have found stationary meron pair solutions, shown that they have a logarithmic interaction, and shown that they have characteristic fermion zero modes localized about the individual merons. Hence the presence and role of merons in numerical evaluations of the QCD path integral should be investigated, and the study of fermionic zero modes and cooling of gauge configurations provide possible tools to do so.

We would like to thank J. Kuti and F. Lenz for useful discussions. This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy under cooperative research agreement #DF-FC02-94ER40818.


text:
# Metal Enrichment of The Primordial Interstellar Medium through 3-D Hydrodynamical Evolution of The First Supernova Remnant

## 1. Introduction

Recently, the diversity in the abundance patterns of metal-deficient stars in the Galactic halo has been observed by several authors (McWilliam et al. 1995; Ryan, Norris, & Beers 1996). On the other hand, theoretical attempts (Audouze & Silk 1995; Shigeyama & Tsujimoto 1998) have led to the conclusion that star formation induced by quite few or a single supernova (SN) event results in the observed diversity in the abundance patterns. In particular, Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998) have suggested that star formation occurs in the thin shell produced by a SN explosion and that stars of the next generation inherit the abundance pattern thereof. This shell was assumed to contain all the heavy elements newly synthesized and ejected by the SN. As a result, the abundance pattern of new stars is determined by combinations of the SN ejecta and the interstellar medium (ISM) swept up by the explosion. In this scenario, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability is supposed to happen to destroy the dense heavy element layer into numbers of blobs which penetrate into the supernova remnant (SNR) shell. It is clear that a spherically symmetric SNR in a uniform ISM cannot bring its heavy element layer into the thin shell formed immediately behind the shock front. To check whether the abundance in the thin shell produced by a SNR reaches the average abundance inside the SNR as predicted by Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998), it is necessary to calculate hydrodynamical evolution of the SNR in three dimensions.

The evolution of a SNR is characterized by several phases (Chevalier 1977) as the ejecta-dominated (ED) phase, Sedov-Taylor (ST) phase, pressure-driven snowplow (PDS) phase, and momentum-conserving snowplow (MCS) phase. Each phase has been investigated by a number of authors, e.g., for the first two phases see Truelove & McKee (1999) and for the last two phases see Cioffi, McKee, & Bertschinger (1988). Most of these previous studies have been restricted to spherically symmetric SNRs in the uniform ISM. However, the inhomogeneity of an ISM affects the evolution of a SNR. A model of SNR evolution in an ISM with a density gradient (Hnatyk & Petruk 1999) has shown that the shape of the SNR was easily deformed to be non-spherical in $`10,000`$ yr after explosion. However, our objective is to see how a single SN event distributes newly synthesized heavy elements in the ISM when the SNR stops expanding at $`t>1`$ Myr after explosion. The ISM must also evolve on this time-scale due to gravity and radiative cooling. Hence, we need to follow the evolution of a SNR in the inhomogeneous and evolving ISM for more than 1 Myr.

In this Letter, we investigate the evolution of a SNR originated from a Population III (Pop III) star in the inhomogeneous ISM with the primordial abundances by using a 3-D hydrodynamics code. Especially, we will focus our attention on the correlation of the abundance of heavy elements with the gas density in each cell to identify the abundance of heavy elements that would be inherited by stars of the next generation. Consequently, we can test the hypothesis proposed by Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998).

## 2. The method and initial model

To model the three-dimensional evolution of a SNR, we have constructed a parallel 3-D hydrodynamics code incorporating self-gravity and radiative cooling of the ISM with no heavy elements. We adopt the Godunov type (Godunov 1959) scheme to solve the hydrodynamical equations (the HLLC method in Toro 1997). The usage of the first order scheme reduces not only the computational costs of the 3-D calculation by a factor of two compared with higher order schemes like PPM (Colella, & Woodward 1984) but also the number of boundary values to be transferred in parallel version. To obtain a second order scheme in time, the Strang-type dimensional splitting (Strang 1968) is used. In addition, we have made two modifications to the usual Godunov type scheme. First, to properly follow the adiabatic change of thermal energy in a pre-shock region, we adopt the method used in a usual cosmological hydrodynamics code (Ryu, Ostriker, Kang, & Cen 1993). Second, the consistent multi-fluid advection method (Plewa & Müller 1999) is implemented since we are interested in how heavy elements ejected by a SN explosion mix with the ISM. The 3-D Poisson equation is solved by the FFT method to calculate the self-gravity of the ISM. To solve the energy equation including radiative cooling term, we use an implicit method, i.e., the Newton-Raphson method.

In the early stage of the universe, the gas contains no heavy element and the main coolant at temperatures below $`10^4`$ K is hydrogen molecules. However, to solve rate equations for the formation and destruction of hydrogen molecules is not feasible for a simulation like presented here. We note that there are some attempts to take this approach (e.g., Abel et al. 1998). Accordingly, throughout this Letter, we use the radiative cooling rates for the gas with \[Fe/H\] $`=2`$ 111The abundance ratios of the other heavy elements with respect to Fe have the “primordial” values in Sutherland & Dopita (1993) to mimic the cooling function of the very early stage of the universe. The cooling rate is computed by MAPPINGS III software by R.S. Sutherland (MAPPINGS III is the successor of MAPPINGS II described in Sutherland & Dopita 1993). The radiative cooling due to hydrogen molecules is not included in MAPPINGS III. In the low temperature range as low as 1000 K, the adopted cooling rate is slightly lower than the cooling rate by hydrogen molecules (see Figure 2 of Nakasato, Mori & Nomoto 2000). We use the equation of states incorporating hydrogen and helium in ionization equilibrium. We have assumed that ions and electrons are in thermal equilibrium, since the temperature in the SNR is almost always below $`10^5`$ K during the evolution.

The ISM is modeled by a periodic square box composed of 1503 zones. The size of the simulation box is set to 80 pc to cover the maximum size of a SNR. The simulation procedure is divided into following two stages.

The first stage of the simulation is devoted to archiving an inhomogeneous ISM structure. Firstly, an initial density field ($`\rho (\stackrel{}{r})`$) for the first stage of the simulation is generated by the COSMICS package (Bertschinger 1995) with a power spectrum of the density expressed as $`P(k)k^1`$. The initial mean number density of hydrogen atoms is set to $`n=100`$ cm-3. We assume that the initial temperature is uniform with $`T=100`$ K. Then, we obtain the initial velocity field ($`v_i(\stackrel{}{r})`$) by integrating the equation of motion for one dynamical time ($`t_{\mathrm{dyn}}\sqrt{1/\left(4\pi G\rho \right)}2.7`$ Myr in the present case, where $`G`$ is the gravitational constant). We use the Zel’dovich approximation (Zel’dovich 1970) in this integration: $`v_\mathrm{i}(\stackrel{}{r})=a_\mathrm{i}(\stackrel{}{r})t_{\mathrm{dyn}}`$, where $`a_\mathrm{i}(\stackrel{}{r})`$ is the acceleration field generated by $`\rho (\stackrel{}{r})`$ through the Poisson equation. Then we have followed the hydrodynamical evolution of the box for further $`5t_{\mathrm{dyn}}`$. Due to the self-gravity, filamentary and knotty structures gradually form like in calculations of the cosmological structure formation. In $`5t_{\mathrm{dyn}}`$ of the evolution, the inhomogeneity develops in the box with the density ranging from 0.5 cm-3 to 106 cm-3. The volume filling factor of the low density region with $`n<10^2`$ cm-3 (this equals to the initial mean density) is $`84`$ %. The velocity dispersion is about 3 km s-1. This value will be used to test the hypothesis of Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998). In the subsequent paper, we will present a detailed analysis of the 3-D inhomogeneous structure of the ISM obtained in the first stage of our simulation.

In the second stage of our simulation, we model the ST and PDS phases of the evolution of a SNR with the same code. For the initial condition of the SNR model, we deposit the SN explosion energy ($`E_{\mathrm{sn}}=10^{51}`$ erg) into a cell as thermal energy. At the same time, we add the progenitor mass (20 $`M_{}`$ as a fiducial value) to the same cell and treat 1.7 % (0.34 $`M_{}`$) of the progenitor mass as Mg (Tsujimoto et al. 1995).

In this Letter, we do not intend to simulate the star formation processes. Instead, we show the results for two cases : the first SNR event occurs in (1) low density region or (2) high density region. We consider the region where $`n`$ is lower than $`10^2`$ cm-3 as the low density region and the rest of the box as the high density region. In the case (1), we select an arbitrary cell in the low density region as a SN site. After the star formation, the star leaves the star forming site and moves around under the gravitational field of the ISM. Thus, most of SNR events are expected to occur in the low density regions due to the large volume filling factor. Also in the case (2), we select an arbitrary cell in the high density region as a SN site. In the case (2), we treat 20 $`M_{}`$ of the gas in the cell as the progenitor mass.

## 3. Results

### 3.1. case (1): low density regions

The first SN occurs in a smooth region where the density gradient of the ISM is small. This region corresponds to a “hole” (or a tenuous region) of the inhomogeneous ISM. The number density ($`n`$) of the chosen SN site at the end of the first stage is $`13`$ cm-3. After adding 20 $`M_{}`$ ejecta to the cell, $`n`$ becomes $`5350`$ cm-3. The temperature ($`T`$) of the SN site becomes $`1.2\times 10^8`$ K at the beginning of the second stage. Then a strongly shocked region is produced and the density of the cell decreases very quickly. Although the ejecta soon become nearly spherical in $`<0.1`$ Myr, they are deformed after the collision with the dense structure of the ISM.

To see the evolution of the shape of the ejecta quantitatively, let $`V`$ the volume of the metal-enriched regions and $`S`$ the surface area of the metal-enriched regions. We define the volume filling factor ($`V_f`$) as $`V/L^3`$ and the deformation factor ($`D_f`$) as $`S/(4\pi ((3V)/(4\pi ))^{2/3})`$, where L is the size of the simulation box. Figure 1 shows the evolutions of $`V_f`$ (upper panel) and $`D_f`$ (lower panel) with the solid line for the case (1). In the PDS phase of a spherical SNR in a uniform ISM, the shocked volume evolve as $`t^{6/7}`$ (Cioffi, McKee, & Bertschinger 1988). If we assume the $`V_f`$ evolves as $`t^\alpha `$, the exponent $`\alpha `$ during the first 1 Myr is smaller than unity and then increases to almost unity at $`t3`$ Myr. It is likely that the ejecta expand faster than the shock front in later phases. The fact that $`D_f`$ shown in the lower panel is significantly greater than unity indicates that the shape of the surface of the ejecta becomes very deformed from a sphere due to the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

Figure 2 shows the mass of the heavy elements at $`t=3`$ Myr as a function of number density ($`\mathrm{log}n`$) and metallicity (\[Mg/H\]). We note that this mass distribution function does not change its shape for last 1 Myr. There are two peaks in this diagram. One is located at $`(\mathrm{log}n,[\mathrm{Mg}/\mathrm{H}])(0,2)`$ and not so pronounced as the other. The total amount of the heavy elements involved in this peak is not so large. The low density indicates that these heavy elements have been staying near the SN site. The other peak is located at $`(\mathrm{log}n,[\mathrm{Mg}/\mathrm{H}])(2.1,2.7)`$. A majority of the heavy element is involved in this peak. The swept up mass estimated from equation (2) of Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998) becomes $`\left(10^{2.1}\right)^{0.062}\times \left(3/10\right)^{9/7}3.5`$ times greater than the original value in this equation. Here, the first factor in the left hand side comes from the density and the second from the sound speed (or the velocity dispersion). Thus the \[Mg/H\] estimated from this equation would be $`2.9`$. The analytical work and 3-D calculation have shown a fairly good agreement in this respect. What Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998) did not mention is that this peak has a finite width. This metallicity distribution can be considered to be a consequence of the inhomogeneity of the ISM: A part of the ejecta that penetrates into a dense part of the primordial ISM, mixes with it, and tends to get a small metallicity. On the other hand, a part of the ejecta that contacts with a tenuous part of the ISM, mixes with a small amount of ISM thereof, and thus gets a larger metallicity. A part of the ejecta that never mixes with the ISM will keep its initial metallicity.

The resultant \[Mg/H\] ranges $`3.2<`$ \[Mg/H\] $`<2.2`$ with a peak at \[Mg/H\] $`2.7`$. With the resolution of our calculations, i.e. $`dx0.53`$ pc, a cell with $`\mathrm{log}n>2.43`$ includes more than one solar mass. Thus the metallicity inherited by the next generation stars may be overestimated unless the mass of these stars is much smaller than one solar mass.

### 3.2. case (2): high density regions

In this case, $`n`$ and $`T`$ of the SN site at the beginning of the second stage are $``$ 11,500 cm-3 and $`5.6\times 10^7`$ K, respectively. The evolution of $`V_f`$ and $`D_f`$ is presented in Figure 1 with the dotted lines. We can see that $`V_f`$ is always smaller than in case (1) and $`D_f`$ is always higher than in case (1). This is because the SN occurs in a dense filament that produces a large density gradient. Namely, the SNR easily expands perpendicular to the direction of the filament but is much slowed down along the direction of the filament. The surface of the metal-enriched region at $`t=3`$ Myr is shown in Figure 3 together with the filamentary structure of the ISM. The SN site is located at the center of the simulation box. The yellow surface represents the \[Mg/H\] $`=2.6`$ iso-surface and the orange filamentary shape shows the 3-D density structure. The ejecta expand into tenuous regions of the ISM and are deformed by the filamentary ISM structure.

As in case (1), the frequency distribution function of the mass of Mg at $`t=3`$ Myr with respect to $`\mathrm{log}n`$ and \[Mg/H\] is shown in the right panel of Figure 2. Although there are two peaks at $`(\mathrm{log}n,[\mathrm{Mg}/\mathrm{H}])(2.3,2.6)`$ and $`(\mathrm{log}n,[\mathrm{Mg}/\mathrm{H}])(4.0,2.5)`$ also in this case, both of the locations and shapes are different from those for case (1). Equation (2) of Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998) gives \[Mg/H\] $`2.8`$ that agrees with this 3-D calculation within a factor of $`2`$.

## 4. Summary and Discussion

In this Letter, we have presented the first results of 3-D hydrodynamical calculations of a SNR originated from a Pop III star in the inhomogeneous ISM with the primordial abundances. We have constructed an efficient parallel numerical code to solve the 3-D hydrodynamical equations and the Poisson equations. Using our code, we first evolve a random density field and obtain the inhomogeneous ISM model. Then, we follow the long-term evolution of a SNR to see how a single SN distributes the newly synthesized heavy elements into the ISM.

For the site of the first SN event in the simulation, we consider low density and high density environments. In both cases, a strong shock is produced and then the shock front is slowed down by collisions with the filamentary structure of the ISM. Our calculations indicate that a majority of the newly synthesized heavy elements is distributed into the gas in filamentary structures to get the metallicity of $`3.2`$ \[Mg/H\] $`2.2`$ depending on the SN site. Thus, Pop II stars born from a high density filament polluted with the ejecta of a SN will have \[Mg/H\] $`2.7`$ on their surfaces. We have compared the values of \[Mg/H\] in dense regions of the simulation box with those estimated from the analytical work by Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998) and found that they are in agreement with each other with an accuracy to $`0.3`$ dex, though the assumed density structure of the ISM in Shigeyama & Tsujimoto (1998) is quite different from that in the present work.

To understand metal enrichment process at the early stages of galaxy evolution, we will need to eliminate (or identify, at least) the influences from numerical artifacts that may be caused by the limited resolution of our model. First, we needed to deposit thermal energy into one cell to initiate a SN. A significant fraction of the explosion energy of a real SN with the size of $`0.5`$ pc must be in the form of kinetic energy. Thus the ejecta of a real SN are expected to penetrate deeper into the filamentary structure to get lower metallicity than shown in this Letter. Second, the inhomogeneous ISM model obtained in the first stage of our simulation procedure may be changed depending on a number of model assumptions which include the initial power spectrum of the model, the cooling rates due to molecular hydrogen, neglect of the dark matter potential, the effect of radiative transfer, and etc..

We will report results of a detailed study of the inhomogeneous ISM and longer evolution of the metallicity distribution in a separate paper (Nakasato & Shigeyama 2000). Calculations for SNe with different progenitor masses will be also performed to see the abundance patterns of Pop II stars.