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# Cosmological Breaking of Supersymmetry or Little Lambda Goes Back to the Future II

## 1 Introduction

This paper is an expanded version of a short talk I gave at Lenny Susskind’s 60th birthday celebration at Stanford University. It is dedicated to Lenny, who taught me how to think about physics, and whose own recent ideas have profoundly influenced those I am reporting on here. The central message of the paper can be summarized in a few sentences: The Bekenstein-Hawking Entropy of (Asymptotically) DeSitter (AsDS) spaces represents the logarithm of the total number of quantum states necessary to describe such a universe. This implies that the cosmological constant is an input to the theory, rather than a quantity to be calculated. The structure of an AsDS universe automatically breaks supersymmetry (SUSY). From this point of view, the “cosmological constant problem”is the problem of explaining why the SUSY breaking scale is so much larger than that associated in classical supergravity (SUGRA) with the observed value of (bound on ?) the cosmological constant. I suggest that large renormalizations of the classical formula are to be expected on the basis of the UV/IR correspondence in M theory. These may be viewed as contributions from virtual black holes. The phenomenologically correct formula $`M_{SUSY}(\mathrm{\Lambda }M_P^4)^{1/8}`$ may be derivable from such considerations.

The implication of these ideas is that SUSY breaking vanishes in the flat space limit, which is consistent with the fact that we have not succeeded in finding a string vacuum with broken SUSY and asymptotically flat spacetime. We will begin the paper with a brief review of the evidence for this.

We then turn to a defense of the contention that an asymptotically DeSitter (AsDS) universe can be described by a finite number of states, given by the Bekenstein-Hawking formula. We discuss the difference between such an AsDS universe and the temporary DeSitter phase of an inflationary universe. We caution the reader that once he accepts these arguments, he will be forced to conclude that the cosmological constant is an input, or boundary condition, rather than a parameter to be calculated. The conventional cosmological constant problem can then be rephrased as: why isn’t the scale of SUSY breaking related to the cosmological constant by the standard classical SUGRA formula, which (without fine tuning) predicts $`M_{SUSY}\mathrm{\Lambda }^{1/4}`$.

We argue that this formula may receive large renormalizations. Indeed, standard field theory calculations predict logarithmically divergent renormalizations (at finite orders in the loop expansion) of the masses of particles in softly broken SUSY theories. Conventionally, these divergences are absorbed into the parameters in the low energy effective field theory. Wilsonian renormalization group arguments suggest that these divergent terms have no dependence on the cosmological constant if this parameter is much smaller than the cutoff scale. We argue that the UV/IR correspondence of M theory suggests a possible source for such a dependence. The highest energy states of the theory are huge black holes with a size of order the DS horizon size. Their spectrum is very sensitive to the value of the cosmological constant. We speculate that it may change the value of the “critical exponent” relating the SUSY breaking scale to the cosmological constant, to $`M_{SUSY}(\mathrm{\Lambda }M_P^4)^{1/8}`$. This formula fits the observational data.

## 2 Vacuum selection

One of the unfortunate features of M-theory as a theory of the real world, is its plethora of unphysical, exactly SUSic vacua. On the one hand, this aspect of the theory is precisely what has enabled us to get so much mathematical control over its properties. On the other hand, even if one succeeded in finding a SUSY breaking vacuum which precisely describes the real world (we should be so lucky!) one would still have the uncomfortable task of explaining why the universe does not resemble one of the beautifully SUSic vacua.

From this point of view, it is interesting and exciting that it appears very difficult to break SUSY in a way which leaves us with an approximately flat spacetime. Many candidate SUSY violating vacuum states of M-theory have tachyonic instabilities. Almost all111The exceptions are the models of . These have no potential for moduli at one and two loops. I am suspicious of these models because they appear to have an infinite fermi-bose degeneracy, despite the absence of SUSY. I suspect that this degeneracy is lifted at some order of perturbation theory, at which point a potential is generated. classical candidate vacua generate potentials for their moduli in the quantum theory. The effect of these potentials is either to drive the system into a region of moduli space where we are unable to analyze it (except to conclude that, since it must have a large negative vacuum energy, it cannot describe an asymptotically flat spacetime), or to drive it deep into the weak coupling regime where gravity becomes a free field theory. In neither case do we get an acceptable description of the real world. The weakly coupled system has massless moduli and low energy effective parameters which vary too rapidly with time.

The above analysis is based on weakly coupled string theory and semiclassical SUGRA. Similar conclusions follow from an analysis of SUSY breaking in Matrix Theory . In this nonperturbative formulation of M-theory in a variety of asymptotically flat, SUSY, spacetimes, asymptotic spacetime (more precisely the configuration space of multiparticle asymptotic states propagating on the spacetime) arises as the moduli space of a SUSY quantum system. Breaking SUSY collapses spacetime.

By analogy with the AdS/CFT correspondence for asymptotically AdS SUSY vacua, one might try to find a nonsupersymmetric version of this correspondence (with an AdS space with curvature much less than the Planck scale) by searching for conformal field theories with certain properties. In particular, they should have a large gap in dimensions between the stress tensor, and all but a small number of other operators in the theory. The stress tensor is the primary field corresponding to gravitons in AdS, while other operators correspond to states with mass of order the string or Planck scale. The gap in dimensions indicates a large ratio between the AdS curvature scale and the Planck scale. In SUSY examples this gap is ”guaranteed” by SUSY nonrenormalization theorems combined with an hypothetical scaling law for the dimensions of nonchiral operators in the large $`g_sN`$ limit. The dimension of the stress tensor is always protected, but in the absence of SUSY we do not expect to have lines of fixed points and there is no obvious parameter which could tune the gap to be asymptotically large.

Another feature of a large AdS space which would have to be reproduced by our hypothetical conformal field theory, would be the existence of multigraviton excitations. Even in supersymmetric examples this property is not well understood. That is, it is understood only in the regime of $`AdS_5\times S^5`$ moduli space where the ’t Hooft expansion is applicable. And in this regime, multiparticle excitations exist even when the curvature of AdS space is large. There should be a purely field theoretical argument which would prove the existence of multiparticle excitations in regimes where the AdS curvature is large, independently of the dimension of the space or the existence of a weakly coupled string regime. Only when we understand this could we hope to check whether a SUSY violating conformal field theory really represented a large AdS space.

Finally, we would have to show that the theory contained metastable excitations corresponding to black holes with size much bigger than the Planck scale but much smaller than the AdS radius. So far, there is no evidence for nonsupersymmetric CFTs with these properties. Indeed, we have little understanding of either cluster decomposition and multiparticle structure , or metastable flat space black holes, in the supersymmetric versions of AdS/CFT.

In summary, all the extant evidence indicates the absence of asymptotically flat M-theory vacua with broken SUSY. There are no solid examples, though the models of  may yet turn out to fulfill their design criteria.

## 3 The entropy of DeSitter space

The results reviewed in the preceding section suggest (but certainly not very strongly) that SUSY breaking in asymptotically flat spacetime may be impossible in M-theory. There is certainly a well known relation between the breaking of SUSY and the Ricci scalar of spacetime. Namely a generic nonsupersymmetric quantum field theory generates a cosmological constant of order at least the SUSY breaking scale. Conversely, a positive cosmological constant is incompatible with SUSY.

The well known problem with this relation is the relative scale of the two effects. The cosmological constant is bounded from above by a number of order eighty percent of the critical density, while the scale of SUSY breaking is bounded from below by several hundred GeV. Without fine tuning of parameters, and using the methods of effective field theory, this leads to a cosmological constant about 60 orders of magnitude larger than the observational bound. We normally think about this problem by doing quantum field theory in flat spacetime and then calculating the corrections to the spacetime background. SUSY breaking “causes” a large cosmological constant which then makes the flat spacetime a bad approximation. I would like to suggest that we have been thinking about this problem the wrong way around. The flat space computation counts the zero point energy of the degrees of freedom in spacetime. We have been learning that the number and properties of the degrees of freedom in M-theory depends crucially on our specification of the boundary conditions on spacetime . Asymptotically Anti-DeSitter spaces of various dimensions have very different kinds of high energy degrees of freedom and further they all differ drastically from asymptotically flat spaces. Remarkably, the semiclassical Bekenstein-Hawking formula consistently gives the right answer for the extreme high energy entropy. This is an example of the UV/IR connection. High energy states are associated with large, low curvature (outside the horizon) geometries, whose gross properties are encoded in general relativity.

For DS space, the Bekenstein-Hawking formula predicts a finite entropy. More precisely, any observer in an AsDS space only sees a finite portion of the universe, bounded by a cosmological event horizon. One quarter of the area of this of this event horizon (in Planck units) is the finite Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. I would like to interpret this number as the logarithm of the total number of quantum states necessary to describe the universe as seen by this observer.

There are three arguments for this. The first is simply an analogy with black hole physics (according to the holographic principle ): event horizons may be viewed as holographic screens on which all information about “what is going on on the other side of the horizon” is encoded for the benefit of observers “on this side” . All of the arguments in favor of this holographic view of black hole horizons apply equally well to DS space.

The second argument is by far the most convincing. Imagine an observer inside DS space trying to contradict our contention by collecting as much entropy as she can. As long as she works on scales smaller than the DS radius of curvature, she can do this most efficiently by forming flat space black holes, whose entropy is bounded by their area. The black hole size is bounded by something of order the horizon size so there is no way to violate our bound. Put another way, a system with an entropy larger than the DS horizon size would simply not evolve into an AsDS spacetime with the assumed value of the cosmological constant.

The third argument is more technical. While few people believe any longer that quantum gravity is described by an Euclidean functional integral over metrics, this paradigm does seem to provide helpful and correct hints about the quantum physics of black holes and AdS spaces. Euclidean DS space is a sphere, a compact geometry. The rules for Euclidean quantum gravity (c.f. perturbative world sheet physics in string theory) tell us that all diffeomorphisms, including the DS group of isometries are gauge transformations and should be integrated over. All physical information is invariant. This is in marked contrast to asymptotically flat or AdS universes, where the isometries act nontrivially on the nonfluctuating boundary geometry. In these cases, the isometries are large gauge transformations and physical states need not be invariant under them.

Now consider quantum field theory in DS spacetime, defined by analytic continuation of Euclidean Green’s functions on the sphere. Long ago, constructive field theorists showed  for a large class of superenormalizable theories, that these Green’s functions have a Hilbert space interpretation in terms of the Hilbert space of an observer living in the static patch of Lorentzian DS space. The state defined by these Green’s functions is the thermal state of the static patch Hamiltonian, at the Hawking temperature. These rigorous results are the generalization of the observations of  for free field theory and the perturbation expansion around it. To obtain the field theory in the full DS space one uses DS isometries to copy the Green’s functions from one static patch to another. According to the argument of the previous paragraph, this procedure just produces gauge copies of the original system. Thus, from this point of view it would be wrong to introduce independent physical degrees of freedom for each static patch.

It is important to examine several situations which appear to contradict the idea that AsDS spaces have a finite number of degrees of freedom. One such argument is based on considering a spacetime which is DS in the remote past. At early times, the volume of space is very large, and one can easily impose initial conditions which have a larger entropy than the DS maximum. However, most of these initial conditions will not lead to an AsDS spacetime (with the same value of the cosmological constant). Einstein’s equations (with appropriate conditions on the stress tensor) will not allow a violation of the Bekenstein-Fischler-Susskind -Bousso (BFSB) bound.

The “approximately DeSitter” spacetimes of inflationary cosmology are confusing only so long as we forget the nature of the holographic principle. There is no cosmological event horizon in these spacetimes (unless things settle down into a DS phase much later in the history of the universe) , so the horizon size of the inflationary DS phase is at best a temporary measure of the maximal entropy in the experience of local observers. When the inflationary phase ends, the horizons of these observers expand. The proper holographic screen on which all the information in these universes can be encoded depends on their evolution after the end of inflation.

By taking a limit in which the number of e-folds of inflation becomes infinite, we can generate a paradoxical situation. If we admit the possibility of independent information in different static patches of DS space (as we have for any finite number of e-foldings) then we obtain AsDS spacetimes with entropy larger than the horizon area. These are essentially the time reverse of the spacetimes we encountered two paragraphs ago. Of course, if we extrapolate these expanding geometries back into the past, we inevitably encounter a spacelike singularity. Thus, the proper description of these spacetimes is a Big Bang singularity which evolve to DS space in the future. Note that no local observer in such a universe will ever encounter more entropy than is allowed by the bound. The confusion lies in the fact that there are many ways of cutting the space up into regions observed by independent local observers. I believe that the confusion engendered by this example is connected to initial conditions at the singularity, and propose that a proper quantum treatment of cosmology will never lead to spacetimes of this type. In particular, I suspect that general initial conditions at the singularity for a number of degrees of freedom larger than the DS entropy will not evolve into the postulated DS space. The particular solutions described above will involve extreme fine tuning of initial conditions at the singularity, and might not exist at all in a quantum mechanical treatment.

The claim that the cosmological constant determines the number of degrees of freedom in an AsDS universe is extremely important if true. Traditionally, we think of the cosmological constant as an effective field theory parameter with no direct connection to the microscopic physics of the world. It is to be calculated in terms of more fundamental quantities. If however it is a direct count of the number of degrees of freedom, then its value is part of the fundamental set up of the quantum theory. The dimension of Hilbert space (if it is finite dimensional) or the number of fundamental canonical degrees of freedom (if the Hilbert space is infinite dimensional) is part of the definition of the theory. We will see below that the possibility of such a direct connection between an apparent low energy parameter and the fundamental dynamics is an expression of the UV/IR relation of M-theory.

We must not attempt to calculate the cosmological constant but rather to postulate its value and derive other observable quantities from it. From this point of view the “cosmological constant problem” is turned on its head. It is not “why is the cosmological constant so small”, but “given the value of the cosmological constant, why is SUSY breaking so large”. Indeed, although I cannot derive this logically from what I have already said, in this context it seems inevitable that one should attribute all breaking of SUSY to the fact that we live in an AsDS universe. This is consistent with the impossibility of defining SUSY in DS space, and also with our failure so far to find SUSY violating asymptotically flat states of M-theory, but it flies in the face of all previous wisdom about SUSY breaking.

The classical formula relating SUSY breaking to the cosmological constant is (without fine tuning)

$$M_{SUSY}(\mathrm{\Lambda })^{1/4}.$$
(1)
A formula that fits the data is

$$M_{SUSY}(\mathrm{\Lambda }M_P^4)^\alpha $$
(2)
with $`\alpha =1/8`$. I would propose that we describe these formulae with the following slogan: The $`\mathrm{\Lambda }/M_P^40`$ limit of M-theory is a critical limit in which the number of degrees of freedom of the system goes to infinity. In this limit, the SUSY breaking scale goes to zero, and we are trying to calculate the critical exponent for its vanishing. The classical mean field value is $`1/4`$. Experiment indicates that the correct value is $`1/8`$.

## 4 How can this be?

If the scale of SUSY breaking is smaller than the Planck scale, then low energy physics is described by a locally SUSY effective Lagrangian. The breaking of SUSY in this Lagrangian is spontaneous. If the relevant SUSY is $`N=1`$ , $`d=4`$, then the Lagrangian can have DeSitter solutions with spontaneously broken SUSY. The cosmological constant and the scale of SUSY breaking are independent parameters in this Lagrangian. The scalar potential has the form

$$V=e^K[K^{i\overline{j}}F_i\overline{F_{\overline{j}}}3|W|^2]$$
(3)
Everything has been expressed in Planck units. We will be working near the flat space limit, where the cosmological constant is very small. In that limit, the $`F_i`$ terms are the order parameters for SUSY breaking in the sense that mass splittings in supermultiplets are proportional to the values of the F terms at the minimum of the potential. Note that both supermultiplet and mass are approximate concepts if the cosmological constant is nonzero. Mathematically, there are no global symmetry generators with which to define these words precisely. Physically, particles cannot be separated from each other by more than a horizon size222See the section on the fate of the universe, below. , and we cannot define scattering amplitudes.

By choosing parameters in the superpotential and Kahler potential, we can arrange a minimum with nonvanishing F terms and arbitrary value for the cosmological constant. However, this is generally considered to be fine tuning, according to the following Wilsonian argument. When we calculate radiative corrections to the effective Lagrangian below the SUSY breaking scale, we find a contribution to the renormalized cosmological constant of order $`M_{SUSY}^4`$, where $`M_{SUSY}`$ is the largest splitting in supermultiplets, and is also chosen to be the cutoff in the calculation. This can be cancelled, by adroit choice of the parameters in the Lagrangian, but the latter are thought to represent the effect of integrating out fluctuations at very short spacetime scales. In local field theory, degrees of freedom can be classified by their spacetime extent in an underlying classical metric. Degrees of freedom at short scales see long wavelength degrees of freedom as essentially constant parameters. According to this philosophy, the calculation of the effects of short wavelength degrees of freedom is essentially independent of the value of the cosmological constant, as long as the latter is much smaller than (the - 4th power of) the wavelength. Thus, one argues, it is unnatural to imagine a cancellation of the bare cosmological constant against the low energy contribution. Furthermore, in a field theory with spontaneously broken SUSY, in flat spacetime, the very high energy contributions to $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ cancel. Similar exact cancellations in string theory with exact SUSY, suggest that this is not just a fluke of the field theoretic approximation.

There are obvious problems with applying this argument to M-theory. The spacetime metric, which is used to characterize what constitutes long and short wavelength fluctuations, is, in M-theory, an approximate description of fluctuating quantum variables. More importantly, the association of large mass scales with short distances is incorrect in M-theory. This correspondence is valid down to the string scale in weakly coupled string theory. However, the high mass states of string theory are predominantly of large spacetime extent. More generally, above the Planck scale, the high mass excitations are black holes, whose Schwarzchild radius grows with their mass. It is incorrect to say that the dynamics of these objects is unaffected by the cosmological constant. Indeed, black holes with radius larger than the cosmological horizon do not exist in DS space. Thus it is no longer implausible that the low and high energy contributions to $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ cancel each other 333An argument along these lines has been given by L.Susskind in a variety of public and private venues over the last six months..

Our identification of the cosmological constant as the (inverse logarithm of) the number of quantum states of an AsDS universe suggests a slightly different point of view. The value of the cosmological constant is now a fundamental parameter (actually a boundary condition - see below) and we should set parameters in our effective Lagrangian to match it. In the low energy effective Lagrangian, this requires us to find a vacuum with spontaneously broken SUSY, but the natural scale of SUSY breaking is set by the cosmological constant. Field theoretic renormalizations will not upset this relation. There are, in Feynman diagrams, logarithmic renormalizations of mass splittings in supermultiplets, but as long as the field theoretic couplings are small, these are not substantial when the cutoff is of order the Planck mass. Furthermore, they do not depend strongly on the cosmological constant. Now however, consider quantum gravity corrections to the mass splittings, first as loops of gravitons in Feynman diagrams. These contribute to logarithmic divergences as well, but there is no longer any small parameter controlling the series in powers of logs. However, there is still no apparent dependence on the cosmological constant. The crucial question now is what cuts off the divergences when we reach the Planck scale. Much has been made of the softness of perturbative string amplitudes at large momentum transfer  . Many people have viewed this as the ultimate cutoff promised by a true theory of quantum gravity. But there is plenty of evidence, both internal to the perturbative analysis and using D-brane techniques  that this is not correct. In  it was suggested instead that the ultimate cutoff comes from black hole physics. That is, all high energy high momentum transfer scattering amplitudes, and even the Regge regime, are eventually dominated by black hole production with subsequent decay by Hawking radiation. This is again an invocation of the UV/IR connection. The gross features of the highest energy processes in M-theory are ultimately encoded in General Relativity, because they involve low curvature geometries. We need the microscopic theory to calculate the detailed quantum properties of the states near a black hole horizon, but the level density of the high energy spectrum and many properties of inclusive cross sections can be calculated from semiclassical general relativity.

Thus, I would claim that there is no evidence for suppression of ”diagrams” in which virtual black holes of mass much larger than the Planck scale renormalize the splittings in low energy supermultiplets. The size of these contributions must be estimated from the physics of black holes. In such a calculation it is clear that the DS horizon radius will provide a cutoff on black hole contributions. It is entirely possible that a proper calculation involves the detailed microphysics of black hole states. We will explore a more optimistic scenario below.

It is important to realize that there is no claim being made that the theory with $`\mathrm{\Lambda }0`$ is divergent. We are merely trying to show that various quantities which vanish with the cosmological constant do so more slowly than is indicated by formulae which only take gravity into account classically. What we are claiming is that the theory with vanishing cosmological constant must be supersymmetric. It is reasonable to suppose that the restoration of SUSY will cancel otherwise divergent contributions from virtual black holes.

### 4.1 Proposal for a thermodynamic calculation

Our proposal implies that a full understanding of the relation between the cosmological constant and the scale of SUSY breaking is possible only if we know something about M-theory at very high energies. Rather than giving up and saying that this puts the problem beyond our powers at the present, I would like to suggest that the UV/IR correspondence may be used to get at least a rough estimate of the size of the effect. According to this principle, high energy physics in M-theory is black hole physics, and some aspects of black hole physics are computable in the semiclassical approximation to SUGRA. We may hope that an estimate of the relation between SUSY breaking and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ may be obtained in the semiclassical approximation.

The first aspect of semiclassical physics in DS space that will be important to us is that the state of the system is a thermal ensemble with respect to the static Hamiltonian of DS space. We consider this relevant, despite our previous remarks that the DS group is a group of gauge transformations. We are contemplating a limit of very small cosmological constant, and trying to describe physics as seen by observers who are unable to discern that space is not asymptotically flat (because they are making observations that refer to low energy , approximately local, physics). The phrase “mass splittings in supermultiplets” refers precisely to properties of the (approximate) SuperPoincare generators defined by such observers. The DS Hamiltonian goes over in the limit to the Poincare Hamiltonian of the asymptotically flat observer. We use it, because our considerations will depend on the curvature of DS space.

Our second assumption is that the parameters in the local effective Lagrangian actually get contributions from “Feynman diagrams with virtual black holes in them”. There is not even a semi-rigorous justification for this assumption, and the following hand waving will have to suffice: Consider Feynman diagrams contributing to the masses of some of the particles in the theory. As we allow the momenta in internal loops to grow larger than the Planck scale, we encounter subgraphs which look like super-Planckian scattering amplitudes, amplitudes in which all kinematical invariants are larger than the Planck scale. According to classical general relativity, we expect such collisions to result in black hole production. I claim that the quantum mechanical interpretation of this is that there is no suppression of the probability of producing virtual black holes.

The reader may be disturbed by the feeling that such large energy and momentum transfer processes should be cut off in M-theory. My response is that the black holes themselves provide the cutoff. For example, probability one black hole production followed by Hawking evaporation, gives exponentially suppressed inclusive cross sections for finite numbers of particles with energy and momentum transfer much larger than the Planck scale444In weakly coupled string theory we find suppression of hard processes at a much lower scale. This however is only valid in an intermediate regime ..

Given our two assumptions we expect the SUSY breaking mass terms to be given by a thermodynamic average

$$\frac{𝑑Me^{S(M)\beta M}\mathrm{\Delta }m(M)}{𝑑Me^{S(M)\beta M}}$$
(4)
Here $`S(M)`$ is the black hole entropy and $`\beta `$ is the inverse Hawking temperature of DS space. $`\mathrm{\Delta }m(M)`$ is the contribution to SUSY breaking from virtual black holes of mass $`M`$. We will restrict attention to four dimensions, since this is the only place where low energy SUGRA can have DS solutions. In that case $`S(M)=4\pi M^2=\pi R_S^2`$, while $`\beta =2\pi R_D`$. The integral is actually cut off when the Schwarzchild radius $`R_S`$ = $`R_D`$. It is easy to see that the integral is dominated by its upper endpoint (unless $`\mathrm{\Delta }m`$ falls extremely rapidly with black hole mass).

Our claim then is the SUSY breaking induced by DS space can be approximated by that due to virtual black holes of a size near the upper cutoff for Schwarzchild-DeSitter black holes. I hope to report on an estimate of this effect in the near future.

## 5 The fate of observers in an AsDs universe

There is a line in an old country and Western song that goes ”DeSitter space is a lonely place $`\mathrm{}`$” . Indeed, once the cosmological constant takes over the expansion rate, everything that is not gravitationally bound to us soon passes outside our horizon. Worse, after baryons decay, gravitationally bound systems will cease to exist if they have not collapsed into black holes. And when quantum mechanics is taken into account even this ultimate refuge is lost to us, since the black holes decay. Eventually, the universe becomes full of elementary systems, each in its ground state in its own horizon volume (we are for the moment ignoring the Hawking radiation of DeSitter space).

Physics as we know it, which describes local interactions between systems which can communicate with each other, becomes increasingly irrelevant in such a universe, though the time scale for this to happen is enormously long. Thus, the usual apparatus of physics describes an epiphenomenon in an AsDS universe. One of the technical problems related to this observation is how one describes the physical answers that are relevant to us as exact, gauge invariant, mathematical quantities in such a theory.

In asymptotically flat space, the holographic principle tells us that we can calculate the S-matrix. So far we have found no other sensible physical quantities in Asymptotically Flat M-theory. But there is no S-matrix in AsDS spaces. One must really search for more local quantities, but it seems that any such search may have only an approximate nature. For example, one might imagine showing that the low energy effective Lagrangian description had the status of the first term in an asymptotic expansion of something. But what might that something be? If we extrapolate to high enough energy we are always required to ask questions about all of the degrees of freedom and their dependence on the global geometry of AsDS space. There is no exact quantum number that takes the place of energy. If we are willing to take the attitude that at sufficiently high energy we can neglect SUSY breaking, we can use the flat space, SUSY vacuum which best approximates our AsDS universe to calculate scattering amplitudes above the Planck scale. But we must recognize that at sufficiently high energies these amplitudes describe processes involving black holes larger than the DS radius. These have nothing to do with anything in the real world, if the universe is AsDS. It is also far from obvious to me that one could find a systematic incorporation of the the SUSY violating corrections to these amplitudes into a more exact description of the world. In our view, SUSY violation is a consequence of the AsDS geometry of the universe, and might be incompatible with a description of the world in terms of scattering amplitudes. The phrase SUSY violating scattering amplitude, might be an oxymoron that made sense only at energies below the Planck scale.

All of this suggests that there is a somewhat more local description of holographic physics than any which exists at present. I presented a preliminary sketch of what such a formalism might look like at the Millenium conference in January. It involves a collection of Hilbert spaces $`_i`$, each of which is supposed to represent those states observable in the causal past of a finite number of points, in a cosmological spacetime which begins at a Big Bang singularity. More precisely, using the Bekenstein-Hawking-Bousso relation between areas and entropy, and a causal structure which is defined by mappings of the algebra of operators in one space into a subalgebra with (in general) nontrivial commutant in another, I proposed to reconstruct a spacetime directly from quantum mechanics. 555This is not the place for a detailed exposition of these ideas, which I hope to present at a later time.

In this formalism, the experience of a more or less localized observer is encoded in a sequence of Hilbert spaces of (exponentially) increasing dimension. Each space in the sequence is mapped into a tensor factor of the one succeeding it. In order to have unitary evolution, the full state in the successor Hilbert space must be determined by partial mappings from many different predecessor states. In general it is not required that the entire process, including an infinite sequence of steps, can be incoporated in a single Hilbert space of finite dimension. One consistent rule which allows this is that the Hilbert spaces in any sequence converge after a finite number of steps to a space of some fixed dimension, the same for every sequence. The inclusion maps become unitary mappings of this space into itself.

I would like to identify such a situation with an AsDS space, in the limit that the number of dimensions of the asymptotic Hilbert space is very large. Appropriately smooth unitary mappings between different sequences would represent the different ways in which the spacetime could be represented as the static patch of a given observer, each of whom perceives all of the things outside her horizon as a thermal gas.

In this view of the universe, the local degrees of freedom whose investigation is the province of experimental physics should be viewed as being ”on temporary loan” from the ”thermal DeSitter library” . As the DeSitter era unfolds , more and more of the observer’s degrees of freedom are ”returned to the shelf”: they get swept outside his horizon, and become part of the thermal background. It is interesting that the total number of borrowed degrees of freedom that we need to describe what we see is, even if we include the entropy in hypothetical black holes in the center of each galaxy, smaller by a factor of $`10^{30}`$ than the Bekenstein Hawking entropy corresponding to the cosmological constant. Thus, from a sufficiently cosmic viewpoint, the entire organized part of the universe may be just a small coherent fluctuation in a random system with an enormous number (nearly a googleplexus)of degrees of freedom. It may be that in the far future, after the universe has degenerated into a collection of frozen elementary systems, each in its own horizon volume, a new fluctuation in the Hawking radiation can form, and the whole process will begin again.

Let me conclude this section by repeating that the most important technical problem posed by this view of the AsDS universe is to realize the physical measurements we make in terms of exact mathematical statements about the finite dimensional Hilbert space associated with the spacetime.

## 6 Metaphysics

One of the most disturbing aspects of the proposal in this paper is that the theory of the universe involves a fixed integer $`N`$, the total number of quantum states in the universe. I believe that a discussion of the meaning of this number will depend on the distinction between equations of motion and boundary conditionsin physics. It has long been apparent, that even if we find the ultimate physical laws encoded in a set of equations of motion, we will still have to deal with the question of what determines the boundary conditions. In cosmology, this question has traditionally been split into two parts: ”Do the spatial sections of a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology have a boundary (and what are the boundary conditions there)?”, and ”What are the initial conditions?”. Einstein preferred closed cosmologies because he believed this eliminated the first of these questions. Various authors  have tried to address the second.

There is a well known problem associated with Einstein’s suggestion, if one believes that quantum theory is the ultimate description of nature, and also believes in an ultraviolet cutoff. A closed universe with a UV cutoff must have a finite number of states. If we try to associate the cutoff with a cutoff of short distances, we immediately run into a problem. The volume of the universe changes with time, so the number of states allowed by a short distance cutoff would appear to change as well. This violates unitarity.

The advent of holographic cosmology  has resolved this conundrum. The obvious conjecture that follows from this work is that the number of states in a cosmology is the exponential of one fourth of the area in Planck units of a maximal set of holographic screens666Provision must probably be made for duplication of information on different screens. An incomplete draft of a proposal for a completely quantum mechanical and holographic formalism for cosmology was outlined in my talk at Strings at the Millenium in CalTech. A somewhat more extended presentation of these ideas is in preparation .. I believe that ultimately this prescription will be turned around. Cosmology will be derived from quantum mechanics, with spacetime geometry being computed from the number of quantum states.

From this point of view, the natural distinction between cosmological boundary conditions will be in terms of the number of quantum states that they admit. We first have the possibility of a finite number, and then infinity. We expect that systems with a finite number of states can describe either AsDS universes or recollapsing universes. It is likely that the distinction between the two is simply whether we require an infinite or a finite number of steps in our choice of time evolution.

With an infinite number of states it is natural to look for some operator on the Hilbert space whose eigenspaces with finite eigenvalue are finite dimensional and then to make a finer classification in terms of the behavior of the density of states at large eigenvalue. Geometrically we would expect this to map into the problem of black hole entropy in cosmologies with no finite area cosmological horizon.

I think that, apart from the apparent observational evidence for a cosmological constant, our reaction to the choice between finite and infinite cosmologies (in the present sense) can at best be an emotional one. On the one hand, it is reasonable to think that nothing is actually infinite - that infinity or infinitesimal always refers to an idealization that makes problems more easy to treat mathematically (in the practical, rather than the rigorous sense of mathematics). Then one will be saddled with the annoying question of why a particular finite number is chosen. This may lead one prefer to accept infinity as a reality, though I would claim that the various choices among behaviors of the asymptotic spectrum of black holes will be equally annoying. One may find that insisting on a large asymptotic symmetry group somewhat restricts the possibilities, but the plethora of exactly stable Poincare and AdS vacua of M-theory makes this seem unlikely. The only theoretical basis for resolving this problem would seem to be to prove a theorem that every system with an infinite number of states which is asymptotically describable by a large smooth geometry, becomes supersymmetric in the asymptotic limit. As, I have noted, there is some meager evidence for this conjecture.

Given that N is finite, the question of how it is chosen might have two generic kinds of answer:

* In the fullness of time we might show that N had to satisfy some number theoretic property that is satisfied by $`[0,1,2,216,2^{10^{120}}+23,2^{10^{250}}+13365,\mathrm{}]`$ . Or perhaps it is the unique solution to some number theory problem.
* There is some meta-dynamics which gives rise to quantum systems with different values of N. Perhaps it is even some kind of deterministic dynamics and could alleviate our unease with the application of probabilistic ideas to the whole universe. In such a system we might find either a true dynamical explanation of the value of N, or the framework for an anthropic determination of this single parameter.

The point about these possible answers is that they have very little to do with physics in the universe we observe (hence the title of this section). Our best strategy is probably to ignore the question. The most useful attitude would appear to be to assume N is a boundary condition and hope that many features of the dynamics have universal properties for large but finite N. Thus the characterization of the formula $`M_{SUSY}\mathrm{\Lambda }^{1/8}`$ as a formula for a critical exponent.

## 7 Some remarks on phenomenology

One of the most interesting features of the proposal in this paper is that it solves what I consider one of the primary phenomenological problems of M-theory, namely why we do not live in one of the many stable supersymmetric ground states of the theory. The answer is simply that we do not have enough states. Poincare invariant ground states have an infinite number of excitations, at least all of the scattering states of gravitons.

Our suggestion about the origin of SUSY breaking probably has more practical implications for SUSY phenomenology as well. For example suppose that the generation structure of the standard model is related to a discrete gauge symmetry that is spontaneously broken at an energy scale well below the Planck scale. We have attributed the dominant contribution to SUSY breaking to very high energy black hole states. These states will be insensitive to the low energy breaking of generation symmetry and might well produce flavor singlet squark mass matrices. Alternatively, the mere fact that SUSY breaking comes from a thermal average over a large number of states might produce flavor singlet mass matrices, without appeal to symmetries (Of course, we probably want to have flavor symmetries to explain the quark mass matrix.). One might imagine the possibility of deriving the minimal SUGRA spectrum, or some other simple pattern of SUSY breaking, from this scenario.

Another general conclusion would appear to be that the gravitino mass, as well as the masses of any moduli which originate from SUSY breaking, will be of order $`\mathrm{\Lambda }^{1/4}`$. This causes well known cosmological difficulties, which must be solved.

Finally one may hope that the current approach to cosmology will eventually solve the vacuum selection problem of string/M-theory. In the limit of vanishing cosmological constant, our approach implies that the finite dimensional Hilbert space of an AsDS M-theoretic cosmology, approaches that of an asymptotically flat SUSY vacuum of M-theory. This is presumably the state which describes scattering of particles inside gravitationally bound clusters during the pre-asymptotic stage of the AsDS universe.

The question of which flat SUSY background we approach in the limit might depend on initial conditions - that is, in the small $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ limit, the Hilbert space might break up into superselection sectors and different cosmological evolutions might end up in different sectors. On the other hand, one might hope for a more unique and universal answer. At any rate, the question is certainly tied up with that of initial conditions for cosmology.

Certain features of the desired background can be understood from general considerations. It must be supersymmetric, and its low energy effective Lagrangian must have a small deformation corresponding to a SUSY violating DS space. This makes it virtually certain that the SUSY background cannot have any moduli. Small deformations of a SUSY Lagrangian with moduli will generally give rise to cosmologies with varying moduli, rather than a DS space. In  I discussed a general analysis of inflationary cosmologies deriving from M-theory. Approximate moduli were argued to be good inflaton candidates, and the discrepancy between the inflation and SUSY breaking scales was attributed to the existence to a submanifold of approximate moduli space where SUSY and a discrete R symmetry were restored. Much of the postinflationary dynamics of the universe depended on the dimension of this submanifold. The present considerations suggest that one wants it to be a point, as has long been advocated by Dine . This suggests that, in order to find the vacuum state of M-theory that describes the universe approximately, one must search for an isolated point in the approximate moduli space of an $`N=1`$ compactification, which preserves SUSY and a discrete R-symmetry.

## 8 Conclusions

It should be obvious that the claims made here are somewhat tentative and unformed. One aspect of the subject that I find rather confusing is the relation of the fundamental theory to the low energy effective Lagrangian. Despite the UV/IR correspondence, I believe it is correct that physics below the Planck scale is governed by a locally supersymmetric effective Lagrangian. In  I have suggested that local SUSY is in fact connected to the arbitrary choice of holographic screen, and should therefore be a fundamental symmetry, not to be broken. Since we expect the scale of SUSY breaking to be much smaller than the Planck scale there should be an effective Lagrangian description of low energy physics which is locally supersymmetric, which means that SUSY breaking appears spontaneously. The SUSY breaking scale and cosmological constant should simply be set by tuning parameters in this Lagrangian.

The confusing point is that in this description there appears to be a low energy origin for SUSY breaking. Some chiral field’s F term gets a nonzero expectation value. I suspect that the correct description will simply introduce SUSY breaking through a Volkov-Akulov  goldstino multiplet. The SUSY breaking scale and cosmological constant will be put in by hand. They are related by a formula of the form $`M_{SUSY}=KM_P(\mathrm{\Lambda }/M_P^4)^{1/8}`$. This formula can only be understood, and the constant $`K`$ calculated, within the framework of the full theory. Similarly, the couplings of the Goldstino to other low energy fields, which determine the phenomenology of SUSY breaking, will depend on high energy physics. Only if the conjectures about relating high energy physics to black hole physics, which were adumbrated in section 4 are correct, will we be able to extract any details of the SUSY spectrum without a full understanding of the quantum mechanics of M-theory.

###### Acknowledgments.

I would like to thank Willy Fischler for impressing upon me the importance of understanding the entropy of DeSitter space and for numerous conversations about this subject. Raphael Bousso, Lenny Susskind, and Emil Martinec also made very useful comments and suggestions. This work was supported in part by the Department of Energy under grant DE-FG02-96ER40559.


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# INSTANTANEOUS RESPONSE OF THE IONOSPHERE TO A SUDDEN COMMENCEMENT OF THE STRONG MAGNETIC STORM OF APRIL 6, 2000

## INTRODUCTION

Mid-latitude ionospheric effects of geomagnetic disturbances of different origins were addressed in many publications, including a number of thorough reviews (Hunsucker, 1982; Hocke and Schlegel, 1996). It is now a well-established fact that the auroral zones of the northern and southern hemispheres generate acoustic-gravity waves (AGW) and traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs), caused by them, of the type of solitary wave of about 1-hour duration propagating in the equatorial direction with sound and subsonic speeds (from 100 to 300 m/s). The occurrence delay $`\tau `$ TIDs over various observing stations in mid-latitudes reaches $`10^4`$ s. The propagation velocity fundamentally distinguishes the TIDs from sudden ionospheric disturbances (SIDs) which are a virtually instantaneous ($`\tau `$ no more than $`10^3`$ s) response of the dayside ionosphere to an increase in ultraviolet radiation intensity observed during chromospheric flares on the Sun (Mitra, 1974). The physical mechanisms for generation of the above-mentioned types of disturbances were discussed in a large number of theoretical publications, and are considered to be relatively reliably established. By analyzing the ionospheric effects from a strong magnetic storm of April 6, 2000, we detected, most likely, a new manifestation of geomagnetic disturbances in the mid-latitude ionosphere implying an ”instantaneous” (compared to the above-mentioned TID effects) ionospheric response to the magnetic storm sudden commencement (SC). For detecting this effect, we used a global spatial averaging of the variations in total electron content (TEC) obtained from the data from the international GPS network. Currently (as of June 2000) this network includes at least 712 points, the data from which are posted to the INTERNET. High-precision measurements of the TEC along the line-of-sight (LOS) between the receiver on the ground and transmitters on the GPS system satellites covering the reception zone are made using two-frequency multichannel receivers of the GPS system at almost any point of the globe and at any time simultaneously at two coherently coupled frequencies $`f_1=1575.42`$ MHz and $`f_2=1227.60`$ MHz. The sensitivity of phase measurements in the GPS system is sufficient for detecting irregularities with an amplitude of up to $`10^3`$$`10^4`$ of the diurnal TEC variation. This makes it possible to formulate the problem of detecting ionospheric disturbances from different sources of artificial and natural origins.

## RESULTS OF OBSERVATIONS

For the time interval 16:00-18:00 UT, Fig. 1 presents the variations in magnetic flux (a), 5 MeV proton flux (b) at geostationary orbit of the GOES10 station ($`135^{}W`$), and of the H-component of the magnetic field at station Irkutsk ($`52.2^{}N`$; $`104.3^{}E`$ \- c) for April 6, 2000. The time of the geomagnetic disturbance SC, determined from these data and from the data from other ground-based magnetic observatories, including those located in the western hemisphere (on the dayside), corresponds to 16:42 (16.7) UT. The time of SC is shown on panels (a-e) by a vertical dashed line. The geometry of the part of the global GPS network that was used in this study when analyzing the ionospheric response to the SC of the strong magnetic storm of April 6, 2000 (180 stations), is presented in Fig. 2a. Dots correspond to the location of GPS stations; we do not give here their coordinates for reasons of space. The upper scale indicates the local time LT, corresponding to the time 16 UT. As is evident from Fig. 2a, our selected set of GPS stations cover reasonably densely North America and Europe, and much less densely the Asian part of the territory used in the analysis. An even smaller number of GPS stations are in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. However, coverage of the territory with partial LOS to the satellites for our selected limitations to the LOS elevations $`\theta `$ ¿ $`10^{}`$ is substantially wider. Panel b shows the coordinates of subionospheric points for the height of the F2-layer maximum $`h_{max}`$ = 300 km for all satellites visible at the SC time for each of the GPS stations marked on panel a (a total of 746 beams). An analysis of the TEC data from the selected GPS stations revealed that almost all stations over the time interval 16:30-17:30 UT, containing the SC time, show a single negative disturbance of about 20-min duration. Upon removing the trend and smoothing with a time window of 30 min, we were able to determine for each beam to the satellite the amplitude A and the time $`t_{min}`$ at which a minimum TEC value was attained. Fig. 3 presents the latitudinal dependencies (obtained for each beam) of the $`t_{min}`$ -a) and of the amplitude A - b) of the ionospheric response to the magnetic storm SC, as well as the distributions of $`t_{min}`$ \- c) and A - d) as a function of local time LT. The SC time is shown in panels e and j by a horizontal straight line. Thick curves show the approximating dependencies obtained from all counts using polynomials of degree 4. The scatter of the position of $`t_{min}`$ is due to the fact that when the trend is removed with a time window of 30 min, the response to the SC is always overlapped by existing TEC oscillations with similar periods and with a random phase. Therefore, identifying the response requires a coherent combination of TEC variations for all LOS. The result of such a global spatial averaging of dI(t) for 511 LOS on the dayside is shown in panel d. A similar result for 235 LOS on the nightside is presented in panel e.

## DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

An analysis of the data in Fig. 1 suggests the conclusion that the ionospheric response to the SC has the form of a single negative disturbance of about 20-min duration. On the dayside of the Earth the largest value of the net response amplitude was found to be of order $`0.8\times 10^{16}`$ m-2 (1–2$`\%`$ of the background TEC value), and the delay with respect to the SC in mid-latitudes was about 200 s. In higher latitudes the delay goes as long as 15 min. On the nightside these values are $`0.2\times 10^{16}`$ m-2 and 30 min, respectively. Of special note is that the onset of negative TEC disturbance on the dayside, marked according to the level of 0.5 from a maximum deviation (panel d), coincides with the magnetic flux SC (panel a) and is 120 s ahead of the SC time determined from the data from ground-based magnetic observatories. The velocity of the traveling disturbance from middle to high latitudes as well as from the dayside to the nightside is estimated at about 10-20 km/s. Thus our detected disturbance (a global delay $`\tau `$ no more than $`10^2`$ \- $`10^3`$ s) is inexplicable in terms of the AGW model, and it should be sought when modeling a electromagnetic set of phenomena accompanying a strong geomagnetic disturbance. It is not improbable that in the analysis of the mechanism it would be useful to take into account some important characteristics of the ”global detector” which we are using, such as primarily the sensitivity, continuity and global character. However, it may well be of crucial importance that, unlike conventional techniques of ionospheric observations, the altitude limit of which does not exceed 500 km (ionosondes, HF Doppler measurements) or 1000-2000 km (incoherent scatter radars, and stations for recording the rotation of the polarization plane of the VHF signal from geostationary satellites), it has become possible, for the first time, to carry out a global detection of the Earth’s plasmaspheric disturbances in the height range as high as 20,000 km.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors are grateful to A. V. Mikhalev, E. A. Ponomarev and A. V. Tashilin for their encouraging interest in this study and active participations in discussions. Thanks are also due V. G. Mikhalkovsky for his assistance in preparing the English version of the -manuscript. This work was done with support under RFBR grant of leading scientific schools of the Russian Federation No. 00-15-98509 and Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 99-05-64753).


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# Face-on galaxies NGC 524 and NGC 6340: chemically decoupled nuclei and inclined circumnuclear disks

## 1 Introduction

Early-type disk galaxies differ from late-type disk (spiral) galaxies by a smooth appearance of their disks: in general, they lack a massive gaseous component and noticeable star formation regions. However, often some gas is present in the circumnuclear regions; it is widely accepted that this gas has an external origin. Bertola with co-workers have reported a large statistics of decoupled distributions and kinematics of gaseous and stellar components in nearby lenticulars. Particularly, Bertola et al. (1992a) have reported three cases of gas counterrotation in a sample of 15 objects and concluded, by involving literature data, that at least 40% gas-possessing S0 have to accrete this gas during their late evolution. Kuijken et al. (1996) also noted that a significant fraction of gas disks in lenticulars, $`24\%\pm 8\%`$ in their sample, demonstrate counterrotation with respect to stars. Among the known decoupled distributions of gas and stars, a class of polar rings is the most spectacular one. Besides the extreme case of NGC 2685 where the radius of the gaseous polar ring is comparable to the radius of the global stellar disk, there exist more ”minor-axis dust-lane” galaxies, such as NGC 1947 (Bertola et al., 1992b) or NGC 7280 (Carollo et al., 1997b; Afanasiev & Sil’chenko, 2000) where compact circumnuclear gaseous disks are shown to rotate orthogonally with respect to the global stellar rotation.

In 1992 we have published our first paper (Sil’chenko et al., 1992) on chemically distinct nuclei in early-type disk galaxies. In 3 lenticulars and in 3 Sa–Sb’s we have found a sharp drop of magnesium absorption line strength when passing from the nuclei to the surrounding bulges. The difference in Mg absorption strength indicates an order of magnitude change in metallicity on scales of a few arcseconds whereas smooth metallicity gradients in galactic spheroids are usually only 0.3 dex per a decade in radius in ellipticals (Carollo et al., 1993) or somewhat larger, with a mean of –0.5 and an extremum of –1.0 per dex, in bulges of early-type disk galaxies (Balcells & Peletier, 1994; Fisher et al., 1996). The origin of chemically decoupled nuclei in disk galaxies may be related to a gas accretion event and a subsequent star formation burst in the nucleus where the accreted gas is accumulated. With this hypothesis we try to find a connection between the chemical distinctness of the nuclear stellar population and the presence of gas subsystems of obviously external origin. We (Sil’chenko et al., 1992; Sil’chenko, 1999a) have already noted chemically distinct nuclei in the lenticulars NGC 1023 where an inclined extended HI disk is present and NGC 7332 where circumnuclear gas counterrotates with respect to the stars. The lenticular galaxy with the chemically decoupled nucleus NGC 7280 represents a remarkable example: the circumnuclear gas coupling with tiny dust lanes is extended and rotates orthogonally to the circumnuclear stellar disk which is, on its own, inclined with respect to the main galactic disk (Afanasiev & Sil’chenko, 2000).

In this paper we present the results of a complex study for the central parts of two nearby face-on early-type disk galaxies: NGC 524 and NGC 6340. Some time ago we found chemically decoupled nuclei in these galaxies. NGC 524 (Sil’chenko et al., 1992) and NGC 6340 (Sil’chenko, 1995) were observed at the 6m telescope with the Multi-Pupil Field Spectrograph (MPFS) equipped by IPCS, and the drops of the magnesium absorption line equivalent width along the radius were detected. Recently we have re-observed the galaxies because the MPFS is now equipped with CCD and the data becomes more accurate. Besides the investigation of the radial variations of absorption-line indices, we present also results of kinematical and morphological analyses for the central parts of NGC 524 and NGC 6340. Due to face-on orientation of their main planes, any inclined disks, both stellar and gaseous, can be easily detected if systematic visible velocity gradients are observed which can be attributed to rotation velocity projection onto the line of sight. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the observations and their reduction as well as the data from open archives which we use. In Section 3 we re-consider radial variations of metal absorption-line indices and confirm that the stellar nuclei of NGC 524 and NGC 6340 are chemically decoupled. In Section 4 we study the morphology of distributions of gas and stars in the galaxies, and in Section 5 we present two-dimensional velocity fields both for ionized gas and stars in the central regions. Section 6 contains the main conclusions. In Table 1 we give the basic parameters for the galaxies under consideration.

## 2 Observations and Data Reduction

The observations of NGC 524 and NGC 6340 which we present in this paper have been performed in 1996–1997 with the Multi-Pupil Field Spectrograph (MPFS) of the 6m telescope in the Special Astrophysical Observatory, Nizhnij Arkhyz, Russia (Afanasiev et al., 1990, 1996). The detailed log of the observations is given in Table 2. The detector used was $`520\times 580`$ CCD ISD015A (”Electron”, St-Petersburg), with the pixel size $`18\mu m\times 24\mu m`$ and read-out noise of 13$`e^{}`$. The gain was 3.4$`e^{}`$ in 1996 and 7$`e^{}`$ in 1997.

MPFS which resembles the French integral-field spectrograph TIGER (Bacon et al., 1995) by the principles of its design allows to obtain simultaneously a set of spectra from an extended area ($`8\times 12`$ square elements in the present work); each spatial element is $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3\times 1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$, so the full field of view which we centers onto the nuclei of the galaxies is $`10\mathrm{}\times 16\mathrm{}`$. Two spectral ranges were exposed, blue and red, with a (reciprocal) dispersion of 1.6 Å per pixel (the spectral resolution of 4–6 Å, slightly varying over the field of view). The blue spectral range under consideration contains several strong absorption lines such as the Mgb feature. We have used it to derive stellar velocity fields by cross-correlating spectra of the galaxies with the spectra of K giant stars observed during the same nights with the same spectrograph. Also we have calculated absorption-line indices H$`\beta `$, Mgb, and Fe5270 in the popular Lick system (Worthey et al., 1994) to study radial variations of the mean metallicity of the stellar populations. The sky background in the blue was exposed separately after each galaxy exposure. Properly normalized and smoothed, it was then subtracted from the spectra of the galaxies. The exposure times for the galaxies were long enough to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio not less than 50–70 per Å in the nuclei – this level of S/N provides an accuracy of the absorption-line indices better than 0.2 Å (Cardiel et al., 1998). However the accuracy drops to 0.5–0.6 Å for the outermost elements observed, and to keep a constant level of signal-to-noise ratio up to $`R8\mathrm{}`$ we added the element spectra in concentric circular rings with the width of $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ and the center in the nuclei. After azimuthal averaging, the accuracy of all indices measured along the radius is about 0.1 Å. To check consistency of our index system with the standard Lick one, we have observed 9 G8–K3 stars, both giants and dwarfs, from the list of Worthey et al. (1994) and have calculated their indices in the same manner as those for the galaxies. The agreement between stellar indices measured by us and those tabulated in Worthey et al. (1994) is excellent within the errors cited by them; the mean deviations of our measurements from those of Worthey et al. (1994) for all the indices are less than 0.05 Å, so we need no degenerate our spectral resolution to come into agreement with the standard Lick index system. The indices Mgb and Fe5270 measured in the galaxies have been corrected for the stellar velocity dispersion broadening; the correction values are determined by artificial Gauss broadening the stellar spectra with varying $`\sigma `$’s. For NGC 6340 this correction is small, only 0.1 Å, because the stellar velocity dispersion in the center of this galaxy is 100–140 km/s (Bottema, 1989). For NGC 524 this correction is 0.5 Å in the nucleus and 0.4 Å beyond it, because the nuclear stellar velocity dispersion is 246 km/s (LEDA) or $`236\pm 19`$ km/s (Schechter, 1983), and it decreases only slightly in the nearest vicinity of the nucleus (our impression from the visual inspection of the spectra). The red spectral range under consideration contains the emission line \[NII\]$`\lambda `$6583, strong in the centers of NGC 524 and NGC 6340. It is used to obtain two-dimensional velocity fields of the ionized gas. The wavelength calibration for both spectral ranges was made by using separate exposures of the hollow-cathod lamp filled with helium, neon, and argon. The accuracy and absence of systematic shifts of the velocity scale was checked by measuring the night-sky emission lines. The accuracy of the individual velocity measurements both for stars and ionized gas is about 25 km/s. The primary data reduction – bias subtraction, flatfielding, cosmic ray removal, extraction of one-dimensional spectra, wavelength calibration, construction of surface brightness maps – have been performed with the software developed in the Special Astrophysical Observatory (Vlasyuk, 1993). The absorption-line indices were calculated with our own FORTRAN programs.

We have also retrieved a long-slit spectrum of NGC 524 in the La Palma Archive. The galaxy was observed on December 24, 1995, at the ISIS WHT with the dispersion of 0.4 Å per pixel in the spectral range 5000–5400 Å (blue arm of the spectrograph); the slit (width equal to $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}62`$) was aligned almost along the minor axis of the galaxy, $`PA=135\mathrm{°}`$. We have used this spectrum to calculate Mgb and Fe5270 indices along the slit with the same techniques as the indices from our MPFS data (the sky for subtracting was taken from the edges of the slit) though we cannot reduce these indices into the standard Lick system because of the lack of standard Lick star observations.

The photometric data involved in our analysis are taken from the La Palma and HST Archives. The details of the observations are given in Table 3. The programs in the frame of which the central parts of the galaxies have been observed at the Hubble Space Telescope are ”Core properties of bulges of spiral galaxies” (Principal Investigator: Stiavelli, Program ID: 6359) and ”Nuclear structure of S0 galaxies” (Principal Investigator: Phillips, Program ID: 5999). We have derived morphological characteristics of the surface brightness distribution in the galaxies by analysing these images; the program FITELL of Dr. Vlasyuk has been used for this purpose.

## 3 Chemically decoupled nuclei in NGC 524 and 6340

As we have noted in the Introduction, the galaxies under consideration exhibit stellar nuclei with enhanced magnesium absorption lines: for NGC 524, see Sil’chenko et al. (1992), for NGC 6340, see Sil’chenko (1995). Now we present more precise radial profiles of Mgb together with those of Fe5270 and H$`\beta `$. The azimuthally averaged index measurements are presented in Table 4. The accuracy of the azimuthally averaged measurements is improved by a factor of 3 with respect to our earlier results. However, the qualitative conclusions remain the same.

NGC 524 (Fig. 1) shows radial profiles of the magnesium and iron indices of very similar shapes. The maximum equivalent widths of the metal lines are observed in the nucleus and decrease radially up to $`R4\mathrm{}`$ (600 pc). Between $`R=4\mathrm{}`$ and $`R=8\mathrm{}`$ the MPFS profiles flatten off. Their extensions by the long-slit data confirm the flat behavior of the metal-index profiles in the radius range $`5\mathrm{}20\mathrm{}`$ (the bulge-dominated region) though the long-slit measurements are not reduced into the Lick system. By calculating index gradients in the bulge in a traditional manner, versus $`\mathrm{log}R`$ in the radial range $`3\mathrm{}8\mathrm{}`$, we have obtained $`d\text{Mgb}/\mathrm{log}R=0.85\pm 0.18`$Å/dex and $`d\text{Fe5270}/\mathrm{log}R=0.59\pm 0.02`$Å/dex, both gradients corresponding to $`d\text{[m/H]}/\mathrm{log}R=0.4`$ – a value quite typical for early-type galaxies (Balcells & Peletier, 1994; Fisher et al., 1996). The zero-points of the linear regressions corresponding to the extrapolated bulge indices at $`R=1\mathrm{}`$, Mgb=$`4.34\pm 0.14`$ Å and Fe5270=$`2.68\pm 0.01`$ Å, are noticeable smaller than the nuclear indices, $`\text{Mgb(nuc)}=4.87\pm 0.16`$ Å and $`\text{Fe5270(nuc)}=3.16\pm 0.19`$ Å. We have taken the mean bulge characteristics by averaging the MPFS data in the radial range $`4\mathrm{}8\mathrm{}`$, resulting in $`<\text{Mgb(bul)}>=3.75\pm 0.06`$ Å and $`<\text{Fe5270(bul)}>=2.27\pm 0.04`$ Å. If we apply now the models for old stellar populations of Worthey (1994) to the differences $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$Mgb and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\text{Fe5270}`$ between the nucleus and the mean bulge under the assumption of equal mean stellar population ages, we obtain $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$\[Fe/H\]=$`0.50\pm 0.10`$ dex from $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$Mgb and $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$\[Fe/H\]=$`0.56\pm 0.15`$ dex from $`\mathrm{\Delta }\text{Fe5270}`$, the nucleus being more metal-rich. Unfortunately, we cannot determine the mean age of the stellar population in the center of NGC 524 by using the absorption-line index H$`\beta `$ because it is notably affected by the emission line. However, usually chemically decoupled nuclei in lenticular galaxies appear to be younger than the bulges (Sil’chenko, 1999a; Afanasiev & Sil’chenko, 2000), so the derived metallicity difference must be considered as a low limit. The coincidence, within the errors, of the $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$\[Fe/H\] values derived from $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$Mgb and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\text{Fe5270}`$ gives some evidence for equal magnesium-to-iron ratios in the nucleus and in the bulge of NGC 524.

NGC 6340 (Fig. 2) has been twice observed in the green spectral range with the MPFS+CCD, so we can independently estimate the accuracy of our measurements from the comparison of two data sets. One can see in Fig. 2 that the claimed accuracy of 0.1 Å for the azimuthally averaged points is kept quite well up to $`R6\mathrm{}`$. The shape of the radial profiles of the metal-line indices demonstrates again the presence of a chemically decoupled nucleus though the contrast of the Fe5270 drop is obviously smaller than that of Mgb. As we have in this galaxy more measurements than in NGC 524, the mean indices for the nucleus and the bulge of NGC 6340 are estimated more precisely: for the nucleus, $`\text{Mgb(nuc)}=4.57\pm 0.08`$ Å and $`\text{Fe5270(nuc)}=2.80\pm 0.13`$ Å, and for the bulge, $`R=4\mathrm{}6\mathrm{}`$, $`\text{Mgb(bul)}=3.22\pm 0.04`$ Å and $`\text{Fe5270(bul)}=2.32\pm 0.07`$ Å. After applying the models of Worthey (1994) to the nucleus-bulge differences $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$Mgb and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\text{Fe5270}`$, we obtain $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$\[Fe/H\]=$`0.61\pm 0.05`$ dex from $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$Mgb and $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$\[Fe/H\]=$`0.30\pm 0.13`$ dex from $`\mathrm{\Delta }\text{Fe5270}`$. Again, these metallicity differences represent only low limits due to age uncertainty: a narrow H$`\beta `$ emission line is seen inside the broader absorption and so the absorption-line index H$`\beta `$ is invalid for the age diagnostics. Unlike NGC 524, NGC 6340 demonstrates different $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$\[Fe/H\] from the magnesium and iron index differences; it may be a signature of different magnesium-to-iron ratios in the bulge and in the nucleus of this galaxy.

The question on magnesium-to-iron ratio can be addressed directly with a diagram (Fe5270, Mgb). The first fruitful attempt to use this diagram to diagnose the Mg/Fe ratio was made by Worthey et al. (1992), and they found immediately that a bulk of luminous ellipticals are magnesium overabundant. I noted that Mgb and Fe5270 in the centers of disk galaxies, including lenticulars, satisfy the models with solar magnesium-to-iron ratio (Sil’chenko, 1993), though later Fisher et al. (1996) reported several nuclei (but not the bulges!) in luminous lenticulars which were magnesium overabundant. Figure 3 presents these diagrams for NGC 524 and NGC 6340; the model sequences with varying metallicity and ages calculated by Worthey (1994) for \[Mg/Fe\]=0 border the narrow locus of the solar Mg/Fe ratio. The comparison of the observations with the models reveals that both chemically decoupled nuclei are magnesium overabundant; though less accurate, the measurements of Trager et al. (1998) confirm this conclusion. The magnesium overabundance of the chemically decoupled nuclei in lenticular galaxies is not unique: we have found it for example in NGC 1023 (Sil’chenko, 1999a); but it is not a rule – NGC 7332 and NGC 7280, being of the same total luminosity as NGC 6340, demonstrate the solar Mg/Fe in their chemically decoupled nuclei as well as in their bulges (Sil’chenko, 1999a; Afanasiev & Sil’chenko, 2000). NGC 6340 shows solar magnesium-to-iron ratio in its bulge; the \[Mg/Fe\] difference between the nucleus and the bulge is about 0.3 dex. NGC 524 demonstrates a quite different Mg/Fe behavior: the data taken along the radius lie parallel to the model sequence but shifted to the right. This is interpreted as $`\text{[Mg/Fe]}+0.3`$ constant up to $`R8\mathrm{}`$ (1 kpc) in this galaxy. Such behavior of Mg/Fe resembles that in ellipticals (Worthey et al., 1992) and in some bulges of supergiant spirals like M 31 (Sil’chenko et al., 1998) or NGC 488 (Sil’chenko, 1999b).

## 4 Morphology of stellar and gas distributions in the center of NGC 524 and NGC 6340

To understand the structure of the central regions in NGC 524 and NGC 6340, we have analysed digital images obtained from the La Palma and HST Archives. The radial dependencies of the major axis position angle and ellipticity of the isophotes approximated by ellipses are presented in Fig. 4 for NGC 524 and in Fig. 5 for NGC 6340.

The galaxies have been earlier studied photometrically, especially NGC 524. For NGC 6340 only one-dimensional brightness profiles can be found in the literature (Boroson, 1981; Whitmore & Kirshner, 1982); they give evidence that the global disk begins to dominate at $`R15\mathrm{}`$. For NGC 524 the information is rich and somewhat controversial. According to Kent (1985) and Bothun & Gregg (1990), which have made the brightness profile decomposition in the $`r`$-band and $`B`$-band respectively, the bulge dominates over the disk at all radii; so in some respect NGC 524 may be re-classified as an elliptical with embedded disk. However, the profiles presented by Hodge & Steidl (1976) and Magrelli et al. (1992) reveal an extended exponential disk dominating over the bulge at $`R30\mathrm{}`$. The ellipticity estimates for the outer isophotes range from $`0.03\pm 0.01`$ (Hodge & Steidl, 1976) to 0.06 (Kent, 1984); our estimate from the La Palma data is 0.06; in any case, the galaxy inclination cannot be larger than $`20\mathrm{°}`$. The line-of-nodes orientation lies somewhere between $`PA_0=5\mathrm{°}\pm 23\mathrm{°}`$ (Hodge & Steidl, 1976) and $`41\mathrm{°}`$ (Kent, 1984; Magrelli et al., 1992) – more exact determination is prevented by the low ellipticity of the isophotes, particularly, LEDA and RC3 omit the estimate of the major-axis position angle (see our Table 1).

The combination of the photometric data of different spatial resolution allows us to study the structure of the inner regions of NGC 524 and NGC 6340 in more detail.

Figure 4 shows the radial variations of the major-axis position angle and ellipticity in the center of NGC 524. At $`R>5\mathrm{}`$ they look rather constant, $`PA_0`$ at the level of about $`40\mathrm{°}`$ and $`1b/a`$ at the level of 0.03. This behavior does not contradict the data for the outer regions according e.g. to Magrelli et al. (1992). However, at $`R4\mathrm{}`$ the major axis seems to be turned by some $`20\mathrm{°}`$ and, more important, the ellipticity seems to increase up to about 0.10 – the value which is not reached even in the outermost part of the galaxy. Though an accuracy of the morphological parameter estimates is low for such roundish isophotes and though some dust is present inside $`R1\mathrm{}`$ (Byun et al., 1996) which causes a discrepancy of two HST measurements of the ellipticity through the different filters , a presence of the visibly elongated stellar structure in the center of NGC 524 seems to be quite probable.

The variations of the morphological parameters in the center of NGC 6340 are even more prominent than in the center of NGC 524. In the disk-dominated region, at $`R=30\mathrm{}35\mathrm{}`$, the position angle of the isophote major axis, that is, the orientation of the line of nodes, is $`PA_0=131\mathrm{°}`$. The asymptotic ellipticity is 0.08, so the inclination of the galactic plane may be as large as $`23\mathrm{°}`$. However, at $`R<5\mathrm{}`$ (Fig. 5) the major axis is surely turned and its $`PA85\mathrm{°}`$ differs from the orientation of the line of nodes at least by $`45\mathrm{°}`$. The ellipticity demonstrates a local maximum at $`R5\mathrm{}`$, the most prominent in the high-resolution HST data. Though some discrepancy of the data inside $`R3\mathrm{}`$ which is caused by the different spatial resolutions of the observations can be seen, the elongated stellar structure in the center of NGC 6340 is also rather probable.

Our spectral observations have detected the emission line \[NII\]$`\lambda `$6583, and so the presence of ionized gas, in the centers of both galaxies. We wonder if the distributions of diffuse matter, gas and dust, resemble those of the stellar components. First, we can examine the dust. Figure 6 presents direct WFPC2 (namely PC) images of both galaxies. One can see a rather extended roundish dust disk in the center of NGC 524 which consists of tightly wrapped thin dark spirals. Lower-resolution observations made by Veron-Cetty & Veron (1988) also revealed a red nucleus and ”almost face-on dust ring” with the sizes of $`16\mathrm{}\times 12\mathrm{}`$; let us note, however, that such axis ratio, 0.75, favors a dust disk inclination rather close to $`40\mathrm{°}`$, not exactly face-on. In the center of NGC 6340 (Fig. 6b) Carollo et al. (1997b) noticed ”a tiny dust lane”. We can add that the very compact, with the radius of less than $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$, dust disk is seen almost edge-on ($`i_{dust}70\mathrm{°}`$), and therefore we deal with a circumnuclear polar ring. Its line of nodes is close to $`PA_090\mathrm{°}`$.

Our MPFS observations allow to refer directly to emission-line brightness maps. Figure 7 presents surface distributions of the \[NII\] emission intensity in arbitrary units. In NGC 6340 the nitrogen emission-line isophotes are elongated in $`PA130\mathrm{°}`$, so they imply the existence of rather extended gaseous disk which line of nodes, but not the inclination, coincides with that of the global disk. In NGC 524 the emission distribution is strongly asymmetric: it is confined to the western part of the circumnuclear region, and its geometry is not quite evident. However, if we remind the work of Macchetto et al. (1996) who observed lenticular galaxies through the narrow-band $`\text{H}_\alpha +\text{[NII]}`$ filter, we find that the emission distribution in the center of NGC 524 matches perfectly that of the dust: the same roundish patchy disk with the radius of some $`20\mathrm{}`$. A bright emission knot in the western vicinity of the nucleus is also seen in the map presented by Macchetto et al. (1996), so our Fig. 7a represents probably a high-level slice of the overall emission distribution.

## 5 Kinematics of gas and stars in the central regions of NGC 524 and 6340

When we look at a rotating disk from its pole, it is projected ”face-on” (on the sky plane) and the projection of its rotation velocity onto the line of sight is zero. Generally, face-on galaxies should lack any line-of-sight velocity gradients (over their images). It is just what we would expect from NGC 524 and NGC 6340. However the line-of-sight velocity fields obtained by us for these galaxies look quite different.

Figure 8 presents velocity fields for the ionized gas in the centers of the galaxies. Both maps demonstrate obvious signs of regular rotation: the measured line-of-sight velocities gradually changes from one map corner to another. In the case of axisymmetrical (circular, cylindric) rotation the direction of the highest velocity gradient (which we call ”dynamical major axis”) should coincide with the line of nodes. In NGC 524 (Fig. 8a) this direction is $`PA_023\mathrm{°}`$, in NGC 6340 (Fig. 8b) – $`PA_0115\mathrm{°}`$. Both directions are indeed close to the major axes of the inner isophotes as measured by us in the previous Section, though it is not quite true for NGC 6340: $`PA_0(phot)`$ changes along the radius in the center of this galaxy, and it is not quite clear what orientation must be chosen as a reference one. But as the first approximation, one can conclude that we see circumnuclear rotating thin (cold) gaseous disks; and these disks, unlike the main stellar disks, are obviously not face-on: their visible rotation is very fast.

As for the stellar rotation, we have not found clear signs of it in the center of NGC 6340. The systematic velocity variation over the full line-of-sight velocity field of this galaxy, the spatial base of which is some $`10\mathrm{}`$, if it exists, does not exceed the random error of one velocity measurement, namely, 25 km/s. On the contrary, stars in the center of NGC 524 demonstrate quite noticeable rotation (Fig. 9). This is somewhat unexpected: LEDA (see Table 1) gives for NGC 524 $`i=8.7\mathrm{°}`$ and for NGC 6340 $`i=25.6\mathrm{°}`$, so the latter galaxy would have a projection factor three times less than the former. Besides, the stellar velocity dispersion in the center of NGC 524 is rather high, the galaxy is thought by many photometrists to be bulge-dominated, so this galaxy is closer to ellipticals than NGC 6340, and as a luminous early-type galaxy it should rotate slowly. However, the line-of-sight velocity gradient is quite visible in Fig. 9; the direction of the maximum velocity gradient, $`PA_019\mathrm{°}`$, agrees well with the dynamical major axis of the gaseous component. As the photometric major axis in the radius range of $`1\mathrm{}4\mathrm{}`$ also is aligned in $`PA_0(phot)20\mathrm{°}`$ (Fig. 4), we conclude that the separate stellar disk with the radius of $`4\mathrm{}5\mathrm{}`$ (0.6–0.8 kpc) having a gaseous extension up to $`R20\mathrm{}`$ (3 kpc) exists in the center of NGC 524. Its line of nodes is aligned in $`PA20\mathrm{°}`$, whereas the global line of nodes is close to $`PA_040\mathrm{°}`$ (Fig. 4, see also Magrelli et al. (1992)), so the circumnuclear disk is inclined with respect to the main galactic plane.

To compare more thoroughly stellar and gaseous rotations in the centers of NGC 524 and NGC 6340, we have simulated one-dimensional velocity profiles along the dynamical major axes overlaping a narrow ”slit” on the two-dimensional velocity fields for the gas and stars. The resulting profiles are plotted in Fig. 10. In NGC 524 (Fig. 10a) there is no significant discrepance between the stellar and gaseous rotation; however both velocity variation amplitudes are too high to be attributed to the rotation plane inclined by $`i20\mathrm{°}`$, unless we accept $`V_{rot}360`$ km/s at $`R<1`$ kpc. We would rather ascribe $`i40\mathrm{°}`$ implied by the morphology of the dust ring (Veron-Cetty & Veron, 1988) to this fast-rotating circumnuclear disk. This is one more sign for its decoupling. In NGC 6340 we had a problem with determining a position angle for our cross-section: the ionized gas shows $`PA_0115\mathrm{°}`$, the dynamical major axis of the circumnuclear stellar component is unknown, and the global line of nodes is close to $`PA_0140\mathrm{°}`$ (Fig. 5). Bottema (1989) has chosen $`PA=130\mathrm{°}`$ for his long-slit observations, and to make also a comparison with his data we cut the velocity fields along $`PA=130\mathrm{°}`$. The gas and stellar velocity profiles in the center of NGC 6340 look quite different (Fig. 10b): the slope of the gas velocity profile, though it is not taken exactly along the dynamical major axis, is at least five times steeper than that for the stellar component. The central stellar velocity dispersion is low; galactic bulges with such $`\sigma _{}`$ usually rotate rapidly (Kormendy & Illingworth, 1982). An explanation which can reconcile the visible kinematics of both components is that the gas and stars in the center of NGC 6340 rotate in different planes. While Bottema (1989) decided that the visible stellar rotation of NGC 6340 is quite normal for the inclination of $`20\mathrm{°}`$, the rotation of the ionized gas must be more related to the edge-on circumnuclear dust ring visible on the image provided by the HST (Fig. 6b). The highly elongated isophotes of the \[NII\] emission brightness surface distribution (Fig. 7b) support this suggestion.

## 6 Conclusions and Discussion

Two early-type face-on disk galaxies, NGC 524 and NGC 6340, where we previously suspected the presence of chemically decoupled nuclei, have been re-investigated with the Multi-Pupil Field Spectrograph of the 6m telescope equipped with CCDs. We confirm a drop of the magnesium-line index between the nuclei and the bulges $`4\mathrm{}8\mathrm{}`$ from the centers in these galaxies; the $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$Mgb’s measured now imply metallicity differences of 0.5–0.6 dex. In NGC 524 the iron-line index Fe5270 also demonstrates a drop between the nucleus and the bulge; the magnesium overabundance, \[Mg/Fe\]$`+0.3`$, is almost constant over the full radius range under consideration. In NGC 6340 the nucleus is magnesium overabundant too, but the ratio \[Mg/Fe\] falls to zero toward $`R4\mathrm{}`$.

The presence of chemically decoupled nuclei in the galaxies is accompanied by indications of inclined disks detected in the circumnuclear regions though our investigation is completely confined to the bulge-dominated regions. In NGC 524 the central velocity fields of the ionized gas and stars are similar; the orientation of the dynamical major axis, $`PA_020\mathrm{°}`$, coincides with the photometric major axis orientation in the radius range of $`1\mathrm{}5\mathrm{}`$. Though both deviate from the line of nodes which has $`PA_0=32\mathrm{°}42\mathrm{°}`$, the coincidence of the photometric and dynamical major axes proves the axisymmetric character of rotation: in a triaxial potential the photometric and dynamical major axes turn in opposite directions with respect to the line of nodes (Monnet et al., 1992). As the gaseous and stellar rotation velocities are comparable, probably we deal with a stellar-and-gaseous disk inclined with respect to the main plane of the galaxy. The rather high visible velocity variation amplitude favors larger inclination of the circumnuclear disk than is that of the global disk of the galaxy: from the geometry of the dust distribution (Veron-Cetty & Veron, 1988) we would guess about $`i40\mathrm{°}`$ in the center versus $`i20\mathrm{°}`$ for the whole galaxy. The central disk may be extended up to $`R20\mathrm{}`$ (3 kpc) as the dust spirals and emission-line distribution in Macchetto et al. (1996) evidence (in the bluer passbands we also trace $`PA_020\mathrm{°}`$ up to $`R13\mathrm{}`$, Fig. 4). But we see the solid-body fast rotation only up to $`R5\mathrm{}`$, and under the assumption of $`i=40\mathrm{°}`$ the mass contained within this radius can be estimated as $`(710)10^9M_{\mathrm{}}`$ – a rather high value corresponding to the fast circumnuclear rotation, $`\omega 280`$ km/s/kpc.

In the center of NGC 6340 the stellar and gaseous velocity fields differ dramatically. The lack of visible stellar rotation must be confronted with the isophote major axis turn and the local ellipticity maximum in the radius range $`1\mathrm{}5\mathrm{}`$. Such combination of morphological and kinematical properties in the center of the face-on disk galaxy may be explained by a slight bulge triaxiality with its largest axis aligned in $`PA85\mathrm{°}`$ whereas the line of nodes of the galaxy is close to $`PA_0130\mathrm{°}140\mathrm{°}`$. Interestingly, the tiny dust lane noticed by Carollo et al. (1997b) in their HST observations of NGC 6340 goes through the nucleus just in this direction. Obviously, the diffuse matter is going to settle into one of the principal planes of the triaxial bulge; in this particular case we see a quasi-polar circumnuclear gaseous disk. The alignment of the \[NII\] emission isophotes (Fig. 7b) and of the dynamical major axis of the gas velocity field (Fig. 8b) in $`PA_0115\mathrm{°}120\mathrm{°}`$ proves a planar character of the gas rotation, but not exactly in the principal plane of the triaxial bulge. Perhaps the circumnuclear gaseous disk is not completely stabilized yet. However the high line-of-sight velocity gradient evidences for a rather edge-on orientation of the rotation plane.

Circumnuclear polar gaseous disks in galaxies with triaxial bulges or bars represent a rather new phenomenon which is not wide-known yet. However several examples are found in nearby non-interacting disk galaxies. We (Sil’chenko et al., 1997) have reported on the existence of a fast-rotating gaseous polar disk with a radius of $`200`$ pc in the regular Sb galaxy NGC 2841; later we have proved that its bulge is triaxial (Afanasiev & Sil’chenko, 1999). The orthogonal planar rotations of ionized gas and stars have also been detected by us in the center of the lenticular galaxy NGC 7280 (Afanasiev & Sil’chenko, 2000); this galaxy also possesses an intermediate-scale bar. Another example of the circumnuclear polar gaseous disk is known in NGC 253 (Anantharamaiah & Goss, 1996). Qualitative arguments (Sofue & Wakamatsu, 1994) evidence that an existence of circumnuclear polar gaseous disks well inside triaxial stellar structures may be a result of intrinsic dynamical evolution; an accretion of external gas is not quite necessary in such a case. However, an extended stellar-and-gaseous disk with a randomly inclined rotation axis in the axisymmetric galaxy, such as NGC 524, seem to require external gas (and stars?) accretion.

Another important question which we try to answer for some time is if a chemically distinct nucleus (core) and a circumnuclear stellar disk are the same thing or are they different substructures though perhaps evolutionarily related? In elliptical galaxies the former variant is discussed for several years (Surma & Bender, 1995; Carollo et al., 1997a). But in some spiral galaxies we clearly resolve the circumnuclear stellar disks and simultaneously cannot resolve their chemically distinct nuclei. Perhaps, the brightest example is M 31: the size of its chemically distinct entity is restricted by $`R4\mathrm{}`$ whereas the circumnuclear stellar disk extends up to $`R30\mathrm{}`$ (Sil’chenko et al., 1998). Though less convincing due to the worse spatial resolution, a similar situation appears to be present in NGC 524. The kinematically traced inclined stellar disk is seen at $`R=4\mathrm{}`$, but the effect of the chemically distinct nucleus is already negligible at this radius. So we would prefer to separate the chemically distinct nucleus and the circumnuclear stellar disk in this galaxy. Rather we would associate the chemically distinct nucleus in NGC 524 with its ”core” that has been found from WFPC HST observations of the central luminosity profile (Byun et al., 1996). The radius of the photometrically distinct core in NGC 524 is $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ that cannot be resolved in our observations; but as it is detectable from photometry, it may affect the spectral characteristics of the galactic nucleus if the stellar population of the core is different from the stellar population of the bulge. As for NGC 6340, we do not know if this galaxy has a separate circumnuclear stellar disk – not identifying by its kinematics, it may be only face-on. But a photometric core detected from the HST data is also present in NGC 6340; its radius is $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$ (Carollo & Stiavelli, 1998), so we would see it as an unresolved issue.

I thank the astronomers of the Special Astrophysical Observatory Drs. V. L. Afanasiev, S. N. Dodonov, V. V. Vlasyuk, and Mr. Drabek for supporting the observations at the 6m telescope. I am also grateful to the post-graduate student of the Special Astrophysical Observatory A. V. Moiseev for the help in preparing the manuscript. The 6m telescope is operated under the financial support of Science Ministry of Russia (registration number 01-43). During the data analysis I have used the Lyon-Meudon Extragalactic Database (LEDA) supplied by the LEDA team at the CRAL-Observatoire de Lyon (France) and the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of the La Palma Archive. The telescope JKT is operated on the island of La Palma by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The work is partly based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. The work was supported by the grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Researches 98-02-16196, by the grant of the President of Russian Federation for young Russian doctors of sciences 98-15-96029 and by the Russian State Scientific-Technical Program ”Astronomy. Basic Space Researches” (the section ”Astronomy”).