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# Random bond 𝑋𝑋𝑍 chains with modulated couplings

1 \[

## Abstract

The magnetization behavior of $`q`$-periodic antiferromagnetic spin $`1/2`$ Heisenberg chains under uniform magnetic fields is investigated in a background of disorder exchange distributions. By means of both real space decimation procedures and numerical diagonalizations in $`XX`$ chains, it is found that for binary disorder the magnetization exhibits wide plateaux at values of $`1+2(p1)/q`$, where $`p`$ is the disorder strength. In contrast, no spin gaps are observed in the presence of continuous exchange distributions. We also study the magnetic susceptibility at low magnetic fields.

PACS numbers: 75.10.Jm, 75.10.Nr, 75.60.Ej.

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The study of low dimensional antiferromagnets has received much renewed attention largely owing to the synthesis of ladder materials . One particular issue that captured both experimental and theoretical efforts in the past few years is the appearance of magnetization plateaux, i.e. massive spin excitations in the magnetization curve. In general, the latter are quite robust and for pure spin systems appear at rational magnetization values . More recently, some experiments have indeed confirmed these theoretical predictions in a few particular cases  but some issues yet remain unresolved .

In order to make closer contact with experiments, one has to take into account the disorder that is almost inevitably present due to lattice imperfections and magnetic doping. A relevant question related to the appearance of magnetization plateaux is whether they are robust in the presence of quenched disorder. As a first step in this direction, in this work we analyze the effect of a disordered distribution of exchange couplings with a periodically modulated mean on the magnetic behavior of an $`XXZ`$ antiferromagnetic chain. Both even  and odd  modulations are known to exist and are ultimately responsible for the structure of the magnetization curve . $`q`$-merized $`XX`$ chains have also been studied in  using a Jordan-Wigner transformation.

By means of a decimation procedure similar to that used in  we argue that plateaux in the magnetization curve appear at specific magnetization values $`m`$ which depend both on the couplings periodicity $`q`$ and the strength of the disorder $`p`$. Hence disorder, instead of removing completely the plateau structure, shifts the position of certain plateaux in a precise way which depends on the disorder strength. Surprisingly, as we shall see from our numerical evidence, the plateaux predicted via this simple argument are indeed present. Moreover, they are rather wide and therefore could be eventually observable in low temperature experiments which in turn would allow for a precise determination of the disorder degree.

By extending the methods of , we also investigate the characteristics of the magnetic susceptibility at low fields. Its behavior shows an interesting even-odd effect, similar to that found in the study of disordered $`XX`$ $`N`$-leg ladders . In fact, for $`q`$ odd we find the same kind of divergence as for the homogeneously disordered case ($`q=1`$) , namely

$$\chi _z\frac{1}{H[\mathrm{ln}(H^2)]^3},$$
(1)
whereas the even $`q`$ modulations yield a generic non-universal power law behavior as in  for $`q=2`$,

$$\chi _zH^{\alpha 1},$$
(2)
where we give an analytic expression for $`\alpha `$ for arbitrary $`q`$. In principle, these results should emerge from experimental susceptibility measurements in disordered low dimensional compounds.

In what follows we focus attention on the occurrence conditions of zero temperature plateaux in a random $`q`$-merized $`XXZ`$ spin-1/2 chain whose Hamiltonian is

$$H=\underset{i}{}J_i\left(S_i^xS_{i+1}^x+S_i^yS_{i+1}^y+\mathrm{\Delta }S_i^zS_{i+1}^z\right),$$
(3)
where $`J_i`$ are randomly distributed bonds. Specifically, let us consider a binary distribution of strength $`p`$ ($`p=0`$ corresponds to the pure $`q`$-merized case while $`p=1`$ corresponds to the uniform chain),

$$P(J_i)=p\delta (J_iJ^{})+(1p)\delta (J_iJ_0\gamma _iJ),$$
(4)
where $`\gamma _i\gamma ,(\gamma )`$ if $`i=qn,`$ ($`iqn`$), along with a Gaussian disorder $`P(J_i)\mathrm{exp}\frac{(J_i\overline{J_i})^2}{2\sigma _i^2}`$, and log-normal distribution given in terms of $`W_i=\mathrm{ln}(J_i)`$ and $`P(W_i)\mathrm{exp}\frac{(W_i\overline{W_i})^2}{2\lambda _i^2}`$. All these distributions, taken with same mean and variance, are built to enforce $`q`$-merization, whose value is measured on average by $`\gamma J`$. In what follows we assume that $`J^{}`$ is the smallest coupling and consider $`0<\gamma <J_0/J`$.

a. Decimation procedure — Here we follow the arguments used by Fisher in . The procedure is roughly to decimate the strongest bonds up to an energy scale given by the temperature. The remaining spins can be considered as free and each of them will then give rise to a Curie behavior in the magnetic susceptibility.

In our problem (which is at $`T=0`$) the energy scale is provided by the magnetic field, and in order to compute the magnetization, decimation has to be stopped at an energy scale of the order of the magnetic field. We assume that all spins coupled by bonds stronger than the magnetic field form singlets and do not contribute to the magnetization, whereas spins coupled by weaker bonds are completely polarized. The magnetization is thus proportional to the fraction of remaining spins at the step where we stop decimation. Our argument happens to apply well to the binary distribution, provided the energy scales of the involved exchanges are well separated.

b. Plateaux in $`q`$-merized chains —Let us first consider the case $`q=2`$ and assume we start at high enough magnetic field, such that all spins are polarized (saturation, $`m=1`$) and begin decreasing the magnetic field. The magnetization stays constant for a while, then decreases abruptly at $`hJ_0+\gamma J`$ and after that a plateau occurs at $`m=p`$. This can be easily understood: at $`hJ_0+\gamma J`$ we can decimate all the strongest bonds $`J_0+\gamma J`$ (the corresponding spin pairs form singlets and do not contribute), and the number of remaining (completely polarized) spins is $`N2\times (1p)N/2=pN`$. Here, the factor of 2 comes from the removal of two spins each time we decimate a bond. Hence, the first plateau occurs at $`m=p`$. The appearance of this spin gap is due to the fact that the remaining strongest bonds have values $`J_0\gamma J`$ , and all spins left from the first step of decimation remain polarized (and the magnetization constant), until the magnetic field decreases to $`hJ_0\gamma J`$. At this point the magnetization again decreases abruptly and a second plateau occurs. The abrupt change corresponds to the decimation of bonds $`J_0\gamma J`$ which leaves us with $`N2\times (1p)\frac{N}{2}2\times (1p)\frac{N}{2}p^2`$ completely polarized bonds. The plateau occurs then at magnetization $`m=pp^2+p^3`$. The term $`(1p)\frac{N}{2}p^2`$ comes from the bonds $`J_0\gamma J`$ which, having a $`J^{}`$ bond at each side, were not decimated in the first step and thus is the number of bonds actually decimated at the second step. Evidently, for $`q>2`$ we can follow the same reasoning. Thus, the number of spins which yield finite contributions to the total magnetization at $`hJ_0+\gamma J`$ is simply $`N2\times (1p)N/q`$. Hence, we find the first plateau at

$$m=1+\frac{2}{q}(p1).$$
(5)
Notice that this result locates correctly the spin gaps appearing in a pure $`q`$-merized chain ($`p=0`$). In this sense, Eq. (5) provides an extension of this latter case  in the presence of binary disorder. Since the decimation procedure applies for generic $`XXZ`$ chains , we conclude that the emergence of the plateaux predicted in (5) is a generic feature, at least with the anisotropy parameter $`|\mathrm{\Delta }|<1`$. It is straightforward to generalize this analysis to the case of an arbitrary but discrete probability distribution. Given a finite difference between the highest values of the couplings in the inequivalent sites, one can predict the presence and position of the plateaux.

To enable an independent check of these assertions, we turn to a numerical diagonalization of the Hamiltonian (3) contenting ourselves with the analysis of the subcase $`\mathrm{\Delta }=0`$. This allows us to explore rather long chains using a fair number of disorder realizations. In Figs. 1(a), 1(b) and 1(c) we show respectively the whole magnetization curves obtained for $`q=`$2, 3 and 4 after averaging over 100 samples of $`L=5\times 10^4`$ sites under the exchange disorder (4). It can be readily verified that this set of robust plateaux emerges quite precisely at the critical magnetizations given by Eq. (5). The secondary plateaux, though narrower, are still visible in Fig. (1).

It is important to stress that the derivation of our results for the quantization conditions derived above rely strongly on the discreteness of the probability distribution and would not be applicable to an arbitrary continuous exchange disorder. In fact, for the Gaussian case referred to above it turns out that no traces of plateaux can be observed. Furthermore, the magnetic susceptibility in the Gaussian case only vanishes asymptotically when approaching the saturation regime, as can be seen in Fig. 2 for a variety of coupling periodicities. Here, the sampling was improved up to $`5\times 10^4`$ realizations though the length of the chain was reduced to $`L=1500`$ sites, as the CPU time per spectrum grows as $`L^2`$.

¿From the numerical curves, it appears that the usual DN-PT  transition is smoothed in the presence of disorder, both in the cases of binary and Gaussian distribution. Using the exact results of  for a family of Poissonian distributions, one sees that the behavior of the magnetization close to saturation has a non-universal exponential decrease. On the other hand, this non-universality is reflected for the binary case, in the fact that saturation occurs with an upper bound given by $`2J_{\text{max}}`$. Since the universal DN-PT transition is destroyed near saturation, we expect that the same will occur in the vicinity of a non-trivial plateau. In fact, this is noticeable in the numerical data.

c. Susceptibility at low magnetic fields — For homogeneously disordered chains (i.e. $`q=1`$), one can use the decimation procedure of  along with the universality of the fixed point, to show that either for discrete or continuous distributions the low field magnetic susceptibility behaves according to Eq. (1). Following a simple argument based on random walk motion used in , it can be readily shown that for $`\mathrm{\Delta }=0`$ (or $`XX`$ chains), these arguments can be extended to the case of $`q`$ odd giving the same singularities. In fact, these expectations can be compared to the numerical results obtained for $`q`$ odd with both Gaussian and binary disorders, as shown in Figs. 2 and 3 respectively. In particular, we direct the reader to the semi-log insets of Figs. 2(b), 2(d), 3(b) and 3(d) which evidently follow the universal singularity referred to in Eq. (1). The numerical results for the log-normal distribution lead to the same qualitative behavior obtained for the Gaussian case.

For $`q`$ even, for which there is a plateau at $`m=0`$ in the pure case, the situation is more subtle. Using the notation of , for $`XX`$ chains we can again define a random walk of the variable $`u_i=\mathrm{ln}(\mathrm{\Delta }_i)`$ between the boundaries $`\mathrm{ln}(\stackrel{~}{V}^2/E)`$ and $`\mathrm{ln}(E)`$, now with a driving force $`F`$ and diffusion coefficient $`D`$ given by

$`F`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2}{q}}<\mathrm{ln}J_{i=qn}^2\mathrm{ln}J_{iqn}^2>,`$ (6)
$`D`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{q}}\left[\text{var}^2(\mathrm{ln}J_{i=qn}^2)+(q1)\text{var}^2(\mathrm{ln}J_{iqn}^2)\right].`$ (7)
By means of the method given in  for the undriven random walk, one can approximate the problem to a discrete time diffusion problem with an absorbing and reflecting wall. One can then show that the average number of bonds for a cycle to be completed goes now like $`\overline{n}e^{\alpha \mathrm{\Delta }u/2}`$, which gives the asymptotic behavior for the magnetic susceptibility as in (2). The non-universal exponent $`\alpha `$ turns out to depend on the distribution parameters (6) and (7) namely, $`\alpha =2F/D`$. Also, this exponent coincides with the results obtained in  using decimation and other methods for the $`q=2`$, $`XXZ`$ chain.

Once more, our numerical results for the binary and Gaussian coupling distributions considered above lend further support to this non-universal picture of even modulations. Specifically, there are in fact situations for which the low field susceptibility can either diverge ($`\alpha <1`$) as displayed in Figs. 2(a), 2(c), 3(c) or collapse ($`\alpha >1`$) as shown in Figs. 3(a). Moreover, we checked that our $`\alpha `$ exponents can fit reasonably the numerical behavior obtained in this regime, as indicated by the log-log insets of Figs. 2(a) and 2(c).

To summarize, we have studied the effect of disorder on the plateaux structure in $`q`$-merized $`XXZ`$ chains. By means of a simple real space decimation procedure we could account for a non-trivial phenomenon namely, the shift in the magnetization values for which certain plateaux emerge, as compared to the pure system. This was tested by numerical diagonalizations of large XX chains finding a remarkable agreement with Eq. (5). We have also analyzed the behavior of the low magnetic field susceptibility which exhibits a clear $`q`$-odd (even) logarithmic (power law) behavior. Our theoretical predictions could be experimentally checked on dimerized compounds such as CuGeO3 doped with Si  under magnetic fields. Also trimerized compounds exist in nature  and it would be interesting to see if they can be doped. We trust this work will convey an interesting motivation for further experimental studies.

We acknowledge useful discussions with P. Degiovanni, F. Delduc, A. Honecker, R. Mélin, and C. Mudry. This work was done under partial support of EC TMR contract FMRX-CT96-0012. The research of D.C.C and M.D.G. is partially supported by CONICET, ANPCyT (grant No. 03-02249) and Fundación Antorchas, Argentina (grant No. A-13622/1-106).


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# Extreme intranight variability in the BL Lacertae object AO 0235+164

## 1 Introduction

The BL Lac object AO 0235+164 is one of the most intensively studied blazars. It is a very compact source (e.g. Jones et al. 1984, Chu et al. 1996) which ejects superluminal components with apparent velocities up to $`30c`$ (see Fan et al. 1996 and references therein). The object presents emission lines at a redshift of $`z=0.94`$ and foreground absorption features at $`z=0.85`$ and $`z=0.524`$, which have led several authors to study a gravitational microlensing scenario for this source (e.g. Stickel et al. 1988, Abraham et al. 1993).

The historical lightcurves at different optical frequencies of AO 0235+164 have been recently compiled by Fan & Lin (2000). This source is one of the most optically variable BL Lac objects (e.g. Webb et al. 1988). Very rapid changes of its flux density have been reported across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Quirrenbach et al. (1992), Romero et al. (1997), and Kraus et al. (1999) have detected intraday radio variability. At optical wavelengths, Rabbette et al. (1996), Heidt & Wagner (1996), and Noble & Miller (1996) have found rapid changes of a few tenths of a magnitude within a single night. Schramm et al. (1994) reported extreme optical microvariability (1.6 mag in 48 hours), although not with high time resolution. At high energies, AO 0235+164 has also displayed significant variability (see Hartman et al. 1999).

In this Letter we present the results of two-colour optical CCD photometry with high time resolution of AO 0235+164 carried out with the 2.15-m CASLEO telescope. Our observations revealed one of the most extreme variability events ever observed at optical frequencies in any blazar. The observational results can be used to shed some light on the mechanisms that generate the short-term flux changes in this puzzling object.

## 2 Observations and data analysis

The observations were carried out during 6 consecutive nights in November 1999 with the 2.15-m CASLEO telescope at El Leoncito, San Juan, Argentina, as part of an extensive program of optical monitoring of gamma-ray blazars. A cryogenically-cooled CCD camera with an excellent cosmetics Tek-1024 chip (with a read-out-noise of 9.6 electrons and a gain of 1.98 electrons adu-1) was used. Originally, several blazars were scheduled for observation with a Johnson $`V`$ filter, but when it became obvious that A0 0235+164 was undergoing extraordinary brightness variations we focused only on this source and incorporated observations with a Kron-Cousins $`R`$ filter in order to achieve two-colour photometry and a high time resolution. These conditions were obtained from the third to the last night. Typical integration times were $`100`$ s. The CCD frames were bias subtracted and flat-fielded using dome-flats and twilight frames in order to correct the pixel-to-pixel variations of the CCD. Standard stars selected from Landolt (1992) were also observed each night for magnitude calibration.

Each target frame contained, in addition to the BL Lac object, several stars which were used for comparison and control purposes following the procedures described in detail in Romero et al. (1999). Data reduction was made with the IRAF software package. The aperture routine APPHOT was applied to perform the differential photometry, and lightcurves were calculated as target minus comparison star, as usual in this kind of studies (e.g. Carini et al. 1991). In order to avoid possible spurious variability introduced by seeing fluctuations that could affect the blazar but not the point-like stars, we have followed the recommendations of Cellone et al. (2000) and selected an 8-pixel (6.5 arcsec) radius aperture. Checks using plots of the PSF FHWM vs. time confirmed that the aperture was correctly selected, and that the magnitude changes were real and not originated in varying light contamination from the weak foreground galaxies induced by small changes in seeing conditions.

The standard deviation ($`\sigma `$) of comparison minus control stars was adopted as a measurement of the observational errors. The average variability errors were $`\sigma _R0.011`$ mag and $`\sigma _V0.012`$ mag, whereas the individual photometric errors were typically $`0.004`$ mag and $`0.005`$ mag for the $`R`$ and $`V`$ bands, respectively.

Absolute calibration to the standard system was performed for AO 0235+164 and the field stars, tying all nights to the best (photometric) one. The expected zero-point error is $`0.01`$ mag for both $`R`$ and $`V`$ bands, although internal consistency in the $`VR`$ colours should be better than this. The blazar’s standard magnitudes were corrected for Galactic extinction adopting $`E_{BV}=0.08`$ (Schlegel et al. 1998), and absolute flux densities in both bands were calculated using the calibrations of Bessell (1979). Tables with the resulting values of the flux densities of AO 0235+164 from November 3 to November 8 1999 are available upon request from G.E. Romero111romero@irma.iar.unlp.edu.ar.

Spectral indices for the blazar were computed fitting a power-law spectrum $`F\nu ^\alpha `$ and errors adequately propagated from the flux values. Spectral index variability during the observation span was additionally controlled using the scatter of the spectral indices obtained for the field stars $`|\sigma _\alpha |0.074`$.

## 3 Results

The complete differential $`V`$-band lightcurve of AO 0235+ 164 is presented in Figure 1 along with the corresponding curve for the stellar comparison. The confidence of the variability is at a 26.3 $`\sigma `$ level. For the $`R`$ band the confidence is even higher: 30.9 $`\sigma `$. In Table 1 we present a summary of the results obtained from the observations; from left to right we list the observing band, the UT date, the variability error $`\sigma `$ obtained from the scatter of the field stars, the timescale of the variability defined as $`t_\mathrm{v}=\mathrm{\Delta }F(dF/dt)^1`$, the confidence level $`C`$ of the observed variability estimated as the ratio between the scatter in the BL Lac lightcurve and the observational errors: $`C=\sigma _{\mathrm{Bl}}/\sigma `$, the variability amplitudes defined as in Heidt & Wagner (1996): $`Y=100[(\mathrm{}F)^22\sigma ^2]^{1/2}/<F>`$ (where $`<F>`$ is the averaged flux density), the fractional variability index defined as $`FV=\mathrm{}F/F_{\mathrm{min}}`$, and, finally, the average flux density in mJy.

The lightcurve shown in Figure 1 presents one of the most extreme forms of optical variability reported in the literature since the introduction of CCD cameras. Between the fourth and the fifth nights the source brightness changed by $`1.2`$ mag in about 24 hours. Translated to flux density this means a change of about 100%: the source doubled its flux density in one day. During the fifth night there was a variation of $`0.5`$ mag in six hours. This extreme behaviour is even more violent than the very strong outbursts observed in 1990 and 1991 by Noble & Miller (1996) in this same object, when intranight amplitudes of $`0.25`$ mag were registered.

In Figure 2 we show the spectral index evolution during the observations (starting on the third night when the $`R`$ filter was incorporated). The average index is $`<\alpha >=3.04`$ (i.e., $`<(VR)_0>=0.68`$), a steep value in agreement with the very red colour indices quoted by Véron-Cetty & Véron (2000). Some day-to-day variability seems to be present in the spectral index, but the confidence level ($`C=1.65`$) is too low as to be conclusive. A Pearson’s correlation analysis yields values of $`r=0.87`$ for the linear correlation between both bands and the spectral index, whereas it is $`r0.5`$ for the stars, as expected just from correlated observational errors. This could mean a trend in the sense that the source becomes brighter when the spectrum gets harder, as observed in other blazars (e.g. Romero et al. 2000 and references therein). But, we emphasize, the confidence level is too low as to allow any conclusion in this respect.

A correlation analysis using an interpolated correlation function (ICF) gives a time lag of just 14.7 minutes for the entire lightcurves, in the sense that variations appear first at higher frequencies. However, the associated error, determined as in Gaskell & Peterson (1987), is 31.5 minutes, hence the variations can be considered as simultaneous at both bands.

On the night of November 5, a complete outburst was observed. The flux density in the $`V`$-band changed from $`F_{\mathrm{min}}0.46`$ mJy to $`F_{\mathrm{max}}0.63`$ mJy at a rate of $`dF/dt0.04`$ mJy/hr and returned to its original value in 6 hours. This means a fluctuation with an amplitude $`Y30.4`$ % in the $`V`$ band. In the $`R`$ band the variation was similar: $`Y29.4`$ %, with identical timescale. The ICF analysis is consistent with no time lag at all: $`<\mathrm{lag}>=1.3\pm 5.7`$ minutes. During the outburst, the spectral index did not undergo significant changes; its average value was $`<\alpha >=3.11`$, with a scatter of $`\sigma =0.09`$ for the entire night. In Figure 3 we show the lightcurves in both bands for this event as well as the spectral index behaviour.

## 4 Discussion

Several models have been proposed to explain the rapid variability of AO 0235+164. Interstellar scintillation is only relevant at cm-wavelengths (e.g. Romero et al. 1997, Kraus et al. 1999), but relativistic shocks and gravitational microlensing can produce important changes in the flux density at optical wavelengths. Accretion disk instabilities are also often invoked as a source of optical variations in AGNs (e.g. Wiita 1996), but any accretion disk model would have enormous difficulties to explain outbursts of about 100 % in a few hours. Extremely large and rapid optical variations require the introduction of relativistic effects in order to be explained (e.g. Marscher 1992). These effects are present if an important part of the emission received by the observer is originated in a superluminal feature, such as a thin relativistic shock propagating down the jet of the source. Rapid variability, then, arises when the shock interacts with density inhomogeneities or turbulent features in the flow (e.g. Marscher 1990, Qian et al. 1991, Romero 1995). The shock evolution, however, is not achromatic: radiative losses make the source brighter when the spectrum flattens (e.g. Marscher 1997). This is not the case for the rapid outburst shown in Figure 3, although the evolution of the source during the entire observational campaign could be consistent with this behaviour (as we mentioned above the confidence on this point is not too high). The rapid change observed on November 5 1999, on the contrary, suggests a geometric origin because of its lack of spectral variability and time symmetry.

Kraus et al. (1999) outlined a precessing jet model for AO 0235+164 where the trajectory of the shocked components is determined by collimation in the magnetic field of the perturbed beam, which can develop an helical configuration. This model has been recently expanded by Qian et al. (2000) in order to include aberration effects. If the relativistic source changes the viewing angle due to its propagation through the helical path, the Doppler factor should vary, introducing important changes in the observed flux density. For a Lorentz factor $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=25`$ (Qian et al. 2000), a small change from $`0\mathrm{°}`$ to $`1\mathrm{°}`$ in the direction of the shock with the line of sight would result in a change from 50 to 42 in the Doppler factor, and, consequently, in a flux variation of $`70`$ % for the emitting component at all optical wavebands. If the contribution from this component represents a significant fraction of the total flux density, changes of $`30`$ % can be easily obtained without variations in the spectral index. If aberration effects are included, then the helical beam model can also explain the radio behaviour observed by Kraus et al. (1999), as it is shown by Qian et al. (2000), as well as possible rotations of the polarization angle (e.g. Königl & Choudhuri 1985, Romero et al. 1995a).

Alternatively to intrinsic models involving shocks, superluminal gravitational microlensing (e.g. Romero et al. 1995b) could explain the rapid and time symmetric outbursts observed in AO 0235+164. This is also an achromatic phenomenon; small lenses in the interposed galaxies could amplify the emission from a thin shock producing fast variations superposed to the longer ones, which are due to the shock propagation. Although this mechanism probably fails at radio frequencies because temperatures in excess to the inverse Compton limit are demanded for the emitting region in the blazar, at optical bands it cannot be ruled out at present (see Rabbette et al. 1996 for additional details and numerical estimates). The fact that a similar outburst was observed on the night of November 4 (only in the V band) opens the question of how frequently these outbursts occur. A large number could pose problems to the microlensing interpretation because a high density of small lenses would be required in the interposed galaxy, leading to a ”smearing out” of the individual outbursts.

Future simultaneous radio-optical observations with high time resolution, as well as rapid polarimetric observations, would be very helpful to improve our understanding of this extraordinary blazar.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors acknowledge use of the CCD and data acquisition system supported under US National Science Foundation grant AST-90-15827 to R.M. Rich. They are also very grateful to the CASLEO staff for their kind assistance during the observations and to J.H. Fan and S.J. Qian for useful remarks. This work has been supported by the Argentine agencies CONICET (PIP 0430/98) and ANPCT (PICT 98 No. 03-04881), as well as by Fundación Antorchas (through funds granted to GER and JAC).


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# Interaction of Mesoscopic Magnetic Textures with Superconductors.

## Abstract

We analyze magnetic textures in a thin magnetic film and screening currents induced by these textures in a superconducting film. The two films are supposed to be parallel and close each to other, but interact only via magnetic fields. We consider also vortices inside superconducting film and their interaction with magnetic textures. As examples of magnetic textures we consider magnetic dot and magnetic vortex. We derive the condition at which spontaneous formation of a vortex or a coupled vortex-magnetic defect is energetically favorable. It is proven that the normal component of magnetic field generated by a magnetic dot changes sign in the presence of the superconducting vortex.

The fabrication and experimental study  of mesoscopic heterogeneous magnetic/superconducting systems together with recent theoretical predictions  open a new class of physical effects. Earlier two of us (I.F.L. and V.L.P.) proposed to separate superconductivity and magnetism in space employing the modern technique of nano-fabrication . The proximity effect which suppresses both order parameters can be easily avoided by growing insulator oxide layers between ferromagnetic (FM) and superconducting (SC) components. Inhomogeneous magnetization of the magnetic texture generates magnetic field penetrating into the superconductor. The magnetic field from the SC currents interacts with magnetic subsystem . We have proposed different realizations of mesoscopic magneto-superconducting systems: arrays of magnetic dots on the top of a superconducting film , magnetic/superconducting bi-layers , magnetic nano-rods embedded into a superconductor .

In the majority of proposed systems a magnetic texture interacts with the superconducting current. An inhomogeneous magnetization generates magnetic field outside the magnet. The magnetic field generates screening currents in superconductors which, in turn, change the magnetic field. The problem must be solved self-consistently . In this article we develop a general formalism for interacting inhomogeneous magnetization (texture) and superconductors in the London’s approximation. Employing this formalism, we find two elementary solutions for a circular magnetic dot on the top of a superconducting film, magnetized perpendicularly to it, and for a coupled magnetic and superconducting vortices. London’s approximation works satisfactory since the sizes of all structures in the problem exceeds remarkably the coherence length $`\xi `$.

Recent theoretical works  consider problems close to ours. The main difference between our work and the Ref.  is that they do not incorporate spontaneous vortices in the ground state. In comparison to the Refs.  our approach is more general and universal. A more detailed comparison with these references will be given later.

So far only arrays of sub-micron size magnetic dots covered by thin superconducting films have been prepared and studied experimentally ∗∗. The effect of commencuracy on the transport properties was reported. This effect is not specific for magnets interacting with superconductors and was first found many years ago by Martinoli and his group . Predicted effects specific for FM/SC systems, including topological instability of homogeneous state in bi-layers , were not yet observed experimentally.
General formalism The total energy of a stationary magnet-superconducting system reads:

$$E=\left[\frac{𝐁^2}{8\pi }+\frac{mn_s𝐯_s^2}{2}𝐁𝐌\right]𝑑V$$
(1)
where $`𝐁`$ is the magnetic induction, $`𝐌`$ is the magnetization, $`n_s`$ is the density of superconducting carriers, $`𝐯_s`$ is their velocity and $`m`$ is their effective mass. We assume that the superconducting density $`n_s`$ and the magnetization $`𝐌`$ are separated in space. We assume also that the magnetic field $`𝐁`$ and its vector-potential $`𝐀`$ asymptotically turn to zero at infinity. Employing Maxwell equation $`\times 𝐁=\frac{4\pi }{c}𝐣`$ , and $`𝐁=\times 𝐀`$, the magnetic field energy can be transformed as follows:

$$\frac{𝐁^2}{8\pi }𝑑V=\frac{𝐣𝐀}{2c}𝑑V$$
(2)
The current $`𝐣`$ can be represented as a sum: $`𝐣=𝐣_s+𝐣_m`$ of the superconducting and magnetic currents, respectively:

$$𝐣_s=\frac{n_s\mathrm{}e}{m}\left(\phi \frac{2\pi }{\varphi _0}𝐀\right);𝐣_m=c\times 𝐌.$$
(3)
In the gauge invariant Eq.3 $`\phi `$ is the phase of the SC carriers wave-function and $`\varphi _0`$ is the (SC) flux quantum. Plugging Eq.(3) into Eq.(2) and Eq.(1), after minor transformations, we arrive at following equation for the total energy:

$$H=\left[\frac{n_s\mathrm{}^2}{2m}(\phi )^2\frac{n_s\mathrm{}e}{2mc}\phi 𝐀\frac{𝐁𝐌}{2}\right]𝑑V$$
(4)
The phase gradient $`\phi `$ can be included into $`𝐀`$ as a gauge transformation with the exception of vortex lines, where $`\phi `$ is singular. Eq. (4) allows to separate the energy of vortices from the energy of magnetization induced currents and fields and from the interaction energy.
Two dimensional textures and vortices. Below we apply our general formalism to the case of two parallel films, one FM, another SC, both very thin and very close to each other. Neglecting their thickness, we assume that both films are located at $`z=0`$. The super-carrier density $`n_s(𝐫)`$ can be represented as $`n_s(𝐑)=\delta (z)n_s^{(2)}(𝐫)`$ and the magnetization $`𝐌(𝐑)`$ can be represented as $`𝐌(𝐑)=\delta (z)𝐦(𝐫)`$, where $`n_s^{(2)}(𝐫)`$ is the super-carrier density per unit area, $`𝐦(𝐫)`$ is the magnetization per unit area and $`𝐫`$ is the two-dimensional radius-vector. In what follows $`n_s^{(2)}`$ is assumed to be a constant and the index (2) is omitted. The energy (4) can be rewritten for this special case:

$$H=\left[\frac{n_s\mathrm{}^2}{2m}(\phi )^2\frac{n_s\mathrm{}e}{2mc}\phi 𝐚\frac{𝐛𝐦}{2}\right]d^2𝐫$$
(5)
where $`𝐚=𝐀(𝐫,z=0)`$ and $`𝐛=𝐁(𝐫,z=0)`$. The vector-potential satisfies Maxwell-London’s equation:

$`\times (\times 𝐀)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\lambda }}𝐀\delta (z)+{\displaystyle \frac{4\pi \mathrm{}n_se}{mc}}\phi \delta (z)`$ (6)
$`+`$ $`4\pi \times (𝐦\delta (z))`$ (7)
where $`\lambda =\lambda _L^2/d_S`$, is the effective screening length for the SC film, $`\lambda _L`$ is the London penetration depth and $`d_s`$ is the SC film thickness.

According to our arguments, the term proportional to $`\phi `$ in Eq. (7) describes vortices. A plane vortex characterized by its vorticity $`q`$ and by position of its center on the plane $`𝐫_0`$ contributes a singular term $`q\frac{\widehat{z}\times (𝐫𝐫_0)}{|𝐫𝐫_0|^2}`$ to $`\phi `$ and generates a standard vortex vector-potential:

$$𝐀^v(𝐑𝐫_0)=\frac{q\varphi _0}{2\pi }\frac{\widehat{z}\times (𝐫𝐫_0)}{|𝐫𝐫_0|}_0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{J_1(k|𝐫𝐫_0|)e^{k|z|}}{1+2k\lambda }𝑑k$$
(8)
Different vortices contribute independently into the vector-potential and magnetic field. Below we calculate the contribution of a magnetic texture to the vector potential $`𝐀^m(𝐑)`$ in a special gauge $`A_z=0`$. The magnetization vector field can be represented as follows:

$$𝐦(𝐫)=m_z(𝐫)\widehat{z}+𝐦^{}(𝐫)+𝐦^{}(𝐫)$$
(9)
where $`𝐦^{}(𝐫)`$ is the gradient part of $`𝐦(𝐫)`$ and $`𝐦^{}(𝐫)`$ can be represented as a vector product $`\widehat{z}\times f`$ ( $`f`$ is an arbitrary function of $`𝐫`$ ). This representation is unique. The corresponding contributions to $`𝐀^m`$ are :

$$𝐀^m(𝐑)=𝐀^{}(𝐫)+𝐀^{}(𝐑)$$
(10)
where

$`𝐀^{}(𝐫)`$ $`=`$ $`2\pi 𝐦^{}(𝐫)\times \widehat{z}`$ (11)
$`A_j^{}(𝐑)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle G_{jl}(𝐑𝐫^{})m_l(𝐫^{})d^2𝐫^{}}`$ (12)
where non-zero component $`G_{lj}(𝐑𝐫^{})`$ are $`(𝐑=(𝐫,z))`$ :

$`G_{\alpha z}`$ $`=`$ $`ϵ_{\alpha \beta }{\displaystyle \frac{x_\beta x_\beta ^{}}{|𝐫𝐫^{}|}}{\displaystyle \frac{2}{\lambda ^2}}F_1({\displaystyle \frac{|𝐫𝐫^{}|}{\lambda }},{\displaystyle \frac{z}{\lambda }});\alpha =x,y`$ (13)
$`G_{xy}`$ $`=`$ $`G_{yx}={\displaystyle \frac{2}{\lambda ^2}}F_0({\displaystyle \frac{|𝐫𝐫^{}|}{\lambda }},{\displaystyle \frac{z}{\lambda }})`$ (14)
Here :

$$F_\gamma (\eta ,\zeta )=_0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{J_\gamma (\eta k)e^{k|\zeta |}k^2}{1+2k}𝑑k;\gamma =0,1$$
(15)
$`ϵ_{\alpha \beta }`$ is the second rank antisymmetric tensor and $`J_\gamma (x)`$ are the Bessel functions.

Equations (14,15) can be further simplified if the magnetization has only $`z`$ and $`r`$ components and both depend only on $`r`$. Then the vector-potential $`𝐀_\alpha ^m(𝐑)`$ is directed along azimuthal lines and its only non-zero component reads :

$$A_\varphi ^m(𝐑)=\underset{\alpha =0}{\overset{1}{}}K_\alpha (𝐑,𝐫^{})m_\alpha (𝐫^{})d^2𝐫^{}$$
(16)
where $`\alpha =0`$ stays for $`z`$, and $`\alpha =1`$ stays for $`r`$,

$$K_\alpha (𝐫,𝐫^{})=\frac{4\pi }{\lambda ^2}f_\alpha (\frac{r}{\lambda },\frac{r^{}}{\lambda },\frac{z}{\lambda })$$
(17)
and

$$f_\alpha (\xi ,\eta ,\zeta )=_0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{J_1(\xi k)J_\alpha (\eta k)e^{k|\zeta |}k^2}{1+2k}𝑑k.$$
(18)
Santos et al.  have developed a formalism for calculation of magnetic fields and screening currents generated by magnetic textures in superconductors similar to ours. However, they did not consider singular current distributions, i.e. vortices. Bulaevsky et al.  considered a special system of prepared domains in a thick magnetic slab contacting with a semi-infinite superconductor and generating vortices in it. The spontaneous formation of domains and chains of vortices was discussed earlier  for a bi-layer composed from very thin films.

Magnetic Dot. For infinitely thin circular magnetic dot with magnetization $`𝐦=m\widehat{z}`$ and radius $`R`$ the magnetic field can be calculated using Eq.16,17. Its z-component has the form:

$`B_z(r,z)`$ $`=`$ $`4\pi \lambda mR{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}J_0(kr)J_1(kR)e^{k|z|}{\displaystyle \frac{k^2dk}{1+2\lambda k}}`$ (19)
$`+`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{q\varphi _0}{2\pi }}{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{J_0(rk)ke^{k|z|}}{1+2\lambda k}}𝑑k`$ (20)
Numerical calculation based on Eq.20 show that $`B_z`$ on the film $`(z=0)`$ changes sign at some $`r>R`$ if q is positive (see Fig.1), but it is negative everywhere at $`r>R`$ if $`q=0`$. The physical reason for this behavior is simple: the dot itself, without vortex currents, generates dipolar field which has the sign opposite to dipolar moment in the plane passing through the dipole and perpendicular to it. The SC current resists this tendency. At small distances from the center the screening is neglegible and the field generated by dot dominates. At large distances $`r\lambda `$ the field generated by a vortex decays like $`1/r^3`$, whereas the screened field of the dot decays as $`1/r^4`$. The position of node $`r_0`$ can be easily determined if $`R\lambda `$: then $`r_0=2\pi \sqrt{mR^2\lambda /\mathrm{\Phi }_0}`$. Thus, the measurement of magnetic field near the film may serve as a diagnostic tool to detect SC vortex bound by the dot. The experimental measurements  demonstrated that $`B_z`$ changes sign, i.e. the dot indeed generates the vortex.

In the presence of a vortex with charge $`q`$ , the energy of the system can be calculated using Eqs.(5, 20). The result is:

$$E=q^2ϵ_0ln\frac{\lambda }{\xi }qϵ_m\frac{R}{2\lambda }2\pi m^2Rln\frac{R}{a}$$
(21)
where $`ϵ_m=m\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$ is the characteristic SC/FM interaction energy. The vortex becomes energy favorable if $`ϵ_mR/(2\lambda )>ϵ_0`$ or $`mR>[\mathrm{\Phi }_0/(8\pi ^2)]\mathrm{ln}(\lambda /\xi )`$. The ratio

$$\delta =\frac{ϵ_m}{ϵ_0}=Sg\frac{2n_md_m}{n_sd_s}$$
(22)
is the relative strength of the SC/FM coupling . In Eq. (21) $`n_m`$ is the density of magnetic atoms, $`d_{m,s}`$ are the thicknesses of magnetic and superconduccting films, $`S`$ is the value of an elementary spin in the magnet and $`g`$ is the Lande factor. Far from the threshold the vorticity $`q`$ generated by the magnetic dot is an integer closest to the value

$$\stackrel{~}{q}=\frac{\delta }{4\mathrm{ln}\frac{\lambda }{\xi }}\frac{R}{\lambda }$$
(23)
The logarithmic factor in Eq. (23) varies in the range 3-8. For typical values $`R=10^4`$cm, $`d_m=10^6`$cm, and $`n_m=10^{22}`$cm-3, we find $`\stackrel{~}{q}>1`$. Eq. (23) shows that, apart the logarithmic factor, the SV generation is controlled by properties of the magnetic film. The characteristic scale in superconducting film is $`\lambda `$. For this reason, at $`R\lambda `$, the condition $`\delta 1`$ gives an approximate criterion for the spontaneous vortex formation.

Sasik and Hwa  mimicked the magnetic dots by magnetic dipoles. This approach does not reflect properly the real dot geometry. As it is seen from our results, the magnetic field and energy can not be expressed in terms of the total dot magnetic moment ($`\pi mR^2`$) only.

Coupled Magnetic/Superconducting Vortices. Earlier we predicted spontaneous formation of the pairs of bound superconducting and magnetic vortices in the case of bi-layer consisting from superconducting and magnetic film with easy plane anisotropy . A detailed analysis given below confirms this prediction, but reveals more restrictive criterion for this phenomenon. The exchange Hamiltonian of the magnetic layer reads:

$$_M=\frac{J_M}{2}d^2𝐫(𝐧)^2$$
(24)
where $`𝐧(𝐫)`$ is the unit 2D vector directed along the local magnetization. Further we assume that the vector $`𝐧`$ lays in plane (XY symmetry.) In a single magnetic vortex (MV) the local magnetization is directed along the radius: $`𝐧(𝐫)=𝐫/r`$. The energy (24) is invariant under a global rotation of all spins by the same angle. The MV energy grows logarithmically with the system size $`L:`$ $`E\pi J_M\mathrm{ln}(L/\xi )`$. We employ general formulae, (7, 17,18) to calculate the vector-potential, magnetic field and the total energy. The vector-potential induced by the vortex, including the effect of screening currents is:

$$A_\phi (𝐑)=4\pi m\lambda _0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{J_1(kr)}{1+2\lambda k}e^{k|z|}𝑑k$$
(25)
Employing the standard vortex vector potential Eq. 7 with $`R=0`$ and eq. (5), we calculate the energy of the MV-SV pair with logarithmic accuracy:

$$E=q^2ϵ_0\mathrm{ln}(\frac{\lambda }{\xi })q\frac{ϵ_m}{2}\mathrm{ln}(\frac{L}{\lambda })+8\pi ^2m^2\lambda \mathrm{ln}(\frac{L}{\lambda })$$
(26)
The exchange energy of the magnetic vortex $`E_{ex}`$ is typically by 1-2 order of magnitude smaller than $`ϵ_0`$ and can be neglected. The energy is minimal at $`q`$ being an integer part of the value $`\stackrel{~}{q}=\frac{m\varphi _0\mathrm{ln}(\frac{L}{\lambda })}{2ϵ_0\mathrm{ln}(\frac{\lambda }{\xi })}`$. The coupled pair of SC/FM vortices becomes energy favorable when minimum is realized at $`q=1`$. It means that $`\delta `$ must overcome a threshold value $`\delta _c=\frac{\mathrm{ln}(\lambda /\xi )}{\mathrm{ln}(Ł/\lambda )}`$. In the limit $`L\mathrm{}`$, due to the logarithmically divergent second term in Eq. 26, the magnetic/superconducting vortex pair is always energetically favorable. However, in practice the logarithmic factor never exceeds $`57`$. Therefore, the value $`\delta `$ exceeding 1 triggers generation of the MV/SV pairs. The value of $`\delta `$ can be enhanced by either reducing the supercarrier density $`n_s`$ or increasing the thickness of the magnetic film.

In a bi-layer of XY ferromagnet and SC films with Curie temperature $`T_c`$ larger than SC transition temperature, the ferromagnetic state will be observed in the temperature interval between $`T_s`$ and $`T_c`$. Below $`T_s`$ the MV/SV vortices proliferate. They destroy both, ferromagnetism and superconductivity. Hovewer, the reentrant phase transition at $`T=T_V`$ leads to restoration of both order parameters if $`\delta (T=0)`$ is smaller than the logarithms ratio.

The vortices of the same sign repulse each other, whereas the antivortex attracts vortex. Together they form a dense system, most likewise a crystal at low temperature, with the lattice constant $`d\lambda `$, since $`\lambda `$ is the only characteristic length in the system. This is a new phase, never observed in 2d systems before. It differs from a vortex crystal in the 3d superconductors in magnetic field. It is also very different from the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless zero-field liquid vortex phases having no bound vortex-antivortex pairs.

In conclusion, we presented a general formalism to treat the interaction between magnetic textures and superconductors. As applications, we have shown that vortices in superconducting films can be generated by magnetic dots with normal to the film magnetization. Superconducting vortices also appear in bound pairs with magnetic vortices in a homogeneous, easy-plane magnetic film. We have found how the magnetic dot size and its material control the vortex appearance. Spontaneous generation of the MV/SV pairs in the bi-layer of the XY magnetic and SC films starts when characteristic FM-SC interaction energy $`ϵ_m`$ exceeds the energy $`ϵ_0`$ necessary for creation of a single SV. We have proposed experiments to detect the bound state of the magnetic dot and vortex and coupled pairs of magnetic and superconducting vortices.

This work was partly supported by the grants DE-FG03-96ER45598, NSF DMR-00-72115 and THECB ARP 010366-003. It is a pleasure to acknowledge discussions with A.I. Larkin, D.R. Nelson, D.Naugle, G.W. Crabtree and I.K. Schuller.


text:
# 𝒪_ϵ[𝐺] is a free module over 𝒪[𝐺]

## Abstract.

We show that the quantised function algebra $`𝒪_ϵ[G]`$ of a simply connected semisimple algebraic group $`G`$ at a root of unity is a free module over the subring isomorphic to $`𝒪[G]`$.

All three authors were visiting and partially supported by MSRI while this research was conducted and extend their thanks to that institution. The research for this paper was undertaken while the second author was supported by TMR grant ERB FMRX-CT97-0100 at the University of Bielefeld and the third author supported in part by the NSF

Let $`G`$ be a simply-connected semisimple algebraic group over $``$. Let $`\mathrm{}>1`$ be an odd integer, prime to $`3`$ if $`G`$ has a component of type $`G_2`$, and let $`ϵ`$ be a primitive $`\mathrm{}^{\text{th}}`$ root of unity. The quantised function algebra of $`G`$ at $`ϵ`$, denoted $`𝒪_ϵ[G]`$, is a noetherian $``$-algebra containing the ring of regular functions of $`G`$, denoted $`𝒪[G]`$, in its centre, . Since a false proof of the following theorem, and a proof of the special case $`G=SL(2)`$, have both recently appeared in the literature (see the remarks below for details), it seems worthwhile to record the full result.

###### Theorem.

As a module over $`𝒪[G]`$, the algebra $`𝒪_ϵ[G]`$ is free of rank $`\mathrm{}^{dimG}`$.

###### Proof.

Thanks to \[4, Theorem 7.2\] $`𝒪_ϵ[G]`$ is a projective $`𝒪[G]`$-module of rank $`\mathrm{}^{dimG}`$. By a result of Marlin, \[7, Corollaire 3\], the Grothendieck group of projective modules over $`𝒪[G]`$ is trivial, in other words

$$K_0(𝒪[G]).$$

In particular, if $`P`$ is a finitely generated projective $`𝒪[G]`$-module then $`P`$ is stably free. Hence if the rank of $`P`$ is greater than the Krull dimension of $`𝒪[G]`$, then $`P`$ is necessarily free, \[2, Corollary IV.3.5\]. Since $`\mathrm{}>1`$ we have $`\text{Kdim}𝒪[G]=dimG<\mathrm{}^{dimG}=\text{rank}𝒪_ϵ[G]`$, so the theorem follows. ∎

It is incorrectly stated in \[12, Lemma 8\] that this result follows from \[13, Theorem 2.2\] in the more general setting of a Hopf algebra, $`U`$, finitely generated over a central sub-Hopf algebra, $`O`$. However, there exist numerous examples in the literature of Hopf algebras that are not free over central sub-Hopf algebras. The ones closest in spirit to the present work occur in , where the author shows that, when $`n`$ is even, $`U=𝒪[SL_n()]`$ is not free over the subring $`O=𝒪[PSL_n]`$. For example, consider the case $`n=2`$. Then, $`O`$ is the fixed ring $`U^A`$, where $`A=/2=\sigma `$ acts on the generators $`x_{ij}`$ of $`U`$ by $`\sigma (x_{ij})=x_{ij}`$. This is even a Hopf-Galois extension with central invariants for the Hopf algebra $`H=A`$, in the notation of \[12, §1.1\]. This requires that $`U`$ is an $`H`$-comodule algebra (use the map $`\rho :UUH`$ defined by $`x_{ij}x_{ij}\sigma `$) such that $`U^H=\{xU:\rho (x)=x1\}=O`$, that the natural map $`U_OUUH`$ given by $`xy(x1)\rho (y)`$ is bijective, together with certain naturality conditions. These are easy to check in this case.

###### Remarks.

1. It is clear the proof of the theorem generalises a little. Assume $`k`$ is an algebraically closed field and $`U`$ is a noetherian prime Hopf $`k`$-algebra, finitely generated as a module over the central sub-Hopf algebra $`O`$. Then $`U`$ is a projective $`O`$-module, \[6, Theorem 1.7\]. If $`K_0(O)`$ then freeness follows as above when $`dimO`$ is less than the rank of $`U`$ over $`O`$.
2. One way to check that $`K_0(O)`$ is as follows. The algebra $`O`$ is the ring of regular functions of an irreducible affine algebraic group, say $`G`$, \[5, Section I.3\]. Let $`R_u(G)`$ be the unipotent radical of $`G`$ and set $`G_{\mathrm{red}}=G/R_u(G)`$, by definition a reductive group. Thanks to \[10, Proposition 4.1\], the projection $`GG_{\mathrm{red}}`$ induces an isomorphism in $`K`$-theory, $`K_0(G)K_0(G_{\mathrm{red}})`$. Now, if the commutator subgroup of $`G_{\mathrm{red}}`$, a semisimple algebraic group, is simply-connected we have an isomorphism $`K_0(G_{\mathrm{red}})`$, \[9, Corollary 1.7 and Corollary 4.7\].
3. For other situations where a Hopf algebra is free over particular subalgebras, see for example, .
4.  proves the theorem for the case $`G=SL(2)`$; in this case an explicit free basis is provided.
5. We do not know whether $`𝒪_ϵ[G]`$ is a cleft extension of $`𝒪[G]`$. It would be interesting to find general conditions implying this.
6. The theorem appears in  too, where it is used in studying the representation theory of quantised function algebras at roots of unity.


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

The World Wide Web is now ubiquitous. At a time when every advertisement on television seems to end with a URL, it is of some interest to note that the SLAC Library had the first Web server in North America (indeed the first outside Europe), which it set up to aid the research of High Energy/Particle physicists. In this talk we explore the role technology has played in the organisation and dissemination of information in High Energy Physics (HEP), where paper is now a medium of last resort, and discuss why HEP provided the ideal conditions for the rapid adoption of new technology.

## 2 The Compulsive Communicators

Communication has long played a vital role in physicists’ research. Not content to wait for the publication of their work in journals, they, or perhaps their departments, would send out preprints of their work to institutions or other researchers they personally knew (once the duplication process became affordable). Naturally because of the cost and effort involved in this, large departments and famous scientists enjoyed a numerical advantage both in sending and receiving. However, for every poor soul in a small, out of the way department lamenting intellectual starvation, a well known researcher would be suffering from an overstuffed mailbox. By the 1960’s the sheer number of preprints had somewhat perversely made the communication of research more difficult, due to information overload.

Since its foundation in 1962, the SLAC Library, at the request of the director, W.K.H. Panofsky, had been actively collecting new preprints (as a world centre for physics, it attracted some three thousand articles per year). The details of each preprint were entered into a card catalogue, including every author, no matter how many there were on the paper, which for an experiment could easily be in the hundreds (the current record is over 1000). From this catalogue, the library published a weekly list of new preprints for the SLAC community.

In 1967 work began at Stanford University on a computer database system that would be able to handle a practically limitless number of large bibliographic records. It was decided early on that the SLAC Library’s preprint card catalogue would be a suitable test subject for this database, and so in March 1968 the SLAC Library began participating in the development and testing of SPIRES, the Stanford Physics Information REtrieval System. SPIRES (later renamed the Stanford Public Information REtrieval System) was envisioned as a fully searchable database, and each bibliographic record would contain the preprint’s author list (with each author’s institution), title, report number, date.

The remaining bibliographic element, which turned out to be of vital importance, was the paper’s reference list, that is the list of earlier papers the present paper has cited . Only references to published journal articles would be included (as these were the most likely to be accurate), and they would be stored by the journal, volume and first page number. The importance of these reference lists was with SPIRES, one could search through them for a given paper, and thus find every preprint that cited the paper, thereby establishing (in some way) the impact this paper had in the literature. Naturally, this is of considerable interest to physicists .

However, this activity was not limited to the New World. In 1962, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany, had begun to publish a list named “High Energy Physics - An Index,” (HEPI) of all the research literature it received. Included in this list was both the published literature and unpublished preprints (whereas SLAC concentrated mainly on preprints), amounting to at that time some nine thousand documents per year. Like SLAC, DESY provided the title, author and date, but instead of references, HEPI staff physicists assigned to each paper up to 23 keywords (or, more often, key phrases) chosen from a controlled list.

Naturally it made sense for the SLAC and DESY teams to work together in their coverage of the particle physics literature, and so preparations for this began. By June 1969 specifications for the conversion of the DESY data to SPIRES format were complete.

## 3 SPIRES and the Internet 1969–1990

In 1968 the SLAC librarians, Louise Addis, Bob Gex and Rita Taylor were funded by the the US Atomic Energy Commission (precursor to today’s Department of Energy), with the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) of the American Physical Society as a sponsor, to publish a weekly preprint list for the entire particle physics community . This list of all preprints entered in the past week could be easily generated from the newly commissioned SPIRES-HEP database. In January 1969 the first Preprints in Particles and Fields (PPF) list was sent out to over a thousand eager subscribers. Therefore, to get your work known all around the world (or at least the title of your work seen) all you would have to do would be send your preprint to SLAC, and similarly you could browse the titles of all the week’s preprints by just looking at one list. This established the idea of a central repository for preprints.

A sister “Anti-preprints” list (PPA) recorded the preprints that had since been published in journals. This allowed the original preprints to be discarded, and proved quite popular with the journal editors, who were then able to match references to preprints with the published article.

By 1974 both the SLAC and DESY libraries (and in later years other collaborators ) were working on the single HEP database, and comprehensively cataloguing preprints, and by extension, the published literature, in high-energy physics.

This new PPF age, though, was not perfect. Receiving lists of new preprints and journal articles is all very well, but after several years one is left once again with a stack of paper. Trying to find a copy of a particular article or information on a certain subject can be very difficult. The Internet allowed a further development.

The problem of finding just the right preprints from this ever growing body of research was not an issue for the SLAC community. The SPIRES database allowed searches by date, author, institution, report number, title, keywords (assigned by DESY) and a number of other fields. Simply by logging in to their computer, SLAC physicists were able to search through thousands of papers, and the paper PPF list would serve as a newspaper, with a similar longevity. With the rise of the Internet anyone in the world could now access this service. A program, QSPIRES , developed in 1985  by SLAC database systems developer George Crane, allowed physicists to search the SPIRES database using E-mail and other bitnet message protocols (which actually had priority over E-mail and hence were faster). One would send off an E-mail query to the database and a swift reply would follow. This made an enormous difference for people outside SLAC, especially those outside the U.S., who had previously only been able to access SPIRES, through rare and specially issued SLAC accounts. People were able to find all the papers by a particular author or from a certain institution, or find out how many citations their work had . The PPF and PPA lists could also be sent by E-mail.

## 4  and the Single Archive

By 1990, lists of new articles were being sent to physicists by E-mail and people were searching for articles in the SPIRES database via E-mail. Everything was modern and electronic, up to the point where you actually wanted to read a paper. In this case, the reader would have to request that an author send a copy in the mail. Thus, if you were overseas it could take weeks to months before you actually saw the article; this was clearly unacceptable.

Around this time another technical innovation had sufficiently matured to obviate this problem. High energy physics articles usually contain a lot of mathematics, which makes them difficult to write with a standard set of alpha-numeric characters. In the late 1970’s, Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth  had begun work on a special typesetting program, (pronounced “tek” since the “x” is actually a Greek $`\chi `$), that could display mathematics beautifully from source containing no special characters . After 1983 when the current version was released, the language soon proved very popular with physicists and mathematicians as it gave them complete control over the production of their documents.222This paper has been written using a derivative of

The underlying “-file” was simply a normal, portable text file, in which the mathematics was written using certain rules which could then be processed on any computer into a viewable final output format, such as PostScript (PS), , changing

```
\int_0^1\frac{e^x}{2\pi} dx

```

to

$$_0^1\frac{e^x}{2\pi }𝑑x.$$

The PS file can then be printed out and read. Therefore, to send a paper, all you would have to do is send the tex-file via E-mail and the person at the other end could process it and print it out; another step in the communication process had entered the future. By 1990 the use of in the HEP community was almost universal.

With preprint list distribution, SPIRES database searches, requests for papers, and even the transfer of these papers being done through E-mail, all stages of the process were electronic and pretty much immediate …except one. SLAC was still receiving the E-prints as “hard-copy”. Some authors had begun sending their preprints as files, but for some researchers this would unfortunately lead to overstuffed electronic mailboxes, echoing a problem of the Paper Days. In 1991, Paul Ginsparg of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) decided to do something about this. If authors could send their papers electronically to a central repository, with author-supplied bibliographic data, a list could be sent out of each day’s additions and the preprints could be obtained directly from this archive . Here, TeX proved a godsend, as it provided a means of storing rather small files that researchers could request and then process into the viewable PS files at their home institutions. In August 1991, the first paper was sent to the Los Alamos archive. Twenty seven papers were sent that month333In August 1999, over 800 particle physics papers were sent to the LANL archive. and physicists began receiving daily E-mails of the new papers sent to LANL.

Soon there were over 2000 subscribers to this daily E-mail notification and it gradually began to replace SLAC’s PPF list (though not the SPIRES database itself) as the HEP community’s “newspaper” — its most immediate source of new research information. Far from competing, though, the two services at LANL and SLAC, complemented each other nicely. SLAC continued to process hard copy preprints that were never sent to LANL and journal articles that had never been preprints, adding such information as their references, experiment numbers, authors’ institutions, etc. The electronic preprints, E-prints, began to account for a good deal of the HEP literature, and Ginsparg’s system allowed for considerable automation and efficiency in SLAC’s work. A good deal of useful information could be harvested electronically from the files authors supplied to LANL (though there was still much that had to be done by hand).

This evolution from preprints to E-prints had another important facet. The E-prints were assigned a unique number of the form archive/0007040 (eg 9501251 for the 251st paper in January 1995), which the SLAC Library immediately began to store as a new element in each record in the SPIRES database. In the past “report numbers” had been assigned to preprints by the author’s home institution in a less than completely systematic way and with a variety of conventions, which made the tracking of citations too difficult for the SPIRES database. Thus, as mentioned earlier, only citations to published journal articles were recorded, and the many citations made to an author’s paper while it was an unpublished preprint were lost. The standardised E-print number changed all that, since these numbers soon started appearing in reference lists. After some work, these citations to unpublished works could be registered. It is worth noting that the most cited HEP article in 1998 spent some ten months as an unpublished E-print . The next step was to ensure that the database recognised that the published article and the E-print were essentially the same paper, and thus, that the true number of citations was the sum of the citations of both. In some instances this lead to double counting, which needed special programming to eliminate, as it became fashionable to include both the E-print number and the journal reference when citing an article!

## 5 The Mouse That Clicked

With the SPIRES database and the LANL archive you could find a particular paper and be reading it within minutes merely by sending E-mail, after just a little work to process the file and print it out. A lot had changed in 20 years since the SLAC Library first started sending out a list of all the preprints it had received. However, the guiding philosophy behind computing is that no work a person has to do can ever be “too little.” A new technology was about to make the research process even easier.

In September 1991, SLAC physicist Paul Kunz, was visiting CERN, Geneva, where he was shown the infant World Wide Web, which allowed information on different computers to be accessed in a very user-friendly (and now completely familiar) manner. Realising the Web interface would be perfect for searching the SPIRES database he told then librarian and SPIRES database manager, Louise Addis, about it upon his return to SLAC. She was quick to recognise the potential of this  and by December SLAC had the first WWW server in the Western Hemisphere.444There was no Initial Public Offering. The E-mail access-system became obsolete as more and more physics departments installed the free software necessary to reach the SPIRES WWW interface . A group was formed at SLAC, the WWWizards  to provide help with WWW technology .

The key feature of the WWW is linking. Therefore, when displaying search results in the SPIRES database, a number of things could be linked to each record. One of these was the full-text at Los Alamos which was being stored in a minimal fashion as source. As mentioned before, files need to be processed before they can be printed out. In the early stages, many of the source files contained errors or idiosyncrasies that made them difficult to process. In order to enter all the relevant information into the SPIRES database the SLAC Library staff needed to print out each paper, and so would process the files sent to Los Alamos into PS files. At first this was done manually, which soon grew to be very time consuming. Luckily, the SLAC Library was helped by Paul Mende from Brown University who created an automatic procedure. Accompanying figures could be faxed to the SLAC Library, where they would be converted via NextFAX to a PS file. The PS files (of both text and figures) were then stored on a server at SLAC. The record in the SPIRES database would link to both the Los Alamos entry, where the source file was stored, and the SLAC PS server, where the user could view the PS file.

Around the same time a similar script to convert source to PS had been written at Los Alamos by Tanmoy Bhattacharya, a physicist specialising in the heavily computational subfield of Lattice Gauge Theory. Initially for personal use, this PS generating code was built into a powerful tool by Bhattacharya, Rob Hartill and Mark Doyle. By mid 1995, the LANL archive was producing its own PS files thereby freeing the SLAC Library from this task. Ultimately PS generation was incorporated into the LANL submission process, and it came with an ultimatum: if your paper couldn’t be processed, it wouldn’t be accepted. Many authors were shocked to find that the files they had previously sent to Los Alamos could not be easily processed, thus making their work less accessible, and welcomed this checking procedure. With the ability to generate PS from directly from source, PS that had been generated from was no longer acceptable, and by late 1996 submissions of such would be rejected . For whatever reasons, this led to some grumbling, but faced with being denied the opportunity to post to LANL, there was no real alternative to complying.555An interesting and oftentimes amusing timeline of the development of the Los Alamos archive can be found at .

With all this in place the SPIRES database was linking to reliable PS files generated and stored at the Los Alamos archive. The LANL archive would also link to both references and citations stored in the SPIRES database. This formed perhaps the first publically available full-text, cross-linked scientific database. Paper had been eliminated from the process and the virtual library was born .

## 6 The Many Hands Interpretation

The model of authors sending their electronic texts to LANL has pushed the effort of publication onto the researchers themselves, who benefit from an inexpensive, immediate, wide-scale dissemination of their work. This idea has led many computer scientists to ponder automated systems for indexing and retrieving these full-text papers. How much of the work of collecting information on the literature can be realistically facilitated by the authors? The combination of the Web, the SLAC Library’s automated systems and the LANL archives provides an interesting testing ground for this question.

The goal of the LANL archive is to be as automated as possible, so that it can exist without administrative intervention (as opposed to the SPIRES database). To this end it has a number of checks to ensure that all submissions meet the entry requirements (one we have already discussed ensures the file is successfully processed into PS). The basic bibliographic information (author, title, etc.) data is supplied by the users in a neatly structured format that can be downloaded into the SPIRES database automatically. This raw information requires only minor attention from the Library staff who, among other things, ensure spelling consistencies, and add in the author affiliations from the INSTITUTIONS database.

Far and away the most time consuming part of this is collecting the references of each paper, from which the citation searching is built . As citation results reflect some degree of professional accomplishment, physicists tend to be rather interested in them and a good deal of their correspondence with the SLAC Library concerns omissions or mistakes in the reference lists (which is exacerbated by the posting to LANL of revised versions of E-prints, which often contain additional references). Originally these reference lists were typed into the database, but as another happy spin-off of about 90% of them can now be extracted from the author’s file. Unfortunately, this only makes a huge job large, as they still have to be checked by the Library staff, and authors regularly confound the reference extracting program by adopting imaginative new ways of writing the journal-volume-page sequence, or simply making errors in a reference.

Obviously the LANL model suggested there should be some way to place the burden of constructing and checking the reference list on the authors themselves (as they do with bibliographic information), before they send their paper out to the world. Two things really stood in the way of this. First, the original program that extracted the references was not definitive enough for this sort of user-side checking, as there was no real way of specifying which references the code would extract, and which it would not. The second problem was that with physicists being rather busy, any new system would have to result in less, not more, work for it to be widely adopted.

Once again, helped with the solution. The SPIRES team developed and offered a new service: the database would display records in format, with the exact information needed to construct the reference as an additional tag. The authors then had a very simple process of cut and paste to create their reference lists, and the tag would sit invisibly in the file (not appearing in the final PS file) waiting to be extracted at the SLAC library. The strict structure of the CITATION tag and the simplicity of its extraction allowed for the creation of a checking program that authors could use, for example:

```
\bibitem{O’Connell:1997}
H.~B.~O’Connell,
‘‘Recent developments in $\rho\!-\!omega$ mixing,’’
Austral.\ J.\ Phys.\ {\bf 50}, 255 (1997)
[hep-ph/9604375].
%%CITATION = HEP-PH 9604375;%%

```

which becomes:

H. B. O’Connell, “Recent developments in $`\rho \omega `$ mixing,” Austral. J. Phys. 50, 255 (1997) \[hep-ph/9604375\].

So far over five hundred papers have been written using this system.

A second way we’ve been experimenting with author–supplied data is asking them to help us with another thing that is of great interest to them: missing papers in our database. Traditionally adding them in was another time consuming exercise that would require Library staff to get the journal from the shelves and type in all the relevant information. Using a web form that authors can fill out themselves allows a paper to be added to the database simply by cutting and pasting on the part of the Library staff.

By inviting our users to help us in maintaining the database and automating as many processes as possible, we have been able to accomplish a lot of additional work without spending significant amounts of extra time. This would not be possible, though, without the eagerness and attention to detail that characterises the Physics community.

## 7 All the news that’s fit to link

The WWW created a unique opportunity for the SPIRES database by providing a system that would conveniently attach to any record all the related information both inside the database and around the world in a very compact manner. Over the past six years we have worked on making this process as efficient as possible both in terms of computer programming and the output display our users see . I shall now discuss how this works.

A single record in the Literature database might have certain basic elements such as

* Title
* Author (and author’s institution) or corporate author
* Date
* Publication note

but the article could also be hyperlinked to

* the appropriate record in the EXPERIMENTS database
* full text of article at the journal server or the E-print server
* the references of the article
* other articles that cite it
* experimental data in the REACTIONS database,
* the record for the conference at which the paper was given

allowing the researcher to selectively explore any particular related item. Thus an original record only ten lines long becomes a gateway to information stored around the globe.

The construction of these links requires special care and co-operation with outside services. One particular case that followed an evolutionary process was linking to the published version of the document on journal home pages. Optimally, this URL would point to a unique “abstract page,” rendered in HTML so that the link to the journal server can be fast. Once there the user can be presented with all the Journal services such as full text in a variety of formats (the most common being PS or the newer Portable Document File (PDF)). From the point of view of the publisher, this means that a URL has to be found for every article. From our point of view this URL should be calculable from the information we already have about the record, as it then permits us to run in the URL automatically. Articles have always been cited through the journal-volume-page (JVP) convention, so it made sense that a number of major publishers, including the American Physical Society  and Elsevier  adopted a URL scheme based on these three elements. Setting up such a system does present something of a technical challenge for the journals, but is well worth it in terms of presenting the simplest possible interface to the outside world and providing reliable access to their wares.

The journals also link back into our database, mainly for the references of the paper (though publishers have proven less eager to link to our database record of the actual paper). In an effort which I hope will become more widely adopted, we have worked closely with the American Physical Society’s Physical Review  to share the bibliographic data (including reference lists) and either update an existing record in our database, or add a new record, when they publish new articles.

Where possible we have also tried to link to other literature databases. Some, like the CERN Library’s database , have a significant overlap with our system (there are currently over fifty thousand two-way links between SPIRES and CERN). Others, such as Harvard’s Astrophysics Data System and the American Mathematical Society’s Mathematical Reviews (AMSMR)  cover a much smaller set of papers in our database, but from a different perspective and connect the paper to other academic disciplines. Here, once again, we need to work with the other databases to ensure maximal efficiency and reliability in this linking. Our links to the Harvard database use a JVP scheme, while those to CERN and AMSMR databases use unique record keys. SPIRES can be linked to either way. There is also the consideration that the link should bring additional information, rather than just repeating what record in the SPIRES database (or else why bother?). Therefore, we apply these links selectively.

## 8 So why HEP?

Why did the High Energy Physics community provide such a fertile ground for this particular aspect of the so-called “Information Revolution”? We have touched on the reasons throughout this talk, but it is useful, perhaps, to summarise them to understand how this model might be more widely adopted (or why it might not be).

The first thing is that it has not been a revolution so much as an evolution. Particle physicists have always been compulsive communicators. Generally free of commercial or governmental restrictions, the habit of sending out advanced copies of work goes back to the days of carbon paper. They also have a long standing tradition of international collaboration, so any new advances in communication technology are eagerly adopted, and the high technological literacy facilitates this. This is especially true of the experimental community whose collaborations can have hundreds of members all over the world and whose experiments depend on high speed computer network connections. It is worth noting that the two SLAC physicists most closely involved in spinning the web at SLAC, Paul Kunz and Tony Johnson are experimentalists, though I should also point out that Paul Ginsparg of Los Alamos is a theorist.

In this environment the sheer quantity of existing literature necessitated creating the organisation begun by the SLAC Library in the late 1960’s. Through using this PPF list service, physicists became accustomed to the idea of a central “clearing house” for preprints. As the use of E-mail spread through the Physics community, particularly the High Energy sector, the SPIRES E-mail interface was introduced in the mid 80’s and before long was being used by thousands of researchers in over forty countries. The typesetting language, favoured by those needing to write complex mathematics, allowed one to send simple ASCII files using E-mail, thus giving rise to the electronic distribution of preprints, which was centralised by Ginsparg’s E-print archive. The World Wide Web then laid the ground for a highly powerful way to integrate the various facets of research communication.

It should be acknowledged that these are rather special conditions. It is instructive to note that in other scientific communities where is less heavily used, the adoption of the LANL archives has been noticeably slower, though in principle there is nothing to stop them (despite being built with in mind, the archive is not dependent on it, and will accept submissions in a variety of formats). The fluent mathematics community, on the other hand, though quick to adopt the new system, perhaps lacked the detailed computing knowledge to play a leading role.

For different research communities there are other obstacles. Faced with the incredibly rapid and wholehearted adoption of this E-print scheme by high energy physicists, the traditional journal publishers found it best to not to offer any real resistance. They had nothing to fear, really, as over seventy percent of HEP papers sent to Los Alamos are eventually published in journals and another twenty percent appear in conference proceedings. In other fields, with newer archives, this is still something of a touchy subject, such as in the biological and medical research communities, as can be seen in the Biochemical Society’s response  to the NIH’s proposal for a preprint server for the life sciences  (further reflections on eprints and the life sciences can be found at ).

## 9 Conclusion

In this paper I have described the evolution of paperless publishing in a particular academic community and how special circumstances conspired to make this happen faster and more comprehensively than in any other field. In doing this I have hoped to convey the sense that this was indeed a process of evolution rather than revolution.

It may be interesting to speculate what the future holds. Will more and more of what used to be called “bibliographic data,” become author–supplied “metadata” which annotates each article with various related information? Can this metadata be shared to create cross-database, and cross-discipline, linking ? Our experience shows that if you make the procedure simple enough, and offer an advantage to the authors for doing it (such as the ability to check their reference list), they will use it. The challenge now is to bring this to other scholarly communities .

We have begun in the SPIRES-HEP database to exploit Web technology to handle information beyond the traditional bibliographic record or what one could obtain from a print version (such as the full text and reference list). These other facets range from the paper’s citation list, which is constantly growing (if the author is fortunate), to the home-page of the experimental collaboration that wrote the paper, to what information researchers might really want out of a paper, in a form far more useful than could ever be delivered in paper (such as a computer file of experimental data or 3-D computer images created by the author).

The fluidity of this new, electronic means of publication also has implications for the traditional research process. At what point does an author “give the final answer” and the paper become “set in stone”? The LANL archive, has neatly addressed this issue in an appropriate manner, by archiving each version of an E-print with a date stamp, documenting any modifications in the paper. Once the article is published in a journal, it is a finished piece of work, with any subsequent alterations handled via errata. Other authors may comment on the published paper, to which the author may reply, but the comment and reply are treated as new articles, and the original is left unchanged. One journal, however, has broken away from the traditional model. Living Reviews in Relativity  exists solely on the Web, and allows authors to constantly revise their articles. In part this is due to the pedagogical nature of the journal; it seeks to provide reviews that aid learning, rather than publish original research.

Well aware of the difficulties of predicting anything in the Internet world, I have merely tried, in concluding, to state some of the current trends in electronic publication.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Louise Addis, Paul Ginsparg, Marek Karliner, Pat Kreitz, Michael Peskin, Hartmut Preissner and Ann Redfield for reading this manuscript and offering helpful comments and suggestions. I have also enjoyed conversations on the topics mentioned here with Richard Dominiak, Mark Doyle, Paul Ginsparg, Tony Johnson, John Jowett and Paul Kunz.