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# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

In ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions the colliding nuclear matter emerges with a pattern that has its origin in the incompressibility of nuclear matter and the mean field effects. The observation of collective behaviour in the system validates the use of a hydrodynamic description of the evolution of the collision. Within the hydrodynamic model the collective motion results from pressure gradient in the matter, which depends upon the compressibility of the underlying equation of state . In the case of a phase transition from hadronic matter to quark gluon plasma, increased number of degrees of freedom may lead to a softening of the equation of state . Collective flow manifests in altered event shapes which can be studied by measuring the momentum distributions of produced particles. The azimuthal distribution of these event shapes are studied using coefficients in their Fourier expansion. One of the major current aims of the study of ultra-relativistic heavy ion experiments is to determine the magnitude of anisotropy present in the final state momentum distributions of various particle species, in different regions of phase space. The systematic dependence of this anisotropy on energy, centrality and other collision parameters is predicted to be sensitive to the equation of state .

Most of the experimental studies on azimuthal anisotropy have been restricted to charged particles (a large number of results for charged particle measurements can be found in the review article ). The measured anisotropy of charged particles includes effect due to final state Coulomb interactions and may inhibit a direct comparison of results with the predictions of strong interaction physics.

Measurements of anisotropy in the azimuthal distribution of photons have been reported recently . Since almost 90% of photons produced in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions originate from the decay of $`\pi ^0`$, the anisotropy measured in photons should have their origin in the anisotropy of $`\pi ^0`$ produced in the reaction. However, the measured anisotropy in photons will also include some effect due to decay. The decay introduces non-flow correlations amongst kinematic variables of photons due to four-momentum conservation and also dilutes the existing correlation in azimuthal angles. Determination of the effect of decay should enable deduction of the anisotropy in $`\pi ^0`$. This would complement the study of flow using charged particles and would be free from Coulomb effects. Such a determination will provide much needed additional information to characterise the final state momentum distributions . A comparison of the anisotropies deduced from charged and neutral pions would help in estimating the effect of final state Coulomb interaction on the charged particles.

In the present work we study the effect of $`\pi ^0`$ decay on the observed anisotropy of photons for various assumed flow parameters and multiplicities using a fast simulation technique. Preliminary results can be found in . We show how the anisotropy parameter for the parent $`\pi ^0`$ distribution can be deduced using the measured anisotropy in the azimuthal distribution of photons.

## 2 Simulation

A complete determination of the flow parameters in different regions would require a measurement of the three-dimensional momentum distribution of all the particles. Several experiments determine the anisotropy parameters in azimuthal angle distributions ($`dN/d\varphi `$) of produced particles. . In the present work we restrict ourselves to the study of photon multiplicity in a detector having full azimuthal acceptance in one unit of pseudo-rapidity suitably chosen with practical detectors in mind . We generate events having azimuthally anisotropic shapes and analyse them using methods employed for the analysis of experimental data.

### 2.1 Anisotropy

Let us assume that the event shape in the azimuthal plane can be described by an arbitrary ellipse. The most general equation of an ellipse in polar coordinates is

$`r(\varphi )={\displaystyle \frac{1}{2\pi }}\left[1+2v_1\mathrm{cos}(\varphi \psi _1)+2v_2\mathrm{cos}2(\varphi \psi _2)\right]`$ (1)
where $`\psi _1`$ and $`\psi _2`$ define the direction of the shift of the centroid of the ellipse from the origin and the orientation of the major axis of the ellipse respectively. $`v_1`$ is the magnitude of the shift of the centroid and $`v_2`$ is a measure of the difference in the major and the minor axes of the ellipse. $`v_1`$ and $`v_2`$ denote the first order and the second order flow components, termed as directed and elliptic flow.

### 2.2 Event generation

For the fast simulation, a set of events consisting of $`\pi ^+,\pi ^{}`$ and $`\pi ^0`$ is generated. The particle multiplicity in the event is selected in such a way that the multiplicities of charged particles ($`\pi ^+,\pi ^{}`$) and decay photons within the one unit of pseudo-rapidity acceptance of the given detector are in the range of 100 to 4000. Such a wide range of multiplicity corresponds to varying centralities encompassing the SPS, RHIC and LHC energies and serves to determine the effect of fluctuations due to finite number of particles. The multiplicity distribution of particles is assumed to be Gaussian with a width $`\sigma =2\sqrt{M}`$ for a mean multiplicity M.

We assume the azimuthal distributions to have initial flow components $`v_m^{in}`$, where $`m`$ (=1,2) denotes the order of flow. Using these values, the azimuthal angles of the charged and neutral pions are assigned according to the distribution given by eqn. (1). $`\psi _1`$ is chosen randomly. For the present work we have chosen $`\psi _2`$ = $`\psi _1`$, which corresponds to the major axis of the ellipse along the direction of the shift of the centroid. Physically this represents in-plane flow. The data are also generated for different values of $`v_1^{in}`$ and $`v_2^{in}`$, corresponding to different initial flow.

The pseudo-rapidity and $`p_T`$-distributions are taken from a parametrised form of the HIJING event generator  at the relevant energy. Neutral pions are generated in the pseudo-rapidity interval extending to 1.5 units on both sides of the assumed acceptance of the detector. These are allowed to decay and the $`\eta `$, $`p_T`$ and $`\varphi `$ of the photons are obtained. The photons falling within the acceptance region of the detector are used for further analysis.

### 2.3 Analysis

The set of events thus generated is analysed to extract the anisotropy parameters $`v_m`$ using the Fourier expansion technique in a manner identical to the analysis of experimental data. The present analysis is based on 10000 events for each combination of multiplicity and anisotropy.

The generated data have been analysed to obtain the following:

1. $`\psi _1^{est}`$ : the estimated direction of the first order event plane. Because of finite particle multiplicity the estimated event plane $`\psi _1^{est}`$ in the generated data fluctuates about the actual event plane, $`\psi _1`$, with a spread that depends on the initial anisotropy and the multiplicity.
2. $`v_1^{}`$ = $`\mathrm{cos}(\varphi \psi _1^{est})`$ : a measure of the directed flow in the direction of $`\psi _1^{est}`$, where the average is over all particles of all events.
3. $`\psi _2^{est}`$ : the estimated direction of second order event plane. This also fluctuates about the actual direction $`\psi _2`$.
4. $`v_2^{}`$ = $`\mathrm{cos}2(\varphi \psi _2^{est})`$ : a measure of the ellipticity about $`\psi _2^{est}`$ where the average is over all particles of all the events. This is a measure of the difference of the major axis and the minor axis of the event shape.

Since the estimated event plane differs from the actual event plane, the values of $`v_m^{}`$ are systematically lower by a factor $`\mathrm{cos}m(\psi _m\psi _m^{est})`$, where the average is over all events for a particular sample. This factor is the resolution correction factor (RCF). The values $`v_m`$ that represent the magnitude of directed ($`m`$ =1) and elliptic ($`m`$ = 2) flow, for the sample of events, are obtained by $`v_m^{}`$/RCF.

Experimentally, RCF is obtained using the subevent method described in . Here every event is divided randomly into two subevents of equal multiplicity and the angle $`\psi _m`$ is determined for each subevent. This enables a determination of a parameter $`\chi _m`$ directly from the experimental data using the relation :

$`{\displaystyle \frac{N_{events}(m|\psi _m^a\psi _m^b|>\pi /2)}{N_{total}}}={\displaystyle \frac{e^{\frac{\chi _m^2}{4}}}{2}}`$ (2)
where $`N_{total}`$ denotes the total number of events, $`\psi _m^a`$, $`\psi _m^b`$ are the estimated angles of the two subevents (labelled $`a`$ and $`b`$) and the numerator on the left denotes the number of events having the angle between subevents greater than $`\pi /2m`$. The parameter $`\chi _m`$ is then used to determine RCF according to the relation given in the Ref. .

The generated azimuthal distribution of the charged pions are also analysed in a manner similar to the azimuthal distribution of photons. Comparing the results of charged particles and photons enables a determination of the effect of decay.

## 3 Results

### 3.1 Effect of decay

The results for the estimated anisotropy $`v_1`$ for directed flow are shown in Fig. 1(a) as a function of multiplicity for charged particles and Fig. 1(b) for photons for varying values of $`v_1^{in}`$. Similar results for elliptic flow are shown in Fig. 2. For charged particles the analysis technique correctly reproduces the initial anisotropy for all multiplicities for both directed and elliptic flow, demonstrating the validity of the technique used. For lower multiplicities the errors on the estimated values are larger due to greater fluctuations.

The same analysis technique, when applied to photons, yields values of $`v_m`$ that are generally different from the initial anisotropy present in the $`\pi ^0`$ distribution. This difference in the anisotropy values for photons and $`\pi ^0`$ is attributed to two effects of decay : (i) it dilutes the initial flow by randomising the existing azimuthal correlation, and (ii) it mimics flow, the correlations due to momentum conservation producing an anisotropy in the final state distributions.

To estimate the effect of momentum conservation correlation we generated azimuthally symmetric distributions, corresponding to $`v_m^{in}`$=0. The decay photons falling within the acceptance of the detector were analysed, and the values of $`v_m`$ obtained for them are also shown in Fig. 1(b) and in Fig. 2(b). One observes that the deduced anisotropy in photons is always non-zero. At low multiplicities the values can be as high as those observed in charged particle measurements . The values for elliptic flow are systematically lower than for directed flow, implying lesser effect of momentum conservation correlation on the elliptic event shape.

For all values of initial anisotropy, the estimated anisotropy in photons decreases with increasing multiplicity. At low multiplicity the correlation due to momentum conservation competes with dilution due to decay. The relative importance depends on the initial anisotropy in neutral pions. For low anisotropy in $`\pi ^0`$, this leads to enhanced anisotropy in photons.

The above results hold for both orders of flow. It is seen that the decay dilutes the elliptic flow more than it dilutes directed flow.

### 3.2 Estimation of $`\pi ^0`$ flow

While the effect of decay is seen to depend on the values of multiplicity and the amount of initial flow, the ratio of anisotropy observed in photon distributions, $`v_m(\gamma )`$, to that in the parent $`\pi ^0`$ distribution, $`v_m^{in}(\pi ^0)`$, is seen to scale with the parameter $`\chi _m`$. Fig. 3 shows this ratio as a function of $`\chi _m`$ for a large combination of values of anisotropy and multiplicity.

We have parametrised the observed scaling behaviour by a relation :

$`{\displaystyle \frac{v(\gamma )}{v^{in}(\pi ^0)}}={\displaystyle \frac{a}{(\chi b)^2}}+c`$ (3)
The relation was motivated by the fact that the effect of two particle correlations scales as 1/M  and $`\chi _m`$ is proportional to $`\sqrt{M}`$. If the exponent is chosen a free parameter, the best-fit value varies between 1.9 and 2.1, depending upon the number of points used in the fit.

The continuous curves in Fig. 3 show the fitted functions for both directed and elliptic flow. The values of the constants for different values of $`m`$ are given in Table 1. The values of $`b`$ reflect the lower limit of $`\chi `$ upto which the anisotropy in $`\pi ^0`$ can be deduced by this method. The lower value of $`b`$ for $`m`$=2 implies that elliptic flow in neutral pions can be studied for lower anisotropy and multiplicity. $`c`$ is the limiting value of the fractional anisotropy remaining in photons.

It is noteworthy that a simple parameterisation can be used up to quite low values of $`\chi `$. The parameter $`\chi _m`$ depends on anisotropy and multiplicity ($`\chi _m=v_m\sqrt{2M}`$) and can be determined from experimental data using eqn. (2). Combining this with the anisotropy values $`v_m`$ determined from the experimental data on photon distributions, one can deduce the anisotropy present in the parent $`\pi ^0`$ distribution using the above scaling relation.

To check the efficacy of the method, we simulated another data set with $`v_m^{in}`$ = 0.02 and $`v_m^{in}`$ = 0.04 and for a range of multiplicities varying between 250 and 3000. This data set was analysed as earlier and the value of anisotropy in neutral pions was estimated using the scaling relation. The estimated values are close to the input values, the ratio of the two deviating from unity only for the cases when both the multiplicity and the initial flow are small.

The error on the deduced $`\pi ^0`$ anisotropy will be small for large values of $`\chi `$, as is evident from the local slope of the curve in Fig. 3. The percentage errors on the deduced anisotropy values are shown as a function of multiplicity in Fig. 4 for both orders of flow. These have been calculated by taking the statistical errors in $`v_m(\gamma )`$ and $`\chi _m`$, both experimentally measurable quantities. The errors are generally within 10%, except for elliptic flow at low multiplicities.

## 4 Summary

A set of events having built-in azimuthal anisotropies has been analysed using techniques employed for the analysis of experimental data. The anisotropies are introduced in both charged and neutral pion distributions. Photon distributions are obtained from the $`\pi ^0`$ distributions. The pion distributions are generated to have the desired multiplicities in the range 100 to 4000 in one unit of pseudo-rapidity.

Analysis of charged particle distribution leads to estimates of anisotropy values in close agreement with the initial anisotropy present in the event. Due to the effect of decay, the values obtained from photon distributions are different, being lower, or higher, than the initial anisotropy depending on the value of the initial anisotropy and multiplicity.

The ratio of estimated anisotropy in photon distributions to the initial anisotropy in $`\pi ^0`$ distributions is seen to scale with a parameter $`\chi `$ which can be determined from experimental data and depends on both anisotropy and multiplicity. This scaling behaviour provides us with a simple relation to deduce the initial anisotropy in $`\pi ^0`$ distributions by the experimental study of photon distributions. The anisotropy is obtained with varying precision which improves when either flow or multiplicity increases.

Acknowledgements

We thank Drs. Sardar Singh and Tapan Nayak for useful discussions and Dr. Dinesh Srivastava for a critical reading of the manuscript. Financial support from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, is gratefully acknowledged.


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# References

Surprising success of non-relativistic quark models with funnel or oscillator potential in describing hadron mass spectra for heavy quark systems had waken the hopes that at least some aspects of the strong interactions are understood after all. Good insight of previous works concerning this subject is given in . But evidently the picture is not complete until it incorporates the light quarks $`u`$, $`d`$ and $`s`$. But this means that the problem is shifting into quantum chromodynamical sector. In this respect the search of alternative possibilities of incorporating relativistic kinematics is quite actual. A very promising approach to the solution of relativistic problem of interaction of two particles was suggested recently by R. Gaida and his collaborators -. Their results can be directly applied to our problem of calculating the mass spectrum of quarkonium as a system of two-quarks. Somewhat different approach was simultaneously developed by I. Todorov and P. Bogolyubov  and later by E. Predazzi et. al. . In this work we shall investigate the results concerning the application of their findings to light-quark systems.

Let us follow first the way, suggested by Predazzi et al -. Following the ideas expressed in  and later developed in , let us start with the classical expression for the relativistic total energy of two particle system with masses $`m`$ and $`M`$, respectively

$$E=\sqrt{𝐩_1^2+m^2}+\sqrt{𝐩_2^2+M^2}$$
(1)
were $`𝐩_1=𝐩_2𝐩`$ in the c.m. system. The main problem here is the mode of inclusion the interaction between two particles. For equal masses Lucha and Schoberl  write basing on (1) and passing to quantum mechanics

$$\left(2\sqrt{𝐩^2+m^2}+V\right)\mathrm{\Psi }\left(𝐫\right)=E\mathrm{\Psi }\left(𝐫\right)$$
(2)
which they call the spinless Bethe-Salpeter equation. They solve very cunningly this equation in the configurational momentum representation but obtain not very good results, which we shall discuss later. But in any case we can conclude that exactly the way of introducing the interaction is responsible for their failure. Therefore we propose here another way of introducing the interaction. Namely, following Predazzi et al  we linearize the expression

$$\left(\frac{E^2+m^2M^2}{2E}\right)^2=𝐩^2+m^2$$
(3)
which follows from (1) after simple algebraic transformations, and obtain

$$\left(\frac{E^2+m^2M^2}{2E}\right)\mathrm{\Psi }\left(𝐫\right)=(\alpha c𝐩+\beta mc^2+\stackrel{~}{V})\mathrm{\Psi }\left(𝐫\right)$$
(4)
where $`\alpha `$ and $`\beta `$ are the usual Dirac matrices, $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ is the four- component wave function for which we shall use two-component representation

$$\mathrm{\Psi }\left(𝐫\right)=\left(\begin{array}{c}\phi \left(𝐫\right)\\ \chi \left(𝐫\right)\end{array}\right).$$
(5)
In the general case we would have on this stage to decide what kind of Lorentz-transform properties we shall ascribe to the interaction.

In general the interaction can transform either like Lorentz-scalar (like the mass) or to be a 4-th component of Lorentz-vector, i.e. transform like energy.Then we shall consider the interaction $`\stackrel{~}{V}`$ as a mixture

$$\stackrel{~}{V}=\beta S\left(1\epsilon \right)+𝐈V\epsilon $$
(6)
where $`\epsilon `$ is some mixing parameter. In what follows we shall simplify the expression for $`\stackrel{~}{V}`$ by taking $`\epsilon =1/2`$ (which is suggested by experimental data (see,e. g.  and also ) what means that (6) can be written in the form

$$\stackrel{~}{V}=\frac{1}{2}(\beta +𝐈)\left(V+S\right).$$
(7)
This form is chosen in order to obtain simple non-relativistic result $`\stackrel{~}{V}=V`$ if there is no difference between $`S`$ and $`V`$. Such potential was introduced previously by V. Kukulin, M. Moshinsky et. al.  and was called an averaged potential, which allows to reduce the system of Dirac equations to a single relativistic oscillator equation.In this, particular case when the mixture of scalar $`S`$ and vector $`V`$ part of potentials are equal we shall consider the following possibilities

$$S\left(r\right)+V\left(r\right)\stackrel{~}{V}=\frac{\alpha _s}{r}+Ar^2+V_0,$$
(8)
$$S\left(r\right)+V\left(r\right)\stackrel{~}{V}=\frac{\alpha _s}{r}+kr+V_0,$$
(9)
$$S\left(r\right)+V\left(r\right)\stackrel{~}{V}=\frac{g^2}{6\pi \mu }\left(1e^{\mu r}\right)\frac{16\pi }{25}\frac{e^{kr}}{r\mathrm{ln}\left(b+\left(\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Lambda }r}\right)^2\right)}+V_0.$$
(10)
Today all of these potentials are used to describe the quark-antiquark interaction. The discussion concerning the advantages and handicapes of these potentials is given in . Our aim is to apply these potentials to describing the meson mass spectra with relativistic kinematics which is built into equation (4). In comparison to  the search of the best description by minimizing $`\chi ^2`$ will be given. For an averaged potential (7) the equation (4) reduces to single equation for the large wave function $`\phi (𝐫)`$

$$\left(EV\right)^2\phi \left(𝐫\right)=\left[4𝐩^2+4m^2+4mS+S^2\right]\phi \left(𝐫\right)=\left[4𝐩^2+4\left(m+\frac{S}{2}\right)^2\right]\phi \left(𝐫\right).$$
(11)
For this propose we have to solve numerically the following equation

$$[𝐩^2+\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\frac{\stackrel{~}{V}}{2}\left(\frac{E^2}{4}m^2\right)]\phi \left(𝐫\right)=0.$$
(12)
Transferring to operators and carrying out the substitutions for unknown function

$$\phi \left(𝐫\right)=\frac{\mathrm{\Phi }\left(𝐫\right)}{𝐫}$$
(13)
one obtains the equation

$$\left[\frac{d^2}{dr^2}\frac{l(l+1)}{r^2}\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\frac{\stackrel{~}{V}}{2}+\frac{E^2}{4}m^2\right]\mathrm{\Phi }\left(𝐫\right)=0.$$
(14)
In a simple approximation

$$S+V=\frac{1}{2}\left(Ar^2+V_0\right)$$
(15)
one obtains

$$[𝐩^2+\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\left(\frac{1}{2}Ar^2+\frac{1}{2}V_0\right)\left(\frac{E^2}{4}m^2\right)]\phi \left(𝐫\right)=0$$
(16)
which leads to the equation for relativistic isotropic oscillator

$$\left[\frac{d^2}{dr^2}\frac{l(l+1)}{r^2}\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\frac{1}{2}Ar^2+\frac{E^2}{4}m^2\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\frac{1}{2}V_0\right]\mathrm{\Phi }\left(𝐫\right)=0.$$
(17)
Now with the standard change of variables

$$\sqrt{\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\frac{1}{2}A}r^2=x^2$$
(18)
one obtains

$$\left[\frac{d^2}{dx^2}\frac{l(l+1)}{x^2}x^2+\frac{E^2/4m^2\frac{1}{2}V_0\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)}{\sqrt{\left(\frac{E}{2}+m\right)\frac{A}{2}}}\right]\mathrm{\Phi }\left(𝐫\right)=0.$$
(19)
The physical solution of (7) is satisfied, when

$$\frac{E^2}{4}m^2=\sqrt{\frac{A}{2}\frac{E+2m}{2}}\left(4N+2l+3\right)+\frac{V_0\left(E/2+m\right)}{2}$$
(20)
or

$$\frac{E}{2}m=\sqrt{\frac{A}{E+2m}}\left(4N+2l+3\right)+\frac{V_0}{2}$$
(21)
In the non-relativistic limit when $`E2m`$ one has

$$E2m+\sqrt{\frac{A}{m}}\left(4N+2l+3\right)+V_0$$
(22)
in full accordance with the non-relativistic case (see,e.g.).

Actually for large total energies $`E`$ from (21) it follows $`E^2l^{4/3}`$ i.e. almost linear Regge-trajectory as it should be from general considerations. As we shall see the application of other variants of potentials gives even better results.

As we have mentioned earlier, recently very promising $`\pi `$ approach to the problem of relativistic description of many-particle system was elaborated along with the ideas presented by Gaida in  and elaborated by Tretyak, Spytko and Duviryak . They used the Weyl quantization method and succeeded in solving the problem for relativistic oscillator between two particles.

Considering oscillator-type interaction

$$V=\omega ^2𝐩_1𝐩_2r^2$$
(23)
where

$$𝐩_1𝐩_2=\frac{m_{RED}}{2}=\frac{m_q}{4}$$
(24)
the non-relativistic approximation they would obtain for mass of two-particle system

$$M=\left\{\left[2m_q+\frac{\omega }{2}\left(4N+2l+3\right)\right]^2+\frac{\omega ^2}{4}\right\}^{1/2}+V_0$$
(25)
or

$$M=\sqrt{\left(m_q+\sqrt{\frac{A}{m_q}}\left(4N+2l+3\right)\right)^2+\frac{A}{m_q}}+V_0$$
(26)
if we express the (26) in form of string tension $`A`$ and generalize their results to our boundary condition of isotropic oscillator.

Exactly such approximation was taken in . But if we suggest that in general

$$𝐩_1𝐩_2=\frac{E+m_q}{8}$$
(27)
then Lvov group results

$$M=\left\{\left[2m_q+\sqrt{\frac{2A}{E+m_q}}\left(4N+2l+3\right)\right]^2+\frac{2A}{E+m_q}\right\}^{1/2}+V_0$$
(28)
will resemble very much our relativistic approach. The results of calculations according to (28) are given below. The parameters are taken to be $`A=0.01`$ $`GeV^3`$, $`V_0=0.436`$ $`GeV`$ certainly this approximation is valid if one considers the energy dependence of $`𝐩_i`$ only on the last stage of calculations.

It is interesting that similar to (28) result for $`𝐌^\mathrm{𝟐}`$\- operator was obtained in relativistic approach by Ishida-Oda based on special assumption of covariant relativistic approach. Even the numerical values of parameters of Ishida-Oda  are close to the result of (28). Their value $`A=0.05GeV^3`$ which is of the same order as our $`A`$. More precise comparison is impossible because of ambiguity of other parameters.

Usually such potential models like we have used here are called naïve quark model. But exactly our model is not-so naïve. Firstly, the relativistic kinematics not only renders it more complicated, but shows the possible way of building the model of interaction of two relativistic particles. Secondly the potentials like (8-10) incorporate asymptotic freedom the strong coupling constant $`\alpha _s`$ was calculated according to the classical expression

$$\alpha _s\left(r\right)=\frac{12\pi }{332N}\frac{1}{\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{1}{r^2\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Lambda }}^2}\right)}$$
(29)
where $`\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Lambda }}`$ was taken to be equal to $`\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Lambda }}=0.14GeV`$. And lastly the model allows to include spin-spin interaction either by passing to Breit-Fermi equation or by using Dirac equation straightly. In the Table 1 $`\alpha _s`$ is taken exactly according to (29).

It is interesting to note that the definition of mass can be given in a different way. Considering one particle as moving in the field of another and vice versa and adding the obtained masses we obtain the results with parameters which correspond very closely to our Table 1. Namely one can write down the Dirac equation for one particle moving in the outer field, reduce it to the equation for large component $`\chi \left(𝐫\right)`$ and obtain

$$\left(E^2m^2\right)\chi \left(𝐫\right)=𝐩^2\chi \left(𝐫\right)+\left(E+m\right)V\chi \left(𝐫\right).$$
(30)
Applying the virial theorem to this equation

$$\chi (y)\left|𝐩^2(y)\right|\chi (y)=\frac{1}{2}\chi (y)\left|y\frac{V}{y}\right|\chi (y)=\chi (y)\left|y^2\right|\chi (y)$$
(31)
Combining (30) and (31) for oscillator interaction one obtains

$$E^2m^2=2\sqrt{C\left(E+m\right)}B_{Nl}+\left(E+m\right)V_0$$
(32)
where

$$B_{Nl}=\chi (y)\left|y^2\right|\chi (y)=2N+l+3/2$$
(33)
This expression on resembles very much the (28). So we are left with the five most realistic from our point view possibilities, namely, of calculating masses according to (8), (9), (10), (26), (28).

To obtain the masses of multi-quark system according to these expressions, it is necessary to define the values of parameters. The masses of quarks were taken to be as usually in quark models $`m_u=0.33GeV`$, $`m_c=1.6751.75GeV`$, $`m_b=5.055.1GeV`$. Parameters for different potentials are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. The parameter values for different potentials

Table 2.Variation of $`\chi ^2`$ for different parameters of potential (9).

| $`k`$  $`(GeV^2)`$ | $`\chi _{u\overline{u}}^2`$ | $`\chi _{c\overline{c}}^2`$ | $`\chi _{b\overline{b}}^2`$ | $`V_0`$  $`(GeV)`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`0.1826`$ | $`514`$ | $`1.1510^5`$ | $`1.310^4`$ | $`0.628`$ |
| $`0.25`$ | $`98`$ | $`6.210^3`$ | $`210^4`$ | $`0.791`$ |
| $`0.26`$ | $`67`$ | $`2.210^4`$ | $`1.610^4`$ | $`0.813`$ |
| $`0.27`$ | $`43.6`$ | $`310^4`$ | $`2.910^3`$ | $`0.835`$ |
| $`0.29`$ | $`12.6`$ | $`710^4`$ | $`8.510^3`$ | $`0.878`$ |
| $`0.305`$ | $`1.8`$ | $`1.3610^5`$ | $`4.310^4`$ | $`0.908`$ |

The value of $`V_0`$ reflects the fact that potential is the Fourier-transform of scattering amplitude $`V_0`$ being the constant of interaction. Gromes $`\left[21\right]`$ has evaluated this constant for linear confinement and obtained the value of $`V_0`$

$$V_02\sqrt{k}e^{\left(\gamma 0.5\right)}$$
(34)
where $`k`$ is the string tension $`\gamma =0.57721\mathrm{}`$ is Euler-MacLoraint constant. According to our values of $`k=0.180.305GeV^2`$. According to (34) has to vary within the limits $`V_0=\left(0.77÷1.02\right)GeV`$ which is quite close to values, cited in the table (2). Let us stress that the set values are not colour-dependent, which, reduces the number of adjustable parameters.

The result of calculation together with experimental data are shown in Tables (3-6). Experimental values were taken from . For choosing the parameters the minimum of $`\chi ^2`$criterion was used, with the definition of $`\chi ^2`$ given in . In this definition $`𝐍`$ is the number of meson masses, $`𝐧`$ is the number of parameters (in our case we considered them to be equal to two namely confinement parameter and $`V_0`$), $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ is the experimental error in definition of experimental mass $`M_{EXP}`$ of two-quark system  since $`V_0`$ was chosen to match the experimental value of ground-state mass we are actually left only which one adjustable parameter $`A`$ (or $`k`$). Since we do not include LS-forces we had to take the average center of gravity (COG) value of $`P`$-resonances, which was calculated according to formula

$$M_{COG}=\frac{_j\left(2j+1\right)M_j}{_j\left(2j+1\right)}.$$
(35)
As one can see from both radial and orbital excitation calculation the variant which incorporates in one or another way the relativistic kinematics give better description of Regge-trajectories, which, are believed to be linear in $`l`$ for $`M^2.`$

It is well known that even in non-relativistic limit one can obtain good description of $`u\overline{u}`$-$`d\overline{d}`$ -systems at the account of spoiling the $`c\overline{c}`$ of $`b\overline{b}`$ -description.

Indeed in the Table 2 we show $`\chi ^2`$ obtained for Eichten parameters. Due to a high precision of defining $`J/\mathrm{\Psi }`$ and $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$-mesons the large $`\chi ^2`$ were considered good for these mesons and bad for $`\rho `$-meson trajectory. On other hand the non-relativistic Badalyan  results are good for $`u\overline{u}`$, but bad for $`J/\mathrm{\Psi }`$. Fabre  in order to obtain good results for light quarkonium had to change the very potential. Instead of this situation our way or incorporating the relativistic kinematics we obtain good results for all data. The table 2 demonstrates this statement. Table 3 contains the comparison of different potentials. The discussion concerning the choice of potentials is given in . We shall choose in what follows the Cornell-potential (9) which seems to be preferable though potential (10) is also quite good. The parameters $`\alpha _s`$ here are taken from table 1. The $`u\overline{u}`$-data are fantastically good, but $`c\overline{c}`$ and $`b\overline{b}`$-data could be better.Therefore in tables 4-6 we give the results for $`k=0.29GeV^2`$. We consider these results as the best. It is interesting that the values which give these best results are close to those of Lucha and Schöberl .We want to stress that all the above results are obtained by numerical solution of (14). The last columns in $`\left(46\right)`$ are calculated according to (28 ). With the choice $`A=0.071GeV^3`$, $`V_0=1.0077GeV`$, $`m_u=0.33GeV`$, $`m_c=1.75GeV`$, $`m_b=5.13GeV`$ the results are quite comparable with the other entries. But still we have to conclude that pure oscillator potential is too rough to give final result. The use of more sophisticated potential is to be taken hear too. But it demonstrates nicely that inclusion of relativistic kinematics is very crucial.

We would like to call the attention to one interesting feature of relativistic models, namely that the slope of linear (or close to linear) Regge-trajectory in this case is constant, while in nonlinear models it is neither constant nor linear. Roughly experiments show this slope to be equal $`1.2GeV^2`$. In our cases it varies from $`1.15`$ to $`2.5GeV^2`$ for different cases. As Tutik et  have indicated the Regge trajectories for low-lying states coincide while for large values of orbital momentum $`l`$ the screened potential (10) leads a limited Regge-trajectory in contrast to infinitely rising trajectories for other potentials like (8) or (9).

Table 3. Mass spectrum of $`u\overline{u}`$-system with some realistic potentials.

| $`State`$ | $`designation`$ | $`M_{EXP}`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{8})`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{9})`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{10})`$  $`GeV`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`1S`$ | $`\rho `$ $`1^+(1^{})`$ | $`0.768\pm 0.0005`$ | $`0.768`$ | $`0.768`$ | $`0.768`$ |
| $`1P`$ | $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{COG}^{}`$ | $`1.262\pm 0.03`$ | $`1.26`$ | $`1.296`$ | $`1.3`$ |
| $`2S`$ | $`\rho `$ $`1^+(1^{})`$ | $`1.465\pm 0.025`$ | $`1.609`$ | $`1.573`$ | $`1.561`$ |
| $`2P`$ | $`a_2`$ $`1^{}(2^{++})`$ | $`1.935\pm 0.015`$ | $`2.003`$ | $`1.932`$ | $`1.889`$ |
| $`3S`$ | $`\rho `$ $`1^+(1^{})`$ | $`2.15\pm 0.01`$ | $`2.3`$ | $`2.155`$ | $`2.103`$ |
| $`1D`$ | $`\rho _3`$ $`1^+(3^{})`$ | $`1.691\pm 0.013`$ | $`1.665`$ | $`1.689`$ | $`1.687`$ |
| $`2D`$ | $`\rho _3`$ $`1^+(3^{})`$ | $`2.25\pm 0.01`$ | $`2.348`$ | $`2.235`$ | $`2.1845`$ |
| $`1F`$ | $`a_4`$ $`1^{}(4^{++})`$ | $`2.037\pm 0.036`$ | $`2.03`$ | $`2.021`$ | $`2.003`$ |
| $`1G`$ | $`\rho _5`$ $`1^+(5^{})`$ | $`2.350\pm 0.015`$ | $`2.366`$ | $`2.312`$ | $`2.275`$ |
| $`1H`$ | $`a_6`$ $`1^{}(6^{++})`$ | $`2.45\pm 0.13`$ | $`2.685`$ | $`2.576`$ | $`2.514`$ |
| $`\chi ^2`$ | $``$ | $``$ | $`53.3`$ | $`1.8`$ | $`19.6`$ |

Table 4. The best mass spectrum of $`u\overline{u}`$-system with Cornell-potential (9)

in formula (28).

| $`State`$ | $`designation`$ | $`M_{EXP}`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{9})`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{28})`$  $`GeV`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`1S`$ | $`\rho `$ $`1^+(1^{})`$ | $`0.768\pm 0.0005`$ | $`0.768`$ | $`0.768`$ |
| $`1P`$ | $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{COG}^{}`$ | $`1.262\pm 0.03`$ | $`1.281`$ | $`1.198`$ |
| $`2S`$ | $`\rho `$ $`1^+(1^{})`$ | $`1.465\pm 0.025`$ | $`1.551`$ | $`1.577`$ |
| $`2P`$ | $`a_21^{}(2^{++})`$ | $`1.935\pm 0.015`$ | $`1.902`$ | $`1.923`$ |
| $`3S`$ | $`\rho `$ $`1^+(1^{})`$ | $`2.15\pm 0.01`$ | $`2.12`$ | $`2.244`$ |
| $`1D`$ | $`\rho _3`$ $`1^+(3^{})`$ | $`1.691\pm 0.013`$ | $`1.665`$ | $`1.577`$ |
| $`2D`$ | $`\rho _3`$ $`1^+(3^{})`$ | $`2.25\pm 0.01`$ | $`2.197`$ | $`2.244`$ |
| $`1F`$ | $`a_4`$ $`1^{}(4^{++})`$ | $`2.037\pm 0.036`$ | $`1.987`$ | $`1.923`$ |
| $`1G`$ | $`\rho _5`$ $`1^+(5^{})`$ | $`2.350\pm 0.015`$ | $`2.278`$ | $`2.244`$ |
| $`1H`$ | $`a_6`$ $`1^{}(6^{++})`$ | $`2.45\pm 0.13`$ | $`2.529`$ | $`2.547`$ |
| $`\chi ^2`$ | $``$ | $``$ | $`12.6`$ | $`35.68`$ |

Table 5. The same for $`c\overline{c}`$-system.

| $`State`$ | $`designation`$ | $`M_{EXP}`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{9})`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{28})`$  $`GeV`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`1S`$ | $`J/\mathrm{\Psi }`$ $`0^{}(1^{})`$ | $`3.096\pm 0.00009`$ | $`3.07`$ | $`3.014`$ |
| $`1P`$ | $`\chi _{cl}`$ $`0^+(1^{++})`$ | $`3.51\pm 0.00012`$ | $`3.5118`$ | $`3.331`$ |
| $`1D`$ | $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`3.770\pm 0.0025`$ | $`3.837`$ | $`3.632`$ |
| $`2S`$ | $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ $`0^{}(1^{})`$ | $`3.688\pm 0.0001`$ | $`3.732`$ | $`3.632`$ |
| $`2D`$ | $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`4.159\pm 0.02`$ | $`4.296`$ | $`4.195`$ |
| $`3S`$ | $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`4.04\pm 0.01`$ | $`4.227`$ | $`4.195`$ |
| $`3D`$ | $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`4.415\pm 0.006`$ | $`4.692`$ | $`4.717`$ |
| $`\chi ^2`$ | $``$ | $``$ | $`710^4`$ | $`8.410^5`$ |

Table 6. The same for $`b\overline{b}`$-system.

| $`State`$ | $`designation`$ | $`M_{EXP}`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{9})`$  $`GeV`$ | $`M_{TH}(\text{28})`$  $`GeV`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`1S`$ | $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}\left(1^{}\right)`$ | $`9.460\pm 0.00022`$ | $`9.479`$ | $`9.542`$ |
| $`1P`$ | $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{COG}^{}`$ | $`9.892\pm 0.0007`$ | $`9.883`$ | $`9.741`$ |
| $`2S`$ | $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`10.023\pm 0.00031`$ | $`10.037`$ | $`9.932`$ |
| $`2P`$ | $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{COG}^{}`$ | $`10.268\pm 0.00057`$ | $`10.299`$ | $`10.121`$ |
| $`3S`$ | $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`10.355\pm 0.0005`$ | $`10.433`$ | $`10.308`$ |
| $`4S`$ | $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`10.58\pm 0.0035`$ | $`10.776`$ | $`10.675`$ |
| $`5S`$ | $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`10.865\pm 0.008`$ | $`11.062`$ | $`11.034`$ |
| $`6S`$ | $`\mathrm{{\rm Y}}`$ $`\mathrm{?}^\mathrm{?}(1^{})`$ | $`11.019\pm 0.008`$ | $`11.332`$ | $`11.385`$ |
| $`\chi ^2`$ | $``$ | $``$ | $`8.510^3`$ | $`7.410^4`$ |


text:
# SUBSYSTEM ENTROPY EXCEEDING BEKENSTEIN’S BOUND Alberta-Thy-08-00, hep-th/0007237

((2000 July 28))

## Abstract

If Bekenstein’s conjectured bound on the microcanonical entropy, $`S2\pi ER`$, is applied to a closed subsystem of maximal linear size $`R`$ and excitation energy up through $`E`$, it can be violated by an arbitrarily large factor by a scalar field having a symmetric potential allowing domain walls, and by the electromagnetic field modes in a coaxial cable.

Motivated by considerations of the generalized second law of thermodynamics for processes in which objects are lowered into black holes, Bekenstein  conjectured that the entropy $`S`$ of a system confined to radius $`R`$ or less and energy $`E`$ or less would obey the inequality

$$S2\pi ER.$$
(1)
He and colleagues found many arguments and examples supporting this inequality \[1-14\], though many counterarguments and counterexamples have also been noted \[15-28\].

Part of the difficulty of determining whether the bound (1) is correct or not is the ambiguity of what systems are to be considered, and what definitions are to be assigned to $`S`$, $`R`$, and $`E`$. To give a concrete resolution of the first ambiguity, here I shall consider only nongravitational quantum field theories of a single quantum field in Minkowski spacetime, avoiding counterexamples with large numbers of fields  (unless it is assumed that the fields have enough positive vacuum energy included in $`E`$ to save the bound ).

For the definitions of $`S`$, $`R`$, and $`E`$, Bekenstein initially  took $`S`$ to be the von Neumann entropy $`Tr(\rho \mathrm{ln}\rho )`$ of the system, $`R=(A/4\pi )^{1/2}`$ with “area $`A`$ of that (quasi) spherical surface which circumscribes the system,” and $`E`$ to be the mean regularized energy, $`Tr(H\rho )`$, of the “complete system,” which was meant to include any walls needed to keep the system within the (quasi) spherical surface of area $`A=4\pi R^2`$. With these definitions, the truth of the conjectured bound (1) for nongravitational systems of a suitably small number of quantum fields in Minkowski spacetime seems to be an open question, since it is difficult to give a detailed description of walls that may be needed to confine the system. If the walls are themselves made up of quantum fields that are not held in place by yet other walls, I would conjecture that no complete stationary system can be totally confined to be within any finite radius $`R`$ of Minkowski spacetime, in which case the right hand side of (1) is infinite for any system with positive energy, making the bound trivially true for complete systems with a nondegenerate vacuum that has nonnegative energy.

Therefore, to give (1) a nontrivial content, one might prefer to apply it to a subsystem of the universe, say a quantum field inside some boundary circumscribed by a sphere of radius $`R`$. Indeed, this is an approach that Schiffer and Bekenstein have advocated as follows :

“But there is no gainsaying the conceptual clarity gained when the bound (1.1) \[(1) above\] is regarded as applying to the field in the cavity and only the field. This motivates an alternative approach to bound (1.1) which abandons the canonical method in favor of the microcanonical one (entropy is the logarithm of the number of available microstates), interprets $`E`$ as the available energy above the vacuum state, and ignores the walls of the cavity. …

“If $`\mathrm{\Omega }(E)`$ denotes the number of quantum states accessible to the field system with energy up to and including $`E`$, then the microcanonical definition of entropy is $`S(E)=\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Omega }(E)`$.”

This approach avoids counterexamples to (1)  from negative Casimir energies by simply redefining the ground state energy of the field in the cavity to be zero. By using the microcanonical entropy $`\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Omega }(E)`$ instead of the canonical or von Neumann entropy $`Tr(\rho \mathrm{ln}\rho )`$, it also avoids counterexamples to (1)  from very low temperatures when $`E=0`$ for the ground state, as it is defined to be here.

Using these definitions of $`S`$, $`R`$, and $`E`$, I now wish to show two types of counterexamples for the conjectured entropy bound (1) for a single quantum field within a cavity. For each the ratio of the left hand side to the right hand side,

$$B\frac{S}{2\pi ER},$$
(2)
can be made arbitrarily large, thereby violating the conjectured entropy bound (1) by an arbitrarily large factor.

The first counterexample uses a field with nontrivial self-interaction , which old arguments  had suggested could be used to violate (1).

In particular, consider a scalar field $`\varphi `$ whose potential energy density $`V(\varphi )`$ is symmetric in $`\varphi `$ and has its global minima at $`\varphi =\pm \varphi _m0`$, and impose the condition $`\varphi =0`$ at the boundary of the region under consideration, say a cavity of radius $`R`$. If the region is large enough, the energy of a classical configuration with $`\varphi =0`$ at the boundary will have a global minimum for a configuration in which $`\varphi `$ is near $`\varphi _m`$ over most of the region and then drops smoothly to 0 at the boundary. (The region must be large enough that the reduction in the potential energy density from $`V(0)`$ to $`V(\varphi _m)`$ integrates to more than the increase in the “kinetic” or gradient energy density from the spatial gradients of $`\varphi `$ near the boundary. For a spherical region, the potential energy reduction is of the order of $`[V(0)V(\varphi _m)]R^3`$, whereas the gradient energy increase is of the order of at least $`(\varphi _m/R)^2R^3`$, so the former definitely dominates if

$$R\varphi _m/\sqrt{V(0)V(\varphi _m)},$$
(3)
allowing a nonuniform $`\varphi (x^i)`$ to minimize the energy.)

Classically, there is another global energy minimum of exactly the same energy with $`\varphi (x^i)`$ replaced by $`\varphi (x^i)`$. But quantum mechanically, there will be some tiny tunneling rate between these two classical configurations, so the quantum ground state, of energy $`E_0`$, will be a symmetric superposition of the two classical energy minima (plus quantum fluctuations of all the other modes). However, there will also be an excited state of energy $`E_1>E_0`$ which is the antisymmetric superposition of the two classical energy minima (plus other fluctuations). For a large region, the energy excess $`E_1E_0`$ of this excited state will be exponentially tiny. The number of orthogonal quantum states with energy up to and including $`E=E_1`$ will be $`\mathrm{\Omega }(E_1)=2`$, so the microcanonical entropy of that energy is $`S(E_1)=\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Omega }(E_1)=\mathrm{ln}2`$.

When the two classical extrema configurations $`\varphi (x^i)`$ and $`\varphi (x^i)`$ are well separated, we can estimate that the excitation energy $`E_1E_0`$ is given by some energy scale multiplied by $`e^I`$, where $`I`$ is the Euclidean action of an instanton that tunnels between the two classical extrema configurations $`\varphi (x^i)`$ and $`+\varphi (x^i)`$. This instanton will be a solution of the Euclidean equations of motion of the field $`\varphi `$ that obeys the boundary condition $`\varphi =0`$ at spatial radius $`r=R`$ for all Euclidean times $`\tau `$, but which for $`r<R`$ interpolates between $`\varphi (x^i)`$ and $`+\varphi (x^i)`$ as $`\tau `$ goes from $`\mathrm{}`$ to $`+\mathrm{}`$. When the strong inequality (3) applies, the static configuration $`+\varphi (x^i)`$ that applies asymptotically for large positive $`\tau `$ is very near $`\varphi _m`$ over almost all of the spatial volume (except very near $`r=R`$), and the Euclidean instanton is essentially a domain wall concentrated at some Euclidean time that can be chosen to be $`\tau =0`$.

The energy-per-area or action-per-three-volume of the domain wall is

$$\epsilon =_{\varphi _m}^{+\varphi _m}\sqrt{2V(\varphi )}𝑑\varphi ,$$
(4)
and the three-volume of the Euclidean section at $`\tau =0`$ across the ball $`rR`$ is $`4\pi R^3/3`$, so the Euclidean action of the instanton is

$$I\frac{4\pi }{3}R^3\epsilon .$$
(5)
A suitable energy scale to multiply $`e^I`$ is $`R^2\epsilon `$. At our level of approximation, it does not help to try to get the numerical coefficient of the energy scale correct, since our estimate (5) of the Euclidean action, though being the dominant piece when it is large in comparison with unity, has smaller corrections that are also large in comparison with unity. Therefore, using $``$ to mean that the logarithms of the two sides are approximately equal (up to differences that are small in comparison with the logarithms themselves but which may actually be large in comparison with unity, so that the ratio of the two sides themselves may be much different from unity), we get

$$E_1E_0R^2\epsilon e^IR^2\epsilon \mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{4\pi }{3}R^3\epsilon \right).$$
(6)
When the strong inequality (3) holds, classically the energy $`E_0`$ is essentially the energy of a half-thickness of domain wall at the radius $`R`$, approximately $`2\pi R^2\epsilon `$. As Bekenstein has noted , for large $`I`$ this classical energy (and also the energy of any wall outside $`R`$ needed to keep $`\varphi =0`$ at $`R`$) dominates over $`E_1E_0`$ (though, incidentally, it does not go to zero as $`R\mathrm{}`$, as he also claimed). However, here I am only considering the field subsystem inside $`R`$ (and so am not counting the walls), and I am also following the approach of Schiffer and Bekenstein  in taking “$`E`$ as the available energy above the vacuum state” (which avoids counterexamples to the conjectured bound for other closed subsystems with negative Casimir energy).

Therefore, taking $`E=E_1E_0`$ gives

$$B\frac{S}{2\pi ER}=\frac{\mathrm{ln}2}{2\pi (E_1E_0)R}\frac{e^I}{I}\frac{\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{4\pi }{3}R^3\epsilon \right)}{R^3\epsilon }\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{4\pi }{3}R^3\epsilon \right),$$
(7)
which can be made arbitrarily large by making $`R`$ arbitrarily large. Indeed, $`B1`$, the violation of Bekenstein’s conjectured bound (1) if it is positive, grows large very rapidly with $`R`$ large enough to obey the inequality (3).

For instance, take a toy model in which

$$V(\varphi )=\frac{\lambda }{4}(\varphi ^2\varphi _m^2)^2=\frac{\lambda }{4}\varphi ^4\frac{1}{4}m^2\varphi ^2+\frac{m^4}{16\lambda }$$
(8)
where $`\lambda 1`$ and $`m`$ is the mass of small field oscillations around the potential minima at $`\varphi =\pm \varphi _m=\pm m/\sqrt{2\lambda }`$. (If it is objected that this model is actually a trivial quantum field theory , then use instead a well-defined supersymmetric model in which the bosonic sector has a scalar field with this potential.) Then

$$\epsilon =\frac{2}{3}\sqrt{2\lambda }\varphi _m^3=\frac{m^3}{3\lambda },$$
(9)
so for $`R\varphi _m/\sqrt{V(0)V(\varphi _m)}=2\sqrt{2}/m`$, one gets

$$I\frac{8\sqrt{2}\pi }{9}\lambda ^{1/2}\varphi _m^3R^3=\frac{4\pi }{9\lambda }m^3R^31.$$
(10)
When this Euclidean tunneling action is inserted into Eq. (7), one gets that the quantity $`B`$, which Bekenstein has conjectured to be bounded above by unity, is

$`B`$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{e^I}{I}}e^I\mathrm{exp}\left({\displaystyle \frac{8\sqrt{2}\pi }{9}}\lambda ^{1/2}\varphi _m^3R^3\right)=\mathrm{exp}\left({\displaystyle \frac{4\pi }{9\lambda }}m^3R^3\right)`$ (11)
$``$ $`10^{10^{100}}\mathrm{exp}\left\{\left(10^{100}\mathrm{ln}10\right)\left[\left({\displaystyle \frac{10^{12}}{\lambda }}\right)\left({\displaystyle \frac{m}{10^{16}\mathrm{GeV}}}\right)^3\left({\displaystyle \frac{R}{0.502269\mathrm{cm}}}\right)^31\right]\right\}.`$
This is thus larger than a googolplex for

$$R>0.50227\mathrm{cm}\left(\frac{10^{16}\mathrm{GeV}}{m}\right)\left(\frac{\lambda }{10^{12}}\right)^{1/3}.$$
(12)
The second counterexample to Bekenstein’s conjectured entropy bound (1) in the microcanonical approach uses simply the free electromagnetic field inside the annular region of a long coaxial cable that forms a closed loop of length $`LR`$ coiled up inside the sphere of radius $`R`$.

For simplicity, take the inner and outer coaxial cable cylinders to provide perfectly conducting boundary conditions for the electromagnetic field between them, and let this region between the perfectly conducting cylinders be vacuum (except for the electromagnetic field itself), rather than the dielectric used to keep the inner and outer conducting cylinders apart in realistic coaxial cables. As Schiffer and Bekenstein advocated , we shall again take the energy $`E`$ to be the available electromagnetic field energy over that of the electromagnetic vacuum within the long annular cavity, ignoring the energy of the walls of the cavity itself (the hypothetical perfectly conducting cylinders).

When the coaxial cable lies along the $`z`$-axis, and $`\rho =\sqrt{x^2+y^2}`$ is the cylindrical radial coordinate, the transverse electromagnetic (TEM) wave mode , in the vacuum annular region $`\rho _1<\rho <\rho _2`$ between the inner perfectly conducting cylinder at radius $`\rho _1`$ and the outer perfectly conducting cylinder at radius $`\rho _2`$, has an electromagnetic field two-form

$$𝐅=𝐝[f(tz)+g(t+z)]𝐝\mathrm{ln}\rho ,$$
(13)
a radial electric field and azimuthal magnetic field whose strengths vary as $`1/\rho `$ in the radial direction and have a wave behavior in the time and $`z`$-direction. Here $`f(tz)`$ gives a TEM wave moving at the speed of light in the positive $`z`$-direction, and $`g(t+z)`$ gives a TEM wave moving at the speed of light in the negative $`z`$-direction.

When the coaxial cable is coiled up so that it lies entirely within the sphere of radius $`R`$, the TEM wave forms will be altered by a fractional amount that is small when the radius of bending of the cable is much greater than its cylindrical radius $`\rho _2`$, which will be assumed to be the case here. Then TEM waves will still move along the cable with very nearly the speed of light. If the two ends of the cable are connected together to form a closed loop of length $`L`$, the angular frequency of TEM modes in the loop will be very nearly

$$\omega _n=2\pi |n|/L$$
(14)
for each nonzero integer $`n`$. (Each eigenfrequency has two modes, $`n=\pm |n|`$, one for each direction the wave can go around the loop.)

Now if we take the energy $`E=\omega _1=2\pi /L`$, then $`\mathrm{\Omega }(E)`$, the number of quantum states accessible to this electromagnetic field system with energy up to and including $`E`$, is 3, since there is the electromagnetic vacuum state with energy defined to be zero, the state with one photon of energy $`E`$ in the mode $`n=1`$, and the state with one photon of energy $`E`$ in the mode $`n=1`$ (going in the opposite direction around the loop). Therefore, the microcanonical definition of the entropy for this energy is $`S(E)=\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Omega }(E)=\mathrm{ln}3`$, so

$$B\frac{S}{2\pi ER}=\frac{(\mathrm{ln}3)L}{4\pi ^2R}.$$
(15)
This exceeds unity if

$$L>\frac{4\pi ^2}{\mathrm{ln}3}R35.9348R.$$
(16)
For example, suppose that we coil up the coaxial cable of cylindrical radius $`r=\rho _2`$ into a close-packed roll, so that in a small cross-section locally perpendicular to the coiled cable, each piece of the cable intersecting this cross-section takes up an hexagonal area $`A=\sqrt{12}r^2`$. If we fill the sphere of radius $`R`$ (and hence volume $`V=4\pi R^3/3`$) with these coiled up hexagonal cylinders that circumscribe the circular cylinders of the cable itself, so $`LA=V`$, then $`L=2\pi R^3/(3\sqrt{3}r^2)`$, giving

$$B=\frac{\mathrm{ln}3}{6\sqrt{3}\pi }\left(\frac{R}{r}\right)^2.$$
(17)
This obviously can be made arbitrarily large by making the radius $`R`$ of the sphere enclosing the electromagnetic field system arbitrarily larger than the cylindrical radius $`r`$ of the outer perfectly conducting cylindrical boundary of the coaxial cable loop containing the electromagnetic field system.

This example appears to be not only a counterexample to Bekenstein’s conjectured entropy bound $`B1`$ in the microcanonical form for a closed subsystem of maximal linear size $`R`$, but also a counterexample to what is claimed to be proved in , that the microcanonical bound holds “for a generic system consisting of a noninteracting quantum field in three space dimensions confined to a cavity of arbitrary shape and topology,” “any free quantum field which is described by a Hermitian, positive-definite Hamiltonian $`H`$. Simple examples are the scalar, electromagnetic, and Dirac fields.”

The question now arises as to whether Bekenstein’s conjectured entropy bound can be differently interpreted so that it is still viable. As Bekenstein has emphasized  in his rebuttal to an earlier paper of mine  that gave similar counterexamples to various forms of his conjecture, it may be best to restrict the conjecture to complete systems . If the conjecture is then to be nontrivial, the challenge would be to find a definition of what it means for a complete system to be circumscribed by finite radius $`R`$. Work on this is reported elsewhere .

Some of this work was done in Haiti while awaiting the adoption papers for our now 979-day-old daughter Ziliana Zena Elizabeth. This research was supported in part by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.


text:
# 1 Digital Sound Synthesis

## 1 Digital Sound Synthesis

Digital sound synthesis is a way to generate a stream of numbers representing the sampled values of an audio waveform. To realize the sounds, one sends these samples through a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), which converts the numbers to a continuously varying voltage that can be amplified and sent to a loudspeaker.

One way of viewing the digital sound-synthesis process is to imagine a computer program that calculates the sample values according to a mathematical formula and sends those samples, one after the other, to the DAC. All the calculations are carried out by a program, which can be changed in arbitrary ways by the user. From this point of view, digital synthesis is the same as software synthesis. Software synthesis contrasts with hardware synthesis, where the calculations are carried out in special circuitry. Hardware synthesis has the advantage of high-speed operation but lacks the flexibility of software synthesis. Software synthesis is the technique of choice if one wishes to develop an instrument for data sonification.

With software synthesis, one can indeed realize any imaginable sound—provided one has the time to wait for the results. With a sampling rate of 44,100 samples per second the time available per sample is only 20 microseconds, too short for real-time synthesis of reasonably complex sounds. For this reason, most of today’s synthesis programs generate a sound file, which is then played through a DAC. But data sonification in real time may become feasible on tomorrow’s high-performance computing architectures. Our research effort focuses on the development of a flexible and powerful digital instrument for scientific sonification and on finding optimal ways to convey information through the medium of sound.

### 1.1 DIASS – A Digital Instrument

Two pieces of software consitute the main tools of the project: DIASS, a Digital Instrument for Additive Sound Synthesis, and M4CAVE, a program for the visualization of sound objects in a multimedia environment. Both are part of a comprehensive Environment for Music Composition, which includes additional software for computer-assisted composition and automatic music notation. Figure 1 gives a schematic overview of the various elements of the Environment; C and S mark the data entry points for composition and sonification, respectively.

In this section we describe the workings of DIASS; we will describe M4CAVE after we have discussed our ideas on scientific sonification.

#### 1.1.1 The Instrument

The DIASS instrument functions as part of the M4C synthesis language developed by Beauchamp and his associates at the University of Illinois . Synthesis languages like M4C are designed around the notion that the user creates an instrument together with a score that references the instrument. The synthesis program reads the instrument, feeds it the data from the score file, and computes the final audio signal, which is then written to a sound file for later playback .

The M4C synthesis language is imbedded in the C language. As part of the current project, the instrument and relevant parts of M4C were redesigned for a distributed-memory environment. The parallel implementation uses the standard MPI message-passing library .

Like all additive-synthesis instruments, DIASS creates sounds through a summation of simple sine waves. The basic formula is

$$S(t)=\underset{i}{}P_i(t)=\underset{i}{}a_i(t)\mathrm{sin}(2\pi f_i(t)t+\varphi _i(t)).$$

The individual sine waves that make up a sound are commonly designated as the “partials” of the sound, hence the symbol $`P`$. The sum extends over all partials that are active at the time $`t`$; $`a_i`$ is the amplitude, $`f_i`$ the frequency, and $`\varphi _i`$ the phase of the $`i`$th partial. These variables can be modulated periodically or otherwise; the modulations evolve on a slow time scale, typically on the order of the duration of a sound. Phase modulation is barely distinguishable from frequency modulation, particularly in the case of time-varying frequency spectra, and is not implemented in DIASS.

The audible frequencies range roughly from 20 to 20,000 Hz, although in practice the upper limit is one-half the sampling frequency (Nyquist criterion).

The partials in a sound need not be in any harmonic relationship (that is, $`f_i`$ need not be a multiple of some fundamental frequency $`f_0`$), nor do they need to share any other property. The definition of a sound is purely operational. What distinguishes one “sound” from another is that certain operations are defined at the level of a sound and affect all the partials that make up the sound.

The evolution of a partial can be subject to many other controls, besides amplitude and frequency modulation. Moreover, these controls can affect a single partial or all the partials in a sound. For example, reverberation, which represents the combined effects of the size and acoustic characteristics of the hall, affects all the partials in a sound simultaneously, although not necessarily in the same way. Furthermore, if a random element is present, it must be applied at the level of a sound; otherwise, a complex wave is perceived as a collection of independent sine waves, instead of a single sound. Hence, it is important that all partials in a sound access the same random number sequence and that the controls of any partial that changes its allegiance and moves from one sound to another be adjusted accordingly.

Table 1 lists the control parameters that can be applied in DIASS. Some, like starting time and duration, do not change for the duration of a sound; they are static and determined by a single value. Others are dynamic; their evolution is controlled by an envelope—a normalized function consisting of linear and exponential segments—and a maximum size. Not all control parameters are totally independent; some occur only in certain combinations, and some are designed to reinforce others.

The control parameters give DIASS its flexibility and make it an instrument suitable for data sonification. On the other hand, the fact that the control parameters act at the level of a partial as well as at the level of a sound (or even at the level of a collection of sounds) significantly increases its computational complexity.

#### 1.1.2 The Score

Input for DIASS consists of a raw score file detailing the controls. The raw score file is transformed into a score file for the instrument—a collection of “Instrument cards” (I-cards), one for each partial, which are fed to the instrument by M4C. The transformation is accomplished in a number of steps.

Among the controls are certain global operations (“macros”), which are defined at the level of a sound. In a first pass, these global controls are expanded into controls for the individual partials. The next step consists of the application of the loudness routines. These routines operate at the sound level and ensure that the sounds have the desired loudness. The final step consists of the application of the anticlip routines. For various reasons, historical as well as technical, sound samples are stored as 16-bit integers. The anticlip routines guarantee that none of the sample values produced by the instrument from the score file exceeds 16 bits. Because loudness and anticlip play a significant role in sonification, we discuss the issues in more detail.

##### Loudness.

The perception of loudness is a subjective experience. Although the perceived loudness of a sound is related to the amplitudes of its constituent partials, the relation is nonlinear and depends on the frequencies of the partials. At the most elementary level, pure sinusoidal waves of low or high frequencies require a higher energy flow and therefore a larger amplitude to achieve the same loudness level as similar waves at mid-range frequencies. When waves of different frequencies are superimposed to form a sound, the situation becomes still more complicated. The sum of two tones of the same frequency produced by two identical instruments played simultaneously is not perceived as twice as loud as the tone produced by a single instrument.

An algorithm for data sonification must reflect these subjective experiences. For example, when we sonify two degrees of freedom, mapping one ($`x_1`$, say) to amplitude and the other ($`x_2`$, say) to frequency, then we should perceive equal loudness levels when $`x_1`$ has the same value, irrespective of the values of $`x_2`$. Also, when the variable $`x_1`$ increases or decreases, we should perceive a proportional increase or decrease in the loudness level.

The loudness routines in DIASS incorporate the relevant results of psychoacoustic research  and give the user full control over the perceived loudness of a sound. They also scale each partial so each sample value fits in a 16-bit register (see Box 2).

##### Anticlip.

When several sounds coexist and their waveforms are added, sample values may exceed 16 bits (overflow), even when the individual waveforms stay within the 16-bit limit. Overflow gives rise to “clipping”—a popping noise—when the sound file is played. The anticlip routines in DIASS check the score for potential overflow and rescale the sounds as necessary, while preserving the ratio of perceived loudness levels. Thus it is possible to produce an entire sound file in a single run from the score file, even when the sounds cover a wide dynamic range.

To appreciate the difficulty inherent in the scaling processes, consider the case of a sound cluster consisting of numerous complex sounds, all very loud and resulting in clipping, followed by a barely audible sound with only two or three partials. If the cluster’s amplitude is brought down to fit the register capacity, and that of the soft tiny sound following it is scaled proportionally, the latter disappears under system noise. On the other hand, if only the loud cluster is scaled, the relationship between the two sound events is completely distorted. Many times in the past, individual sounds or groups of sounds were generated separately and then merged with the help of analog equipment or an additional digital mixer. The loudness and anticlip routines in DIASS deal with this problem by adjusting both loud and soft sounds so their perceived loudness matches the desired relationship specified by the user, and no clipping occurs (see Box 3).

#### 1.1.3 The Editor

Features like the loudness routines make DIASS a fine-tuned, flexible, and precise instrument suitable for data sonification. Of course, they require the specification of significant amounts of input data. The editor in DIASS is designed to facilitate this process. It comes in a “slow” and a “fast” version.

In the slow version, data are entered one at a time, either in response to questions from a menu or through a graphic user interface (GUI). The process gives the user the opportunity to build sounds step by step, experiment, and fine-tune the instrument. It is suitable for sound composition and for designing prototype experiments in sonification. The fast version uses the same code but reads the responses to the menu questions from a script. This version is used for sonification experiments.

#### 1.1.4 Computing Requirements

The sound synthesis software embodied in DIASS is computationally intensive (see Box 4). The instrument proper, the engine that computes the samples, has been implemented in a workstation environment and on the IBM Scalable POWERparallel (SP) system. Parallelism is implemented at the sound level to minimize communication among the processors and enable all partials of a sound to access the same random number sequence. In parallel mode, at least four processors are used—one to distribute the tasks and supervise the entire run (the “master” processor), a second to mix the results (the “mixer”), and at least two “slave” nodes to compute the samples one sound at a time. Sounds are computed in their starting-time order, irrespective of their duration or complexity. (A smart load-balancing algorithm would take into account the duration of the various sounds and the number of their partials.)

Performance depends greatly on the complexity of the sounds—that is, on the number of partials per sound and the number of active controls for each partial. Typically, the time to generate a two-channel sound file for a 2’26” musical composition with 236 sounds and 4939 partials ranges from almost two hours on four processors to about 10 minutes on 34 processors of the SP. Figure 2 gives some indication of the speedups one observes in a multiprocessing environment. The three graphs correspond to three variants of the same 2’26” piece with different complexity. The time $`T_p`$ refers to a computation on $`p+2`$ processors ($`p`$ “slaves”); all times are approximate, as they were extracted from data given by LoadLeveler, a not very sophisticated timing instrument for the SP. Speedup is measured relative to the performance on four processors (two compute nodes). One observes the typical linear speedup until saturation sets in. The more complex the piece (the more partials), the later saturation sets in.

With a sampling rate of 44,100 samples per second and two-channel output, a sound file occupies 176 KB per second of sound, so the sound file for the 2’26” musical composition takes close to 25.8 MB of memory.

## 2 Data Sonification

Sonification is the faithful rendition of data in sounds. When the data come from scientific experiments—actual physical experiments or computational experiments— we speak of “scientific sonification.” Scientific sonification is therefore the analog of scientific visualization, where we deal with aural instead of visual images. Because sounds can convey significant amounts of information, sonification has the potential to increase the bandwidth of the human/computer interface. Yet, its use in scientific computing has received limited attention. One reason is, of course, that our sense of vision seems much more dominant than our sense of hearing. Another important reason is the lack of a suitable instrument for scientific sonification. One of the goals of our project is to demonstrate that, with an instrument like DIASS, one can probe multidimensional datasets with surgical precision and uncover structures that may be hidden to the eye.

### 2.1 Past Experiments

An early experiment with scientific sonification was done by Yeung . Seven chemical variables were matched with seven variables of sound: two with frequency, one each with loudness, decay, direction, duration, and rest (silence between sounds). His test subjects (professional chemists) were able to understand the different patterns of sound representations and correctly classify the chemicals with a 90% accuracy rate before and a 98% accuracy rate after training. His experiment showed that motivated expert users can easily adapt to complex auditory displays.

Recently, a successful application of scientific sonification was reported in physics by Pereverzev et al. . The authors were able to detect quantum oscillations between two weakly coupled reservoirs of superfluid 3He using sound, where oscilloscope traces failed to reveal structure.

Several other experiments reported in the literature refer to situations where sounds are used in combination with visual images for data analysis. Bly  ran discriminant analysis experiments using sound and graphics to represent multivariate, time-varying, and logarithmic data. Mezrich et al.  used sound and dynamic graphics to represent multivariable time series data. The “Exvis” experiment at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell  expanded this work by assigning sonic attributes to visual icons. The importance of sound localization is recognized by ongoing work at NASA-Ames . The evaluation of auditory display techniques is reported extensively at the annual conferences of ICAD, the International Conference on Auditory Display; see . Sound as a component of the human/computer interface is discussed in .

Most of the attempts described above used MIDI-controlled synthesizer sounds, which have drastic limitations in the number and range of their control parameters. Bargar et al.  at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have developed a complex instrument with interactive capabilities, which includes the VSS sound server for the CAVE virtual-reality environment.

### 2.2 What We Have Done So Far

Much of our work so far has been focused on the development of DIASS . In addition, we have used DIASS for two preliminary experiments in scientific sonification, one in chemistry, the other in materials science.

The first experiment used data from Dr. Jeff Tilson, a computational chemist at ANL, who studied the binding of a carbon atom to a protonated thiophene molecule. The data represented the difference in the energy levels before and after the binding at $`128\times 128\times 128`$ mesh points of a regular computational grid in space. Because the data were static, we arbitrarily identified time with one of the spatial coordinates and sonified data in planes parallel to this axis. The time to traverse a plane over its full length was usually kept at 30 seconds. In a typical experiment, we assigned a sound to every other point in the vertical direction, distributing the frequencies regularly over a specified frequency range, and used the data in the horizontal direction to generate amplitude envelopes for each of the sounds. Thus, a sound would become louder or softer as the data increased or decreased, and the evolution of the loudness distribution within the ensemble of 64 sounds was an indicator of the distribution of the energy difference before and after the reaction in space. The sound parameters chosen for the representation of the data varied from one experiment to another.

The second experiment involved data from a numerical simulation in materials science. The scientists were interested in patterns of motion of magnetic flux vortices through a superconducting medium. The medium was represented by $`384\times 256`$ mesh points in a rectangular domain. As the vortices are driven across the domain, from left to right, by an external force, they repel each other but are attracted by regularly or randomly distributed defects in the material. In this experiment, frequency and frequency modulation (vibrato) were used to represent movement in the plane, and changes in loudness were connected to changes in the speed of a vortex. A traveling window of constant width was used to capture the motion of a number of vortices simultaneously.

These investigations are ongoing, and the results have not been subjected to rigorous statistical evaluation. They have merely served to demonstrate the capabilities of DIASS and explore various mappings from the degrees of freedom in the data to the parameters controlling the sound synthesis process. Samples can be heard on the Web .

### 2.3 What We Have Found So Far

General conclusions are that (i) the sounds produced in each experiment conveyed information about the qualitative nature of the data, and (ii) DIASS is a flexible and sophisticated tool capable of rendering subtle variations in the data.

Changes in some control variables, such as time, frequency, and amplitude, are immediately recognizable. Changes in the combination of partials in a sound, identifiable through its timbre, can be recognized with some practice. Some effects are enhanced by modifiers like reverberation, amplitude modulation (tremolo), and frequency modulation (vibrato). In some instances, a modifier may lump two, three, or more degrees of freedom together, like hall size, duration, and acoustic properties in the case of reverberation. Through the proper manipulation of reverberation, loudness, and spectrum, one can create the illusion of sounds being produced at arbitrary locations in a room, even with only two speakers.

Like the eye, the ear has a very high power of discrimination. Even a coarse grid, such as the temperate tuning used in Western music, includes about 100 identifiable discrete steps over the frequency range encompassed by a piano keyboard. Contemporary music, as well as some non-Western traditional music, successfully uses smaller increments of a quarter tone or less for a total of some 200 or more identifiable steps in the audible range. Equally discriminating power is available in the realm of timbre.

Sound is an obvious means to identify regularities in the time domain, both at the microlevel and on a larger scale, and to bring out transitions between random states and periodic happenings. Most auditory processes are based on the recognition of time patterns (periodic repetitions giving birth to pitch, amplitude, or frequency modulation; spectral consistency creating stable timbres in a complex sound; etc.), and the ear is highly attuned to detect such regularities.

Most conceptual problems in scientific sonification are related to finding suitable mappings between the space of data and the space of sounds. Common sense points toward letting the two domains share the coordinates of physical space-time if these are relevant and translating other degrees of freedom in the data into separate sound parameters. On the other hand, it may be advantageous to experiment with alternative mappings. Sonification software must be sufficiently flexible that a user can pair different sets of parameters in the two domains.

Any mapping between data and sound parameters must allow for redundancies to enable the exploration of data at different levels of complexity. Similar to visualization software, sonification software must have utilities for zooming, modifying the audio palette, switching between visual and aural representation of parameters, defining time loops, slowing down or speeding up, and so forth.

Our experiments also showed that DIASS, at least in its present form, has its limitations. One limitation concerns the sheer volume of data in scientific sonification. While the composition of a musical piece (the original intent behind DIASS) typically entails the handling of a few thousand sounds, each with a dozen or so partials, the number of data points in the computational chemistry experiment ran into the millions, a difference of several orders of magnitude. By the same token, while a typical amplitude envelope for a partial or sound in a musical composition involves ten or even fewer segments, both experiments required envelopes with well over 100 such segments. Another difficulty encountered was the fact that both experiments required sounds to be accurately located in space. While panning is very effective in pinpointing the source on a horizontal line, suggesting the height of a sound is a major challenge. We hope that additions to the software as well as a contemplated eight-speaker system will help us get closer to a realistic three-dimensional representation of sounds. Finally, to become an effective tool for sonification, DIASS must operate in real time. All three concerns are being addressed in the new C++ version of DIASS currently under development.

## 3 Sound Visualization in a VR Environment

The notion of sound visualization may at first sight seem incongruous in the context of data sonification. However, as has been recognized by several researchers, the structure of a sound is difficult to detect without proper training, and any means of aiding the detection process will enhance the value of data sonification. Visualizing sounds is one of these means. In this project we are focusing on the visualization of sounds in the CAVE, a room-size virtual-reality (VR) environment , and on the ImmersaDesk, a two-dimensional version.

### 3.1 M4CAVE – A Visualization Tool

The software collectively known as M4CAVE takes a score file from the sound synthesis program DIASS and renders the sounds represented by the score as visual images in a CAVE or ImmersaDesk. The images are computed on the fly and are made to correspond exactly to the sounds one hears through a one-to-one mapping between control parameters and visual attributes. The code, which is written in C++, uses OpenGL for visualizing objects.

#### 3.1.1 Graphical Representations

Currently, M4CAVE can represent sounds as a collection of spheres (or cubes or polyhedra), as a cloud of confetti-like particles, or as a collection of planes.

The spheres representation is the most developed and incorporates more parameters of a sound into the visualization than either of the other. Sounds are visualized as stacks of spheres, each sphere corresponding to a partial in the sound. The position of a sphere along the vertical axis is determined by the frequency of the partial, and its size is proportional to the amplitude. A sound’s position in the stereo field determines the placement of the spheres in the room. The visual objects rotate or pulse when tremolo or vibrato is applied, and their color varies when reverberation is present. An optional grid in the background shows the octaves divided into twelve equal increments. Figure 3—taken from our Web site , where more samples can be found—shows a visualization of nine sounds with different numbers of partials.

The plane and cloud representations were designed more on the basis of artistic considerations. (Remember that the purpose of the visualization is to aid the perception of sounds.) The strength of the cloud representation is in showing tremolo and vibrato in the sound. The planes representation is unique in that it limits the visualization to only one partial (usually the fundamental) of each sound. The various representations can be combined, and the mappings chosen for each representation can be varied by means of a menu.

### 3.2 Preliminary Findings

We have used M4CAVE to explore various mappings from the sound domain to the visual domain. Besides the obvious short score files to test the implementation of these mappings, we have used score files generated with DIASS of various musical compositions, notably the “A.N.L.-folds” of Tipei . A.N.L.-folds is an example of a manifold composition, described in Box 1. Each member of A.N.L.-folds lasts exactly 2’26” and comprises between 200 and 500 sounds of medium to great complexity. The picture of Fig. 3 was taken from a run of one of these A.N.L.-folds.

The combination of visual images and sounds provides indeed an extremely powerful tool for uncovering complicated structures. Sometimes, the sounds reveal features that are hidden to the eye; at other times, the visual images illuminate features that are not easily detectable in the sound. The two modes of perception reinforce each other, and both improve with practice.

## 4 Larger Issues

This project is unusual in several respects. It is somewhat speculative, in the sense that we don’t have much experience with the use of sound in scientific computing. This is the main reason why the involvement of someone expert in the intricacies of the sound world is critical for its success. In our case, the expertise comes from the realm of music composition.

When do we declare “success”? Can we reasonably expect that sonification will evolve to the same level of usefulness as visualization for computational science? The answers to these questions depends on one’s expectations. Ours is a visually oriented culture par excellence, and as a society we watch rather than listen. Contemporary musical culture is often reduced to entertainment genres that use a simple-minded vocabulary—no small impediment to discover the potential benefits of the world of sound. But given unusual and unexpected sonorities, we may yet discover that we have not lost the ability to listen.

When we engage in this type of research, it is easy to get swept up by unreasonable expectations, looking for the “killer application.” But the killer application is a phantom, not worth pursuing. What we can offer is a systematic investigation of the potential of a new tool. If it helps us understand some computational data sets a little better, or if it enables us to explore these data sets more easily and in more detail, we have good reason to claim success. If the project adds to our understanding of aural semiotics, we have even more reason to claim success. And if none of these successes materializes, we can still claim that the people involved, both scientists and musicians, gained by becoming more familiar with each other’s work and ways of thinking. Such a rapprochement has, in fact, already occurred and led to a new “Discovery” course entitled Music, Science, and Technology at UIUC, where some of the issues presented here are being discussed in a formal educational context.

## Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division subprogram of the Office of Computational and Technology Research, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31-109-Eng-38.

Hans G. Kaper is Sr. Mathematician at Argonne National Laboratory. After receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in 1965, he held positions at the University of Groningen and Stanford University. In 1969 he joined the staff of Argonne. He was director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division from 1987 to 1991. Kaper’s professional interests are in applied mathematics, particularly mathematics of physical systems and scientific computing. He is a corresponding member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. His main interest outside mathematics is classical music. He is chairman of “Arts at Argonne,” concert impresario, and an accomplished pianist. He can be reached at kaper@mcs.anl.gov or http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~kaper/index.html.

Sever Tipei is professor of composition and music theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he also manages the Computer Music Project of the UIUC Experimental Music Studios. He has a Diploma in piano from the Bucharest Conservatory in Romania and a DMA in composition from the University of Michigan. Tipei has been involved in computer music since 1973 and regards the composition of music both as an experimental and as a speculative endeavor. He can be reached at s-tipei@uiuc.edu or http://cmp-rs.music.uiuc.edu/people/tipei/index.html.

Elizabeth Wiebel was a participant in the Student Research Participation Program, which is sponsored by the Division of Educational Programs of Argonne National Laboratory. She is an undergraduate student at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, where she is pursuing a degree in mathematics and computer science. In addition, Wiebel studies and teaches piano through the St. Norbert College music department. She is currently spending a semester at Richmond College in London (England). She can be reached at wiebep@sncac.snc.edu, F300398@Richmond.ac.uk, or http://members.tripod.com/~LibbyW.

## Box 1. Computer-Assisted Music Composition

The idea of using computers for music composition goes back to the 1950s, when Lejaren Hiller performed his experiments at the University of Illinois . The premiere of his Quartet No. 4 for strings “Illiac Suite”  (May 1957) is generally regarded as the birth of computer music. Since then, computers have helped many composers to algorithmically synthesize new sounds and produce new pieces for acoustic as well as digital instruments. The proceedings of the annual conferences sponsored by the ICMA (International Computer Music Association) are good sources of references .

Why would a composer need computer assistance when composing? A quick answer is that, as in many other areas, routine operations can be relegated to the machine. A more sophisticated reason may be that the composer may rely on expert systems to write Bach-like chorales or imitate the mannerisms of Chopin or Rachmaninov. There are, however, more compelling reasons when composing is viewed as a speculative and experimental endeavor, rather than as an ability to manufacture pleasing sounds .

Music is basically a dynamic event evolving in a multidimensional space; as such, it can be formalized . The composer controls the evolution by supplying a set of rules, and accepts the output as long as it is consistent with the logic of the program and the input data. If the set of rules allows for a certain degree of randomness, the output will be different every time a new “seed” is introduced. The same code and input data may thus produce an unlimited number of compositions, all belonging to the same “equivalence class” or manifold composition . The members of a manifold composition are variants of the same piece; they share the same structure and are the result of the same process, but differ in the way specific events are arranged in time.

A nontraditional way of composing, the manifolds show how high-performace computing provides the composer with new means to try out compositional strategies or materials and hear the results in a reasonable amount of time.

## Box 2. Loudness

Sound is transmitted through sound waves—periodic pressure variations that cause the eardrums to vibrate. But the perception of loudness has as much to do with the amount of energy that is carried by the sound wave as with the processing of this energy that takes place in the ear and the brain once the sound wave has hit the eardrums. The latter is a much more subjective part of the experience. The algorithms underlying the loudness routines of DIASS incorporate therefore formal definitions, as well as results of psychoacoustic research experiments. We summarize the most relevant elements of the algorithm, referring the reader to  or  for details.

The definition of (perceived) loudness begins with the consideration of the energy carried by the sound wave. The intensity $`I`$ of a pure tone (sinusoidal sound) is expressed in terms of its average pressure variation $`\mathrm{\Delta }p`$ (measured in newton/m2),

$$I=20\times \mathrm{log}_{10}(\mathrm{\Delta }p/\mathrm{\Delta }p_0).$$

$`\mathrm{\Delta }p_0`$ is a reference value, usually identified with a traveling wave of 1,000 Hz at the threshold of hearing, $`\mathrm{\Delta }p_0=2\times 10^5`$ newton/m2. The unit of $`I`$ is the decibel (dB).

Because of the way acoustical vibrations are processed in the cochlea (the internal ear), the sensation of loudness is strongly frequency dependent. For instance, while an intensity of 50 dB at 1,000 Hz is considered piano, the same intensity is barely audible at 60 Hz. In other words, to produce a given loudness sensation at low frequencies, a much higher intensity (energy flow) is needed than at 1,000 Hz. The intensity $`I`$ is therefore not a good measure of loudness if different frequencies are involved.

In the 1930s, Fletcher and Munson  performed a series of loudness-matching experiments, from which they derived a set of curves of equal loudness. These are curves in the frequency ($`f`$) vs. intensity ($`I`$) plane; points on the same curve represent single continuously sounding pure tones that are perceived as being “equally loud.” They are similar to those recommended by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)  and are presented in Fig. 4. The curves show clearly that, in order to be perceived as equally loud, very low and very high frequencies require much higher intensities (energy) than frequencies in the middle range of the spectrum of audible sounds.

The (physical) loudness level $`L_p`$ of a Fletcher-Munson curve is identified with the value of $`I`$ at the reference frequency of 1,000 Hz. The unit of $`L_p`$ is the phon. The Fletcher-Munson curves range from a loudness level of 0 to 120 phons over a frequency range from 25 to 16,000 Hz.

The loudness level $`L_p`$ still does not measure loudness in an absolute manner: a tone whose $`L_p`$ is twice as large does not sound twice as loud. Following Rossing , we define the (subjective) loudness level $`L_s`$ in terms of $`L_p`$ by the formula $`L_s=2^{(L_p40)/10}`$. The unit of $`L_s`$ is a sone. To be effective, loudness scaling must be done on the basis of sones.

The loudness of a sound that is composed of several partials depends on how well the frequencies of the partials are separated. With each frequency $`f`$ is associated a critical band, whose width $`\mathrm{\Delta }f`$ is approximely given by the expression

$$\mathrm{\Delta }f25+75\left(1+1.4(f/1000)^2\right)^{0.69}.$$

Intensities within a critical band are added, and the loudness of a critical band can again be read off from the Fletcher-Munson tables. If the frequencies of its constituent partials are spread over several critical bands, the loudness of a sound is computed in accordance with a formula due to Rossing ,

$$L_s=L_{s,m}+0.3\underset{i}{}L_{s,i}.$$

Here, $`L_{s,m}`$ is the loudness of the loudest critical band, and the sum extends over the remaining bands.

The loudness routines in DIASS use critical band information and a table derived from the Fletcher-Munson curves to create complex sounds of specified loudness.

## Box 3. Loudness of Sound Clusters

The waveform of Fig. 5, which was produced with DIASS, illustrates the concept of equal loudness across the frequency spectrum and for different timbres. The waveform represents five sound clusters, each lasting 5.5 seconds (except the fourth, which lasts 5.7 seconds). The clusters, although of widely different structure, have been designed to be perceived at the same loudness level ($`2^5`$ sones).

The distribution of the sounds within each cluster is represented schematically in the diagram of Table 2. The first sound cluster has 24 sounds. The fundamental frequencies of the sounds range from 40 to 5,000 Hz. Each sound is harmonically tuned; that is, it is made up of a fundamental and all its harmonics (partials whose frequencies are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency). The frequencies are limited to one-half of the sampling rate (Nyquist criterion); hence, the number of partials in this cluster is 754 (at a sampling rate of 22,050 Hz). The second sound cluster has 5 sounds, harmonically tuned, with fundamental frequencies ranging from 40 to 4,000 Hz; the number of partials is 113. The third, fourth, and fifth cluster have 15, 1, and 10 sounds, with 453, 60, and 250 partials, respectively. All partials are assigned the same amplitude, which presents the worst-case scenario when one tries to obtain the same perceived loudness for all clusters.

## Box 4. Computational Complexity

To give some idea of the computational complexity, consider the following simple scenario, where we wish to sonify time-varying data representing the values of two primary and several secondary observables measured over the course of an experiment. A natural choice is to map the primary observables onto loudness and frequency and to use amplitude and frequency modulation to monitor the secondary observables. The sample values of the sound wave $`S`$ must be calculated from an expression of the form

$$S(t)=a(t)\mathrm{sin}\left(2\pi f(t)t+\varphi \right).$$
(1)
The frequency $`f`$ represents three degrees of freedom: the carrier frequency $`f^C`$, and the amplitude $`a^{FM}`$ and frequency $`f^{FM}`$ of the modulating wave,

$$f(t)=f^C(t)+a^{FM}(t)\mathrm{sin}\left(2\pi f^{FM}t+\varphi ^{FM}\right).$$
(2)
The carrier frequency is identified with a primary observable, each of the remaining two degrees of freedom can be identified with a secondary observable,

Similarly, the amplitude $`a`$ is given by an expression of the form

$$a(t)=a^C(t)+a^{AM}(t)\mathrm{sin}\left(2\pi f^{AM}t+\varphi ^{AM}\right).$$
(3)
We compute the carrier amplitude $`a^C`$ from the observed loudness, which is identified with one of the (primary) observables, so its value is given. The amplitude $`a^{AM}`$ and frequency $`f^{AM}`$ of the modulation represent two more degrees of freedom, which can be identified with two other secondary observables. In total, we have therefore two primary and four secondary variables (not counting the phases, which we assume to be static).

The amplitude $`a^C(t)`$ must be computed such that $`S(t)`$ has the perceived loudness level $`L_s(t)`$,

$$L_s(S(t))=L_s(t).$$
(4)
The loudness function $`L_s`$ is a nonlinear function of the amplitude and frequency of the partial (sound). Its computation is done in the loudness routines of DIASS and involves a significant number of operations, including table lookups; see Box 2.

On the basis of these formulas we can obtain a rough estimate of the number of operations (additions, multiplications, function evaluations—sine, exponential, or logarithm, and table lookups) required for the computation of a single sample value. The contribution that is most difficult to estimate is the computation of the carrier amplitude from the loudness; the data in Table 3 represent the minimum number of operations.

Ignoring phases and so forth, we find a total of at least 24 operations. Hence, at the standard rate of 44,100 samples per second, one needs to perform more than 1.1 million operations per second.

The simultaneous sonification of more observables is obviously much more complicated; in fact, the complications grow exponentially. A careful estimate of the computational complexity requires an analysis of the anticlip routines, which is beyond the scope of the present article.