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# The distance modulus of the Large Magellanic Cloud based on double-mode RR Lyrae stars

## 1 Introduction

The determination of the distance moduli ($`DM`$) of the Magellanic Clouds plays an important role in establishing the cosmic distance scale. Mostly due to the analyses of the hipparcos data, there is a renewed effort to pin down this crucial distance within an accuracy of better than $`0.05`$ mag. However, the question is far from being settled, and the LMC distance moduli obtained with various methods may differ by several tenth of magnitudes, stretching from the ‘short’ ($`DM18.2`$, e.g., Stanek et al. 2000) to the ‘long’ ($`DM18.6`$, e.g., Feast 1999) distance scales.

In the first paper of this series (Kovács & Walker 1999, hereafter KW99, see also Kovács 2000b) we used RRd stars in Galactic clusters to show that they yield $`0.20.3`$ mag larger distances than the ones inferred from the Baade-Wesselink absolute magnitudes of RR Lyrae stars. This result leads to $`DM18.5`$ mag for the LMC. When the same method is applied to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) beat Cepheids with 0.51 mag relative distance between the SMC and LMC, we get almost the same $`DM`$ for the LMC (Kovács 2000a). In the present Letter we directly extend the analysis to the macho RRd stars (Alcock et al. 1997, 2000) and show that these give larger distance as well, in fine agreement with the above mentioned independent data sets.

## 2 Method, data, parameters

We use the same method as in KW99. This implies the utilization of: (a) multicolor data and reddening values on the LMC RRd variables; (b) linear pulsation models; (c) color $``$ $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ transformations given by the static stellar atmosphere models and by the InfraRed Flux Method (irfm). When considering cluster RRd variables in the context of the LMC distance modulus, we need the same types of information, in addition to the knowledge of the relative cluster distances.

Just briefly mentioning the essence of the method, and referring to KW99 for further details, we note that the pulsation equations yield a relation for the luminosity as a function of the periods, temperature and metal abundance

$`\mathrm{log}L=f(P_0,P_1,\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}},[\mathrm{M}/\mathrm{H}]).`$ (1)
There is also a dependence on other details of the chemical composition, but it has been proved to be rather weak at the relatively low metallicities of the RRd stars in our sample. From the observed dereddened colors we can get estimates on $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$. The metal content \[M/H\] is preferably obtained from direct spectroscopic observations, but we may also assume that RRd and fundamental mode (RRab) variables have the same \[M/H\] in a given cluster and apply the method of Jurcsik & Kovács (1996) to determine the metallicity of the RRab stars. Once the luminosity is computed, using the bolometric correction formula of KW99 simply leads to the distance modulus through the comparison with the observed magnitudes.

In the following we give a more detailed description of the parameters entering in the calculation of the LMC distance modulus.

Together with the earlier discoveries of Alcock et al. (1997), the recent analysis of more than 1300 short-period RR Lyrae stars led to a substantial extension of the known RRd stars in the LMC (Alcock et al. 2000). In the present analysis we include 181 RRd variables, which constitute all presently known RRd stars in the LMC. The macho instrumental magnitudes have been transformed to the standard Johnson $`V`$ and Kron-Cousins $`R_c`$ colors according to the recipe of Alcock et al. (1999). The periods and the average magnitudes are listed in Table 1.111Table 1 is available only in electronic form at CDS (ftp 130.79.128.5)

For an independent computation of the LMC distance modulus we use globular cluster RRd data compiled by KW99. Relative distance moduli required by this method are checked by the photometric data of Udalski (1998) and Clementini et al. (2000b, hereafter C00b).

The $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}=f(\mathrm{color},\mathrm{log}g,[\mathrm{M}/\mathrm{H}])`$ relations are derived from the stellar atmosphere models of Castelli et al. (1997, hereafter C97) with the zero point adjusted to the irfm results of Blackwell & Lynas-Gray (1994, hereafter BLG94). The required color, $`\mathrm{log}g`$ and \[M/H\] data are obtained from Clementini et al. (1995). It is important to remark that this approach assumes a uniform shift in $`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ between the irfm and theoretical scales, and that this shift is applicable throughout the relevant parameter regime (i.e., from dwarfs to giants). Additional difficulty might occur because of the inaccuracy of the \[Fe/H\] and $`\mathrm{log}g`$ values given by the irfm sources, or the neglect of the $`\mathrm{log}g`$ dependence in some of those works (e.g., Alonso et al. 1996; 1999, hereafter A96 and A99, respectively). Furthermore, different colors may yield different shifts, producing inconsistency among the derived temperatures at a level of $`0.004`$ in $`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$. By considering various colors and overlapping samples in the irfm publications, our current estimates for the zero point differences (in the sense of $`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ (source) minus $`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ (C97)) are as follows: $`0.004`$ (BLG94), $`0.007`$ (A96); $`0.008`$ (Blackwell & Lynas-Gray 1998); $`0.010`$ (A99). Here we use the scale of BLG94, because it is close to the one used in our previous studies and in the Baade-Wesselink analyses (see KW99). In Sect. 3 we will discuss the effect of the $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ zero point on the distance determination. The final formulae, adjusted to the BLG94 scale are the following

$`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ $`=`$ $`3.88040.3213(BV)+0.0176\mathrm{log}g`$ (2)
$`+`$ $`0.0066[\mathrm{M}/\mathrm{H}],`$
$`\mathrm{log}T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ $`=`$ $`3.89280.4910(VR_c)+0.0116\mathrm{log}g`$ (3)
$`+`$ $`0.0012[\mathrm{M}/\mathrm{H}].`$
As far as the metallicities are concerned, for the three Galactic clusters (M15, M68 and IC4499) we use the data given in KW99. For the LMC field there are very recent direct $`\mathrm{\Delta }S`$ measurements by Clementini et al. (2000a). The average \[Fe/H\] value of their 7 RRd variables is $`1.6`$ (or $`1.5`$ if the less accurate low-metallicity star is left out). Here we accept $`[\mathrm{Fe}/\mathrm{H}]=1.5`$ for the LMC RRd variables. In principle, one should use variable dependent metallicity as it follows from the analysis of the period ratio diagram (Popielski et al. 2000). However, tests have shown that in the present context and data quality, this dependence has a rather negligible effect on the final conclusion. Therefore, we use the same metal abundance for all variables in the LMC.

In order to compare the direct $`DM`$ obtained from the LMC field RRd variables with the ones computed from cluster RRd stars, we have to know the relative distances and reddenings. In calculating these quantities we follow essentially the method of Kovács & Jurcsik (1997) which employs the periods and the Fourier decompositions of the light curves in computing the physical parameters of RRab stars. In the present implementation of the method we use only the period in deriving the relations for the reddening-free quantities (e.g., $`W=V3.1(BV)`$, $`(BV)_0`$). This approximation is necessary, because of the limited information available on the LMC ogle data set. Nevertheless, the results are sufficiently accurate for the present purpose (see also Kovács & Walker 2000).

It is also possible to make a direct comparison between the colors and distance moduli of the RRd variables in LMC and IC4499. Since they both have very similar metallicities and periods, we may assume that their average intrinsic colors and luminosities are also very similar. The average quantities for the 181 macho LMC RRd stars are the following: $`V=19.30`$, $`VR=0.246`$, $`P_0=0.49`$. Similarly, from C00b for the 10 RRd stars we get: $`V=19.29`$, $`BV=0.37`$, $`P_0=0.48`$. The same quantities for the 15 RRd stars in IC4499 are the following: $`V=17.66`$, $`BV=0.50`$, $`VR=0.31`$, $`P_0=0.48`$. Simple subtraction of the corresponding quantities leads to the results summarized in Table 2.

The close match between the relative distance moduli and reddenings calculated from the different data sets is very encouraging as far as the consistency among the photometric zero points are concerned. We note in passing that relative distance moduli calculated by the method of Kovács & Jurcsik (1997) from the RRab variables of four LMC globular clusters also yield 2.04 mag for the average of the relative distances between those LMC clusters and IC4499.

## 3 Results

In the following we derive the distance of the LMC from two independent data sets containing RRd stars: (1) Galactic globular clusters; (2) macho LMC field variables. We use composition (d) of KW99 ($`X=0.76`$, with solar-type distribution of heavy elements), and opal’96 opacities (Iglesias & Rogers 1996).

Relative distance moduli between the three Galactic globular clusters and their reddenings are from KW99. These parameters have been calculated by the method of Kovács & Jurcsik (1997). We fix the relative distance modulus between LMC and IC4499 at $`2.03`$ mag and the LMC reddening at $`E_{BV}=0.11`$. Column 4 of Table 3 shows the derived distance moduli. The agreement is very good between the different estimates. This shows that the relative values of all parameters have been chosen properly. Our more serious concern is the effect of the various zero point shifts. In the subsequent columns of Table 3 we show the changes of $`DM`$ due to these shifts and also to those ambiguities which occur in the pulsation models. Except for the case of changing \[M/H\], negative shifts in the parameters cause the same amount of negative offsets in $`DM`$. If \[M/H\] is decreased, the corresponding changes are up to 0.04 mag smaller in $`DM`$ than if \[M/H\] is increased by the same amount. The adopted values for the changes of the tested quantities are merely to demonstrate their effects without implying that these changes can, in fact, be expected. In particular, it is rather unlikely that for Galactic globular clusters the reddenings were off by $`0.03`$ mag or more. In any case, zero point effects in $`E_{BV}`$ are not serious in our method, because they are compensated in the derived $`DM`$ through the nearly parallel effects in the calculated luminosity and in the magnitude corrections for reddening (see also KW99).

We see that almost all zero point errors cause uniform shifts in the distance moduli, which are independent of the stellar population. The only exception is the zero point of the metallicity scale. Variables with higher \[M/H\] are more affected by this zero point ambiguity. Therefore, metallicity change in itself cannot decrease the distance modulus too much, because this would result in a substantial increase of the differences between the computed distance moduli.

Ambiguity in the zero point $`T_0`$ of the color $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ transformation is the main source of error in the present method. However, we note that even if we accepted the temperature scale of A99, which is the lowest among the available irfm scales, the derived distances would be still around $`18.4`$ mag. We are not aware of any studies strongly indicating the possibility of more dramatic lowering of the temperature scale. We note that the method of color averaging might have also some effect on the derived effective temperature. Here we use magnitude averaging, which has a tendency of yielding redder equilibrium colors, i.e., lower temperatures than the static ones (Bono et al. 1995).

Effect of period ratio change due to nonlinearity is rather small. Past and very recent works on convective RRd models show that period ratio changes are within $`0.002`$. In the case of RRd models, there is a trend of the nonlinear convective period ratios being smaller than the linear radiative ones (Kolláth & Buchler 2000). This would result in a slight increase in the derived $`DM`$, because our results are based on radiative linear models, but on the other hand, nonlinear period increase might compensate for this effect.

In the last column we show the small change due to varying hydrogen content from $`X=0.76`$ to $`0.70`$ (mixtures (c) and (d) in KW99).

Finally, to exhibit the distribution of the distance moduli derived for the individual stars, Fig. 1 shows these values as a function of the period. The huge scatter of the LMC stars is partially counterbalanced by their large number, which brings the statistical error down to $`0.024`$ mag for the distance modulus derived from these variables. This can be compared with the value of $`0.015`$ mag, valid for the Galactic RRd stars. The largest contribution to the $`\sigma (DM)=0.32`$ mag scatter of the LMC stars comes from the photometric errors. By using the error estimates of $`\sigma _V=0.02`$, $`\sigma _{(VR)}=0.03`$ (see Alcock et al. 1999) we get 0.21 mag for the standard deviation of the individual distance moduli. We note that the result is most sensitive to $`\sigma _{(VR)}`$. For example, with $`\sigma _{(VR)}=0.04`$ we get $`\sigma (DM)=0.26`$ mag. The rest of the scatter comes from the metallicity dispersion, inhomogeneous reddening and possibly from the spatial extent of the LMC.

## 4 Conclusions

The recent revision of the macho RRd magnitudes (Alcock et al. 1999) enabled us to calculate the distance of the LMC directly from the observed magnitudes, colors and periods. This shows a very good agreement with the independent estimate based on Galactic globular cluster RRd stars and SMC beat Cepheids (Kovács 2000a). They all give $`Mm18.5`$ mag, which lends further support to the ‘long’ distance scale. The largest source of systematic error is the potential ambiguity in the zero point of the temperature scale. Even this is not likely to cause the large effect, which would be necessary to lower the distance modulus by $`0.3`$ mag, the value required by some current estimates based on other methods (e.g., Stanek et al. 2000). This amount of change would demand about $`300`$K lower temperature scale than the one used in this work. Since our adopted scale is only 100 K hotter than the presently published lowest infrared flux scale of Alonso et al. (1999), we think that it is highly unlikely that the required lowering of the distance modulus is possible by temperature change alone. Consequently, we would need some ‘conspiracy’ with metallicity, reddening or other parameters, so as to get the necessary decrease in the distance modulus. This situation is also not very probable, because, although the strongest effect comes from the metallicity, this is primarily differential i.e., the distance moduli derived from the low metallicity clusters would not be seriously affected. This would lead to inconsistency among the distance moduli, because the relative distances, being empirically determined, are independent from the adopted metallicities. It is also worthwhile to mention that the metallicity values used in this and in our previous studies are in very good agreement with the ones published by independent spectroscopic studies and that these metallicities minimize the differences between the LMC distance moduli derived from various double-mode stars.

We conclude that the application of standard temperature and metallicity scales leads to the ‘long’ RR Lyrae distance scale, which, except for a drastic lowering of the temperature scale, is not possible to match with the ‘short’ distance scale.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work was started during the author’s stay at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1998. He is very grateful for the hospitality of Kem Cook and Charles Alcock. Special thanks are due to Kem Cook for his help in transforming the data to the standard system. Critical comments by David Alves on the draft version of this Letter are thanked. Correspondence on the LMC photometry with Andrzej Udalski and discussions on the nonlinear period changes with Zoltán Kolláth are very much appreciated. A part of this work was done during the author’s stay at the Copernicus Astronomical Center in Warsaw. Hospitality and useful discussions with Wojtek Dziembowski, Pawel Moskalik and Blazej Popielski are thanked. Useful discussions with Béla Szeidl and Gáspár Bakos were also very instrumental in the near completion phase of this work. The supports of the following grants are acknowledged: otka t$``$024022, t$``$026031 and t$``$030954.


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# Reply on Comment on “Extraction of work from a single thermal bath in the quantum regime”

## Abstract

In our recent letter  we discussed that thermodynamics is violated in quantum Brownian motion beyond the weak coupling limit. In his comment, Tasaki  derives an inequality for the relative entropy and claims, without making any dynamical assumption, that the Clausius inequality is valid, thus contradicting our statements. Here we point out that the claim is unfunded, since the author did not properly identify the concept of heat. Tasaki also applies the inequality to Thomson’s formulation of the second law. This application is invalid as well, since the author did not correctly identify the concept of work. Therefore, Tasaki’s inequality is perfectly compatible with our findings.

To facilitate the reading of the present reply, we will use some notations of Tasaki. As in , we consider a quantum system which consists of a subsystem and a bath. The Hamiltonian of the subsystem $`H_\mathrm{s}(t)`$ depends on time through some of its parameters; that of the bath $`H_\mathrm{b}`$ is time-independent, and that for interaction $`H_{\mathrm{int}}(t)`$ may be time-dependent. The total Hamiltonian is $`H(t)=H_\mathrm{s}(t)\mathrm{𝟏}+\mathrm{𝟏}H_\mathrm{b}+H_{\mathrm{int}}(t)`$. Initially the subsystem is in an arbitrary equilibrium state with density matrix $`\rho _\mathrm{s}^{\mathrm{init}}`$, and the bath is in the Gibbs state with inverse temperature $`\beta `$. The density matrix for the whole system is $`\rho ^{\mathrm{init}}=\rho _\mathrm{s}^{\mathrm{init}}\mathrm{exp}[\beta H_\mathrm{b}]/Z(\beta )`$, where $`Z(\beta )=\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{b}[\mathrm{exp}\{\beta H_\mathrm{b}\}]`$ is the partition function for the bath. ($`\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{s}`$, $`\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{b}`$ stand for the traces over the spaces of the system and the bath, and $`\mathrm{Tr}`$ indicates the full trace.) Let $`\rho ^{\mathrm{fin}}`$ be the density matrix at the final moment obtained from the time evolution according to $`H(t)`$. Tasaki makes no assumptions about the nature of the time evolution or of the final state $`\rho ^{\mathrm{fin}}`$. Using well-known properties of the quantum relative entropy, he then derives the following inequality

$$S_{\mathrm{vN}}[\rho _\mathrm{s}^{\mathrm{fin}}]S_{\mathrm{vN}}[\rho _\mathrm{s}^{\mathrm{init}}]\beta \left[H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{init}}H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{fin}}\right],$$
(1)
where $`S_{\mathrm{vN}}[\rho _\mathrm{s}]=\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{s}[\rho _\mathrm{s}\mathrm{log}\rho _\mathrm{s}]`$ is the von Neuman entropy of the subsystem. Then Tasaki claims that $`H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{init}}H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{fin}}`$ is the heat that flowed out of the bath during the process. Therefore, for him, Eq. (1) becomes the Clausius inequality.

We have no doubts on the mathematical correctness of Eq. (1). Nevertheless we colpletely disagree with identification of $`H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{init}}H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{fin}}`$ as heat. Let first indicate that in  we have used a completely different definition, which appears to be widely accepted in literature . We will show that this common definition never coincides with that given by Tasaki. Then we will argue that the definition of Tasaki is hardly physical.

Since the complete system is closed, its dynamics is given by the von Neumann equation

$$\frac{\mathrm{d}\rho (t)}{\mathrm{d}t}=\frac{i}{\mathrm{}}[H(t)\rho (t)\rho (t)H(t)]$$
(2)
It is easy to see from Eq. (2) that $`\mathrm{Tr}(H\frac{\mathrm{d}}{\mathrm{d}t}\rho )\mathrm{d}Q_{\mathrm{tot}}=0`$, which then implies

$`0=Q_{\mathrm{tot}}={\displaystyle _{t^{\mathrm{in}}}^t}dQ_{\mathrm{tot}}=\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0+\mathrm{\Delta }Q_\mathrm{s}+\mathrm{\Delta }Q_{\mathrm{int}},`$ (6)
$`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0=H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{init}}H_\mathrm{b}_{\mathrm{fin}},`$
$`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_\mathrm{s}={\displaystyle _{t^{\mathrm{in}}}^t}dt^{}\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{s}[H_\mathrm{s}(t^{}){\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{d}}{\mathrm{d}t^{}}}\rho _\mathrm{s}(t^{})],`$
$`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_{\mathrm{int}}={\displaystyle _{t^{\mathrm{in}}}^t}dt^{}\mathrm{Tr}[H_{\mathrm{int}}(t^{}){\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{d}}{\mathrm{d}t^{}}}\rho (t^{})]`$
The interpretation of these equations is straightforward. $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_{\mathrm{tot}}`$ is the heat obtained by the total system, and it is zero since the system is closed. $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_\mathrm{s}`$ is heat gotten by the particle from the thermal bath, since if there is no interaction with the bath, the evolution of the subsystem is by itself unitary, and this quantity is zero. $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_\mathrm{s}`$ directly appears in the first law as the energy of the subsystem . Moreover, it contains only characteristics of the susbsytem, the observable ones. Therefore, it can be controlled and measured in experiment. Taking into account all these factors, as well as experimental confirmations, a great amount of scientists got a conclusion that this quantity has to be identified with heat .

$`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0`$ is the quantity proposed as heat by Tasaki. This will be an alternative definition if one can show that there are sensible limits, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0=\mathrm{\Delta }Q_\mathrm{s}`$. However, it is easy to see that this is not the case, since $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_{\mathrm{int}}`$ is never zero, except when $`H_{\mathrm{int}}0`$, where all terms in r.h.s. of Eq. (6) are zero separately, and there is no reason to speak of heat. The situation will not change if $`H_{\mathrm{int}}`$ will be put to zero starting from some control time, since $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_{\mathrm{int}}`$ is still non-zero. On the other hand, the definition of Tasaki involves degrees of freedom of the bath, which are unobservable and uncontrollable by the very definition of the problem. So $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0`$ can even not be observed directly. It also does not appear in the first law for the particle, whereas the standard definition does .

There is nevertheless some small space for a modification of Tasaki’s definition. It arises when one is interested in a small amount of heat obtained between $`t`$ and $`t+\mathrm{d}t`$, where $`tt^{\mathrm{in}}`$. Having taken the standard weak-coupling assumption , one considers $`H_{\mathrm{int}}`$ as small, and then approximately puts $`\mathrm{d}Q_0=\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{b}[H_\mathrm{b}\mathrm{d}\rho _\mathrm{b}]`$ equal to $`\mathrm{d}Q_\mathrm{s}=\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{s}[H_\mathrm{s}\mathrm{d}\rho _\mathrm{s}]`$. In this weak-coupling limit we found that the Clausius inequality is valid . The result of Tasaki does not bear on this case, since for his derivation it seems to be important to start at $`t=t^{\mathrm{in}}`$ and consider the integral amount of heat. But the weak coupling assumption does not apply at early times. Thus his result is irrelevant even for this standard limit, where the Clausius inequality is known to be valid. The reason is that the author did not take into account any dynamical factor. We will be surprised if Tasaki would be able to derive the proper Clausius inequality without making any dynamical assumptions, since all derivations known to us use certain, although not the same, set of assumptions (see  and refs. there). In this context we recall that our derivations in  are exact (although model-dependent), and concern the case, where those assumptions are invalid.

Let us now mention that Tasaki uses Eq. (1) to derive the impossibility of the perpetuum mobile, which he understands as a violation of the Thomson’s formulation of the second law: No work can be extracted from the thermal bath and subsystem during a cyclical process, by a large number of identical circles. In this context $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0`$ appears for him also as the extracted work. This is again incorrect, since if a parameter $`\alpha `$ of the subsystem is varying with time then the extracted work $`\mathrm{\Delta }W`$ is given as

$$_{t^{\mathrm{in}}}^tdt^{}\frac{\mathrm{d}\alpha }{\mathrm{d}t^{}}\mathrm{Tr}_\mathrm{s}\left[\frac{H_\mathrm{s}}{\alpha }\rho _\mathrm{s}(t^{})\right]=_{t^{\mathrm{in}}}^tdt^{}\frac{\mathrm{d}\alpha }{\mathrm{d}t^{}}\mathrm{Tr}_{\mathrm{s},\mathrm{b}}\left[\frac{H}{\alpha }\rho (t^{})\right]$$

and this is just the work extracted by external sources from the total system. Needless to mention that $`\mathrm{\Delta }Q_0\mathrm{\Delta }W`$. So this statement of Tasaki is also incorrect.

R. Balian is acknowledged for interesting discussions.

We thank Hal Tasaki for communicating us his result before to make it public.

A.E. Allahverdyan1,3) and Th.M. Nieuwenhuizen2)

1)S.Ph.T., CEA Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette cedex, France;

2)Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Amsterdam,

Valckenierstraat 65, 1018 XE Amsterdam, The Netherlands;

3)Yerevan Physics Institute,

Alikhanian Brothers St. 2, Yerevan 375036, Armenia.


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# Comparing Clusters and Supercomputers for Lattice QCD

## 1 INTRODUCTION

The Beowulf project began in 1994 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. More about the history of the project and the current status can be found at the web site http://www.beowulf.org. There are about 100 clusters listed on the Beowulf home page (which is clearly not a complete list). Within the MILC collaboration, we have access to at least five clusters at our universities. We also have done production work on six other clusters at national supercomputer centers.

There are several advantageous characteristics often cited for clusters. Chief among these is the use of commodity hardware to produce a very cost-effective computer. Processors such as the Intel Pentia and Celeron and the AMD Athlon or K6, FastEthernet network cards and switches have been used to build quite cost-effective machines. However, other choices such as the Compaq Alpha processor and higher speed networks such as Myrinet, Giganet and Quadrics QsNet have also been used to build very powerful clusters. Another characteristic of clusters is the use of commodity software such as Linux, GNU, MPICH and PBS to keep software costs close to zero. A third advantage of the cluster approach is their programmability and flexibility. Message Passing Interface or MPI, has become a standard in commercial parallel computers. The MILC code had been compiled under MPI well before being run on a Beowulf cluster. The port to Beowulf required minimal effort. All of our PC cluster benchmarks have been done without any assembly code. Practical calculations can be done on current clusters with a granularity that is well suited to FFT routines. Clusters have a community of users and developers. New system administration tools frequently become available, as do advances in parallel file systems, schedulers and other useful software. Thus, one can take advantage of the vigor of the community and avoid spending a large amount of time developing software unrelated to the physics. Finally, because of the short design time of clusters, one can take quick advantage of the many developments in PC hardware. It is not necessary to lock oneself into a technology either well in advance of it’s actually being available, or a well developed technology that will be outdated by the time a large system can be constructed and commissioned. One can often avoid the problem of having a single source for key items. If you can no longer get a particular motherboard, there will be another vendor with a similar (or superior) offering.

There are also potential disadvantages of clusters. With a standard supercomputer, one can get a maintenance contract, and there is somebody to yell at when things go wrong. (However, as a long-time user of supercomputers, I know that having a vendor doesn’t assure that the problem will be fixed.) Recently, a number of vendors have been selling clusters. So the problem of not having anyone to yell at may be avoided. Of course, there is still no assurance that yelling (or even asking politely) will result in the problem being solved. Another disadvantage of the cluster approach is that of having to rely on the design effort of others. If vendors are not producing hardware with the specifications that you need, you may not be able to build a well optimized system. On the other hand, most physicists are neither skilled at nor interested in VLSI design or PCB layout and would rather spend their time thinking about physics, so why not take advantage of the labor of computer engineers?

The Indiana University Physics Department received $50,000 in 1998 to build a 32-node Linux cluster. The machine we built is called CANDYCANE, which stands for CPUs And Network Do Your Calculation And Nothing Else. CANDYCANE is an appropriate name because it was designed for the “sweet spot,” that is, components were picked to give the best price-performance ratio attainable. It is used by several research groups in the department, but usually only one or two jobs are running at the same time. In September 1998, a four-node prototype cluster was built and tested. Three different ethernet cards were tested to see if the higher priced cards could be justified by superior performance. Detecting no difference in performance, we selected the least expensive card for the production cluster. In October, the purchasing department put out a request for bids on the desired components. In November, just before Thanksgiving, the last of the components arrived. (Several vendors were used to get the best price on each component.) On the Wednesday and Friday of Thanksgiving break, 34 nodes were built, the software was installed and everything was placed on shelves and connected. One node serves as a console, and one as a spare. The cost per node was $693 for a Pentium II 350, with a 4.3 GB hard drive and 64 MB of ECC RAM. Each node has a floppy drive and a FastEthernet card. However, the compute nodes have no keyboard, video card or CDROM. There are a few video cards and an extra keyboard that can be used if a node does not reboot on its own. The 40-port HP Procurve switch cost about $2,000, so the total cost was about $25,000. Currently, (October, 2000) it would be possible to build this system for $`<`$$300 per node, or for approximately $11,500. An even more attractive alternative would be a diskless Athlon 600 MHz system for which the per node cost is about $250. This node would have much better performance than the PII 350; however, the FastEthernet would be a bottleneck on the MILC code with Kogut-Susskind quarks. Even so, a 32 node system with a minimum performance of 1280 and 1660 Mflops, for $`8^4`$ and $`14^4`$ sites per node, respectively, could be built for under $10,000. This works out to a cost/MF of between $6.00 and $7.80.

In Sec. 2, we describe the key issues for good performance and in Sec. 3, we present benchmarks for the MILC code on various supercomputers and clusters. Section 4 gives rough cost-performance ratios for a number of platforms. Additional information about emerging technologies for clusters and user experiences can be found in the on-line presentations from a session that I organized at the March, 2000 APS meeting .

## 2 KEYS TO PERFORMANCE

A very simple approach to achieving good performance for domain decomposition codes like Lattice QCD codes is to optimize single node performance and to try to avoid degrading performance too much when one has to communicate boundary values to neighboring nodes.

The single node performance is likely to depend upon such issues as the quality of the CPU, the performance and size of cache(s), the bandwidth to main memory and the quality of the compiler. For message passing performance, key issues are the latency, peak bandwidth, processor overhead and the message passing software.

Focusing first on single node performance, we note that it is easy to waste a lot of money on a poor system design. To illustrate this, we consider the various speed AMD Athlon processors available and their prices on a particular day. Although we focus on Athlon here, the same considerations apply to Intel or other processors. Figure 1 shows that processor price is a rapidly increasing function of speed. In Fig 2, we divide the price by the speed of the chip and see that the relative expense rises rapidly for the faster chips. At the time this graph was produced, there was an apparent sweet spot at 600 MHz. The faster chips have a higher price-performance ratio. Depending upon the costs of the other components of the system, the entire system may have a higher or lower price-performance ratio.

For our QCD codes, access to memory is quite important. With the benchmarks below we demonstrate that performance does not increase in proportion to the speed of the chip. This is because memory speed is fixed by the 100 MHz Front Side Bus for both 500 MHz and 600 MHz Athlons.

The 600 MHz chip has a peak speed 20% faster than the 500 MHz chip. With $`4^4`$ lattice points, we do see a 20% speed up, but for the larger problem sizes that do not fit into cache, there is only a 5% speedup. We expect that for even faster processors performance increases will be marginal.

Since memory access is so crucial, I have purchased a Pentium III 533B chip that uses PC133 memory. In theory, it should provide about 33% better performance than a similar chip with PC100 memory. I have tried three different motherboards using different support chips and the results are disappointing. The Gigabyte GA6VXE+ motherboard uses a VIA chip set, the Supermicro (SM) PIIISED uses the Intel 810e chip set and I also tried an Intel CC820 motherboard using the Intel 820 chip set. The results are not significantly better than a PII 350 chip using a BX motherboard and the GNU C compiler and are worse than a PII 450 using the Portland Group C compiler. (See Table 2.)

However, there are support chips from ServerWorks that support PC133 memory well. Here are results from Los Lobos (LL), that uses Intel 733 MHz chips in IBM Netfinity servers that use the ServerWorks chip set. SuperMicro is manufacturing a dual processor motherboard that uses a support chip from ServerWorks, but the motherboard currently costs about $280, which is about twice the price of dual processor BX motherboard. Also, this board requires registered memory which will add to the cost of the system.

One of the disadvantages of using Athlon rather than Pentium chips is that there are not dual or quad processor boards available for the Athlon. However, this should change soon as in early October, 2000 AMD demonstrated a dual processor system using double data rate (DDR) memory.

Turning now to multiprocessor performance, we find that a simple performance model of the Kogut-Susskind Conjugate Gradient algorithm gives this bandwidth requirement to overlap communication and floating point operations:

$$MB=48MF/(132L)=0.364MF/L,$$
(1)
where $`MB`$ is the achieved bandwidth in Megabyte/s, $`MF`$ is the achieved floating point speed in Megaflop/s on matrix-vector multiplication and an $`L^4`$ portion of the grid is on each node. We assume there are neighboring nodes in each direction, i.e., 16 or more nodes. The constant factor 0.364 is specific to KS quarks. However, the $`1/L`$ behavior is typical of the domain decomposition approach to parallelism and comes from the surface to volume ratio.

Figure 3 shows a log-log plot of measured bandwidth on a ping-pong test for three types of hardware and the performance model for several processor speeds. The messages vary in size from 800 bytes to 30 KB for problem sizes of interest. The arrows near the bottom of the graph correspond to different L values. The FastEthernet (blue) and Myrinet (green) curves come from measured performance on the Roadrunner (RR) supercluster at the Albuquerque High Performance Computer Center. Two curves are shown for Myrinet. With the newer drivers, bandwidth is better and smoother. The Quadrics curve comes from the Teracluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The measurement was done using the Netpipe program from the Ames Scalable Computing Laboratory . The straight red lines come from the performance model presented above and are plotted for matrix times vector speeds of 50, 100, 200 and 400 MF. We need to run at a large enough value of L so that the measured bandwidth is above the red line (for what ever speed our processor achieves for the corresponding value of L). Because of cache effects, the processors will achieve higher speeds when $`L`$ is small, but that requires the highest bandwidth. Thus, pushing up the communication rate for small messages is important. Being able to run for a small value of $`L`$ with high efficiency allows running a fixed size problem at high total performance. We see that none of the networks achieves more than a small fraction of its peak bandwidth for the message sizes of interest. A system design based on achieving that peak bandwidth would almost certainly be communication bound, i.e., money would have been spent on floating point capacity that could not be used. There are large differences in the prices of FastEthernet, Myrinet and Quadrics hardware. Choice of network can obviously play a critical role in system performance and cost-effectiveness.

In addition to producing the data for the bandwidth curves, Netpipe provides the latency. It is easier to remember the latency of the different hardware and software combinations than the full bandwidth curve, so we tabulate that here.

MPICH with FastEthernet clearly has the longest latency. Unfortunately, the larger value is for a more recent kernel. The longer latency for Roadrunner with MPICH may be because it has dual processors. On CANDYCANE, I have experimented with two alternative protocols. A recent protocol called Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) is being promoted by Compaq, Intel and Microsoft as a communication architecture for clusters superior to TCP/IP. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has developed software called M-VIA . M-VIA supports two types of FastEthernet cards and Packet Engines Gigabit Ethernet cards. It will eventually support hardware that is designed to support the VIA protocol. For now, a very attractive feature is the ability to get reduced latency without spending money on more expensive hardware than FastEthernet. I have also done a small amount of testing with the Genoa Active Message Machine (GAMMA) . The setup and testing of this software is not complete, but a ping pong test under GAMMA gave a latency of 37$`\mu `$s. The GAMMA developer estimates that 7 of the 37 $`\mu `$s come from the switch and that running MPI over GAMMA would add an additional 4$`\mu `$s.

Myrinet hardware is quite popular for high performance Beowulf clusters. The Roadrunner “supercluster” at the Albuquerque High Performance Computer was used to test Myrinet performance. When initially tested in August, 1999, the latency was 31-34 $`\mu `$s. I recently retested with newer drivers and found the latency reduced to 16 $`\mu `$s.

LLNL’s Compaq Alpha based cluster is networked with a Quadrics interconnect. It is a prototype of the Compaq SC series supercomputer. The measured latency there is only 7 $`\mu `$s.

## 3 BENCHMARKS

The simple performance model presented above can help us predict when the communication and floating point are in reasonable balance, but it is no substitute for real benchmarks. A web site for MILC benchmarks may be found at physics.indiana.edu/~sg/milc/benchmark.html. Additional graphs and explanations may be found there. All the benchmarks presented are for single precision Kogut-Susskind conjugate gradient. Of course, we run many other codes, but this is one for which we have results going back several years.

Key variables for the benchmarks are the problem size and number of CPUs or nodes. We run benchmarks with $`L^4`$ sites per CPU and scale the problem size as the number of CPUs increases. \[In most cases, we double the dimensions starting with $`t`$ so that no dimension is more than a factor of two different from the others. However, for 4 CPUs we run both $`L^3\times 4L`$ and $`L^2\times (2L)^2`$.\] We do this because many computers have a sweet spot for some value of $`L`$, and in deciding how many nodes to use for production running, we are usually more interested in running efficiently than at maximum speed. The sweet spot comes about because on a single node, small values of $`L`$ usually perform best because they take advantage of cache. However, as we saw before, small values of $`L`$ make the most demands on the network. As $`L`$ is increased, the single node performance decreases, but the degradation from the network may decrease, so performance may increase until the cache misses become the limiting factor and performance again decreases. On PC clusters, the caches tend to be small and the latency high compared to parallel supercomputers, and we find that performance usually just continues to increase as $`L`$ is increased. It can be frustrating to run on a small supercomputer where one is forced to use a larger value of $`L`$ than optimal. One gets decreased performance both because one is running on fewer nodes and because each node is running more slowly than when running at the sweet spot.

The Roadrunner cluster, built by Altatech, has been very useful for our benchmarking efforts because it has dual processor nodes and one can use either FastEthernet or Myrinet for the message passing. In Fig. 4, we compare the performance using either network but using only one CPU per node. In Fig. 5, we use both processors. From this exercise, we were able to determine that the limitations of the FastEthernet were so great that the second processor did not improve the cost-effectiveness of the system, but for Myrinet the second processor did. (Costs were determined by designing bare bones nodes with the desired characteristics, not by Altatech’s pricing.)

We compare MPICH and MVICH (MPICH running over M-VIA) using the same FastEthernet hardware in Fig. 6. The reduced latency really improves performance for the smaller values of $`L`$. Unfortunately, we don’t have results for more than eight nodes because of a bug in the driver for the FastEthernet card we have in greatest abundance. This bug is supposed to have been fixed, but we have not found the time to install the new drivers and run the tests.

Moving on to supercomputers, we have results for Cray T3E900, IBM SP with various speed nodes, SGI Origin 2000, and Sun E10000. The Cray T3E does not have a sweet spot. Its performance continues to increase as $`L`$ is increased to 14. With some assembly code we get about 75–90 MF per CPU. For the IBM SP with 4 way SMP Winterhawk II (375 MHz Power 3) nodes, we find a distinct sweet spot at $`L=8`$, where the performance is about 175 MF per CPU. By $`L=12`$, however, performance has dropped to 50 MF per CPU. These tests were done with up to 64 CPUs. There may not be enough bandwidth to memory to support all four CPUs on a node. We ought to try prefetching data to cache on this computer to see if that would help. In a poster by Sonali Tamhankar , you can find out about our efforts to speed up the code using OpenMP on the SP and the E10000. The E10000 also has a sweet spot with peak performance of about 120 MF per CPU for $`L=8`$ and 64 CPUs. By $`L=12`$, as on the SP, one is down to a performance level comparable to that of a FastEthernet cluster.

My favorite computer at this point is certainly the LLNL Teracluster, that has 4-way SMP Alpha EV67 667 MHz nodes and a Quadrics QsNet network. It is a cluster, with moderate SMP parallelism and a switched network; however, the QsNet hardware is not a commodity item at $`>`$ $3,000 per node. We get about 280 MF per CPU at the sweet spot $`L=8`$. For $`L=12`$, performance is still close to 200 MF per CPU. These benchmarks use some very old Alpha assembler code that is far from optimized for the current architecture, so with some effort, we might be able to do quite a bit better. (Faster results have been reported by others on Wilson or Clover inverters.) The new NSF Terascale computer to be built at the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center will be quite similar to this, but it will have a more advanced processor.

Figure 7 summarizes results on various supercomputers for $`L=8`$ on up to 64 CPUs. For full details visit the MILC benchmark web page.

## 4 PRICE-PERFORMANCE RATIOS

Before presenting any numbers for price-performance ratios, it is essential to point out some caveats. It is not trivial to get prices for supercomputers. You actually have to take up a salesperson’s time to generate a quote, and that is not a very nice thing to do if your main goal is to tell the person that the computer is overpriced. Also, discounts can vary and details of configuration are not presented here. On the cluster side, the configurations were priced based on the lowest prices at www.pricewatch.com on October 31, 2000. Each node is configured with 64 MB of ECC memory per CPU and a 4.3 GB hard drive. To summarize, the numbers for clusters are up to date, and the numbers for supercomputers are based on older quotes. The cluster numbers presented at the conference were based on node prices over a year old.

We consider cluster nodes with either 450 MHz PII chips as in Roadrunner, or 733 MHz PIII chips as in Los Lobos. For the Los Lobos level system, we are assuming a ServerWorks dual-CPU capable motherboard will have comparable performance to the IBM Netfinity nodes. If one of the VIA chip based motherboards supports PC133 memory well, it would be a more cost effective alternative for the single CPU system. Switch prices are based on quotes received in January, 2000 or recent advertisements. Performance expectations are based on Roadrunner or Los Lobos. (An AMD Athlon based system was considered in Sec. 1. Performance claims there were based on RR, although they should be between RR and LL, so better performance than stated there is very likely.)

To build a single CPU node like Roadrunner, but with 64 MB of memory would cost $325. A dual CPU node, with 128 MB would cost $527. If more memory is desired, it should cost less than $1 per Megabyte. Los Lobos style nodes are $634 and $878, for single and dual cpu, respectively. Per port FastEthernet switch costs are about $56, $185 and $240, for 32, 72 and 144 ports, respectively. Myrinet cost is $1527 per port and scales linearly up to 128 ports with the Clos switches. These prices are for LANai 9, Myrinet 2000 cards. However, Los Lobos does not yet have the latest switch, so it is not running the Myrinet 2000 protocol, which has a peak bandwidth almost twice as fast as the current value.

For a single CPU RR level system, the price-performance ratio in $/MF is 7.2–9.3, 10–13, $``$11–15 and 28–31, for FastEthernet with 32, 64, 128 nodes and Myrinet, respectively. With dual CPUs, the numbers are 8–11, 12–16, 14–19 and 20–23. We see that the second CPU makes the Myrinet based system considerably more cost effective; however, for FastEthernet, although the marginal cost is small, the performance gain is not that great either, and the system is less cost effective. With the more expensive and higher performance LL level nodes, FastEthernet cost in $/MF is about 11, 14 and 17, and Myrinet is 20–22 for single CPU systems. With a second processor the Myrinet number drops to 16–21. Dual CPU benchmarks have not been run with FastEthernet, but the network performance should be even more of an issue here, and we expect the cost effectiveness to be somewhat less.

This work was supported by the U.S. DOE under grant DE-FG02-91ER 40661. Special thanks to the MILC collaboration, and especially R. Sugar for reading the manuscript. We thank the Albuquerque High Performance Computer Center, Indiana University, LLNL, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center and San Diego Supercomputer Center.


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# A Mosaic of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies with XMM-Newton Based on observations with XMM-Newton, an ESA Science Mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States and the USA (NASA)

## 1 Introduction

The Coma cluster of galaxies was one of the performance verification targets of XMM-Newton. The aim was to verify XMM-Newton’s ability to map large extended X-ray sources. This is not an easy task because errors can occur in several areas.

The telescope vignetting plays a major role when overlapping the same region of an extended source, measured at different off-axis angles. Because of the vignetting, the surface brightness of a region measured off axis seems to be lower than the same region measured on axis. The reason for that is the increasing loss of mirror collecting area with increasing off-axis angle, which in addition is energy dependent. By de-vignetting the different observations and normalizing the observations to the observing times the surface brightnesses of the same source regions are corrected and must show the same number of counts/arcmin2/sec. If done correctly, detector-edges or regions of detector gaps should not be visible as inhomogenities in the surface brightness of the merged observations.

The backgrounds in the image are problematic. The part of the background that is produced by particles inside the detector is not distinguishable from X-rays, is not vignetted, and is in general distributed homogeneously over the detector face (except for the lower end of the spectral range and around the detector intrinsic emission lines around 8 keV, see Briel et al. ub00 (2000)). Hence this component must be subtracted before de-vignetting is applied. The extragalactic X-ray background is vignetted in the same manner as diffuse emission from an extended source and may therefore be de-vignetted in the same manner. But there is a third component in the background, the low energy protons, that are again indistinguishable from X-rays. They come through the mirror system and show a different vignetting compared to X-rays (see Strüder et al. ls01 (2001)). In addition, their spectrum and their flux is time variable. Because of the different vignetting, it is essential to subtract a “proton image” from the measured image before de-vignetting is applied, especially when the surface brightness of the proton induced background is in the same order of magnitude as the surface brightness of the extended source.

Coma was chosen because it is a well studied source at all wavelength ranges. With a diameter of the main cluster, which is several times larger than the FOV of the EPIC cameras of about 26 arcmin, it is necessary to mosaic the cluster with XMM-Newton if the large scale structure and dynamics of the cluster are to be investigated. Although Coma was long believed to be the archetype of a relaxed cluster of galaxies, the X-ray image taken during the Rosat All Sky Survey revealed the complex large scale structure, especially the subgroup around NGC 4839 probably falling into the main cluster (Briel et al. ub92 (1992)). Subsequent pointed observations with Rosat showed that Coma has irregular structure on different scales and was most probably formed by hierarchical clustering of several subunits, which are still visible in their X-ray emission (White et al. sw93 (1993)). Observations with ASCA, and also the pointed Rosat observation, showed evidence of temperature structure in Coma (Honda et al. hh96 (1996); Briel & Henry ub98 (1998); Donnelly et al. rd99 (1999); Watanabe et al. mw99 (1999)). The interpretation of the temperature structure favors the ongoing merging of the subgroup around NGC 4839 with the main cluster, a scenario which is still debated.

In this letter we will present the result of merging 12 partially overlapping observations of the Coma cluster with the EPIC pn-CCD-detector on board XMM-Newton. In Section 2 we will describe the observations and present the data reduction and the method of merging the individual observations. In Section 3 we will discuss some of the many point sources in the image, the large scale structure of the X-ray surface brightness distribution, and the hardness ratio map of the inner cluster region.

## 2 Observations and Data Reduction

The region of the Coma cluster of galaxies was observed by the XMM-Newton Satellite (Jansen et al. fj01 (2001)) during the performance verification phase. In Table 1 we show the journal of the observations with information on the pointing directions and observing times.

The two MOS-CCD cameras (Turner et al. mt01 (2001)) were operated in their full-frame mode, which we believe to be well-calibrated for spectral analysis. However due to operational difficulties, less data coverage of the Coma region was obtained in these cameras. The pn-CCD camera (Strüder et al. ls01 (2001)) was operated in the extended full frame mode (see the above papers for a description of the different modes). This latter mode provides potentially the best imaging performance of the pn-CCD camera, but at this date its spectral calibration is less reliable than that of the MOS observation. The analysis of this paper therefore contrasts with that of Arnaud et al. (ma01 (2001)), in that we concentrate more on the gross imaging properties and less on the spectral imaging. The hardness ratio map that we present, based on flux estimate in wide energy bands, is not sensitive to the remaining PN calibration uncertainties. For all observations, the medium filter was used (see Turner et al. mt01 (2001)).

During the observations the proton induced background often varied, and in flares reached count rates up to several hundred counts/sec in the energy band from 0.15 to 10 keV. To increase the signal-to-noise ratio and also to minimize the above described problems of the de-vignetting of residual proton induced events, we binned the 10-15 keV events in 100 sec time bins. From this light curve, times of bins with count rates above 100 counts/100 sec were identified and excluded from further processing. We have chosen the high energy region because we do not expect many events from Coma in that band. This rate criterion gave in all but Coma 4, 6, and 7 reasonably long effective exposure times, which are given in Table 1. The rate criterion for Coma 4 and 7 were 200 counts and 800 counts respectively. We did include these high background times in order to get the mosaic of Coma as complete as possible. We do have to be careful with the interpretation of those two fields. Since the Coma 6 field covers part of the center of the cluster, we did apply the stringent rate criterion, therefore 3.7 ksec exposure time is usable, which is only 25% of the total time pointed at this position.

In addition to the above screening, we also excluded “warm” pixels from the images by checking each individual observation in detector coordinates and searching for single pixels with statistically significant higher numbers of events compared to adjacent pixels.

Images were produced in three different energy bands: 0.3 - 2 keV, 2 - 5 keV and 5 - 7.15 keV. We stopped at 7.15 keV in order to avoid the strong detector intrinsic emission lines of Ni-K, Cu-K and Zn-K, spread over approximately 2 keV. At a later time, when we learn more about the background, the higher energies will be included. An other handicap was the fact that, at the time of analysing the pn-data the correction files for the charge transfer inefficiency (CTI) were only available for the full frame mode (not the extended full frame mode used for our observations), so they were used to correct for the CTI. This effects the corrected amplitude of the events at the level of 5-25 eV depending on the energy and the position in the detector. But for producing images in the above bands, this systematic error is negligible. All valid events were used in the images. Valid events are all single events plus recombined split events, whose position is defined as the position of the pixel containing the maximum amplitude (see Dennerl et. al. kd99 (1999) for a detailed explanation). To minimize the gaps between CCDs, events at the border pixels are also included, although their amplitude could be slightly under estimated because of a possibly not recorded split companion. Again, for making images in wide energy bands, this systematic error is negligible.

In the same energy bands, and with the same selection criteria, background images were produces from a dedicated “background event file”. This file contains 132.8 ksec of pn-data accumulated from 5 other observations, like the Lockman Hole (Hasinger et al. gh01 (2001)), containing no extended X-ray sources and only weak point sources. The single observations are between 13 and 33 ksec long, spread over the 3 months CAL/PV phase of XMM-Newton. These data were also screened for flares and warm pixels, and obvious point sources were taken out. Comparing the single observations of the screened event files, the background rate in the energy band from 0.15 to 10 keV is very stable, the systematic difference between the minimum and maximum rate is 8% of the mean. From each Coma image the corresponding background image, normalized using the effective observing times, was subtracted. Even though we restrict ourselves to observing times with ”low” background, at a distance of 30 arcmin from the center of Coma the background is compareable to the surface brightness of Coma. At the center of Coma the background is $``$ 1.5% and 2.5% of Coma’s surface brightness in the bands 0.3 to 2 keV and 2 to 7.15 keV respectively.

In a further step, exposure maps were produced for the different energy bands, also normalized to the corresponding effective observing times. These exposure maps contain the energy dependent vignetting.

The individual images in the lowest energy band were searched for point sources, and the positions of point sources in overlapping regions were then used to align and merge both the background-free X-ray images and the exposure maps. In a last step, the merged background free X-ray images were divided by the corresponding merged exposure maps. The result is the surface brightness distribution of the Coma field in the different energy bands. In the Figures 1 and 2 we show the 0.3-2.0 keV image and the 2-5 keV image of Coma taken with the pn camera.

To visualize better the low surface brightness of the cluster we smoothed the images with two-dimensional Gaussian filters of variable sizes (with a sigma from 9 arcsec to 96 arcsec). We used these images to look for spectral variations in the central Coma region. A hardness ratio map was produced by calculating the image HR = (image(2-7.15keV)-image(0.3-2keV))/(image(2-7.15keV)+image(0.3-2keV)). In Fig. 3 we show the inner 25.5$`\times `$23.3 arcmin2 of this hardness ratio map. The overlain contours are from the smoothed surface brightness distribution in the 0.3-2 keV band. We performed simulations with XSPEC, using a Raymond & Smith model (with the fixed parameters z = 0.0232, abundance = 0.25 and $`N_H`$ = 8.95 $`10^{19}`$ cm-2 from Dickey & Lockmann jd90 (1990)) and taking into account our current understanding of the errors in the preliminary calibration of the extended full frame mode. With these simulations we converted the hardness ratios into ”temperatures”. The resulting conversion is indicated as color bar with the corresponding temperatures in Fig. 3.

The dynamic range of the hardness ratio in the map is of the order of 20%, corresponding to a ”temperature” variation of $``$ 5 keV. A systematic error of the background model of 10% would be neglectible in the inner 15 arcmin diameter. At larger radii the ratio would be different by $``$ 3%, corresponding to a ”temperature” difference of about 1 keV.

## 3 Discussion

The Coma cluster is the nearest very rich cluster of galaxies. It is probably the best studied cluster at all wavelengths and is one of the brightest extragalactic X-ray sources in the sky. Until now, the deepest X-ray observation of Coma is that of White et al. (sw93 (1993)) consisting of 4 exposures of about 19 ksec each by the ROSAT PSPC. The EPIC pn observations reported here are of comparable length, thus are $``$8 times deeper, while simultaneously extending over $``$3 times wider energy range and with $``$4 times better angular resolution.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the better spatial resolution and deeper observation, the most noticable difference between our XMM images in Figures 1 and 2 compared to Figure 2 of White et al. (sw93 (1993)) is the myriad of newly detected point-like sources. Dow & White (kd95 (1995)) discuss the $``$25 point sources in the ROSAT observations of Coma. There are at least 75 point sources in the smaller solid angle we have analyzed. We have made a first attempt to identify these sources by overlaying our X-ray map on an optical image of the region and then consulting NED when there appears to be a coincidence. Many bright galaxies seem to be X-ray sources including: NGC 4827, 4839, 4858, 4860, 4874, 4889, 4911, and 4921, and IC 4040 and 4051. However some faint galaxies, with magnitudes from 18 to 20, could also be identifications based on positional coincidence. At least three quasars, QSO 1256+281, QSO 1258+280, and QSO 1259+281, are detected. However, the bulk of the sources are unidentified in our initial analysis.

The NGC 4911 and NGC 4839 groups contain concentrations of point sources at our sensitivity. Dow & White (kd95 (1995)) and Neumann et al. (dn01 (2001)) discuss the particularly interesting morphology of the NGC 4839 group.

The large-scale diffuse emission in the soft band shown in Figure 1 is very similar to the ROSAT observations of White et al. (sw93 (1993)) in the same band. The X-ray emission of the Coma cluster is lumpy near its center but becomes smoother at larger radii. An additional lump, apparent in the ROSAT observation but not discussed by White et al. (sw93 (1993)), is directly NE of NGC 4839. It may be yet another group on its way into the main cluster to the ENE. This lump may be preceeding the NGC 4839 group from the direction of A1367 since calculations of cluster growth indicate that the groups that merge to form clusters flow along filaments connecting the clusters. The large-scale diffuse hard emission is very similar to the soft, as Figure 2 shows.

Because the calibration of the spectral response of the extended full frame mode of the pn-CCD is not yet available, we do not yet want to perform spatially resolved spectral fits. We can, however, make a hardness ratio map using wide bands, which we show in Figure 3. While these maps sacrifice spectral details, such as temperatures and abundances, they are the highest angular ($``$40 arcsec) and spatial ($``$26 kpc for H$`_\text{o}`$ = 50 km s-1 Mpc-1) resolution spectral maps ever obtained for a cluster of galaxies.

Using the conversion from hardness ratio to temperature, given in Fig. 3, we have checked our resulting mean temperature in some regions which are known from other measurements. For the over-all temperature within a radius of 10 arcmin, centered on NGC 4874, we determined a temperature of 8.8 keV. The GINGA value is 8.21 $`\pm `$ 0.09 keV (Hughes et al. jh93 (1993)), the ASCA value is 9. $`\pm `$ 0.6 keV (Donnely et al rd99 (1999)) and the XMM-MOS value is 8.25 $`\pm `$ 0.10 keV (Arnaud et al ma01 (2001)). We agree to better than 10% with these previously determined values, which would be expected given our understanding of the uncertainties of the calibration and of the background model. In a further check, we determined the temperature around NGC 4874 within a radius of 0.5 arcmin and within a ring from 1 to 5 arcmin. Our result is 7 and 9.2 keV, the MOS result (Arnaud et al ma01 (2001), Fig. 8) is 6.6 and 8.6 keV respectively, again in agreement within 10%. We found the same kind of agreement on other places, taking into account the large area of 3.5 $`\times `$ 3.5 arcmin2, used for the MOS data by Arnaud et al. (ma01 (2001)).

The large-scale description of the data in Figure 3 agrees with Arnaud et al. (ma01 (2001)): there is cool gas to the south-east and hotter gas to the south-west and west. It agrees to some extent with Donnely et al. (rd99 (1999)), Watanabe et al. (mw99 (1999)) and Briel & Henry (ub98 (1998)) investigations. In particular the south-east cool region was already identified by Donnely et al. (rd99 (1999)) and a hot region in the south-west/west direction, but somewhat further away, was found by Watanabe et al. (mw99 (1999)).

There are spectral variations on the smallest scales that we can measure. Softer emission is associated with many compact sources some of which are associated with galaxies as discussed previously. Although the smoothing of the original surface brightness distribution smears out the point sources to some extend, a significant drop in the radial temperature profile within 1 arcmin of NGC 4874 was also seen by Arnaud et al. (ma01 (2001)), Fig. 8. The Rosat temperature map of Briel & Henry (ub98 (1998)) also shows cooler regions around the two central galaxies (although other cool regions in the center of their map are not confirmed). If these soft regions, associated with galaxies, are extended, we can postulate three possible explanations. First, they are local potential wells centered on cluster galaxies as is was discussed by Vikhlinin et al. (av94 (1994)). The shallower potential wells could only trap lower temperature gas. Second, they are the interstellar emission that the cluster galaxy has been able to retain. Third, integrated emission from low mass X-ray binaries which Irwin & Sarazin (ji98 (1998)) have discussed as the source of soft emission from elliptical galaxies.

Perhaps the most interesting small scale spectral structures are the isolated hard spots that do not appear to be associated with any obvious point-like X-ray emission. For the most part they are not associated with an optical object in NED. The five hard spots north of the NGC 4889NGC 4874 line may be the cause of the hot region in the same general location detected by Donnelly et al. (rd99 (1999)) in their ASCA observations. It seems that these hot spots are washed out in the temperature map of Arnaud et al. (ma01 (2001)) because of the larger (3.5$`\times `$3.5 armin2) integration boxes. They might have been seen however in the even larger integration region of ASCA, if they are associated with variable sources like QSO’s. But we can not entirely eliminate an instrumental cause for some of them because some are aligned parallel to the CCD orientation and on the boarder of the chips.

###### Acknowledgements.

The XMM-Newton project is supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung/Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (BMFT/DLR), the Max-Planck Society and the Heidenhain-Stiftung, and also by PPARC, CEA, CNES, and ASI.
J. P. Henry thanks Prof. J. Trümper for the hospitality at the MPE. We thank the anonymous referee for useful comments, which improved the paper.


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# The detection of a 1.4-h period in RW Ursa Minoris – candidate for shortest recorded orbital period nova

## 1 Introduction

RW UMi is a high galactic latitude nova that erupted in 1956. Its outburst was reported, however, only about six years later (Kukarkin 1962). The nova reached a maximum of at least $`m_V`$$``$$`6.0`$ on 1956 September 24, and decayed to $`m_V`$$``$11.5 a year later. Kukarkin also concluded that the progenitor of the nova was fainter than $`m_V`$=21.2 in POSS. Duerbeck (1987), however, barely detected the pre-nova at $`m_V`$=21.0 in the same plate. Photometric observations of the object during the last two decades are consistent with a visual magnitude stable around $`m_V`$$``$18.8 (Cohen 1985; Kaluzny & Chlebowski 1989; Szkody et al. 1989; Howell et al. 1991; Szkody & Howell 1992; Szkody 1994; Ringwald et al. 1996; Downes & Duerbeck 2000). We note that the estimate of the nova in 1988 as $`m_V`$=21.0-21.5 (Howell 1988) was corrected by Szkody et al. (1989).

Spectra of the post-nova are presented by Kaluzny & Chlebowski (1989), Szkody & Howell (1992) and Ringwald et al. (1996). These show a strong blue continuum and several weak emission lines – the Balmer and He II 4686 lines.

Cohen (1985) marginally detected a nebula around the remnant of RW UMi using an image taken through a narrow H$`\alpha `$ filter. Slavin et al. (1995) repeated this observation, and concluded that the distance to the binary system is 5$`\pm `$2 Kpc. Esenoglu et al. (2000) resolved the shell of RW UMi in 1995 and derived a distance range for the nova of 4200-5840 pc. Downes & Duerbeck (2000) failed, however, to detect the nova nebula in an observation carried out in 1998.

Kaluzny & Chlebowski (1989) found that the nova was not variable at the 0.05 mag level in the $`B`$ and $`V`$ filters in five images taken in 1985 and one in 1987. Szkody et al. (1989) reported the discovery of a variation of about 0.2 mag in a 3-h observation in 1988 using a wide band red filter. They suggested a possible period of 117$`\pm `$5 minutes. Shafter & Campbell (1990) independently announced a similar detection. Howell et al. (1991) observed the nova with a $`B`$ filter for 2.1 h in 1989, and proposeed a period of 113$`\pm `$10 minutes.

There are only three recorded classical novae with established orbital periods below the cataclysmic variables (CVs) period gap – CP Pup 1942, GQ Mus 1983 and V1974 Cyg 1992 (Diaz & Bruch 1997; Ritter & Kolb 1998111Note that the dwarf novae WX Cet and TV Crv were misclassified as novae.). This is compared with about one hundred and twenty other short orbital period systems. In comparison, above the gap there are more than thirty novae and about one hundred and thirty other systems. Thus the ratio of novae to all CVs below the gap is nearly ten times smaller than above the gap. An increase of the number of known novae below the period gap is, therefore, necessary for the understanding of nova cycles of short orbital period CVs. The possibility that the orbital period in RW UMi is below the gap lead us to add this nova to our list of targets in an ongoing programme, maintained at the Wise Observatory, to search for periods in post-novae. Retter (1999) announced the detection of a 1.4-h periodicity in the light curve of RW UMi. In this work we elaborate that report, discuss possible physical mechanisms for the variation and further try to classify the system within the known subgroups of CVs.

## 2 Observations

We observed Nova RW UMi during 10 nights in 1995 through a standard Cousins $`R`$ filter and 14 nights in 1997 through a ‘clear’ filter. A few images of the nova in the $`V`$, $`R`$ and $`I`$ filters were taken as well in 1995 May 11. In addition, one snapshot per night through the $`R`$ filter was taken on 98 occasions between 1997 October and 1999 July. Table 1 presents a summary of the observation schedule. The photometry was carried out using the 1-m telescope at the Wise Observatory, with the Tektronix 1K CCD camera. The typical exposures times were 3-15 m in 1995 and 5-6 m in 1997-1999.

Bias and flat field corrections were made to each frame. Aperture photometric measurements were carried out using the DAOPHOT program (Stetson 1987). Differential magnitudes of the nova relative to several reference stars (the exact number depending on each image quality) were obtained from the images. The Wise Observatory reduction program DAOSTAT (Netzer et al. 1996) was used to reject variable comparison stars. The number of frames obtained in each filter on our programme is: 437 ($`R`$), 906 (‘clear’), 6 ($`V`$) and 1 ($`I`$). The mean of the errors in the observations in the $`R`$ and ‘clear’ filters were 0.11 and 0.04 mag correspondingly.

Fig. 1 presents all observations in the $`R`$ and ‘clear’ bands during 1995-1999. The two filters were combined assuming that the mean ‘clear’ magnitude of the comparison stars is the same as the mean $`R`$ magnitude. The graph shows that the colour $`R`$-‘clear’ of the nova is relatively small compared with the scatter of the points that cannot be attributed only to the observational errors. The nightly means in 1997 varied by a few tenths mag from night to night with a standard deviation of $`\sigma `$=0.09 mag – more than twice the mean error of the data points. During the first six nights in 1997 the nova appeared to be consistently about 0.1 mag brighter than the remaining eight nights.

## 3 Data Analysis

The best nights in the 1995 data showed a possible variation of the order of 1-3 h, however, since an $`R`$ filter was used, the errors were much larger than the 1997 data when more photons were accumulated using a ‘clear’ filter. In addition, the length of run on each night in 1995 was generally very short and two out of the three longest nights have gaps in between. Therefore, the power spectrum of these data is very noisy.

The 1997 data were obtained without a filter, thus having smaller errors. The mean length of the runs was 6.8 h. A variation of $``$1.4 h with a full amplitude of 0.1-0.2 mag can be seen by simple visual inspection of the light curve in a few of the best nights. Fig. 2 presents two examples – June 12 and August 7. In both light curves more than five cycles of the candidate periodicity are easily seen. Note the overall fading during the second night. Such gradients appeared in the light curves of several other nights as well.

The power spectrum of the 1997 data obtained through the ‘clear’ filter is shown in Fig. 3. The detrending was carried out by subtracting the mean from each night. The highest peak at mid-frequencies (f=16.916 d-1) corresponds to a period of 0.05912 d. It is many standard deviations above the noise level. Aliases of this peak are also present. To check whether the second highest peak at mid-frequencies after the 16.916 d-1 frequency, its 1-d alias at 17.916 d-1, is the correct period, we carried out the following test. First a synthetic light curve was built using a sinusoid at this period. This sinusoid was given the same amplitude it has in the data and sampled according to the window function. Next noise was added using the rms of the residuals of the fit to the data. We then checked whether the highest peak in a small interval around the 16.916 d-1 frequency is higher than the strongest peak near the 17.916 d-1 frequency. One thousand simulations show that the probability that the 1-d alias at 17.916 d-1 (0.05582 d) is the correct period is 4%.

The group of peaks at the left-hand side of the diagram is centered around the 2.0 d-1 peak that appears in the window function as well. Other low-frequency peaks correspond to periodicities that are longer than the typical interval of observations in each night, and probably reflect the strong noise level and / or gradients that appear in a few individual nights. A consistent search for a second periodicity in the light curve with the various techniques discussed by Retter et al. (1997) yielded no positive results. We note that the power spectrum of the data after the subtraction of the linear trend from each night removes most low-frequency peaks, but the structure around the 17.916 d-1 frequency is quite similar to Fig. 3.

In Fig. 4 we present the mean light curve of the 1997 observations. The nightly trends were removed by subtracting a linear term from each night. The light curve shows a sinusoidal variation. The first harmonic fit to the data yielded a semi amplitude of 0.025$`\pm `$0.006. The error corresponds to a 99% confidence level, and it was calculated by a sample of 1000 bootstrap simulations (Efron & Tibshirani 1993). The best fit ephemeris for the periodicity is:
T$`min`$ = HJD 2450612.397+0.05912 E
$`\pm `$0.001$`\pm `$0.00015 (2.5$`\sigma `$)

## 4 Discussion

The light curve of RW UMi in 1997 was modulated by the 1.4-h period. There are three obvious interpretations for this periodicity. It might represent the spin period of the white dwarf, a superhump variation or the orbital period of the binary system. In the following we examine the different models and try to classify the system in the light of the observations accumulated so far on the nova.

### 4.1 A spin period-?

First, we discuss the question whether the system is an AM Her (polar) system (for a review see Warner 1995). The primary white dwarfs in these systems possess strong magnetic fields. Thus, the accreted matter from the companion star flows directly to the two poles of the rotating white dwarf whose spin period is synchronized with the orbital period of the binary system.

The spectra of RW UMi show a strong continuum and only weak emission lines. There are no strong high excitation lines, and the He II 4686 line is rather weak (Sect. 1). We thus believe that the polar scenario can be eliminated, since typical spectra of AM Her systems have a weak continuum and strong emission lines (Warner 1995). The typical optical spectra, radiated from accretion discs in post-novae, are characterized by a strong continuum, because the disc is usually optically thick in classical nova systems for a few decades after their eruptions (Retter et al. 1999).

If the magnetic field is moderate the spin period is usually much shorter than the orbital period and an accretion disc might be formed around the white dwarf. These objects are termed ‘intermediate polars’ (for reviews see Patterson 1994; Hellier 1996). Spin periods in intermediate polars range between 33 s in AE Aqr (Hellier 1996) to 1.44 h in Nova V1425 Aql 1995 (Retter et al. 1998). RW UMi might thus be an intermediate polar with the 1.4-h period being the rotation period of the white dwarf. The orbital period should then be somewhat longer than the spin period. The power spectrum of RW UMi (Fig. 3) does not show, however, other periodicities in addition to the 1.4-h period (Sect. 3). Therefore, it seems unlikely that the periodicity we have discovered is a spin period.

### 4.2 A superhump period-?

Superhumps are quasi-periodic oscillations that have been observed in the light curves of non-magnetic CVs with relatively short orbital periods (typically $`P_{orbital}`$$`<`$4 h). They either appear in the bright outbursts (superoutbursts) of the SU UMa subclass of dwarf novae or permanently in nova-likes. Superhump periods differ from binary periods by a few percent. They are understood as the beat periods of the orbital period and the apsidal (or the nodal) precession period of the accretion disc. For reviews on superhumps see Warner (1995) and Osaki (1996) and on permanent superhumps – Patterson (1999) and Retter & Naylor (2000). If the 1.42-h period in RW UMi is a positive superhump, a superhump period excess of 1-4% is expected according to the observed values in superhump systems (Ritter & Kolb 1998), leading to a binary period in the range 1.36-1.40 h. If the periodicity is a negative superhump, the expected range in the binary period is 1.43-1.45 h since period deficits in negative superhumps are about half period excesses in positive superhumps (Patterson 1999). In both cases the orbital period is only a few percent different from the observed periodicity.

### 4.3 The binary period-?

Orbital periods of nova systems range between 1.425 h (GQ Mus) to 48 h (GK Per) with a peak around 3-4 h (Diaz & Bruch 1997). The observed orbital period distribution of CVs presents a deficiency of systems between about 2 h and 3 h, which is termed ’the period gap’ (Warner 1995). So far only three novae with established orbital periods below the gap have been discovered. This is compared with a few dozen novae with orbital periods above the gap (Sect. 1). If the 1.419-h periodicity observed in the light curve of RW UMi is its orbital period, it would be the shortest recorded binary period in a classical nova, although confirmation by radial velocity measurements is required. Table 1 presents the pre-nova and post-outburst magnitudes of the novae below the gap as well as several other properties. The data show that the brightness of the post-novae below the gap is still above the pre-nova state. RW UMi is much brighter than the progenitor value as well.

### 4.4 RW UMi as a high galactic latitude nova

RW UMi is a high galactic latitude nova and therefore probably a binary system in the halo of the galaxy. Halo CVs are believed to be relatively old systems compared with the population of CVs in the galactic disc (see e.g. Howell & Szkody 1990). Thus, according to evolutionary theories halo systems should have shorter orbital periods (assuming they haven’t bounced yet at the period minimum). Such a difference between the two populations has indeed been found (Howell & Szkody 1990). The possibility that the orbital period of RW UMi is the shortest among all known novae is consistent with this idea.

### 4.5 The mass accretion rate and thermal stability of RW UMi

In this section we estimate the mass transfer rate in RW UMi to assess whether it has dwarf nova or nova-like characteristics. Permanent superhumpers (and nova-likes) are believed to occur in CVs with thermally stable discs, while dwarf novae (including SU UMa systems) are thermally unstable. Based on the thermal-tidal disc instability model (Osaki 1996), assuming that the disc is the dominant light source in the visual band, and neglecting a possible contribution from the hot white dwarf in post-novae, Retter & Leibowitz (1998) and Retter & Naylor (2000) developed a way to check the thermal stability state of disc-accreting CVs. In the following, we apply this method to RW UMi to obtain its mass transfer rate.

The visual magnitude of the post-nova is $`m_V`$$``$18.8 and the distance – 4200-5840 pc (Sect. 1). The interstellar reddening is $`A_V`$=0.1 (Anhert 1963; Cohen 1985). For the mass of the white dwarf, we take $`M_{WD}`$=0.7$`M_{}`$ – typical to CVs below the gap (Patterson 1998). The absence of eclipses (Sect. 3) limits the inclination angle to i=0-65. Inserting all these values into eq.(3) of Retter & Naylor (2000), we obtain $`\dot{M}`$=1.2-8.6$`\times 10^{17}`$g s-1. The critical mass transfer rate, calculated by eq.(2) of Retter & Leibowitz (1998), assuming that the orbital period is 1.4 h (Sect. 4.3) is 0.5$`\times 10^{17}`$g s-1. The system is thus very likely to be thermally stable. This fact together with the long-term light curve of the nova (Fig. 1) that does not show dwarf nova outbursts (although obviously outbursts could have been missed) seem to reject the possibility that the post-nova is a dwarf nova system, and therefore it should be a nova-like system. A similar test applied to the progenitor of the nova at $`m_V`$=21.0 (Sect. 1) yields $`\dot{M}`$=0.2-1.1$`\times 10^{17}`$g s-1. This range straddles the limiting value, so the thermal stability state of the pre-nova cannot be determined.

### 4.6 Final classification of the system

A definite classification of the system cannot be made. An AM Her model doesn’t fit the nova properties (Sect. 4.1). An intermediate polar model might be applicable to RW UMi, but only if an additional short-term periodicity (the spin period) or a relatively long period (which would be the orbital period, making the 1.4-h period the spin period) is found in the future. We note that it is very likely that an accretion disc is formed around the white dwarf in RW UMi as the AM Her scenario has been rejected and since it is believed that most intermediate polars have accretion discs (Patterson 1994).

A dwarf nova (SU UMa) model seems to be ruled out by the long-term behaviour of the light curve in 1995-1999 (Fig. 1) that does not show any dwarf nova outburst, and by our findings that the system is almost certainly thermally stable (previous section). RW UMi is therefore most likely a system with a short orbital period in a high state. As such, it should have permanent superhumps according to Osaki (1996), however, the observations accumulated so far cannot confirm this phenomenon, probably because the nova is relatively faint.

## 5 Summary

A photometric period of 1.4-h was detected in the light curve of the classical nova RW UMi. We argue that it is most likely the orbital period of the system or a superhump period. In both models Nova Ursa Minoris 1956 has a very short binary period. If confirmed, RW UMi will be then the fourth nova below the gap and the third to be non-magnetic.

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank the referee, Daisaku Nogami, for many valuable remarks. We are grateful to Hasan Esenoglu who re-raised our interest in this object. Tim Naylor is acknowledged for a careful reading of the manuscript and for many useful comments. We also thank Coel Hellier and Sandi M. Catalan for several fruitful discussions, and John Dan and the Wise Observatory staff for their expert assistance with the observations. AR is supported by PPARC. Astronomy at the Wise Observatory is supported by grants from the Israeli Academy of Sciences.