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# The Quintessential CMB, Past & Future

## CMB Analysis: Past, Present and Future

The CMB is a nearly perfect blackbody of $`2.725\pm 0.002K`$ matherTcmb , with a $`3.372\pm 0.007mK`$ dipole associated with the 300 $`\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ flow of the earth in the CMB, and a rich pattern of higher multipole anisotropies at tens of $`\mu `$K arising from fluctuations at photon decoupling and later. Spectral distortions from the blackbody associated with starbursting galaxies detected in the COBE FIRAS and DIRBE data are due to stellar and accretion disk radiation being downshifted into the infrared by dust then redshifted into the submillimetre; they have energy about twice all that in optical light, about a tenth of a percent of that in the CMB. The spectrally well-defined Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) distortion associated with Compton-upscattering of CMB photons from hot gas has not been observed with FIRAS, but only at high resolution along lines-of-sight through dozens of clusters — with very high signal-to-noise though. The FIRAS 95% CL upper limit of $`6.0\times 10^5`$ of the energy in the CMB is compatible with the $`\mathrm{}<10^5`$ expected from clusters, groups and filaments in structure formation models, and places strong constraints on the allowed amount of earlier energy injection, e.g., ruling out mostly hydrodynamic models of LSS.

Upper Limit Experiments from the 70s & 80s: The story of the experimental quest for anisotropies is a heroic one.111Space constraints preclude adequate referencing here, but these are given in bh95 ; lange00 ; jaffe00 . The original 1965 Penzias and Wilson discovery paper quoted angular anisotropies below $`10\%`$, but by the late sixties $`10^3`$ limits were reached, by Partridge and Wilkinson and by Conklin and Bracewell. As calculations of baryon-dominated adiabatic and isocurvature models improved in the 70s and early 80s, the theoretical expectation was that the experimentalists just had to get to $`10^4`$, as they did, e.g., Boynton and Partridge in 73. The only signal found was the dipole, hinted at by Conklin and Bracewell in 73, but found definitively in Berkeley and Princeton balloon experiments in the late 70s, along with upper limits on the quadrupole. Throughout the 1980s, the upper limits kept coming down, punctuated by a few experiments widely used by theorists to constrain models: the small angle 84 Uson and Wilkinson and 87 OVRO limits, the large angle 81 Melchiorri limit, early (87) limits from the large angle Tenerife experiment, the small angle RATAN-600 limits, the $`7^{}`$-beam Relict-1 satellite limit of 87, and Lubin and Meinhold’s 89 half-degree South Pole limit, marking a first assault on the peak.

These upper limit experiments were highly useful, in particular to rule out adiabatic baryon-dominated models. In the early 80s, dark matter dominated universes lowered theoretical predictions by about an order of magnitude. In the 84 to mid-90s period, many groups developed codes to solve the perturbed Boltzmann–Einstein equations when dark matter was present. Armed with these pre-COBE computations, plus the LSS information of the time, a number of very interesting models fell victim to the data: scale invariant isocurvature cold dark matter models in 86, large regions of parameter space for isocurvature baryon models in 87, inflation models with radically broken scale invariance leading to enhanced power on large scales in 87-89, CDM models with a decaying ($`\mathrm{keV}`$) neutrino if its lifetime was too long ($`\mathrm{}>10\mathrm{y}\mathrm{r}`$) in 87 and 91. Also in this period there were some limited constraints on ”standard” CDM models, restricting $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_B`$, and the amplitude parameter $`\sigma _8`$. ($`\sigma _8^2`$ is a bandpower for density fluctuations on a scale associated with rare clusters of galaxies, $`8\mathrm{h}^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$, where $`\mathrm{h}=H_0/(100\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1\mathrm{Mpc}^1)`$.)

Post-DMR Experiments: The now familiar motley pattern of anisotropies associated with $`2<\mathrm{}\mathrm{}<20`$ multipoles at the $`30\mu K`$ level revealed by COBE at $`7^{}`$ resolution was shortly followed by detections, and a few upper limits (UL), at higher $`\mathrm{}`$ in 19 other ground-based (gb) or balloon-borne (bb) experiments — most with many fewer resolution elements than the 600 or so for COBE. Some predated in design and even data delivery the 1992 COBE announcement. Proceeding from the period we began analyzing them, we have the intermediate angle SP91 (gb), the large angle FIRS (bb), both with strong hints of detection before COBE, then, post-COBE, more Tenerife (gb), MAX (bb), MSAM (bb), white-dish (gb, UL), argo (bb), SP94 (gb), SK93-95 (gb), Python (gb), BAM (bb), CAT (gb), OVRO-22 (gb), SuZIE (gb, UL), QMAP (bb), VIPER (gb) and Python V (gb). A list valid to April 1999 with associated bandpowers is given in bjk9800 , and are referred here as 4.99 data. They showed evidence for a first peak bjk9800 , although it was not well localized. Within limited parameter sets, good constraints on $`n_s`$, some on $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ could be given, when LSS was added.

The Present, TOCO, BOOMERANG & MAXIMA: The picture dramatically improved this year, as results were announced first in summer 99 from the ground-based TOCO experiment in Chile toco98 , then in November 99 from the North American balloon test flight of Boomerang mauskopf99 . These two additions improved peak localization and gave evidence for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}1`$. Then in April 2000 results from the first CMB long duration balloon (LDB) flight, Boomerang debernardis00 , were announced, followed in May 2000 by results from the night flight of Maxima MAXIMA1 . Boomerang’s best resolution was $`10^{}`$, about 40 times better than that of COBE, with tens of thousands of resolution elements. Maxima had a similar resolution but covered an order of magnitude less sky.

Boomerang carried a 1.2m telescope with 16 bolometers cooled to 300 mK in the focal plane aloft from McMurdo Bay in Antarctica in late December 1998, circled the Pole for 10.6 days and landed just 50 km from the launch site, only slightly damaged. In debernardis00 , maps at 90, 150 and 220 GHz showed the same spatial features and the intensities were shown to fall precisely on the CMB blackbody curve. The fourth frequency channel at 400 GHz is dust-dominated. Fig. 1 shows the 150 GHz map derived using only one of the 16 bolometers. Although Boomerang altogether probed 1800 square degrees, only the region in the rectangle covering 440 square degrees was used in the analysis described in lange00 ; jaffe00  and this paper. Fig. 1 also shows the 124 square degree region of the sky (in the Northern Hemisphere) that Maxima-1 probed. Though Maxima was not an LDB, it did so well because its bolometers were cooled even more than Boomerang’s, to 100 mK, leading to higher sensitivity per unit observing time, it had a star camera so the pointing was well determined, and, further, all frequency channels were used in creating its map.

Primary CMB Processes and Soundwave Maps at Decoupling: Both Boomerang and Maxima were designed to measure the primary anisotropies of the CMB, those which can be calculated using linear perturbation theory. What we see in Fig. 1 are, basically, two images of soundwave patterns that existed about 300,000 years after the Big Bang, when the photons were freed from the plasma. The visually evident structure on degree scales is even more apparent in the power spectra of the Fourier transform of the maps, which show a dominant (first acoustic) peak, a less prominent (or non-existent) second one, and the possible hint of a third one from Maxima. Fig. 1 also shows that the quite heterogeneous 4.99+TOCO+Boomerang-NA mix of CMB data is very consistent with what Boomerang-LDB and Maxima show.

The images are actually a projected mixture of dominant and subdominant physical processes through the photon decoupling ”surface”, a fuzzy wall at redshift $`z_r1100`$, when the Universe passed from optically thick to thin to Thomson scattering over a comoving distance $`10\mathrm{h}^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$. Prior to this, acoustic wave patterns in the tightly-coupled photon-baryon fluid on scales below the comoving ”sound crossing distance” at decoupling, $`\mathrm{}<100\mathrm{h}^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$ (i.e., $`\mathrm{}<100\mathrm{kpc}`$ physical), were viscously damped, strongly so on scales below the $`10\mathrm{h}^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$ thickness over which decoupling occurred. After, photons freely-streamed along geodesics to us, mapping (through the angular diameter distance relation) the post-decoupling spatial structures in the temperature to the angular patterns we observe now as the primary CMB anisotropies. The maps are images projected through the fuzzy decoupling surface of the acoustic waves (photon bunching), the electron flow (Doppler effect) and the gravitational potential peaks and troughs (”naive” Sachs-Wolfe effect) back then. Free-streaming along our (linearly perturbed) past light cone leaves the pattern largely unaffected, except that temporal evolution in the gravitational potential wells as the photons propagate through them leaves a further $`\mathrm{\Delta }T`$ imprint, called the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. Intense theoretical work over three decades has put accurate calculations of this linear cosmological radiative transfer on a firm footing, and there is a speedy, publicly available and widely used code for evaluation of anisotropies in a variety of cosmological scenarios, “CMBfast” cmbfast , including the latest hydrogen/helium recombination evaluations, and with extensions to more cosmological models added by a variety of researchers.

Of course there are a number of nonlinear effects that are also present in the maps. These secondary anisotropies include weak-lensing by intervening mass, Thompson-scattering by the nonlinear flowing gas once it became ”reionized” at $`z20`$, the thermal and kinematic SZ effects, and the red-shifted emission from dusty galaxies. They all leave non-Gaussian imprints on the CMB sky.

The Future, beyond 2000: We are only at the beginning of the high precision CMB era. HEMT-based interferometers are already in place taking data: the VSA (Very Small Array) in Tenerife, the CBI (Cosmic Background Imager) in Chile, DASI (Degree Angular Scale Interferometer) at the South Pole, where the bolometer-based single dish ACBAR experiment will operate this year. Other LDBs will be flying within the next few years: Arkeops, Tophat, Beast/Boost; and in 2001, Boomerang will fly again, this time concentrating on polarization. As well, MAXIMA will fly as the polarization-targeting MAXIPOL. In April 2001, NASA will launch the all-sky HEMT-based MAP satellite, with $`12^{}`$ resolution. Further downstream, in 2007, ESA will launch the bolometer+HEMT-based Planck satellite, with $`5^{}`$ resolution.

Secondary anisotropies are also being targeted with new instruments. SZ anisotropies have been probed by single dishes, the OVRO and BIMA mm arrays, and the Ryle interferometer. A number of planned HEMT-based interferometers being built are more ambitious: AMI (Britain), the JCA (Chicago), AMIBA (Taiwan), MINT (Princeton). As well other kinds of bolometer-based experiments will be used to probe the SZ effect, including the CSO (Caltech submm observatory) with BOLOCAM on Mauna Kea, ACBAR at the South Pole, the LMT (large mm telescope) in Mexico, and the LDB BLAST. Anisotropies from dust emission from high redshift galaxies are being targeted by the JCMT with the SCUBA bolometer array, the OVRO mm interferometer, the CSO, the SMA (submm array) on Mauna Kea, the LMT, the ambitious US/ESO ALMA mm array in Chile, the LDB BLAST, and ESA’s FIRST satellite. About $`50\%`$ of the submm background has so far been identified with sources that SCUBA has found.

The CMB Analysis Pipeline: Analyzing Boomerang and other experiments involves a pipeline that takes (1) the timestream in each of the bolometer channels coming from the balloon plus information on where it is pointing and turns it into (2) spatial maps for each frequency characterized by average temperature fluctuation values in each pixel (Fig. 1) and a pixel-pixel correlation matrix characterizing the noise, from which various statistical quantities are derived, in particular (3) the temperature power spectrum as a function of multipole (Fig. 1), grouped into bands, and two band-band error matrices which together determine the full likelihood distribution of the bandpowers bjk9800 . Fundamental to the first step is the extraction of the sky signal from the noise, using the only information we have, the pointing matrix mapping a bit in time onto a pixel position on the sky.

There is generally another step in between (2) and (3), namely separating the multifrequency spatial maps into the physical components on the sky: the primary CMB, the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects, the dust, synchrotron and bremsstrahlung Galactic signals, the extragalactic radio and submillimetre sources. The strong agreement among the Boomerang maps indicates that to first order we can ignore this step, but it has to be taken into account as the precision increases. The Fig. 1 map is consistent with a Gaussian distribution, thus fully characterized by just the power spectrum. Higher order (concentration) statistics (3,4-point functions, etc.) tell us of non-Gaussian aspects, necessarily expected from the Galactic foreground and extragalactic source signals, but possible even in the early Universe fluctuations. For example, though non-Gaussianity occurs only in the more baroque inflation models of quantum noise, it is a necessary outcome of defect-driven models of structure formation. (Peaks compatible with Fig. 1 do not appear in non-baroque defect models, which now appear unlikely.) Though great strides have been made in the analysis of Boomerang and Maxima, there is intense needed effort worldwide now to develop new fast algorithms to deal with the looming megapixel datasets of LDBs and the satellites bcjk99szapudi00 .

## Cosmic Parameter Estimation

Parameters of Structure Formation: For this paper, we adopt a restricted set of 8 cosmological parameters, augmenting the basic 7 used in lange00 ; jaffe00 , $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{\Lambda },\mathrm{\Omega }_k,\omega _b,\omega _{cdm},n_s,\tau _C,\sigma _8\}`$, by one. The vacuum or dark energy encoded in the cosmological constant $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ is reinterpreted as $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$, the energy in a scalar field $`Q`$ which dominates at late times, which, unlike $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, could have complex dynamics associated with it. $`Q`$ is now often termed a quintessence field - see http://feynman.princeton.edu/ steinh/ ”Quintessence? - an overview” for a pedagogical introduction. One popular phenomenology is to add one more parameter, $`w_Q=p_Q/\rho _Q`$, where $`p_Q`$ and $`\rho _Q`$ are the pressure and density of the $`Q`$-field, related to its kinetic and potential energy by $`\rho _Q=\dot{Q}^2/2+(Q)^2/2+V(Q)`$, $`p_Q=\dot{Q}^2/2(Q)^2/6V(Q)`$. Thus $`w_Q=1`$ for the cosmological constant. Spatial fluctuations of $`Q`$ are expected to leave a direct imprint on the CMB for small $`\mathrm{}`$, typically smaller than Boomerang or Maxima are sensitive to. We ignore this complication here. As well, as long as $`w_Q`$ is not exactly $`1`$, it will vary with time, but the data will have to improve for there to be sensitivity to this, and for now we can just interpret $`w_Q`$ as an appropriate time-average of the equation of state. The curvature energy $`\mathrm{\Omega }_k1\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$ also can dominate at late times, as well as affecting the geometry.

We use only 2 parameters to characterize the early universe primordial power spectrum of gravitational potential fluctuations $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$, one giving the overall power spectrum amplitude $`𝒫_\mathrm{\Phi }(k_n)`$, and one defining the shape, a spectral tilt $`n_s(k_n)1+d\mathrm{ln}𝒫_\mathrm{\Phi }/d\mathrm{ln}k`$, at some (comoving) normalization wavenumber $`k_n`$. We really need another 2, $`𝒫_{GW}(k_n)`$ and $`n_t(k_n)`$, associated with the gravitational wave component. In inflation, the amplitude ratio is related to $`n_t`$ to lowest order, with $`𝒪(n_sn_t)`$ corrections at higher order, e.g., bh95 . There are also useful limiting cases for the $`n_sn_t`$ relation. However, as one allows the baroqueness of the inflation models to increase, one can entertain essentially any power spectrum (fully $`k`$-dependent $`n_s(k)`$ and $`n_t(k)`$) if one is artful enough in designing inflaton potential surfaces. As well, one can have more types of modes present, e.g., scalar isocurvature modes ($`𝒫_{is}(k_n),n_{is}(k)`$) in addition to, or in place of, the scalar curvature modes ($`𝒫_\mathrm{\Phi }(k_n),n_s(k)`$). However, our philosophy is consider minimal models first, then see how progressive relaxation of the constraints on the inflation models, at the expense of increasing baroqueness, causes the parameter errors to open up. For example, with COBE-DMR and Boomerang, we can probe the GW contribution, but the data are not powerful enough to determine much. Planck can in principle probe the gravity wave contribution reasonably well.

We use another 2 parameters to characterize the transport of the radiation through the era of photon decoupling, which is sensitive to the physical density of the various species of particles present then, $`\omega _j\mathrm{\Omega }_j\mathrm{h}^2`$. We really need 4: $`\omega _b`$ for the baryons, $`\omega _{cdm}`$ for the cold dark matter, $`\omega _{hdm}`$ for the hot dark matter (massive but light neutrinos), and $`\omega _{er}`$ for the relativistic particles present at that time (photons, very light neutrinos, and possibly weakly interacting products of late time particle decays). For simplicity, though, we restrict ourselves to the conventional 3 species of relativistic neutrinos plus photons, with $`\omega _{er}`$ therefore fixed by the CMB temperature and the relationship between the neutrino and photon temperatures determined by the extra photon entropy accompanying $`e^+e^{}`$ annihilation. Of particular importance for the pattern of the radiation is the (comoving) distance sound can have influenced by recombination (at redshift $`z_r=a_r^11`$), $`r_s=6000/\sqrt{3}\mathrm{Mpc}_0^{\sqrt{a_r}}(\omega _m+\omega _{er}a^1)^{1/2}(1+\omega _ba/(4\omega _\gamma /3))^{1/2}𝑑\sqrt{a}`$, where $`\omega _\gamma =2.46\times 10^5`$ is the photon density, $`\omega _{er}=1.68\omega _\gamma `$ for 3 species of massless neutrinos and $`\omega _m\omega _{hdm}+\omega _{cdm}+\omega _b`$.

The angular diameter distance relation, $`=\{d_k\mathrm{sinh}(\chi _r/d_k),\chi _r,d_k\mathrm{sin}(\chi _r/d_k)\}`$, where $`\chi _r=6000\mathrm{Mpc}_{\sqrt{a_r}}^1(\omega _m+\omega _Qa^{6w_Q}+\omega _ka)^{1/2}𝑑\sqrt{a}`$ is the comoving distance to recombination, $`d_k=3000|\omega _k|^{1/2}\mathrm{Mpc}`$ is the curvature scale and the 3 cases are for negative, zero and positive mean curvature, adds dependence upon $`\omega _k`$, $`\omega _Q`$ and $`w_Q`$ as well as on $`\omega _m`$. The location of the first acoustic peak $`L_{Pk}`$ is proportional to the ratio of $``$ to $`r_s`$, hence depends upon $`\omega _b`$ through the sound speed as well. Thus $`L_{Pk}`$ defines a functional relationship among these parameters, a degeneracy degeneracies  that would be exact except for the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect, associated with the change of $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$ with time if $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ or $`\mathrm{\Omega }_k`$ is nonzero. (If $`\dot{\mathrm{\Phi }}`$ vanishes, the energy of photons coming into potential wells is the same as that coming out, and there is no net impact of the rippled light cone upon the observed $`\mathrm{\Delta }T`$.)

Our 7th parameter is an astrophysical one, the Compton ”optical depth” $`\tau _C`$ from a reionization redshift $`z_{reh}`$ to the present. It lowers $`𝒞_{\mathrm{}}`$ by $`\mathrm{exp}(2\tau _C)`$ at the high $`\mathrm{}`$’s probed by Boomerang. For typical models of hierarchical structure formation, we expect $`\tau _C\mathrm{}<0.2`$. It is partly degenerate with $`\sigma _8`$ and cannot be determined at this precision by CMB data now.

The LSS also depends upon our parameter set: the most important combination is the wavenumber of the horizon when the energy density in relativistic particles equals the energy density in nonrelativistic particles: $`k_{Heq}^15\mathrm{\Gamma }^1\mathrm{h}^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$, where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }\mathrm{\Omega }_m\mathrm{h}\mathrm{\Omega }_{er}^{1/2}`$. Instead of $`𝒫_\mathrm{\Phi }(k_n)`$ for the amplitude parameter, we often use $`𝒞_{10}`$ at $`\mathrm{}=10`$ for CMB only, and $`\sigma _8^2`$ when LSS is added. When LSS is considered in this paper, it refers to constraints on $`\mathrm{\Gamma }+(n_s1)/2`$ and $`\mathrm{ln}\sigma _8^2`$ that are obtained by comparison with the data on galaxy clustering and cluster abundances lange00 .

When we allow for freedom in $`\omega _{er}`$, the abundance of primordial helium, tilts of tilts ($`dn_{\{s,is,t\}}(k_n)/d\mathrm{ln}k,\mathrm{}`$) for 3 types of perturbations, the parameter count would be 17, and many more if we open up full theoretical freedom in spectral shapes. However, as we shall see, as of now only 3 or 4 combinations can be determined with 10% accuracy with the CMB. Thus choosing 8 is adequate for the present; 7 of these are discretely sampleddatabase , with generous boundaries, though for drawing cosmological conclusions we adopt a weak prior probability on the Hubble parameter and age: we restrict $`\mathrm{h}`$ to lie in the 0.45 to 0.9 range, and the age to be above 10 Gyr.

The First Peak and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ and $`w_Q`$: For given $`\omega _m`$ and $`\omega _b`$, we show the lines of constant $`L_{Pk}/r_s`$ in the $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$$`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ plane for $`w_Q`$=$`1`$ in Fig. 2, and in the $`w_Q`$$`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ plane for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$=1 in Fig. 3, using the formulas given above and in degeneracies . Our current best estimate bnu2K  of $`L_{Pk}`$, using all current CMB data, is $`212\pm 7`$, obtained by forming $`\mathrm{exp}<\mathrm{ln}L_{Pk}>`$, where the average and variance of $`\mathrm{ln}L_{Pk}`$ are determined by integrating over the probability-weighted database described above, restricted here to the $`\tau _C=0`$ part. With just the prior-CMB data the value was $`224\pm 25`$, showing how it has localized. The numbers change a bit depending upon exactly what database or functional forms one averages over. The constant $`L_{Pk}`$ lines look rather similar to the contours shown in the right panel, showing that the $`/r_s`$ degeneracy plays a large role in determining the contours. The contours hug the $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}=1`$ line more closely than the allowed $`L_{Pk}`$ band does for the maximum probability values of $`\omega _m`$ and $`\omega _b`$, because of the shift in the allowed $`L_{Pk}`$ band as $`\omega _m`$ and $`\omega _b`$ vary in this plane.

Marginalized Estimates of our Basic 8 Parameters: Table 1 shows there are strong detections with only the CMB data for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$, $`\omega _b`$ and $`n_s`$ in the minimal inflation-based 8 parameter set. The ranges quoted are Bayesian 50% values and the errors are 1-sigma, obtained after projecting (marginalizing) over all other parameters. With Maxima, $`\omega _{cdm}`$ begins to localize, but much more so when LSS information is added. Indeed, even with just the COBE-DMR+LSS data, $`\omega _{cdm}`$ is already localized. That $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ is not well determined is a manifestation of the $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$$`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ near-degeneracy discussed above, which is broken when LSS is added because the CMB-normalized $`\sigma _8`$ is quite different for open cf. pure $`Q`$-models. Supernova at high redshift give complementary information to the CMB, but with CMB+LSS (and the inflation-based paradigm) we do not need it: the CMB+SN1 and CMB+LSS numbers are quite compatible. In our space, the Hubble parameter, $`\mathrm{h}=(_j(\mathrm{\Omega }_j\mathrm{h}^2))^{1/2}`$, and the age of the Universe, $`t_0`$, are derived functions of the $`\mathrm{\Omega }_j\mathrm{h}^2`$: representative values are given in the Table caption. CMB+LSS does not currently give a useful constraint on $`w_Q`$, though $`w_Q\mathrm{}<0.7`$ with SN1.

The Influence of Light Massive Neutrinos: In bnu2K , we considered what happens as we let $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{m\nu }/\mathrm{\Omega }_m`$, the fraction of the matter in massive neutrinos, vary from 0 to 0.3, for Boomerang+Maxima+prior-CMB+LSS when the weak-H+age + $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}=1`$ prior probability is adopted. Until Planck precision, the CMB data by itself will not be able to strongly discriminate this ratio. Adding HDM does have a strong impact on the CMB-normalized $`\sigma _8`$ and the shape of the density power spectrum (effective $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ parameter), both of which mean that when LSS is included, adding some HDM to CDM is strongly preferred in the absence of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$. However, though more (cold+hot) dark matter is preferred at the expense of less dark energy, significant $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ is still required mnu . The $`\omega _b`$ and $`n_s`$ likelihood curves are essentially independent of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{m\nu }/\mathrm{\Omega }_m`$.

The Future, Forecasts for Parameter Eigenmodes: We can also forecast dramatically improved precision with further analysis of Boomerang and Maxima, future LDBs, MAP and Planck. Because there are correlations among the physical variables we wish to determine, including a number of near-degeneracies beyond that for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}`$$`\mathrm{\Omega }_Q`$ degeneracies , it is useful to disentangle them, by making combinations which diagonalize the error correlation matrix, ”parameter eigenmodes” bh95 ; degeneracies . For this exercise, we will add $`\omega _{hdm}`$ and $`n_t`$ to our parameter mix, but set $`w_Q`$=$`1`$, making 9. (The ratio $`𝒫_{GW}(k_n)/𝒫_\mathrm{\Phi }(k_n)`$ is treated as fixed by $`n_t`$, a reasonably accurate inflation theory result.) The forecast for Boomerang based on the 440 sq. deg. patch with a single 150 GHz bolometer used in the published data is 3 out of 9 linear combinations should be determined to $`\pm 0.1`$ accuracy. This is indeed what we get in the full analysis CMB only for Boomerang+DMR. If 4 of the 6 150 GHz channels are used and the region is doubled in size, we predict 4/9 could be determined to $`\pm 0.1`$ accuracy. The Boomerang team is still working on the data to realize this promise. And if the optimistic case for all the proposed LDBs is assumed, 6/9 parameter combinations could be determined to $`\pm 0.1`$ accuracy, 2/9 to $`\pm 0.01`$ accuracy. The situation improves for the satellite experiments: for MAP, we forecast 6/9 combos to $`\pm 0.1`$ accuracy, 3/9 to $`\pm 0.01`$ accuracy; for Planck, 7/9 to $`\pm 0.1`$ accuracy, 5/9 to $`\pm 0.01`$ accuracy. While we can expect systematic errors to loom as the real arbiter of accuracy, the clear forecast is for a very rosy decade of high precision CMB cosmology that we are now fully into.


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# On Isolated Vacua and Background Independence

## 1 Introduction - a vacuous diatribe

There has been much speculation about the topology of the space of asymptotically flat M-theory vacua, by which I mean quantum mechanical states of the system with some number of asymptotically flat dimensions with propagating gravitons and exact Poincare symmetry. In cases where eight or more supercharges are also included in the asymptotic symmetry group, the situation is, as I review briefly below, fairly well understood. There are continuous moduli spaces of such vacua, which can reasonably reliably be said to constitute states of “the same theory” in a sense that I will make more precise. The main purpose of this article is to investigate whether the same can be said of vacua with only four supercharges, which perforce have only four asymptotically flat dimensions. Our considerations will be more general, and actually apply to any two disconnected components of moduli space, but for the most part I will use the language of theories with four supercharges in four dimensions.

In this case, continuous moduli spaces are not generic. Indeed, given the absence of exact continuous global symmetries in string theory, one expects a superpotential of general form on the would be moduli space and this implies that SUSY vacua form a discrete set. Indeed, if we impose the extra restriction of vanishing cosmological constant, the equations are overdetermined and should only be satisfied at points of enhanced discrete complex R-symmetry. It is only if some of the (infinitesimal variations) of the moduli at such an enhanced symmetry point carry vanishing discrete R charge that we can expect a moduli space of nonvanishing dimension . Within such $`N=1`$ moduli spaces, the arguments alluded to in the first paragraph go through and the different vacua are states of the same theory. If these moduli spaces contain boundaries where space decompactifies and an enhanced SUSY algebra is restored, then these vacua are likely to be in the same theory as the higher dimensional, extended SUSY vacua referred to above.

Now however, consider an isolated vacuum with four supercharges111Our considerations apply equally well to any two disconnected components of moduli space with vanishing cosmological constant. . In local quantum field theory we have no problem asserting that such a vacuum state might be in the same theory as any other isolated SUSY vacuum, or the continuous moduli spaces referred to above. Indeed, consider a field theory with two degenerate minima of the potential. If we are willing to expend enough energy, we can easily construct an excited state of the theory in one of these vacuum states, that contains an arbitrarily large region which looks like the other. This is a bubble and its energy scales as the square of its radius. For large radius it is unstable, and shrinks, but causality guarantees that such a large bubble cannot dissipate for times much less than $`R`$. Thus, an experimentalist with a large amount of energy at his disposal can create and study such a vacuum bubble.

In this paper we will argue that the same is not true in a theory containing gravity. At its crudest, the argument consists of the simple observation that if $`\sigma `$ is the surface tension of the bubble, then the Schwarzchild radius of the large distance gravitational field of the bubble is $`\sigma (R/m_P)^2`$. Thus, the bubble will be smaller than its Schwarzchild radius if $`R>m_P^2/\sigma `$. Thus, unless $`\sigma `$ is very tiny in Planck units, an experimenter who attempts to create a large bubble of an alternative universe will instead create a black hole. This observation is closely related to previous studies of “creating a universe in the laboratory”  and more particularly to the seminal work of Cvetic and collaborators  on domain walls between SUSY vacua. We will give a more precise discussion of this work in the next section.

For the moment however, let us return to exact moduli spaces of vacua. In this context, the difficulty mentioned in the previous paragraph does not arise. There is no potential energy on the space of vacua, and we can construct a configuration with a large region of another vacuum at an arbitrarily small cost in energy if we are willing to let the wall interpolating between the bubble and the outside world be very thick (as we will see, this is not an option if we have a potential)222Conversations with Barak Kol, L. Motl and C. Roemelsberger have shown that this discussion is more intricate than one would have thought. In order to explore regions of moduli space which are of order $`NM_P`$ apart (in four dimensional normalization for canonical fields) we must construct bubbles which grow exponentially with $`N`$ and then have a series of small bubbles inside them. The step in field space between a consecutive pair of bubbles is bounded by something of order the Planck scale. The wall of each bubble is about as thick as its radius.. Thus, points at finite separation in exact moduli spaces should surely be thought of as being in the same theory.

Nonetheless, the situation is, even in this case, not quite what SUSY field theory intuition would lead us to believe. The problem is again associated with black holes, though in a superficially different manner. In non-gravitational quantum mechanical models there are two related notions of what it means for two states to be in the same theory. The first comes from classical dynamics, and conditions most of our thinking about these problems. One envisages a classical system with dynamical variables $`q^i(t)`$ and considers two static solutions to be in the same theory because they correspond to different solutions of the same equations of motion. When the system is a field theory in infinite volume, one observes that if the two solutions are also constant in space, then the solution space breaks up into classes which can be viewed as local perturbations of one or the other classical vacuum.

More abstractly, and more generally, one recalls that quantum field theories are defined by (perhaps marginally) relevant perturbations of a fixed point conformal field theory. By studying correlation functions at small Euclidean separations we find the physics dominated by the fixed point and the relevant perturbations of it. In this way, we can determine that two different vacua of the same theory are really in the same theory. The superselection rule that prevents us from putting both vacua in the same Hilbert space has a purely infrared character, and depends on the notion of locality. The Hilbert space obtained by applying local fields to one vacuum state is orthogonal to that obtained by applying them to the other. By studying short distance correlation functions, we can identify the theory underlying each vacuum and verify that they both belong to the same field theory (the same fixed point perturbed by the same relevant operators).

It is worth pointing out that the classical notion of when two vacua come from the same theory is a special case in which the fixed point theory is Gaussian. Indeed, Feynman’s derivation of the path integral formalism proceeds by concatenating propagation over infinitely short time intervals. The Lagrangian formalism emerges when one makes the assumption that the short time behavior is dominated by a quadratic theory. Thus, in the quantum theories we understand, the way to test whether two ground states are states of the same theory is to examine short time, or high energy behavior.

In Asymptotically Flat M (AFM) Theory333As always, I insist on using the term M-theory to describe the unified theory from which weakly coupled string and SUGRA perturbation expansions are derived as limits. It is, at the very least, uneconomical to reserve this term for the region of moduli space near the 11 dimensional SUGRA limit. it was pointed out in  and  that the physics of asymptotically high energies is dominated by black holes. This is an example of the UV-IR  connection in M-theory. High energy states are associated with large objects with low curvatures and large degeneracies. Some aspects of the physics of these objects is consequently accessible to long wavelength SUGRA analysis. The black hole density of states is unlike anything in quantum field theory. It implies that operators which cannot resolve the black hole degeneracy cannot have well defined correlation functions. More precisely (cf.  ) generic Heisenberg operators $`O(t)`$ in such a theory are operator valued distributions on a space of test functions which cannot be localized in time (their Fourier transforms must fall off so rapidly that they cannot vanish outside compact intervals in time).

For our present purposes, what is most important is that the black hole density of states is dimension dependent. Thus, two AFM vacua with different numbers of AF dimensions are not vacua of the same theory in the sense with which we are familiar in Quantum Field Theory. The relation between them is more subtle. The maximum growth of the density of states occurs for four noncompact spacetime dimensions. If one has a moduli space of such four dimensional compactifications, one can find boundaries of moduli space in which more noncompact dimensions appear.

As we take this decompactification limit, states of extended objects wrapped around cycles of the compact manifold will go off to infinite energy. It is no surprise to an M-theorist then (but would be to a quantum field theorist) that if we take the high energy limit after decompactification, we get a different behavior of the density of states than we did before. The relationship between moduli spaces of AFM theory with different numbers of noncompact spacetime dimensions but the same number of SUSYs can then be understood in this limiting fashion. All compactifications to four dimensions with a fixed number of SUSY generators, which lie on the same continuous moduli space, are plausibly states of the same theory. States with more noncompact dimensions can be obtained as limits of these. The limiting process is singular and does not commute with the high energy limit. A question left unanswered by this analysis is the relation between moduli spaces of vacua with the same number of AF dimensions, but different numbers of SUSYs.

The case of only four supercharges deserves a separate discussion. Here, general effective field theory arguments  suggest that most SUSY vacua will have negative cosmological constant. Points with enhanced complex R-symmetry can naturally have vanishing cosmological constant but will generically be isolated. Only if there are chiral superfields with vanishing R-charge can one expect continuous moduli spaces. The moduli space thus splits into disconnected components, most isolated points, but perhaps some of nonzero dimension. The aim of the rest of this paper is to study the extent to which we can consider these disconnected components as part of the same theory.

## 2 Walls of evidence

The first clue that isolated vacua cannot generically communicate with each other, comes from an examination of hypothetical domain walls separating two such vacua. In field theory, the solutions in which an observer in one vacuum injects energy and creates a large, long-lived bubble of another, asymptote, as the energy goes to infinity, to static, stable domain wall solutions. Fortunately, in a beautiful series of papers some years ago , Cvetic and collaborators made a comprehensive study of domain walls in supergravity, in a variety of situations. Here I will only give a partial summary of their work, and I urge the reader to consult the original papers for more detail and for the description of situations with dilaton fields and/or AdS vacua, which are not relevant to the present paper.

It is well known that SUGRA can have supersymmetric vacuum states with nonpositive values of the cosmological constant. The value of the cosmological constant is determined by the value of the superpotential at the supersymmetric points. There are static, stable BPS domain walls between two such vacua with different values of the cosmological constant. The tension of the BPS walls is proportional to the difference of superpotentials in the two vacua.

By examining solutions with the symmetries of domain wall spacetimes in the thin wall approximation, Cvetic and collaborators established a number of remarkable results. Perhaps most strikingly, the BPS tension is the crossover point between two radically different kinds of behavior of domain wall spacetimes, and coincides with the Coleman-DeLuccia  bound on the tension of bubbles created by vacuum tunneling. Coleman and DeLuccia showed that, as a consequence of gravitational effects, tunneling into a lower energy vacuum did not always occur. In AdS space, volume scales like area and so the flat space argument that sufficiently large bubbles of lower energy vacuum always grow, fails. Bubbles will only grow if the tension in their walls is below a certain value, which Cvetic et. al. show coincides with the BPS tension . This is a terribly interesting result, whose significance has probably not yet been fully understood.

For tension below the BPS bound, domain walls are not static, but instead correspond to the infinite radius limit of expanding bubbles of false vacuum. Similarly, for tensions greater than the BPS bound, there are no static solutions. Rather, if we imagine one of the vacua to be asymptotically flat, then the solution looks like a domain wall with constant acceleration, which comes in from infinity and then accelerates away . It spends most of its history moving with respect to the observer in the asymptotically flat region with speed almost equal to the speed of light. Cvetic et. al. describe this situation by saying that both sides of the wall seem to be living on the inside of an expanding bubble of false vacuum. I think instead that these solutions are simply providing evidence that an asymptotically flat observer cannot prepare states that correspond to arbitrarily large bubbles of the other vacuum. The would be infinite radius limits of such bubbles do not admit deformations that would allow us to embed them in asymptotically flat space.

For the purposes of the present paper, we are interested in pairs of vacua which both have vanishing cosmological constant. In this case the BPS tension goes to zero and the domain walls behave as described above. We do not expect large bubbles in this case either.

Before leaving this section I should note that Cvetic et. al. also investigated models with a dilaton field with a potential which had no minimum for asymptotic values of the field. They generically find naked singularities on the side of the domain wall where the dilaton can run. This investigation was not carried out for the most general form of dilaton potential one could imagine in the asymptotic region. It bears on the question of whether isolated vacua are in the same theory as weakly coupled string regions (so that one could hope to gain information about them by resumming string perturbation theory), and deserves further investigation.

## 3 The trouble with bubbles

After these preliminary considerations, it is time to set up the main problem to be solved to resolve the question under study. We will consider a Lagrangian with only a single scalar field coupled to gravity. Multiple field Lagrangians, with generic metric on field space, and the same scaling properties as the Lagrangian below, will behave in exactly the same way. The Lagrangian is

$$=\sqrt{g}[M_P^2R+(\varphi )^2+M^4V(\varphi /m)].$$
(1)
We will assume $`MM_P`$ to assure the validity of effective field theory. Lagrangians of this type can be derived for moduli in various regions of M-theory moduli space. For example, in Horava-Witten like compactifications  we can take $`M`$ to be related to the eleven dimensional Planck scale by $`M^4=\frac{(M_P^{11})^6}{M_P^2}`$. $`m`$ would then be $`M_P`$ or $`M_P^{11}`$ depending on whether $`\varphi `$ was a bulk or boundary modulus444This parametrization may be misleading, in that it holds only in the region of moduli space where the internal volume is large. At the end of this section we will argue that the barrier between a realistic Horava-Witten vacuum and other isolated vacua is of order the Planck scale.. In weakly coupled heterotic string theory with Kahler or racetrack stabilization, we might imagine $`M`$ to be calculated in terms of the string scale and coupling as some nonperturbative effect, $`Mm_se^{c/g^2}`$ while $`m`$ was of order the string scale. Note that in this case one would, for phenomenological reasons, want the string and Planck scales to be very close to each other. A variety of other possible choices for scales could be achieved in brane world scenarios with low fundamental scale.

Before beginning our general analysis, let me note that if $`mM_P`$ , as seems plausible in a variety of contexts, then one can rescale the variables in the Lagrangian in such a way that the equations become independent of all parameters. In such systems there is really only a single scale, $`M^2/M_P`$. Thus, if our contention that “otherwordly” bubbles have a maximum size and lifetime is valid, it implies that the order of magnitude of the maximum size is this universal scale. Thus for bulk moduli in Horava-Witten compactifications, the maximal size of bubbles is of order $`M_P^2/(M_P^{11})^3`$ or about $`10^9`$ times the Planck scale. This is also the order of magnitude of their lifetime, and it is hard to imagine ever distinguishing them from all of the other highly unstable states in such a theory.

It is worth inserting a short comment on energy scales in string theory at this point. Indeed, the argument above appears to be much stronger for cases where the barriers between vacua are of order the Planck scale. In the Horava-Witten case one is faced with the question of what the qualitative difference is between bubbles which are $`10^9`$ times the Planck scale and those which are $`10^{10}`$ kilometers in size. I think the correct answer to this is that we really have no understanding of why any scale in string theory should be much smaller than the Planck scale. Our penchant for thinking otherwise is based on experiment. In cases with a moduli space, one can always get low energy scales by going to boundaries of moduli space. But it is very difficult and may be impossible to find an isolated vacuum in such a regime.

The other generic idea for producing low energy scales involves marginally relevant operators in effective field theory. A modestly small deviation from a fixed point along a marginally relevant direction can generate exponentially small energy scales. The two classes of extant examples in M-theory involve four dimensional models with either eight or four supercharges. In the former case there seems to be no reason for the gauge theory energy scale to have anything to do with the size of the barrier between M-theory vacua. The gauge theory does not produce a potential on the moduli space. When there are only four supercharges we often generate a small potential on the moduli space but the cosmological constant is generically nonvanishing and we are not in the class of asymptotically flat vacua we have been investigating in this paper. While there are supersymmetric gauge theories which generate a small superpotential and have isolated vacua with R-symmetry at the minimum555I thank A. Nelson for pointing out a large class of examples., it is not clear that any of them are realized in string theory.

The question of scales takes on a new light in view of the conjectures presented in . There are two classes of low energy scales that are indicated by experiment. The first is the collection of scales associated with standard model physics. It is plausible that all of these are related to the SUSY breaking scale, and if the conjecture of  is correct, they would not be present in a limiting, asymptotically flat supersymmetric theory of the type we are studying here. The other class are the three pieces of evidence (coupling unification, neutrino mass, and amplitude of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations) for a scale a few orders of magnitude below the Planck scale, which is unrelated to SUSY breaking. In Horava-Witten compactifications, this scale is related to a small potential on moduli space generated by branes in a bulk with eight supercharges. However, the small value of the potential is itself attributed to the fact that the minimum is in an extreme region of moduli space where the volume of the internal space is large in Planck units. It is not easy to understand (particularly in the Horava-Witten context where the codimension of the standard model brane is $`1`$) how the system could have a minimum in this regime. Thus, it is not implausible that other isolated minima are in fact separated from the one describing the real world by barriers of order the (relevant) Planck scale.

### 3.1 Properties of bubble solutions

The investigation of spherically symmetric bubble solutions proceeds by introducing an ansatz for the metric and scalar field in terms of angular coordinates $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ and a two dimensional, radius/time space $`z^a=(t,r)`$. The metric is

$$ds^2=g_{ab}(z)dz^adz^b+\rho ^2(z)d\mathrm{\Omega }^2.$$
(2)
and $`\varphi `$ is taken to be a function only of $`z`$. The equations of motion may be derived from the two dimensional Lagrangian

$$\sqrt{g}[M_P^2\rho ^2R+M_P^2(\rho )^2+\rho ^2(\varphi )^2+M^4\rho ^2V(\varphi /m)].$$
(3)
The stress tensor of the matter field is

$$T_{ab}=_a\varphi _b\varphi g_{ab}(\frac{1}{2}(\varphi )^2M^4V(\varphi /m)).$$
(4)
We are looking for solutions that have the following properties at late times:

* There is an inner region where $`\varphi `$ is approximately constant and equal to one of the isolated minima of $`V`$.
* The metric is asymptotically flat and $`\varphi `$ asymptotes to some other minimum of $`V`$.
* The variation of $`\varphi `$ between the two minima takes place principally in a region of geodesic size $`l`$. We will call this the bubble wall.
* There is a moment of maximal expansion of the bubble wall, when all fields are instantaneously static.

The motivation for the third property, as well as determination of the length $`l`$ comes from the standard energetics of domain walls. The distance between the two minima in field space is of order $`m`$. Thus, the energy of the wall at radius $`R`$ is approximately

$$E4\pi R^2[(m^2/l)+lM^4].$$
(5)
This is minimized at $`l\frac{m}{M^2}`$, giving a tension $`TmM^2`$.

Reserving a detailed investigation of these equations of motion for future work, we borrow an old result of W. Israel . Israel studied bubbles whose walls were made of dust i.e. matter with vanishing pressure. Though this is not necessarily a good approximation to a scalar field stress tensor in the present circumstances, I believe it captures the essential physics. Israel worked in a coordinate system whose radial coordinate is just the field $`\rho `$. He took the bubble to be infinitely thin and parametrized its position by a function $`R(t)`$ where $`t`$ is proper time in the comoving frame of the bubble wall. The metric outside the wall is, by Birkhoff’s theorem, the Schwarzchild metric with mass $``$. In our system $`=4\pi R_{max}^2T`$, where $`R_{max}`$ is the maximal value of the radius and $`T`$ is the tension estimated above.

The equation of motion of the bubble wall is

$$=\mu (\sqrt{1+\dot{R}^2}1/M_PR).$$
(6)
where $`\mu `$ is an integration constant. This determines $`\mu =/(11/R_{max})`$.

The problem comes in the consistency condition that $`R`$ remain outside the Schwarzchild radius of the external metric. This reads

$$R>2/M_P^2=8\pi TR_{max}^2/M_P^2$$
(7)
A fortiori this must be satisfied at $`R_{max}`$ so we obtain an order of magnitude bound

$$R_{max}<\frac{M_P^2}{M^2m},$$
(8)
which is the result announced in the introduction. The introduction of a more realistic model of the scalar stress tensor should not change this result dramatically.

We conclude then that an asymptotic observer who tries to create too large a bubble of otherwordly vacuum will instead create a black hole. Note that for domain wall tensions of order $`1`$ TeV the maximum size bubble is of order $`10^{10}km`$, so discussions of multiple vacua in low energy quantum field theory are not substantially effected by our bound. However, the size shrinks rapidly with rising energy scale for the domain wall tension, and once we are in the range of unification scales the gravitational corrections are significant.

## 4 Discussion

There are, I believe, two possible interpretations of the results of this paper. The most straightforward is the one advertised in the introduction . Isolated asymptotically flat M-theory vacua, and more generally, disconnected components of the moduli space of vacua with four dimensional $`N=1`$ SUSY are truly in different theories. One cannot access one from the other.

One might, as in field theory, hope to evade this conclusion by examining the high energy behavior of the theory, but here again black holes and the UV/IR connection get in the way. High energy scattering in M-theory is almost certainly dominated by black hole production and decay . Black holes decay by Hawking radiation and the Hawking temperature goes to zero with the mass. Thus, by examining the final states in high energy scattering processes, one probes the low energy spectrum of the theory. It is simply not true that high energy physics becomes independent of the choice of isolated vacuum state.

Note by the way that the same conclusion can not be drawn for the case of two different points on a continuous moduli space. The low energy excitations are the same in this case: massless moduli and gravitons and gauge fields. Thus, the asymptotics of high energy black hole production will be the same at the two points.

Another, more bizarre, interpretation of our results is motivated by the idea of black hole complementarity . We have seen that otherworldly bubbles of too large a size end up inside a black hole. As part of the explanation of the black hole information paradox, Susskind and collaborators proposed that the Hilbert space describing physics as seen by observers falling into a black hole is actually a part (a tensor factor) of the Hilbert space of external observers . The great disparity between the description of physics by these two classes of observers is ascribed to noncommutativity between their preferred classes of observables.

Could it be that a similar statement applies to the Hilbert spaces of two isolated vacua: that superpositions of the states of “our” world (if it were asymptotically flat) correspond to states in a completely different vacuum? It is not clear what mathematical content such a statement could have. Any two infinite dimensional separable Hilbert spaces are unitarily isomorphic to each other. So the Hilbert space of asymptotically flat M theory is the same as that of any quantum mechanics problem, even one with a single bosonic degree of freedom. Quantum theories are distinguished by the differences between their Hamiltonian operators and other preferred observables. Once we have fixed those they are surely unitarily inequivalent for different vacua.

Although I cannot at the moment see a way in which such a complementarity between different isolated vacua could make sense, I can also remember the time when black hole complementarity made no sense to me. So perhaps it is worthwhile to keep this crazy idea in the back of our minds.

The most likely conclusion then is that the quantum moduli space of AFM-theory vacua has disconnected components. Different components can not be viewed a part of the same theory, at least not in any of the ways familiar to us from classical or quantum field theory. The components are partially classified by the number of asymptotically flat dimensions and the number of supercharges. For eight or more supercharges, it is plausible (but not proven) that the moduli spaces have only a few connected components, and that we can even pass from lower dimensional compactifications to higher dimensional ones by going to the boundaries of moduli space. For four supercharges it is likely that there are a large number of different theories, one for each connected component of the moduli space. We may view these as being labelled by expectation values of scalar fields, but this description has only a limited, low energy, utility. We cannot explore regimes of the scalar field potential near the Planck energy since any attempt to do so leads to the creation of black holes.

There are two questions closely related to the issues explored in this paper, which deserve further study. The first is the relation between isolated supersymmetric vacua and extreme regions of moduli space. Much of our information about M-theory is gleaned from an examination of weak coupling string theory or low energy SUGRA, and certain approximate vacuum states in this regime look tantalizingly similar to the universe we inhabit. On the other hand, it is very likely that the real world does not inhabit such a regime, even in the limit in which the cosmological constant vanishes and SUSY is restored. What then is the relation between perturbative string or SUGRA vacua, and isolated SUSY minima? The results of  suggest that domain walls between an isolated minimum and a weak coupling regime have problematic naked singularities. It is of great interest to understand the implications of this result for processes within a given asymptotically flat theory.

Finally, we come to the question of whether or not there is a component of the moduli space of AFM-theory with no SUSY whatsoever. In  I suggested that there was not, and a primary motivation for the present paper was the thought that these considerations might provide a proof of my conjecture. So far this has not occurred, but the issue is far from settled.

###### Acknowledgments.

This work was supported in part by the Department of Energy, grant DOE DE-FG02-96ER40959. The author thanks E. Silverstein and A. Rajaraman for discussions. Special thanks go to M. Cvetic for generously explaining numerous details about her work on domain walls in supergravity. I thank E.Witten, B. Kol, L. Motl and C. Roemelsberger for comments which led to most of the changes in this version of the paper.


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

Although many baryon resonances have been seen already in $`\pi N\pi N`$, $`\pi \pi N`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }K`$, etc., many of these states cannot be considered well known. Difficult multi-channel analyses are required to find evidence for resonances from the data, which is necessarily incomplete. Models also predict more states than have been seen in the analyses, and there is a focused effort to discover evidence for as many as possible of these ‘missing’ states in new data from the reactions $`\gamma N`$, $`e^{}N\pi N`$, $`\pi \pi N`$, $`\eta N`$, $`\omega N`$, $`K\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, $`K\mathrm{\Sigma }`$, etc.

The exploration of known and novel resonances which analysis of this new data will allow has important consequences for our understanding of the nature of low-energy hadronic states. The various QCD-based models disagree on the spectrum and even the relevant degrees of freedom and so the number of excitations. There is controversy about the nature of the short-range interactions between the quarks, and the presence of tensor and spin-orbit interactions. QCD also predicts gluonic excitations which have the same quantum numbers as conventional three-quark states, but which have not so far been seen. All of the states are broad and often overlap. It is a unique challenge to those building models of the fundamental excitations and of the reactions to unravel this physics.

Such a program does not directly test QCD. Currently, ab-initio approaches like lattice-QCD are finding good masses for ground-state baryons within the quenched approximation, and full-QCD calculations of these masses are underway . Calculations are also underway of $`P`$-wave baryon masses. However, it will remain difficult to predict with lattice QCD the masses and decay branches of the third and fourth $`P_{11}`$ $`N\frac{1}{2}^+`$ or $`P_{13}`$ $`N\frac{3}{2}^+`$ excited states, for example. The reason for the interest in these highly-excited conventional states is that, as we shall see, establishing their presence rules out models with strong diquark clustering, and the lightest gluonic excitations are likely to have the same quantum numbers.

What this program does test are QCD-based models, which are based on interpreted consequences of QCD. These include potential models, chiral perturbation theory, a collective model based on spectrum-generating algebra, large-$`N_c`$ expansions, and recently relativistic field-theoretic models based on QCD. This work focuses on the description of baryon masses and decays using potential models.

## 2 Potential models

In this approach the effective degrees of freedom are constituent quarks, treated symmetrically, unlike those in quark-diquark  and collective  models. These constituent quarks move in two- and three-body potentials. Initial formulations were non relativistic and based on the Schrödinger equation , although many authors now use the relativistic kinetic energy  (with a lower constituent quark mass) and some introduce relativistic corrections  in the potentials. The dynamical problem is solved by expanding the wave function in a large basis, generally the harmonic-oscillator basis, which has many advantages. It is also possible to use a basis which interpolates between the Coulomb and linear eigenfunctions expected from the short and long-distance behavior of the spin-independent potential, respectively . Once the Hamiltonian matrix has been constructed, it can be diagonalized to find the spectrum and wave functions, and the size of the basis increased until a reasonable convergence of the spectrum is attained.

A popular model of confinement in baryons uses flux-tubes or strings attached to the quarks and to a junction, combined with the adiabatic approximation, where the strings are assumed to adjust rapidly to the quark motion. A potential is generated by minimizing the string length for each set of quark positions. Two cases are illustrated in Fig. 1, that where all of angles in the triangle made by joining the quarks are less than 120, or where one of the angles is larger than 120. In the first case the sum of the string lengths is minimized when the angles at the junction are all 120, and in the second it is when the junction is over the quark where the large angle resides. In both cases the confining potential is the sum of the string lengths times the string tension $`b1.0`$ GeV/fm, and it is this potential which is used in modern baryon spectrum calculations.

Quarks are known to exchange gluons with a coupling which is weak at short distances. The short distance potential between the quarks is modeled using this one-gluon exchange interaction as a guide. An alternate model (OPE) uses the exchange of an octet of pseudoscalar mesons , with the motivation that the short-distance dynamics of constituent quarks should be governed by dynamical chiral-symmetry breaking. The one-gluon-exchange interaction is similar to the hyperfine interaction between the proton and the electron in the hydrogen atom, with contact and tensor pieces, although it is much stronger. It is responsible for the approximately 300 MeV splitting of the $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1232)`$ and the nucleon. There are also spin-orbit interactions implied by the one-gluon exchange interaction, and spin-orbit interactions due to Thomas-precession in the confining potential are present regardless of the source of the short-distance interactions.

More recent models generally use the relativistic kinetic energy for the quarks and a quark mass of about 220 MeV for the light quarks. The relativized model  also applies momentum-dependent relativistic corrections to the confining and short-distance potentials. The wave functions are then expanded in a large (often harmonic-oscillator) basis, and the resulting Hamiltonian matrix is then diagonalized to find the spectrum and wave functions.

As a relevant illustration of this technique, there are three radially-excited harmonic oscillator spatial states, one in each of the two relative coordinates and one unique to the three-body system proportional to the dot product of the two relative coordinates ($`𝝆𝝀`$). When combined into states of definite exchange symmetry, these make up a symmetric state and a pair of mixed-symmetry states, two of which are illustrated in Fig. 2. When these $`L^P=0^+`$ states are combined with the mixed-symmetry quark-spin $`S=\frac{1}{2}`$ and totally symmetric $`S=\frac{3}{2}`$ states, the result is five states nominally in the $`N=2`$ oscillator band (but note the potential is not harmonic). These are two $`N\frac{1}{2}^+`$ states, a $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{1}{2}^+`$ state, a $`N\frac{3}{2}^+`$ state, and a $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{3}{2}^+`$ state. Some of these states have been seen on pion-nucleon elastic scattering. These are the Roper resonance $`N\frac{1}{2}^+(1440)`$, its analog $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{3}{2}^+(1600)`$, and $`N\frac{1}{2}^+(1710)`$.

Decay models based on the elementary-meson emission  or the $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{0}^{}`$ pair-creation model  can explain why the other states have not been seen–they have small $`N\pi `$ couplings–and can predict alternate final-state channels in which they are likely to be seen. In one-gluon exchange models the Roper resonance is lighter than the other positive-parity excited states due to a strongly negative contact interaction like that in the proton, and it is also split from the other positive-parity states by the anharmonic nature of the confining potential . When treated properly, without resort to perturbation theory in the large anharmonic perturbation, the Roper resonance becomes much lighter than the other positive parity excited states, but not light enough to explain its position in the spectrum below the lowest (at 1520 MeV) of the negative-parity non-strange excited states. The next $`P_{11}`$ state, $`N\frac{1}{2}^+(1710)`$, is in roughly the right position in the spectrum.

Models with OPE-based short-distance interactions explain the low position of this state as due to the flavor-dependence of the resulting contact interaction . However, the Roper resonance is very broad (roughly 350 MeV width), and neither of these approaches takes into account shifts in its mass due to self-energy corrections from baryon-meson loops, which can naively be expected to be of the order of the width. It is therefore not clear whether 100 MeV discrepancies in any spectrum will allow conclusions to be made until this rather difficult problem is consistently dealt with, for all the states in the spectrum.

Masses for nonstrange baryon states below 2200 MeV calculated in this way are shown in Figures 3 and 4, along with $`N\pi `$ decay amplitudes  (their squares give the $`N\pi `$ partial widths) for each state. The calculated masses are shown as thin bars, and the length of the shaded part of each bar is proportional to the $`N\pi `$ decay amplitude strength. Also shown in these figures are boxes showing the range in the central value of the mass of resonances quoted by the Particle Data Group  (along with their best estimate of the mass), which are compiled from partial-wave analyses of mainly $`N\pi `$ elastic and inelastic scattering data. It is clear that low-lying well separated states with substantial $`N\pi `$ widths are those likely to have been seen in the analyses, and that model states with small $`N\pi `$ couplings are either poorly established resonances, or not present at all in the analyses. Models which describe the degrees of freedom in baryons at low energy as quarks and diquarks have fewer degrees of freedom and so fewer excitations, so the discovery of additional positive parity excited states (and the confirmation of some existing states) predicted by models which treat the quarks symmetrically could rule out this possibility.

Further insight into the nature of the short-distance interactions between quarks can be found from a consideration of the nature of the spin-orbit and tensor interactions in baryons. Although the cancellation of the two-body parts of the one-gluon exchange (OGE) spin-orbit interactions and those arising from Thomas precession in the confining potential can be arranged , spin-orbit splittings are still too large in non relativistic OGE-based models. In the relativized model it is shown that it is possible to have small spin-orbit interactions in baryons due to relativistic effects . This problem is not solved by the elimination of the spin-orbit forces due to the short-distance interactions, such as in OPE-based models, as this to a large extent is required to cancel against those from the confining potential .

Pseudoscalar exchange (OPE) models of the short-distance interactions between quarks have tensor interactions which are very different from those arising from OGE. These interactions have important consequences for the tensor mixings between states such as the $`N\frac{1}{2}^{}(1535)`$ and $`N\frac{1}{2}^{}(1650)`$, which are strong. The mixings arising from OGE explain why the lower of these two states has a large branch  to $`N\eta `$, which is not the case for mixings found using OPE. Some form of vector exchange, such as gluon exchange or the exchange of two pions in the form of a vector meson , is required to describe the details of the strong decays of these states.

Finally, it is clear that OPE-based descriptions of the baryon spectrum cannot reproduce the reasonable unification of baryon and meson physics provided by OGE-based models. They cannot produce hyperfine mixing in mesons where it is needed, and imply unphysical OZI-violating mixings in isoscalar mesons . It is, perhaps, natural  to exclude a description of meson states in a model where bound quarks interact by exchanging those same meson states.

Interesting and different physics can be accessed by studying states containing one ($`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$) or more ($`\mathrm{\Xi }`$) strange quarks. The presence of the strange quark breaks degeneracies present in the nonstrange spectrum and so there are more negative-parity ($`L=1`$) excited states. Our knowledge of the spectrum from partial-wave analyses is limited to the ground states $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$, and $`\mathrm{\Sigma }^{}(1385)`$, and about half of the negative-parity excited states and a few of the low-lying positive-parity states predicted by constituent quark models. The spin-orbit partners $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1405)\frac{1}{2}^{}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1520)\frac{3}{2}^{}`$ provide an interesting challenge for quark models, which need to suppress spin-orbit splittings elsewhere in the spectrum to agree with the analyses. These states are predicted to be roughly degenerate in potential models. Because of this poor description in the constituent quark model they been described as $`\overline{K}N`$ bound states. It is also possible that their large mass splitting arises from corrections to their masses from $`qqq(\overline{q}q)`$ configurations, as the lightest state lies just below threshold for decay to $`\overline{K}N`$. Note that OPE models can be adjusted to accommodate this splitting with explicitly flavor-dependent contact interactions (not just through the mass dependence of the hyperfine interaction, as in OGE-based models).

There is information on only a few excited $`\mathrm{\Xi }`$ states extracted from the data, which include the ground states $`\mathrm{\Xi }`$ and $`\mathrm{\Xi }^{}`$, and a few negative-parity excited states. For this reason it is important to search for information on excited $`\mathrm{\Xi }`$ states. There is recent evidence from Jefferson Laboratory of a signal for $`\mathrm{\Xi }`$ states in $`e^{}p\mathrm{\Xi }KK`$.

## 3 Hybrid baryons

The discovery of hybrid baryons is complicated by the fact that the quantum numbers of baryons with excited glue are the same as those of conventional three-quark excitations. Using the flux-tube picture of the confining potential described above, it is possible  to describe light hybrid baryons as states where the quarks move in a potential described by an excited state of the glue. This is very different from earlier $`qqqg`$ models  of hybrid baryons, where a gluon and three quarks are confined to a bag.

For fixed positions $`𝐫_i`$ of the three quarks, the flux tubes are allowed to move. This is modeled by the motion of the junction, and by transverse motion of the strings relative to their equilibrium directions, as in Fig. 5. By means of an analytic calculation with a bead at the junction and a single bead on each of the three strings, it was shown that a reasonable approximation to the ground-state and first-excited-state energy of the string for each quark position can be found by examining only the junction motion. The strings simply follow the motion of the junction. The adiabatic potentials corresponding to the ground state of the string, $`V_B(𝐫_1,𝐫_2,𝐫_3)`$, and the the first excited state of the string, $`V_H(𝐫_1,𝐫_2,𝐫_3)`$, are found by a four-parameter variational calculation, for all quark positions.

The difference of these potentials is then added to the Hamiltonian for the three quark problem, and the energies of the lightest hybrid baryons are then found by solving the three-quark dynamical problem as before, but with the excited string Hamiltonian. It can be shown that the string excitations have orbital angular momentum and parity $`1^+`$, so that when combined with the lowest energy quark motion in the new potential, which is still $`L=0`$ and $`S=\frac{1}{2}`$ or $`\frac{3}{2}`$, the resulting lowest-lying states are $`N\frac{1}{2}^+`$ and $`N\frac{3}{2}^+`$ at roughly 1870 MeV, with a model error of about $`\pm 100`$ MeV. There are also $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{1}{2}^+`$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{3}{2}^+`$, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{5}{2}^+`$ states at about 2075 MeV with the same estimated error. In the bag model  there is a $`N\frac{5}{2}^+`$ excited state and no $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{5}{2}^+`$ state, and the lightest states are at about 1500 MeV, significantly lighter than these flux-tube model calculated masses.

Referring back to Figs. 3 and 4, we see that these new states are predicted by this flux-tube model to lie in a region of the spectrum where there are several missing conventional three-quark excitations. Given that these states are likely to mix with the conventional excitations (through corrections to the adiabatic approximation outlined above), it is important that a careful and detailed analysis of these partial waves is carried out with an eye towards establishing more states than are possible without exciting the flux-tubes. It may also be possible to distinguish hybrids based on their electromagnetic excitation amplitudes  and strong-decay signatures.

## 4 Baryon strong decays

It is not enough to find a state in a model with a mass similar to one seen in analyses of scattering experiments (and so listed by the Particle Data Group). In addition, it is necessary to explain why a state should be seen, usually (for nonstrange states) in $`N\pi X`$, and conversely why states present in the model which have not been seen are missing in the analyses. Popular models of these strong couplings are based on string breaking by the creation of a $`q\overline{q}`$ pair with vacuum quantum numbers. This model is referred to as the $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{0}^{}`$ model , as a such a quark and antiquark necessarily have relative $`L=1`$ and $`S=1`$ combined to $`J^{PC}=0^{++}`$. Models of meson decays preferentially create this pair along the string connecting the quarks.

Progress has been made in understanding this model at the microscopic level . Certain meson decays can result in two relative angular momenta for the final state mesons ($`S`$ and $`D`$-waves, for example), and the ratio of the amplitudes for these decays depends minimally on anything but the structure of the decay vertex. The model of Ackleh, Barnes and Swanson (ABS) creates the quark pair by an interaction with a quark in the decaying meson of the same kind as that which is responsible for that meson’s structure. ABS show that this interaction resembles $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{0}^{}`$ and that the comparison with these ratios favors $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{0}^{}`$ over the creation of a pair with gluon ($`{}_{}{}^{3}S_{1}^{}`$) quantum numbers, for example.

The application of the $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{0}^{}`$ model to baryon strong decays explains why some of the states predicted by OGE-based models are missing in analyses of the scattering data, which is because they have small couplings to the $`N\pi `$ channel. Such selection rules may not apply to electromagnetic production of such states, and this model can be used to predict the strongest decay channels for these missing states. This analysis depends not only on the form of the decay operator but also on the model wave functions used for the baryons. A two-parameter model fit to $`N\pi `$ decays has been used  to predict the $`\mathrm{\Delta }\pi `$, $`N\rho `$, $`N\eta `$, $`N\eta ^{}`$, $`N\omega `$, $`N(1440)\pi `$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1600)\pi `$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\eta `$, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\omega `$ decays of excited baryon states. In addition, decays to $`YK`$ states have been examined, where $`Y`$ is a hyperon $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }^{}(1385)`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1405)`$, or $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1520)`$, and $`K`$ is a kaon or $`K^{}`$. These calculations show that it should be possible to discover ‘missing’ baryon states in several of these channels, especially those with thresholds in the region where these excited positive-parity states lie.

The total widths and branching fractions to nonstrange and strange final states calculated in this way for missing and poorly established nonstrange baryons in the low-lying (nominally $`N=2`$) positive-parity bands are shown in Table 1. Branching fractions to $`\mathrm{\Delta }\omega `$, $`N\eta ^{}`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }\frac{1}{2}^{}(1405)K`$, and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1520)\frac{3}{2}^{}K`$ are omitted as they are never larger than 0.01. Note that these branching fractions should be considered as upper bounds, as there are final states which may have substantial branches, such as $`N^{}\pi `$, where $`N^{}`$ is a negative-parity excited state, which are not included in the total width. Model results for branching fractions are likely to be more reliable than those for the total widths, as they are ratios and some model uncertainties cancel out. Table 1 shows clearly that these states have small $`N\pi `$ branches and that they may be easy to see in $`N\pi \pi `$ final states such as $`\mathrm{\Delta }\pi `$ and $`N\rho `$, as in other channels like $`N\eta `$  and $`N\omega `$. Branching fractions into strange final states are predicted to be somewhat smaller, with a few exceptions, but information on these channels can be considered complementary to that of non-strange final states, and so will likely be very useful.

## 5 Conclusions

One-gluon-exchange based potential models, when combined with the $`{}_{}{}^{3}P_{0}^{}`$ strong decay model, adequately describe diverse features of excited baryon and meson physics. They have been applied to the spectra, strong decays, and electromagnetic couplings of baryons such as photocouplings and electroproduction amplitudes (not mentioned here). The results of these calculations show reasonable agreement with resonance properties extracted from analyses of data.

These models are not covariant, although they include relativistic corrections, and electroproduction amplitudes have been calculated with light-cone based relativistic models. We need new relativistic structure models based on QCD. More importantly, constituent quark models generally ignore Fock-space components of baryons beyond simple $`qqq`$ configurations. This is equivalent to the quenched approximation in lattice QCD, or to assuming that baryon-meson intermediate states have no effects on the physics of the baryon resonances. This is obviously an important missing ingredient, given that none of these states are narrow. In addition, these models need to take into account excitations of the glue.

The parallel development of a detailed and comprehensive data analysis program is required to extract meaningful results for new and poorly established baryons from exciting new data coming from several sources. These results will certainly challenge our understanding of the physics of excited baryons, and may lead to a new level of understanding of the low-energy features of QCD.