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# Cosmic Shear Analysis in 50 Uncorrelated VLT Fields. Implications for Ω₀, 𝜎₈ Based on observations obtained at the Very Large Telescope UT1 (ANTU) which is operated by the European Southern Observatory (program 63.O-0039A).

## 1 Introduction

The weak lensing by large scale structures (hereafter cosmic shear) probes the projected mass density along the line-of-sight, regardless of the distribution of light. This could yield powerful constraints on the evolution of the dark matter power spectrum, the cosmological parameters and the mass/light bias as a function of the angular scale and the redshift (see reviews from \[Mellier 1999\], \[Bartelmann & Schneider 2001\] and references therein).

Four teams announced recently the first measurements of a significant variance of the shear $`\gamma ^2`$ on scales below 30 arc-minutes (\[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\], \[Bacon et al. 2000a\], \[Wittman et al. 2000\], \[Kaiser et al. 2000\]). All the measurements are in remarkable agreement, and it is worth to mention that these analyses were done from independent data sets obtained on various telescopes and by measuring galaxy shapes with different tools. Moreover the signal is consistent with the theoretical expectations of current cosmological models, and does not show strong contamination by residual systematics. Though it is not yet possible to break the degeneracy between the normalization of the power spectrum, $`\sigma _8`$, and the density parameter $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ from a measure of $`\gamma ^2`$ alone (\[Bernardeau et al. 1997\],\[Jain & Seljak 1997\]), some cosmological models can already be rejected (like the COBE-normalized SCDM which predicts too much power at small scale, at the 5-$`\sigma `$ level). These encouraging results show that cosmic shear is close to be a mature tool and offers a neat complementary approach in cosmology compared to CMB anisotropies, SNIa, or galaxy catalogue statistics.

However, more quantitative and reliable constraints on cosmological models are still under way. The need for a high confidence level on the cosmic shear signal demands an excellent control of the systematics and a significant reduction of the cosmic variance (\[Van Waerbeke et al. 1999\]). The former issue is discussed at length by \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\] and \[Bacon et al. 2000a\] on real data, and it is also addressed in \[Kaiser 2000\], \[Erben et al. 2000\] and \[Bacon et al. 2000b\] using simulated data. They have carried out convincing tests and simulations in order to demonstrate that gravitational weak distortion is measurable down to slightly below the percent level, without critical issues regarding residuals from the PSF corrections.

In order to convince that the signal is not contaminated by some unexpected systematics, it is still important to diversify the observing conditions, and produce more independent data sets with different systematics. Of equal importance, the field-to-field variations, caused by source and lens clusterings and by cosmic variance, are an additional source of noise. The four studies mentionned above cover a total area of about 5 deg2 but only totalize 28 uncorrelated fields. Clearly, one needs to increase first the number of uncorrelated fields, rather than the total solid angle of the survey, to explore the field-to-field variation of the cosmic shear amplitude and to minimize the cosmic variance.

This work explores a new data set obtained with the faint object spectrograph FORS1 (\[Appenzeller et al 1998\]) mounted on the first VLT (UT1/ANTU) at Paranal (program 63.O-0039A; PI: Mellier). These data provide independent measurements of the cosmic shear signal, in addition to the four previous studies, but with a totally new technology telescope and a new observing mode. In contrast to previous telescopes the VLT is continuously operated in an active optics mode and offers the possibility to observe in service mode. Thanks to its large collecting power, the VLT can observe many single fields very quickly which permits to do deep pointings on many different lines-of-sights. This new strategy, complementary to the one we adopted on the CFHT data (\[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]), gave us an interesting large complementary sample of 50 VLT/FORS1 uncorrelated fields for cosmic shear. The analysis of these fields is discussed below. They are then combined with other existing results to give the first constraints on ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$,$`\sigma _8`$) derived from cosmic shear.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 is a description of the data and the observations. Details on data reduction are given in Section 3. The analysis of the fields and the measurements of the shapes of galaxies are developed in Section 4. In Section 5 we discuss the systematics. Discussion and combination with other results in a cosmological context is given in Section 6.

## 2 Data and Observations

The targets were selected from three very large sky areas close to the North and South galactic poles with the following criteria:

1. no stars brighter than 8th magnitude inside a circle of 1 degree around the FORS field (to avoid light scattering);
2. no stars brighter than 14th magnitude inside the FORS field;
3. no extended bright galaxies in the field. Their luminous halo could contaminate the shape of galaxy located around them;
4. no rejection of over-dense regions, where clusters or groups of galaxies could be present from visual inspection of the Digital Sky Survey, and no preferences towards empty fields. This criterion avoids biases toward under-dense regions with systematically low value of the convergence;
5. minimum separation between each pointing of at least 5 degrees in order to minimize the correlation between fields;
6. galactic latitudes lower than $`70^{}`$ in order to get enough stars per field for the PSF correction.

We selected 50 FORS1 fields, each covering 6.8’$`\times `$6.8’. The total field of view is 0.64 deg2 and the pointings are randomly distributed over more than 1000 deg2. Among those 50 fields, two have been selected from the STIS parallel data sample, for cosmic shear analysis on very small scale, and two are in common with the WHT sample observed by \[Bacon et al. 2000a\] 111We plan to check the reliability of the measurements by comparing the analyses done by each group on these common fields.

The observations are in I-band data only and were obtained with FORS1 on the VLT/UT1 (ANTU) at the Paranal Observatory. They were carried out in service mode by the ESO staff during Period 63 (March 1999 to September 1999) with the standard imaging mode of the spectrograph. It turns out that our program is perfectly suited for service mode, both from a practical point of view, since they are easily set up during service mode periods on UT1, and from a scientific point of view, since we have a guarantee to get a complete set of data within our specifications.
FORS1 is equipped with a 2048$`\times `$2048 thinned CCD, backside illuminated. The pixel size is 24 $`\mu `$m, providing a scale of 0.2 arc-second in standard mode of the instrument222see http://www.eso.org/instruments/fors1/index.html. Remarkably, no fringe pattern has been detected on FORS1 with this filter, so I-band observations enable one to get optimal image quality on each field. Since we only requested non-photometric nights, with seeing lower than 0.8 arc-seconds, the schedule of our 50 fields over the semester was indeed quite easy. The total exposure time (36 minutes) was computed in order to reach $`I=24.5`$, which corresponds to a galaxy number density per fields of about 30 gal $`\mathrm{arcmin}^2`$. The expected average redshift of the lensed sources is $`z1`$. Each pointing was split into at least $`6\times 6`$ minutes exposures with a random offset of 10 arc-seconds in between. Some details about the 50 fields are given in Table 1.

## 3 Data reduction

The data were received by the end of November 1999 at IAP. The processing of the 50 fields was done using the TERAPIX333see http://terapix.iap.fr data center facilities. The FORS1 images are much smaller than the big CCD mosaics usually processed by TERAPIX, so we used a specific pipeline which includes some IRAF scripts. Since the FORS1 detector has four outputs, we simply consider each quadrant as an individual device during all the preprocessing stage.

The master bias was built using a standard median filter. For the superflat, since the CCD images do not show fringe patterns, the processing can be done in one step with a simple un-smoothed master-flat to correct for the relative pixel-to-pixel variations. However, the multiplicity of observations done in service mode provides images taken during different Moon periods and with different weather conditions which cannot be assembled to build up a single superflat. In our case, when all the images are used, the global master-flat shows a strong and persistent gradient along the CCD ($`>10\%`$). It is therefore preferable to use daily master flats by averaging only the images taken during the same night. The drawback is the small number of images which can be combined together. If it is too small, each individual frame has a strong relative weight which may results in correlated noise between individual images and the master-flat. Therefore we decided to produce a special daily master-flat for each image: each individual frame was flattened by using a master-flat done with the rest of the data taken during the night.

The four quadrants are then put together and rescaled according to the gain of each output. If the sky backgrounds of the four quadrants are still different, we proceed to another small rescaling accordingly. This procedure turns out to work well in most cases. However, some images are not perfectly flatfielded and still show a small cross-shape discontinuity in the middle of the FORS1 images, between the borders of the quadrants. This area has been masked in the final co-added images when necessary.

The stacking of each frame is done using standard IRAF procedure . The final error for alignment was less than one tenth of pixel. The final set of 50 stacked fields turns out to have a remarkable seeing distribution (see Figure 1). In fact, 90% of them are within our seeing specifications, with an average value of 0.63”.

The photometric calibrations of the FORS1 fields were done using the photometric standard star images provided by the ESO staff at Paranal. The fields were chosen in a fairly broad sample of the Landolt’s catalog (\[Landolt 1992\]): SA92, SA95, SA101, SA109, SA110, MARK-A, PG0131-051, PG1313-086, PG1633+099, PG2213-006, PG2331+055. The photometric zero-points were calculated using magnitudes computed by SExtractor 444Using MAG\_AUTO with a minimum radius of 3.5 pixels. and by rescaling the gains of each quadrant accordingly. We noticed a fluctuation of the zero-point of about $`\pm 0.05`$ magnitude along the observing period, probably produced by the important variation of the atmospheric conditions during the whole semester.

The final photometric catalogs look sufficiently homogeneous from field to field for our purpose. The magnitude histograms for each field have the same shapes and show a cutoff at $`I_{AB}=24.525.1`$. This cut-off defines our limiting magnitude. Five fields have a brighter magnitude cut-off at $`I_{AB}=23.524.5`$. These fields have the worse observational condition: seeing higher than 0.8” and high sky background due to the moonlight. Some fields have a higher number of co-added frames but it does not change significantly the final magnitude limit of the 50 fields.

## 4 Measurement of the shear signal

### 4.1 Catalogue generation and selection criteria

The galaxies have been processed using our modified version of IMCAT software555Made available by Nick Kaiser; http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/$``$kaiser/. The modifications and the general analysis method have already been described in Section 3 of \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]. Here we remind shortly the selection procedure, paying attention only to the differences with the previous CFHT data analysis.

The principal steps are the followings:

* Masking the boundaries: the splitting procedure of exposures generates noisy thick strips surrounding the CCD, with lower signal-to-noise ratio than the rest of the image, and a grid-like pattern produced by the stacking procedure. We therefore mask automatically the boundaries of each image.
* Masking the central cross-shape area: the four readout ports of the CCD delineate four well-defined quadrants with different readout noise, charge transfer efficiency and gain. At the junction of the quadrants, the sharp changes of CCD properties appear as a cross-shape area located in the middle of the CCD. In principle, this area is very small, but, like at the boundaries, the small shifts between each exposure enlarge its size which thus appears as a broad region with smaller signal-to-noise ratio than the rest of the image. On the fields affected by this effect, the central cross-area is masked.
* Masking objects: large areas around bright stars, saturated columns and diffraction patterns are masked on all images. They can produce spurious elongated structures which can be misinterpreted as shear signal. Likewise, we also mask areas around bright and/or extended galaxies, elongated stripes produced by residuals from asteroids, satellites or aircrafts. The fraction of objects removed by this masking procedure (boundaries, cross-shape area and objects) varies from 10% to 20%.
* Stars selection: we use a radius ($`r_h`$) vs magnitude ($`mag.`$) plot to select unsaturated stars (we do not include stars closer than one magnitude from the saturation level). The vertical box which encompasses the stars is carefully sized to avoid saturated stars and the crowed faint-magnitude areas of the $`r_hmag.`$ diagram where galaxies and stars mix together. This domain contains very low signal-to-noise objects and is most of the time useless for the calibration.
* Fit of the stellar polarizability tensors: using these stars, we can map the PSF by fitting their raw shape to a third order polynomial. We then compute the quantities $`p_\alpha =\frac{e_\alpha ^{}}{P_{\alpha \alpha }^{sm}}`$ and $`\frac{P_{}^{sh}}{P_{}^{sm}}`$;
* Source selection: The starting sample of galaxies is extracted from the 50 VLT fields using SExtractor (\[Bertin & Arnouts 1996\]) and produces a raw catalogue of 72500 galaxies. Objects at the edge of the fields and deblended objects are immediately removed. Galaxies with a half light radius smaller than the largest size of the star box are also removed. As pointed out by \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\], close pairs of galaxies may produce spurious elongated galaxies, consequently pairs with separation $`d<10`$ pixels are also removed. We do not perform any magnitude selection, therefore the redshift distribution is broad and can be described by:

$$p(z)=\beta \frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }((1+\alpha )/\beta )}{z_0}\left(\frac{z}{z_0}\right)^\alpha \mathrm{exp}\left[\left(\frac{z}{z_0}\right)^\beta \right],$$
(1)
with $`\alpha =2,\beta =1.5,z_0=0.8`$, which is consistent with a limiting magnitude $`I_{AB}24.5`$ as given by \[Cohen et al. 1999\].
* Estimate of the shear: using the stellar fits, we compute the ’pre-seeing’ shear polarizability for all the selected sources as described in \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\].

Figure 3 shows the star ellipticities for all VLT fields before and after the PSF correction. One of the fields shows a seeing significantly alterated by strong wind and its image quality is too far from our specifications, this field (stis7new in Table 1) was removed. We ended up with 49 fields with in average 30 stars/field corresponding to a total number of 46941 galaxies, that is $`21\mathrm{sources}/\mathrm{arcmin}^2`$. Note that this is less than the number given in Table 1 which was the number density before objects selection through our shape measurement process.

### 4.2 Shear measurement

At this stage, the variance of the shear can be computed exactly as described in \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]. However here we have measured the signal in a slightly different manner. Instead of computing the variance of the shear by simply squaring the averaged shear per cell, we directly removed the diagonal terms from the squared quantity, such that the computed variance is by definition an unbiased estimate of the true shear variance (see \[Schneider et al. 1998\]). Therefore we do not need to subtract the shot noise contribution as in previous works, which was done using time-consuming monte-carlo randomizations. Let us call $`e_\alpha (\theta _k)`$ the ellipticity of a galaxy at a position $`\theta _k`$, and $`w_k`$ its weight, calculated according to \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\] (see Section 3.2 of that paper).

An unbiased estimate of the variance of the shear $`\gamma ^2(\theta _i)`$ at location $`\theta _i`$ can be directly obtained by measuring:

$$E[\gamma ^2(\theta _i)]=\frac{{\displaystyle \underset{\alpha =1}{\overset{2}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{kl}{\overset{N}{}}}w_kw_le_\alpha (𝜽_k)e_\alpha (𝜽_l)}{{\displaystyle \underset{kl}{\overset{N}{}}}w_kw_l}$$
(2)
The final product, the variance of the corrected ellipticity of galaxies as function of angular smoothing scales, is summarized on Figure 7. On this Figure we also plot the results of the previous detections. The angular scale corresponds to the diameter of a circular top-hat filter (we rescaled accordingly the angular scales of the previous studies which were published for a squared top-hat). The 1-$`\sigma `$ error bars have been calculated from 100 realizations of noisy catalogues by randomizing the position angle of each galaxy.

The amplitude and the shape of the signal are in good agreement with former results. They are within the 1-$`\sigma `$ error at all scales (note that the points are not independent). The agreement of these new measurements with previous ones provides a new independent indication that the signal is not produced by uncontrolled systematics. However, as for the CFHT analysis (see \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]), we must analyze carefully the systematics in the VLT data.

We checked the stability of this result with respect to the selection criteria by changing the star selection or the galaxy selection criteria. For the stars, we changed the box-size which encompasses the objects inside the vertical $`r_h\mathrm{magnitude}`$ branch by increasing the magnitude range by 0.5 magnitude. For galaxies, we changed a few parameters, like the object definition (9 contiguous pixels having 0.5 $`\sigma `$ above the background or 6 contiguous pixels having 1.5 $`\sigma `$ above the background). We found that the amplitude of the variance fluctuates by $`\pm 7\%`$ on all scales but 2.5 arc-minute for which the fluctuation is larger ($`\pm 15\%`$). These fluctuations are within the 1-$`\sigma `$ error bars, therefore selection criteria do not have a significant influence.
Figure 7 shows an unusual behavior at $`\theta `$ 2.5 arc-minutes. The slope changes and the amplitude of the shear seems to increase and then to drop again on larger scales. This is a marginal perturbation within the error bars, but it turns out that it appears at the angular scale corresponding to one half the CCD size, so it could results from the masking procedure of the cross-shape area. We looked at this more carefully by computing the shear signal inside vertical and horizontal strips of similar width to the mask. The results shown on Figure 4 (which is discussed in the next Section) do not reveal any difference between the central regions ($`X=0`$ or $`Y=0`$), where the two segments of the cross are located, and the rest of the image. We conclude that there is no evidence for systematics generated by the 4-port readout configuration and that the increase of the signal is likely random error due to the lower signal-to-noise ratio on that scale.

## 5 Analysis of systematics

A critical issue regarding the measurement of cosmic shear signal is the understanding and handling of the various systematics. As in previous studies, we have taken special care of this point with this new VLT data set.
\[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\] discussed various types of systematics, attempted to provide some technical solutions to avoid part of them prior to use the KSB correction and provided a posteriori quality check on the shear signal (see Sect. 5 of \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]). We used similar controls for the VLT data:

* CCD effects: The spurious signal produced by bad charge transfer efficiency, very bright stars, big galaxies or asteroids are considerably reduced by the masking procedure described in Section 4. Possible residuals from charge transfer efficiency can be estimated by looking at the variation of the $`e_1`$ and $`e_2`$ components as function of the distance of objects with respect to the readout port, for each quadrant of the CCD. As shown in Figure 4, the corrected components $`e_1`$ and $`e_2`$ do not show variations along the $`X`$ or $`Y`$ strips, except a small negative $`e_1`$ component versus the $`Y`$ strip for $`Y<1000`$. We shall see in the following that it has a completely negligible contribution to the variance of the shear. In fact, these plots do not show the significant systematic residual of the $`e_1`$ component which was observed on CFHT data (\[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]). Therefore it is likely that the residual observed on CFHT data is intrinsic to the CFH12K camera. This also explains why it was not observed also by \[Kaiser et al. 2000\] who only used UH8K data.
* residuals from the correction of the PSF anisotropy: FORS1 has a remarkable image quality over the field. Because of the high quality of the optical design and of the small field of view of FORS1 as compared to the UH8K and the CFH12K cameras, optical distortions are much smaller than in \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]. However, active optics on the VLT could eventually produce a new and/or unexpected systematic effect not fully corrected with KSB.

We tested the systematic residuals in exactly the same way as in \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]. The results are summarized in Figures 5 and 6. The former shows that before the PSF anisotropy correction, the ellipticities of stars and galaxies are correlated. In contrast, after the correction the average galaxy ellipticity is zero, whatever the PSF anisotropy is. It shows that the correction of the PSF anisotropy works very well even in the case of active optics and does not bias the corrected ellipticities of the galaxies.

As pointed out in \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\], the averaged ellipticity of galaxies binned, either with respect to the star ellipticity or to the CCD lines/columns as described above, is not a strong enough test of systematics because it is still possible that the galaxy ellipiticities strongly fluctuate inside very small bins. It is therefore better to measure the variance $`\gamma ^2`$ instead of a simple average in bins. Moreover, the result found can be compared directly to the signal provided that, for each scale, the bin size is adapted to encompass a similar number of galaxies as in the top-hat filter used to measure the signal. If our corrections are not contaminated by strong systematics, at all scales this variance must be much smaller than the signal.
Figure 6 shows the results. For each of the three panels, the filled circles with error bars show the VLT results as shown in Figure 7, and the dashed lines show the 1-$`\sigma `$ error bars obtained from 100 randomizations of the position angle of galaxies. The open circles in the top panel show $`\gamma ^2`$ measured in bins of galaxies sorted according to the strength of the anisotropy of stars (either $`e_1^{}`$ or $`e_2^{}`$ corresponding to the two sets of open circles). The open circles in the middle panel show $`\gamma ^2`$ with the galaxies sorted according to the $`X`$ and $`Y`$ positions on the CCDs. (again, each set of open circles correspond to galaxies sorted either according $`X`$ or to $`Y`$). It is clear from this plot that the slight negative component $`e_1`$ observed for $`Y<1000`$ in Figure 4 is not strong enough to produce a significant systematic compared to the signal. These two panels demonstrate that the residuals are always within the 1-$`\sigma `$ error and fluctuate around zero. We conclude that these residuals are not responsible for the signal we detect.
It is interesting to estimate how strong the systematic effects could be if we neglected to correct the shape of the galaxies for the PSF anisotropies. This is shown in the bottom panel of Figure 6 where $`\gamma ^2`$ is computed in the same way as for the top panel, but with galaxies uncorrected for the PSF anisotropy. The uncorrected signal shows a significant offset which is almost insensitive to the angular scale (because the PSF is roughly constant over each CCD). Therefore, the shape and the amplitude of the signal are unlikely to be produced by residuals from the PSF anisotropy. Moreover, we see that a complete lack of anisotropy correction produces a systematic of similar amplitude as the real signal (and not much higher). Therefore, even a partial anisotropy correction already permits the detection of the cosmic signal.

## 6 Discussion

The VLT data confirms the detection of a significant weak distortion signal on angular scales between 0.5 to 5 arcminutes. Its amplitude and its shape are similar to those announced previously on these angular scales by four independent teams. The study of systematics does not reveal any bias and reproduces similar trends as for the CFHT data but on a much larger sample of uncorrelated fields and on a more homogeneous sample (only I band, narrow seeing distribution and depth).

It is interesting to investigate what constraints on cosmological models we could provide from the cosmic shear surveys completed so far by \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\] (CFHT), \[Bacon et al. 2000a\] (WHT), \[Wittman et al. 2000\] (CTIO), \[Kaiser et al. 2000\] (CFHT) and by adding the VLT data (this work). The five data set have been observed either in $`R`$ or in I-bands, at roughly the same depth ($`I24.0`$), so we can assume that the average redshifts of the sources are almost the same and should be close to the value inferred from the deep redshift survey carried by \[Cohen et al. 1999\]: $`z_00.8`$ with the broad distribution given by Eq.(1). Figure 7 shows some current cosmological models with the present-day data. The non-linear evolution of the power spectrum of density fluctuations has been taken into account following the prescription given by \[Peacock & Dodds 1996\]666Following Peacock’s advice, we do not use anymore the coefficients given in his textbook, “Cosmological Physics” which turn out to be less accurate than in their paper.. One can see that the cluster normalised models fit very well the observations, at least on scales ranging from 0.5 to 10 arc-minutes. However, this plot does not really illustrate the constraints on both $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ we can expect from measurements of the variance of the shear. A more reliable study consists in exploring a very large set of models in a ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$,$`\sigma _8`$) space. As we can see from Figure 7, and as noted before (\[Bernardeau et al. 1997\]), the dependence on the cosmological constant of the variance of the shear is rather weak, and it is not worth to include $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ as a free parameter in this analysis.

Let us consider all the five cosmic shear results simultaneously. Since they provide independent samples, we can use one single measurement point for each of them and perform a simple $`\chi ^2`$ minimization in the ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$,$`\sigma _8`$) plane. From each cosmic shear measurements we choose the point which has the best signal-to-noise, and we avoid the large scale measures in \[Kaiser et al. 2000\] and \[Wittman et al. 2000\], as they are likely affected by finite size effects which tend to increase the error bars (see \[Szapudi & Colombi 1996\] for a general discussion, or \[Bernardeau et al. 1997\] for a specific application to cosmic shear surveys). We extracted five triplets containing the scale, the variance and the 1-$`\sigma `$ error, ($`\theta _i`$, $`\gamma ^2(\theta _i)`$,$`\delta \gamma ^2(\theta _i)`$), out of the literature (the results reported on Figure 7) and computed:

$$\chi ^2=\underset{i=1}{\overset{5}{}}\left[\frac{\gamma ^2(\theta _i)\gamma ^2_{\theta _i}}{\delta \gamma ^2(\theta _i)}\right]^2,$$
(3)
where $`\gamma ^2_{\theta _i}`$ is the predicted variance for a given cosmological model. We computed it for 150 models inside the box $`0<\mathrm{\Omega }_0<1`$ and $`0.2<\sigma _8<1.4`$, with $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0.21`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$, and $`z_0=0.8`$. With $`5`$ data points and two free parameters, the $`\chi ^2`$ has 3 degrees of freedom. The result is given in Figure 8. The grey scales indicates the 1, 2 and 3-$`\sigma `$ confidence level contours. The best fitted models can be described by the empirical law:

$$\sigma _80.59_{0.03}^{+0.03}\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.47}$$
(4)
in the range $`0.5<\theta <5`$ arc-minutes. This is in remarkable agreement with \[Jain & Seljak 1997\] who predicted $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.5}`$ at non-linear scales, and this is very close to the cluster normalization constraints given in \[Pierpaoli et al. 2000\] (for closed models and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0.23`$):

$$\sigma _80.495_{0.037}^{+0.034}\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.60}.$$
(5)
This law overplotted on Figure 8 shows a remarkable agreement between these two approaches.

Our analysis is still preliminary. We have only five independent data points spread over a rather small angular scale. We also assumed the peak in the redshift distribution of the sources to be $`z_0=0.8`$ with the broad distribution given in Eq.(1). This is a reasonable assumption on the basis of the spectroscopic survey carried out by \[Cohen et al. 1999\], but it is still uncertain and needs further confirmations. We also neglected the cosmic variance in the error budget of the cosmic shear sample. Although it does not affect seriously the VLT data which contain 50 uncorrelated fields and the \[Bacon et al. 2000a\] data point (because they estimated the cosmic variance using a Gaussian field hypothesis), the three other measures are probably affected. However, numerical simulations already indicate that cosmic variance should only increase our error bars by less than a factor of two, according to the survey size (see \[Van Waerbeke et al. 2000\]). We expect to have much better constraints on the redshift and the clustering of sources once the VIRMOS redshift survey will be completed (\[Le Fèvre et al. 2000\]). On the other hand, a measurement of the skewness of the convergence will break the degeneracy between $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ (\[Bernardeau et al. 1997\], \[Van Waerbeke et al. 1999\]).

## 7 Conclusion

We have confirmed the cosmic shear signal detected on scales ranging from 0.5 to 5 arc-minutes using for the first time a large sample (50) of uncorrelated fields obtained with the VLT UT1/ANTU. The service mode available on this telescope gave an unprecedented high quality and homogeneous data set. The fields are spread over more than 1000 square-degrees, which minimizes the noise produced by cosmic variance. The amplitude and the shape of the shear are similar to those measured from other telescopes which permits to make a strong statement about the robustness of the signal with respect to various sources of systematics.

Assuming the signal is purely cosmic shear (that is we neglect the possible intrinsic shape correlation), we used the four other studies published so far to infer first constraints on cosmological models. The cosmic shear surveys provide constraints which are in remarkable agreement with those from cluster abundance analysis. As compare to it, the variance of the shear is a direct measure of the combined parameters $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0,\sigma _8`$. As soon as the residual biases are well controlled, and the redsfhit of the sources known, the measurement of $`\gamma ^2`$ will naturally converge to the exact $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0,\sigma _8`$ value with an accuracy that will only depends on the accumulation of measurements on uncorrelated fields of view. This study shows the great potential of cosmic shear for cosmology and what we can expect from future wide fields surveys. In particular, the skewness of the convergence, which is insensitive to $`\sigma _8`$, will appear as a vertical constraint on Figure 8 therefore breaking the $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$-$`\sigma _8`$ degeneracy.

* F. Bernardeau and R. Maoli thank IAP for hospitality were this work has been conducted. We thank J. Peacock for clarifications about the use of Peacock & Dodds’ coefficients, E. Bertin, S. Colombi, T. Hamana, D. Pogosyan and S. Prunet for fruitful discussions and the ESO staff in Paranal observatory for the observations they did for us in Service Mode. This work was supported by the TMR Network “Gravitational Lensing: New Constraints on Cosmology and the Distribution of Dark Matter” of the EC under contract No. ERBFMRX-CT97-0172, and a PROCOPE grant No. 9723878 by the DAAD and the A.P.A.P.E. We thank the TERAPIX data center for providing its facilities for the data reduction of the VLT/FORS data.


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# THE LANDAU POLE AT FINITE TEMPERATURE

## Abstract

We study the Landau pole in the $`\lambda \varphi ^4`$ field theory at non-zero and large temperatures. We show that the position of the thermal Landau pole $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)`$ is shifted to higher energies with respect to the zero temperature Landau pole $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(0)`$. We find for high temperatures $`T>\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(0)`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)\pi ^2T/\mathrm{log}\left(T/\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(0)\right)`$. Therefore, the range of applicability in energy of the $`\lambda \varphi ^4`$ field theory increases with the temperature.

preprint: LPTHE-00-24

As is well known the $`\lambda \varphi ^4`$ field theory as well as QED suffer from unphysical singularities at the Landau pole. At zero temperature and resumming one-loop bubbles, this pole is found at an energy $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(0)=\mu e^{16\pi ^2/[3\lambda ]}`$, where $`\mu `$ is the renormalization scale. In spite of that, $`\lambda \varphi ^4`$ can be used as an effective field theory for energy scales well below $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(0)`$. In such a range, the theory makes full sense and contains a rich physics. The Landau pole for very small coupling is at extremely high energies (beyond the Planck scale in the case of QED ) which reduces its relevance. In the context of the standard model the zero temperature Landau pole provides a limitation for the phenomenologically validity of the theory through the triviality bound. In addition, in the $`O(4)`$ linear sigma model where $`\lambda /(4\pi )1`$ the Landau pole again limits the domain of applicability of such effective theory.

It is therefore an important question to assess how the Landau pole moves when the temperature is non-zero, the Landau pole behaviour for high temperatures $`T\mu `$ being especially relevant. To the best of our knowledge this problem has not been studied in the literature. We obtain in this note the Landau pole position as a function of the temperature.

The Landau pole and the phenomena linked to it clearly correspond to a scale of energy much higher than the renormalized mass for small coupling. Therefore, we can work in the massless $`\mathrm{\Phi }^4`$ theory without loosing generality. Let us consider the critical theory with euclidean bare lagrangian

$$=\frac{1}{2}(_\mu \mathrm{\Phi }_0)^2+\frac{1}{2}m_0^2\mathrm{\Phi }_0^2(x)+\frac{\lambda _0}{4!}\mathrm{\Phi }_0^4(x),$$
(1)
where $`m_0^2`$ and $`\lambda _0`$ stand for the bare mass and coupling constant, respectively.

By massless theory, we mean a theory where the renormalized mass, defined as the zero momentum two-point function, exactly vanishes

$$m_{ren}^2(T)\mathrm{\Gamma }_2(p^0=0,\stackrel{}{p}=0;T)=0,$$
(2)
at a given temperature $`T`$.

Our analysis on the running of the coupling constant $`\lambda (q;T)`$ remain valid in the massive theory provided that the renormalized thermal mass $`m_{ren}(T)0`$ is much smaller than $`T`$ or that we consider momenta $`qm_{ren}(T)`$.

The renormalized mass is derived from the self-consistent gap equation which has the form,

$$m_{ren}^2(T)=m_0^2+\frac{1}{2}\lambda _0T\underset{n=\mathrm{}}{\overset{+\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{d^3q}{(2\pi )^3}\frac{1}{\nu _n^2+q^2+m_{ren}^2(T)},\nu _n=2\pi nT.$$
(3)
We choose a negative bare mass $`m_0^2=m^2<0`$ in order to find a zero physical mass at some positive temperature. Setting $`m_{ren}^2(T)=0`$ in eq.(3) yields,

$$0=m^2+\frac{\lambda _0T^2}{24}$$

Therefore, we choose from now on $`m=\sqrt{\frac{\lambda _0}{24}}T`$ in order to have a vanishing physical mass.

We want to study the evolution of the running coupling constant, defined from the four point vertex at the four-particle static symmetric point $`\overline{p}_i=(0,\stackrel{}{p}_i)`$. That is,

$$\overline{p}_i^2=q^2,\overline{p}_i\overline{p}_j=q^2/3,ij,i,j=1,2,3,4,$$
(4)
where $`q>0`$ is a normalization mass scale.

We have,

$$\lambda (q;T)=\mathrm{\Gamma }_4(\overline{p}_1,\overline{p}_2,\overline{p}_3,\overline{p}_4;T).$$
(5)
In particular we define the zero-temperature $`\mu `$momentum renormalized coupling constant as

$$\lambda (\mu ;0)=\lambda =\mathrm{\Gamma }_4(\overline{p}_1,\overline{p}_2,\overline{p}_3,\overline{p}_4;0)|_{q=\mu }.$$
(6)
We notice that there is a certain freedom in the choice of the thermal coupling constant. Other prescriptions besides eq.(5) are possible as well.

At the one-loop level the four point function is given by the bubble diagram  plus the two crossed bubble graphs; we have the explicit expression at the symmetric point,

$$I_{bub}(\nu _n,q;T)=\frac{3}{2}T\underset{m=\mathrm{}}{\overset{+\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{d^3p}{(2\pi )^3}\frac{1}{\nu _m^2+\stackrel{}{p}^2}\frac{1}{(\nu _m+\nu _n)^2+(\stackrel{}{p}+\stackrel{}{q})^2},$$
(7)
where a $`\frac{1}{2}`$ comes from the symmetry factor of the bubble diagrams.

We renormalize $`I_{bub}`$ with a zero-temperature $`\mu `$momentum subtraction as

$$\mathrm{\Pi }(\nu _n,q)=I_{bub}(\nu _n,q;T)I_{bub}(0,\mu ;0).$$
(8)
For critical theories the renormalized bubble diagram $`\mathrm{\Pi }(s,q;T)`$ can be analytically computed for any temperature, within the imaginary time formalism formalism with analytic continuation to complex $`s=\nu _n`$, or within the real time formalism  with the result

$$\mathrm{\Pi }(s,q;T)=\frac{3}{(4\pi )^2}\left\{\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{\mu }{4\pi eT}\right)+\frac{s}{q}\text{arctg}\frac{q}{s}\frac{i\pi T}{q}\mathrm{log}\left[\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{is+q}{4\pi iT}\right)\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(1+\frac{is+q}{4\pi iT}\right)}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{isq}{4\pi iT}\right)\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(1+\frac{isq}{4\pi iT}\right)}\right]\right\},$$
(9)
where $`e=2.7182818285\mathrm{}`$ is the basis of natural logarithms.

For non-critical theories there are corrections to this result of the order $`m_{ren}(T)/T`$. The four point vertex can be perturbatively evaluated as

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }_4(\overline{p}_1,\overline{p}_2,\overline{p}_3,\overline{p}_4;T)=\lambda \lambda ^2\mathrm{\Pi }(0,q)+O(\lambda ^3).$$
(10)
The one-loop resummed thermal running coupling constant $`\lambda (q;T)`$ as obtained from renormalization group analysis takes the form

$$\lambda (q;T)=\frac{\lambda }{1+\lambda \mathrm{\Pi }(0,q;T)}.$$
(11)
The explicit form is

$$\lambda (q;T)=\frac{\lambda }{1+\frac{3\lambda }{(4\pi )^2}\left\{\mathrm{ln}\frac{\mu }{4\pi eT}+\frac{\pi T}{q}\left[\pi +4\text{Im}\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{q}{4\pi iT}\right)\right]\right\}}.$$
(12)
Notice that $`\lambda (q;T)`$ is a function of $`q/T`$ (and $`\mu /T`$). The low and high temperature limits follow using the Stirling formula and small argument expansions for the Gamma function

$$\text{Im}\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Gamma }(ix)\stackrel{x0^+}{=}\frac{\pi }{2}+\gamma x+𝒪(x^2),$$
(13)
and

$$\text{Im}\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Gamma }(ix)\stackrel{x\pm \mathrm{}}{=}x\mathrm{ln}\frac{|x|}{e}+\frac{\pi }{4}+\frac{1}{12x}+𝒪\left(\frac{1}{x^2}\right),$$
(14)
where $`\gamma =0.5772157\mathrm{}`$ stands for the Euler-Mascheroni constant.

We find for soft momenta $`qT`$,

$$\lambda (q,T)=\frac{16}{3}\frac{q}{T}+O\left(\frac{q^2}{T^2}\mathrm{log}\frac{T}{\mu }\right)$$
(15)
i.e. the interaction linearly vanishes at low momenta due to the dimensional reduction to a three-dimensional theory, as expected.

At zero-temperature we recover from eq.(12) the usual zero-temperature resummed coupling constant

$$\lambda (q;0)=\frac{\lambda }{1+\frac{3}{32\pi ^2}\lambda \mathrm{ln}\frac{\mu ^2}{q^2}}$$
(16)
which exhibits the Landau pole at the scale

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(0)\mathrm{\Lambda }_0=\mu e^{16\pi ^2/[3\lambda ]}.$$
(17)
In the context of effective field theories, this scale is interpreted as the scale where new physics enters, i.e. the scale of the order of the ultraviolet cutoff of the theory $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ where irrelevant operators play an important role and therefore the theory defined by the lagrangian (1) breaks down.

A renormalization group resummed perturbation theory can be consistently implemented only when the internal momenta are integrate up to a scale of order $`\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$.

We would like to know how thermal effects affect the Landau pole. In particular where is the position of the thermal Landau pole $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)`$ at temperature $`T`$. This is the principal outcome of our analysis.

We define the thermal Landau point $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)`$ as the zero of the denominator in eq.(12) for the resummed coupling $`\lambda (q;T)`$. That is, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)`$ is the solution of the equation,

$$\frac{\pi 4\text{Im}\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)}{4\pi iT}\right)}{\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)}=\frac{1}{\pi T}\left[\frac{(4\pi )^2}{3\lambda }+\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{\mu }{4\pi eT}\right)\right].$$
(18)
This is is a transcendental equation which in general can be only solved numerically. However, in the high ($`T\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$) and low ($`T\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$) temperature limits, the position of the Landau pole can be determined analytically using eqs.(13) and (14), respectively.

We find for temperatures below the zero temperature Landau pole $`T\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)\stackrel{T\mathrm{\Lambda }_0}{=}\mathrm{\Lambda }_0+\frac{4\pi ^2}{3\mathrm{\Lambda }_0}T^2+𝒪\left(\frac{T^3}{\mathrm{\Lambda }_0^2}\right).$$
(19)
That is, the temperature increases  as $`T^2/\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$ the position of the Landau pole in energy above its zero temperature value.

We find for temperatures above the zero temperature Landau pole $`T\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$,

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_L(T)\stackrel{T\mathrm{\Lambda }_0}{=}\frac{\pi ^2T}{\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{4\pi eT}{\mathrm{\Lambda }_0}\right)\gamma +𝒪\left(\frac{\mathrm{\Lambda }_0}{T}\right)}.$$
(20)
We see that the thermal Landau pole position grows linearly as $`T/\mathrm{ln}T`$ and it is therefore well above the zero temperature Landau pole.

We notice that the analytic formulas (19) and (20) are in excellent agreement with the numerical evaluation using eq.(12) even beyond their expected range of validity. In particular, eq.(20) reproduces eq.(18) with better than $`1\%`$ accuracy at $`T=\mathrm{\Lambda }_0`$ and $`\lambda =1`$.

In figure 1 we display the evolution of the resummed coupling $`\lambda (q;T)`$ given by eq.(12) for different temperatures starting from $`q=\mu `$ up to $`q=10^{22}\mu `$ for $`\lambda =1`$. In figure 2 we display the position of the thermal Landau pole for different temperatures and $`\lambda =1`$.

In summary, both in low $`T`$ and in the high $`T`$ region the thermal effect consists in pushing the Landau pole scale to higher energies than the zero temperature Landau pole. This is true for all temperatures.

The Landau pole behaves for high and low temperatures in very different ways due to the different runnings of the coupling. For high temperature dimensional reduction takes place yielding a dimensionful three dimensional coupling $`\lambda T`$. Therefore, the one-loop contribution to the effective coupling at momentum $`q`$ behaves as $`T/q`$. This follows just by dimensional considerations or by inspecting the one-loop diagram with two propagators integrated over three-dimensional loop momenta. The Landau pole appears when the one-loop contribution balances the tree level contribution and now this can happen when $`qT`$. This gives a simple understanding why the Landau pole behaves as in eq.(20) for high temperature.

Since the Landau pole grows in energy when the temperature grows, the range of validity of $`\mathrm{\Phi }^4`$ as an effective theory does increase. As mentioned at the begining, the Landau pole sets the limit of validity for theories as the standard model and the $`O(4)`$ linear sigma model.

As is known, fermionic systems often exhibit behaviours which differ from those of bosonic systems (see for example ). We find in spinor electrodynamics that that the Landau pole is well above $`T`$ for temperatures above the Landau pole at zero temperature. In addition, the Landau pole position grows with $`T`$ in such regime \[work in progress\]. Therefore, the Landau pole behaviour in QED seems analogous to the scalar case.

Finally we notice that the conclusions of this paper trivially generalize to $`O(N)`$models with interaction $`\frac{\lambda ^{}}{2N}[\stackrel{}{\mathrm{\Phi }}^2(x)]^2`$ through a trivial rescaling of the coupling constant by a factor three. It is interesting to consider the large $`N`$ limit since in this limit the present results on the Landau pole are exact, even in the strong coupling regime.


text:
# Random Scattering by Atomic Density Fluctuations in Optical Lattices

## Abstract

We investigate hitherto unexplored regimes of probe scattering by atoms trapped in optical lattices: weak scattering by effectively random atomic density distributions and multiple scattering by arbitrary atomic distributions. Both regimes are predicted to exhibit a universal semicircular scattering lineshape for large density fluctuations, which depend on temperature and quantum statistics.

Recent advances in trapping and manipulation of cold atoms interacting with external fields have primarily been implemented thus far either in single-atom systems, such as sparse (low-density) optical lattices, or in Bose-Einstein condensates with macroscopic numbers of atoms.

Between these two limiting regimes lies the scarcely investigated domain of processes involving a finite number of interacting atoms. Both the potential interest and the difficulties involved in studying

such processes are evident in the example of optical lattices with appreciable atomic filling factors, in

which the transition between ”insulating” (localized) and ”metallic” (superfluid) phases have been studied in the framework of the Bose-Hubbard model. As confirmed by the above study, the mean-field approximation is inadequate for small numbers of interacting atoms in lattices due to the presence of large quantum fluctuations. Still more difficult is the analysis of fluctuations in systems of cold atoms coupled by long-range ($`1/r`$ or $`1/r^3`$) field-induced interactions. This leads to the intruiging question: Is there a way to circumvent the formidable task of treating the full dynamics of such systems and still infer their important characteristics, e.g., their dependence on temperature, quantum statistics (Bose or Fermi), number of atoms and lattice parameters? And: Are there universal measurable features which can be a ”signature” of the statistical ensemble (distribution function) of such systems?

Here we consider the possibility of inferring such statistical characteristics from the spectral features of probe photons or particles that are scattered by the density fluctuations of trapped atoms, notably in optical lattices, in two hitherto unexplored scenarios: (a) The probe is weakly (perturbatively) scattered by the local atomic density corresponding to the random occupancy of different lattice sites (Fig. 1 \- inset a). (b) The probe is multiply scattered by an arbitrary (possibly unknown a priori) multi-atom distribution in the lattice (Fig. 1 \- inset b).

At the heart of our analysis is the idea that the Green function of the scattered photon or particle, which embodies the relevant spectral information, can be qualitatively estimated without resorting to cumbersome perturbative calculations of the probe-multiatom interaction by replacing this interaction Hamiltonian by an equivalent random matrix. The random matrix approach, which has been successfully applied to various disordered systems, allows the evaluation of probe spectra

to all orders of scattering, expressing them by means of only the first two moments (the mean and variance) of the random interaction, averaged over the statistical ensemble of the multiatom system. The highlight of our analysis, based on this random matrix approach, is the prediction of a semicircular spectral lineshape of the probe scattering in the large-fluctuation limit of trapped atomic ensembles. Thus far, the only known case of quasi-semicircular lineshapes in optical scattering has been predicted and experimentally verified in dielectric microspheres with randomly distributed internal scatterers.

The Green function of the probe (P) at energy $`ϵ=\mathrm{}\omega `$ is given by

$$G_P(ϵ)=\text{Tr}_S\left[\frac{1}{ϵ\widehat{H}_P\widehat{V}}\widehat{\rho }_S\right],$$
(1)
where $`\widehat{H}_P`$, $`\widehat{V}`$ and $`\widehat{\rho }_S`$ are, respectively,

the unperturbed probe Hamiltonian, the probe-system interaction Hamiltonian and the density operator for the ensemble of the multiatom system (S). We shall assume that the following conditions hold. (i) There is no appreciable back-effect of the probe on the multiatom system (otherwise it is no longer a probe). (ii) The state of the multiatom system does not change during the interaction time with the probe, i.e., the multiatom system remains ”frozen”, as is applicable for optical or atomic probing. This situation then cannot be described as Markovian relaxation (exponential decay) of the probe state into the multiatom reservoir, since the correlation time of this reservoir is now much longer than that of the probe, in contrast with the basic assumption

of relaxation. (iii) The probe spectrum is broadband, i.e., it encompasses many of its eigenstates.

For an ensemble ”frozen” during the interaction time, the tracing in (1) implies statistical averaging over repeated realizations of the multiatom system, every time the probe scattering is recorded, or taking the expectation value with respect to the quantum state of the system. For simplicity, let us explicitly consider elastic scattering (the extension

to inelastic scattering is straightforward), for which

$`\widehat{V}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{\stackrel{}{k}}{}}f_\stackrel{}{k}\widehat{\rho }_{P\stackrel{}{k}}^{}\widehat{\rho }_{S\stackrel{}{k}}+\text{h.c.}\text{or}`$ (3)
$`\widehat{V}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{\stackrel{}{k}}{}}f_\stackrel{}{k}a_\stackrel{}{k}^{}\widehat{\rho }_{S\stackrel{}{k}}+\text{h.c.}`$ (4)
Here $`f_\stackrel{}{k}`$ is the scattering amplitude for momentum exchange $`\mathrm{}\stackrel{}{k}`$ between the probe and the system and the $`\stackrel{}{k}`$-mode Fourier components of the probe (system) density operators $`\widehat{\rho }_{P\stackrel{}{k}}`$ ($`\widehat{\rho }_{S\stackrel{}{k}}`$) are defined in terms of their respective creation and annihilation operators $`\widehat{\rho }_{P\stackrel{}{k}}=_\stackrel{}{q}a_\stackrel{}{q}^{}a_{\stackrel{}{q}+\stackrel{}{k}}`$, $`\widehat{\rho }_{S\stackrel{}{k}}=_\stackrel{}{q}c_\stackrel{}{q}^{}c_{\stackrel{}{q}+\stackrel{}{k}}`$. Equations (3) and (4) stand, respectively, for bilinear and linear probe-system coupling. For optical probes (3) and (4) correspond to Raman and single-photon scattering, respectively. For atom or neutron probes the coupling (3) is appropriate.

The Green function (1) is obtainable, to all orders in $`\widehat{V}`$, by solving the set of equations for its diagonal elements

$$G_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}}(ϵ)=[ϵϵ_\stackrel{}{k}\underset{\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}{}\widehat{V}_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}^2G_{\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}(ϵ)]^1,$$
(5)
where $`ϵ_\stackrel{}{k}`$ are the probe energy eigenvalues in the absence of potential fluctuations and pointed brackets denote the expectation value. The spectral information contained in these $`G_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}}`$ is given by the density of states (DOS) of the probe $`g(ϵ)=\frac{1}{\pi }\text{Im}_\stackrel{}{k}G_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}}(ϵ)`$.

In order to extract information on the system we shall make two simplifying assumptions regarding the probe and the coupling potential (Random Scattering by Atomic Density Fluctuations in Optical Lattices): (i) $`f_\stackrel{}{k}`$ is flat in $`\stackrel{}{k}`$ (the coupling is strongly localized in space) within a band exceeding the relevant band of the system, so that $`f_\stackrel{}{k}f`$; (ii) the statistical distribution of the probe is also flat in $`\stackrel{}{k}`$ and its second moment in $`\widehat{V}^2`$ is replacable by the square of its mean flux (or density) $`\overline{n}_P^2`$ for the bilinear coupling (3) or by its mean flux (density) $`\overline{n}_P`$ for the linear coupling (4). Under these assumptions we can rewrite the squared coupling potential in (5) as

$$\widehat{V}_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}^2=\widehat{V}_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}^2+_P\mathrm{SS}.$$
(6)
Here $`\widehat{V}`$ is the mean coupling potential and $`_P|f|^2\overline{n}_P^2`$ or $`_P|f|^2\overline{n}_P`$ in the case of (3) and (4), respectively. The quantity of interest for the system is the Fourier-transformed density-density correlation of the atomic system

$$\mathrm{SS}=\widehat{\rho }_{S\stackrel{}{k}}^{}\widehat{\rho }_{S\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}+\text{c.c}.$$
(7)
Its diagonal element $`𝒮_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}}`$ is the static structure factor $`𝒮_\stackrel{}{k}`$, which is the Fourier transform of the van-Hove correlation function $`\widehat{\rho }_S^{}(\stackrel{}{r},t=0)\widehat{\rho }_S(\stackrel{}{r}^{^{}},t^{^{}}=0)`$ for the spatial density fluctuations of the ”frozen” atomic ensemble.

The difficulty of having to evaluate or measure the matrix elements $`\mathrm{SS}`$ is avoided for a spatially random density distribution of the atomic system, due to random site occupancy (Fig. 1, inset a) and short-range interaction with the probe (e.g., a neutron or thermal atom). The elements $`\mathrm{SS}`$ in (6) and (7) can then be replaced by the average of the structure factor over all relevant $`\stackrel{}{k}`$:

$$\mathrm{SS}\overline{𝒮}=𝑑\stackrel{}{k}𝒮_\stackrel{}{k}\widehat{n}_S^2\widehat{n}_S^2,$$
(8)
where the right-hand side of $`\overline{𝒮}`$ denotes the local atomic density or number variance averaged over the ensemble.

The implications of evaluating the probe DOS $`g(ϵ)`$ using (5)-(8) will be examined for random fluctuations about a mean scattering potential $`V_S(x)`$ (corresponding to the mean atomic density distribution) that is 1D-periodic. The ”unperturbed” probe dispersion associated with $`V_S(x)`$ is $`ϵ_\stackrel{}{k}=2J\mathrm{cos}(k_xd)+A`$, $`J`$ being the hopping frequency, $`d`$ the lattice period and $`A`$ the band energy offset. This gives rise to the following expression for the Green function (5)

$$G(ϵ)=\left[ϵϵ_\stackrel{}{k}W^2\underset{\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}{}(ϵϵ_\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}\mathrm{\Lambda }(ϵ)+i\mathrm{\Delta }(ϵ))^1\right]^1.$$
(9)
Here $`W^2_P\overline{𝒮}`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(ϵ)=W^2/\sqrt{(ϵA)^24J^2}`$ for $`|ϵA|>2J`$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }(ϵ)=W^2/\sqrt{4J^2(ϵA)^2}`$ for $`|ϵA|<2J`$ and both zero otherwise. Figure 1 shows how the probe DOS $`g(ϵ)`$ changes from that of a periodic band structure corresponding to the mean potential $`V_S(x)`$ to a semicircular shape as the amount of fluctuations measured by $`W^2`$ increases.

In the multiple-scattering scenario,

which pertains to resonantly scattered atomic probes or to intracavity optical probes (Fig. 1, inset b), semicircular lineshapes are

obtained even when the $`\mathrm{SS}`$ cannot be claimed to belong to a random distribution (Fig. 2, inset).

In the case of strongly-interacting atoms within a lattice site or longe-range intersite density correlations the distribution may be quite intricate, corresponding to sharp peaks of $`\mathrm{SS}`$. Nevertheless, the universal spectral trends of Fig. 1 can be shown

to hold in this scenario, provided $`\widehat{V}^2^{1/2}g_0(ϵ)1`$, $`g_0(ϵ)`$ denoting the ”unperturbed” probe DOS. This condition allows us to estimate $`G_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}}`$ in (5) to all orders in $`\widehat{V}`$, upon replacing the state of the atomic system by a gaussian random ensemble. The result is the following universal formula for the renormalized probe energy $`\stackrel{~}{ϵ}`$ at a given input energy $`ϵ`$

$$ϵ=\stackrel{~}{ϵ}+W^2\text{Tr}_P\left(\frac{1}{\stackrel{~}{ϵ}\widehat{H}_Pi0}\right).$$
(10)
The use of (10) leads to a semicircular lineshape similar to the one in Fig. 1, as if the potential were random.

In order to illustrate the role of temperature, quantum statistics and the mean lattice potential in producing the semicircular lineshape, we proceed to evaluate $`W^2`$ for several simple models:
1. The isolated-site limit: The tightly-bound Bose or Fermi distributions in a lattice can be estimated by taking the potential of each site to be that of a harmonic well of depth $`V_0`$. The isolated-site approximation holds for atoms in the lowest vibrational band, when the coupling energy is much smaller than the excitation energy to the next band, $`\sqrt{W^2}\mathrm{}\omega _\nu =\frac{2\pi \mathrm{}}{\lambda }\sqrt{\frac{2V_0}{m}}`$, $`\lambda `$ being the wavelength of the laser light.

In the absence of additional external perturbations, the coupling $`W^2`$ arises because of temperature-dependent fluctuations in the site-occupancy of the optical lattice, which has an approximately gaussian distribution. The resulting random coupling energies averaged over all states yield $`W^2_Pn_\stackrel{}{k},n_\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}n_\stackrel{}{k}n_\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}=_Pn_i,n_jn_in_j_{ij}_P\left(n_S^2n_S^2\right)`$. Here $`n_\stackrel{}{k}c_\stackrel{}{k}^{}c_\stackrel{}{k}`$, $`i`$ and $`j`$ label atomic sites, and $`n_S`$ is the average number of atoms per site. The last step applies whenever $`n_in_j`$ $`i,j`$ and the density fluctuations are approximately site-independent. We have verified this by numerical simulation, considering 2 to 4 identical atoms on a 1D lattice with 6 sites and calculating the density fluctuations if the probability of an occupied site is 1/10 of the probability of an empty site. In all cases the maximum relative difference between $`_P\mathrm{SS}`$ and $`W^2`$ was less than 10 %.

The kinetic contribution to $`W^2`$ due to evaporation of atoms from the lattice is the dominant one at high temperatures, regardless of the statistics. If all the atoms are in the lowest energy band, we may adopt the rate equation used to describe the formation of electron-hole clusters in a plasma and find

$$W^2_{\mathrm{evap}}=an_ST^2e^{\beta V_0}.$$
(11)
Here $`a=k_Bmc_p`$, with $`k_B`$ the Boltzmann constant, $`m`$ the mass of the atoms and $`c_p`$ their specific heat, $`T`$ denotes the temperature, $`\beta ^1k_BT`$ and $`V_0`$ is the optical lattice potential. The influence of evaporation becomes the dominant effect for $`T25\mu `$K. Around $`T300\mu `$K these fluctuations become comparable in size to the square of the optical lattice potential ($`W^2V_0^2100`$ (neV)2) and atoms then largely escape from the lattice.

At low temperatures (well below 100 $`\mu `$K) the density-density fluctuations depend on whether the atoms in the lattice are bosons or fermions. For bosonic atoms in the lowest vibrational state we obtain

$$W^2_{\mathrm{stat},\mathrm{Bose}}=\frac{z}{1z}+\left(\frac{z}{1z}\right)^2+\frac{d^3}{\lambda _T^3}\underset{\alpha =1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{z^\alpha }{\alpha ^{1/2}}.$$
(12)
Here we have approximated the motion of the atoms in the potential wells by a harmonic oscillation with frequency $`\omega _v`$, $`ze^{k_BT/\mathrm{}\omega _v}`$, $`d`$ denotes the average lattice spacing and $`\lambda _T=(2\pi \mathrm{}^2/mk_BT)^{1/2}`$, the thermal wavelength, is the length scale separating quantum statistical behavior (for $`\lambda _Td`$) from classical Maxwell-Boltzmann behavior (for $`\lambda _Td`$). For fermionic atoms in an optical lattice one starts with the analog of the coupling (Random Scattering by Atomic Density Fluctuations in Optical Lattices) for particles

with spin, using creation and annihilation operators $`c_{\stackrel{}{k}\sigma }^{}`$ and $`c_{\stackrel{}{k}\sigma }`$ and performing an additional sum over the spin index $`\sigma `$, and follows the same analysis as above. One then finds

$$W^2_{\mathrm{stat},\mathrm{Fermi}}=\frac{z}{1+z}+\left(\frac{z}{1+z}\right)^2+\frac{2d^3}{\lambda _T^2\lambda _F}\underset{\alpha =1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{z^\alpha }{\alpha ^{1/2}},$$
(13)
with $`\lambda _F`$ the Fermi wavelength. At high temperatures $`z0`$ and both (12) and (13) reduce to the classical Maxwell-Boltzmann result $`W^2_{\mathrm{stat},\mathrm{clas}}=z`$. At low temperatures, fermionic fluctuations approach a constant value, whereas bosonic fluctuations become very large as $`T`$ decreases below $`1\mu `$K, marking the Bose-Einstein condensation.

In Fig. 2 we have taken typical parameters for available optical lattices to show how $`W^2`$ evolves as a function of temperature for both bosonic and fermionic Li atoms. The total density-density fluctuations consist of the sum of (11) and either (12) or (13), depending on the statistics. The isolated-site condition is satisfed for the entire temperature range displayed in Fig. 2. Since the hopping frequency $`JV_0`$, the random coupling for bosonic Li atoms changes from $`W^2/J^2\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}10}`$ to $`W^2/J^2\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}100}`$, when going from $`T8\mu `$K to $`T100\mu `$K. Simultaneously the DOS then evolves from the periodic to the semicircular shape as in Fig. 1. The behavior for Na or Rb atoms is found to be similar to that of bosonic Li atoms , apart from their different mass values in (11) and (12). Employing currently achievable Bragg scattering techniques with a far off-resonant laser (1 mW/cm2 intensity, 5.2 MHz detuning) and a lattice with a sufficiently high atomic filling factor, the scattering spectrum is expected to evolve with T, in the microkelvin range, from the discrete to the semicircular regime.

2. The nearly-free limit: A Bose or Fermi gas weakly modulated by the lattice potential yields $`\mathrm{SS}=𝒮_{\stackrel{}{\kappa }=\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}}=|\varphi _\stackrel{}{\kappa }|^2𝒮_\stackrel{}{\kappa }^{(\text{free})}`$. Here $`\stackrel{}{\kappa }`$ is a reciprocal lattice vector, $`\varphi _\stackrel{}{\kappa }`$ is the corresponding Fourier harmonic of the lattice potential (normalized to 1) and $`𝒮_\stackrel{}{\kappa }^{(\text{free})}`$ is the structure factor for momentum transfer $`\mathrm{}\kappa `$ in a free Bose or Fermi gas. For a Fermi gas $`𝒮_\stackrel{}{\kappa }^{(\text{free})}=\pm \mathrm{\Theta }(k_f\kappa )`$, the Fourier transform of pair correlations with parallel or anti-parallel spins (which determines the sign): it is the well-known step function which vanishes for $`\kappa `$ larger than the Fermi wavevector $`k_f`$. At finite temperatures this distribution broadens. The replacement of the nearly-free fermionic $`\mathrm{SS}`$ by the average value (8) is then justifiable only in the multiple-scattering scenario, while in the weak-scattering scenario the lattice potential harmonics $`\varphi _\stackrel{}{k}`$ pick out well-defined $`𝒮_{\stackrel{}{k}\stackrel{}{k}^{^{}}=\stackrel{}{\kappa }}`$ (Fig. 2, inset - dashed line).
3. The phonon regime: Excitations at frequencies below the chemical potential of a Bose condensate trapped in a lattice can produce collective phonon modes whose ”frozen” spectrum is characterized by $`𝒮_\stackrel{}{\kappa }=_\stackrel{}{q}[(n_\stackrel{}{q}+1)_\stackrel{}{G}\delta (\stackrel{}{\kappa }\stackrel{}{q}\stackrel{}{G})+n_\stackrel{}{q}_\stackrel{}{G}\delta (\stackrel{}{\kappa }+\stackrel{}{q}+\stackrel{}{G})]`$, where $`n_\stackrel{}{q}`$ is the mean number of phonons at temperature $`T`$ with wavevector $`\stackrel{}{q}`$, and $`\stackrel{}{G}`$ denotes the reciprocal lattice vector. The phonon mode spectrum includes quasi-local modes in the case of fluctuating atomic distributions. This naturally leads to the limit (8) and an effectively random coupling (Fig. 2, inset - solid line).

To conclude, we have identified novel regimes of probe scattering by atoms trapped in optical lattices in the random-density and multiple-scattering regimes. These regimes cannot be treated by the mean-field approximation, but are characterized by a universal feature of large density fluctuations, namely, semicircular scattering lineshapes. This is the atom-optical analog of the semicircular broadening of the DOS in disordered electronic systems, which as far as we know has not yet been observed unambiguously. The observation of this atom-optical counterpart presents a nontrivial but feasible challenge for experimentalists.

This work was supported by US-Israel BSF , the Israel Council for Higher Education, Minerva and Arc-en-Ciel.


text:
# COOLING, MONOPOLES, AND VORTICES IN SU(2) LATTICE GAUGE THEORY

## 1 Introduction

The problem of understanding quark confinement in QCD is as old as QCD itself-even older, since there was evidence for quarks well before QCD was precisely formulated. Among physicists working to understand confinement, there is universal agreement that the essence of confinement can be addressed in the pure gauge theory, without light dynamical quarks. In addition, there is near-universal agreement that the mechanism of confinement will be ‘topological’ in nature, caused by a dense gas or network of topological objects which can disorder Wilson loops and produce a linear, confining quark potential.

Even without dynamical quarks, there are a host of quantities which a theory of confinement must explain. First and foremost is the heavy quark potential and in particular, the string tension in the fundamental representation. This has the most real-world relevance in the spectra of mesons composed of charmed quarks. Although only the $`SU(3)`$ color gauge group is relevant to the real world, the non-perturbative dynamics of all the $`SU(N)`$ theories appear to be quite similar, so as a preliminary to work on $`SU(3)`$, there has been a concerted effort to understand confinement for the simpler case of an $`SU(2)`$ gauge group.

The list of topological objects which are possibly relevant to confinement is short; instantons, monopoles, and vortices. Although instantons have a firm basis as semiclassical objects in the continuum limit, recent work casts serious doubt on them as agents of confinement.  Accepting this conclusion leaves monopoles and vortices. The monopole and vortex approaches to confinement share a common postulate: namely that the long-range confining physics should be Abelian in character. They differ in which Abelian subgroup of $`SU(N)`$ is postulated to carry the confining physics.

The path leading to monopoles is normally called ‘Abelian projection’ , in which the projection $`SU(N)U(1)^{N1}`$ takes place after gauge-fixing. Physical quantities may then be calculated using the projected $`U(1)`$ fields; this is called ‘Abelian dominance’, or a further projection made, in which $`N1`$ species of magnetic currents of monopoles are located and then physical quantities calculated. This latter is called ‘monopole dominance’.

The other topological approach, that leading to vortices, makes the projection $`SU(N)Z(N)`$, where $`Z(N)`$ is the center of $`SU(N)`$. There are two methods of proceeding. The one most analogous to Abelian projection is called ‘center projection’, and uses gauge-fixing followed by a projection of $`SU(N)`$ links to $`Z(N)`$ links.  These $`Z(N)`$ links are then used to calculate physical quantities. Vortices are associated with plaquettes which are pierced by non-vanishing $`Z(N)`$ flux. Here, there is no distinction like that between Abelian dominance and monopole dominance, since every $`Z(N)`$ Wilson loop can be expressed as a product of plaquettes over a surface which spans the loop. The second approach to vortices treats a Wilson loop as a ‘vortex counter’. To calculate the heavy quark potential, the Wilson loop is then simply replaced by its $`Z(N)`$ part, which is the sign of the trace for $`SU(2)`$. This vortex part then carries all the information about confinement.  To distinguish these two approaches to confinement via vortices, we will refer to vortices located by examining plaquettes after gauge-fixing and center projection as ‘P-vortices’, and simply use the term ‘vortices’ if no gauge-fixing or projection at the one-link level is used. The ideal situation would be that a P-vortex is locating the geometrical center of an actual physical vortex, so in that case results from the two methods would agree. However, calculations done previously and in this work show that this ideal picture is too naive.

The present work is devoted to problems with monopoles and vortices which arise when configurations are smoothed by cooling. We restrict ourselves to a discussion of the fundamental string tension for the case of an $`SU(2)`$ gauge group.

## 2 Gauge-fixing

The use of gauge-fixing to locate topological objects is common to both the Abelian and center projection methods. Since projection actually deletes certain dynamical degrees of freedom, the use of a particular gauge here is different than say an nth order perturbative calculation of a gauge invariant quantity. There, if all terms of a given order are calculated, one gauge may be more or less convenient than another, but all will give the same answer in the end. On the other hand if, as in Abelian and center projection, certain dynamical degrees of freedom are removed after gauge-fixing, the resulting estimate of a physical quantity like the string tension may depend on the gauge condition used. Thus even though the quantity being calculated is gauge-invariant in the full theory, under Abelian or center projection, there may be an optimal or ‘maximum’ gauge which produces the best approximation to the desired physical quantity. Further, the gauges commonly used in Abelian and center projection involve finding stationary points of gauge-functionals, and are subject to one form or other of the Gribov ambiguity. The question of how results depend on this ambiguity is important, but will not be pursued here. We use the gauge conditions which have been most successful in previous calculations, and gauge-fix each configuration once, i.e. one Gribov copy/configuration is retained.

### 2.1 Maximum Abelian Gauge

The maximum Abelian gauge (MAG) will be used for Abelian projection in the present work. Formulated in the continuum for $`SU(2)`$, we seek a minimum over gauge transformations of the functional

$$G_{mag}=[(A_\mu ^1)^2+(A_\mu ^2)^2]d^4x,$$
(1)
which leads to the following differential condition:

$$(i_\mu \pm eA_\mu ^3)A_\mu ^\pm =0.$$
(2)
The lattice equivalent of minimizing $`G_{mag}`$ is maximizing the functional $`G_{lmag}`$ given by

$$G_{lmag}=\underset{x,\mu }{}\frac{tr}{2}\left[U_\mu ^{}(x)\sigma _3U_\mu (x)\sigma _3\right].$$
(3)
The numerical implementation of the MAG involves a certain stopping criterion. We used the same criterion as in our previous work.  Expanding the gauge-fixed link $`U_\mu `$ in Pauli matrices,

$$U_\mu =U_\mu ^0+i\underset{k=1}{\overset{3}{}}U_\mu ^k\sigma _k,$$
(4)
we perform the lattice Abelian projection by extracting the U(1) link angle $`\varphi _\mu ^3`$

$$\varphi _\mu ^3=2\mathrm{arctan}(U_\mu ^3/U_\mu ^0).$$
(5)
Keeping only the $`U(1)`$ link formed from $`\varphi _\mu ^3=A_\mu ^3a`$ is equivalent to retaining only the Abelian field $`A_\mu ^3`$ in the continuum.

The motivation for making the Abelian projection is really monopoles. For a $`d=3`$ ’t Hooft-Polyakov monopole in MAG, the ‘charged’ fields $`A_\mu ^{1,2}`$ are short-ranged, and the Abelian field $`A_\mu ^3`$ is long-ranged and resembles that of a Dirac monopole with two Dirac units of charge, $`eg=4\pi `$. The Dirac string that appears in this gauge is the basis of the Toussaint-DeGrand method of monopole location on the lattice.  In $`d=3`$, a monopole is at the end of a Dirac string, while in $`d=4`$ the magnetic current of a monopole lies on the edge of a Dirac sheet.

### 2.2 Direct and Indirect Center Gauges

In what is called the direct center Gauge (DCG), the following functional is maximized over gauge transformations:

$$G_{dcg}=\underset{x,\mu }{}(tr(U_\mu (x)))^2.$$
(6)
Using the relation between the trace of group element matrices in fundamental and adjoint representations,

$$tr(U_A)=(tr(U_F))^21,$$
(7)
we see that DCG condition maximizes the trace in the adjoint representation. For small gauge fields this is the same as minimizing

$$\underset{x,\mu }{}(A_\mu ^a)^2,$$
(8)
which is the Landau gauge condition. The functional $`G_{dcg}`$ in Eq.(6) is ‘center-blind’ , i.e. invariant to $`U_\mu ZU_\mu `$, where $`Z`$ is a member of the center group, so the DCG can be thought of as a center-blind Landau gauge. All components of $`A_\mu ^a`$ are suppressed as much as possible, modulo a center factor in the fundamental representation links.

A variant on DCG is the indirect center Gauge (ICG), where after a preliminary gauge-fixing to MAG, the functional

$$G_{icg}=\underset{x,\mu }{}(\mathrm{cos}(\varphi _\mu ^3))^2$$
(9)
is maximized over $`U(1)`$ gauge transformations. Having suppressed $`A_\mu ^{1,2}`$ by the use of MAG, this is a center-blind way to finally suppress $`A_\mu ^3`$.

For both DCG and ICG, the center projection is done by writing

$$U_\mu (x)=sign(tr(U_\mu (x)))\overline{U}_\mu (x).$$
(10)
Non-perturbative, confining physics is postulated to reside in the $`Z(2)`$ gauge field $`Z_\mu =sign(tr(U_\mu ))`$. The presence of a P-vortex is signified by a negative $`Z(2)`$ plaquette which is supposed to represent the physical center of an actual vortex. In our numerical calculations, the stopping criteria used for DCG and ICG were of a similar nature and quality to that used for MAG.

## 3 Unsmoothed Results

The calculations presented here are for the Wilson form of $`SU(2)`$ lattice gauge theory, at $`\beta =2.50`$, on a $`24^4`$ lattice. We have analyzed $`49`$ configurations in the MAG, and $`30`$ in DCG and ICG. In these configurations, we have extracted heavy quark potentials, and examined some features of the distribution of monopoles and P-vortices. As mentioned, we take one Gribov copy/configuration. The number of configurations is moderate, but as seen in Fig.(1), the potentials are extremely linear and noise-free, a characteristic of calculations with topological objects. The string tension in the fundamental representation is easily extracted from the slopes of the potentials vs R. The results are tabulated in Table 1. The corresponding full $`SU(2)`$ fundamental string tension at $`\beta =2.50`$ is 0.033(2) from our own previous work  on $`16^4`$, or 0.0325(12) from Bali, et al  on $`32^4`$, at $`\beta =2.5115`$. The figures in Table 1 show that the monopole string tension is very consistent with the full $`SU(2)`$ results, but that the P-vortex string tensions are too large, by an amount outside error bars. A high value of $`\sigma _{dcg}`$ and $`\sigma _{icg}`$ for one Gribov copy/configuration was also recently observed by Bornyakov et al

Turning to the distribution of monopoles and P-vortices, the percentage of links with magnetic current is 1.36(1), which means there are $`18,000`$ links with magnetic current in a typical configuration. The largest cluster has an average size of 7554(124) links. Only the latter is relevant to confinement so really only $`0.57\%`$ of the links on the lattice play a role in the confining part of the magnetic current.

For P-vortices, the percentage of links pierced by a P-vortex is 3.21(1) for DCG and 3.78(1) for ICG. In the indirect center gauge, there is a strong correlation between the locations of magnetic current and of P-vortices. The magnetic current $`m_\mu `$ resides on the dual of the original lattice, so the timelike magnetic current $`m_t`$ may be placed at the center of a spacial $`(xyz)`$ cube of the original lattice, $`m_x`$ at the center of a $`yzt`$ cube, etc for $`m_y,m_z`$. As first noted by Greensite et al , a large percentage of the time when a 3-cube contains magnetic current, two of its faces are pierced by P-vortices. We measured this percentage and find 93(1)% for this result, consistent with Greensite et al In other words, in the ICG, P-vortices end on monopoles. Since P-vortices are visible, i.e. they cause minus signs in fundamental Wilson loops, they resemble Dirac strings (or sheets in $`d=4`$) with $`2\pi `$ rather than $`4\pi `$ units of flux. A fundamental quark in a Wilson loop acts like a half-integer charge, so a vortex threading the loop gives a factor $`\mathrm{exp}(i2\pi /2)=1`$. Now ‘clock’ or Z(n) approximations to $`U(1)`$ are often successfully used with rather large values of $`n`$. The ICG is an extreme form of this approximation where $`U(1)`$ is projected to $`Z(2)`$. The Coulomb flux of a monopole gets squeezed into a $`Z(2)`$ vortex passing through the monopole. This shows up on the lattice as two negative $`Z(2)`$ plaquettes on the cube-faces surrounding the monopole.

## 4 Smoothed Results

Not all the information contained in a sequence of configurations generated in a Wilson action simulation is relevant to the physics of confinement. Local smoothing of configurations is a way to suppress ultraviolet fluctuations, while keeping the long-range physics intact. In the present work, our smoothing operation is a single cooling sweep of the lattice, in which each link is replaced by its action-minimizing value in the fixed environment of nearby links or ‘staples’.

The string tension is stable under a single cooling, showing that the cooled configurations still encode the information about confinement present in the original configurations. It is reasonable to demand that a description of the confining degrees of freedom also be stable under cooling. To test this we subjected the once-cooled configurations to the same gauge-fixing and object location procedures used in the previous section. The results are shown in Table 2.

The string tensions from monopoles, and vortices from DCG and ICG now agree, but all are $`30\%`$ low, compared to the full $`SU(2)`$ result. This poses a serious problem for claims that monopoles found after gauge-fixing to the MAG, or P-vortices found after gauge-fixing to either DCG or ICG are a correct identification of the infrared confining degrees of freedom.

It is of interest to see how the numbers and distribution of monopoles and P-vortices are affected by cooling. In DCG there are now only $`1.7\%`$ of plaquettes pierced by a P-vortex, an almost $`50\%`$ reduction compared to uncooled configurations. There is a similar reduction of the number of P-vortices in ICG.

For monopoles deduced from the MAG, the reduction in number after cooling is even more dramatic-now only $`0.16\%`$ of the links carry magnetic current, a reduction by a factor of $`8.4`$. Whereas before cooling the largest cluster of magnetic current contained $`7500`$ links, after cooling the largest cluster contains only $`1200`$ links. While $`30\%`$ of the string tension has been lost, from another viewpoint, it is remarkable that $`70\%`$ of the string tension can be obtained with a magnetic current occupying only $`0.16\%`$ of the links of the lattice. Cooling also heavily suppresses small clusters, which are known to be irrelevant for confinement. The connection between P-vortices in ICG and MAG monopoles is even tighter; now 98(1)% of the time a monopole cube-face is pierced by two P-vortices.

The results just discussed show that the most straightforward application of gauge-fixing and object location methods are not stable under smoothing. It does not follow that all hope of a topological description of confinement is lost. From the viewpoint of vortices, we may use the second method of proceeding with vortices. This uses no gauge-fixing, instead the potential is calculated by replacing the Wilson loop by its sign, loop by loop. This yields a fundamental string tension of 0.031(1), consistent with the full $`SU(2)`$ result. From the viewpoint of Abelian projection, we may gauge-fix to MAG, and calculate the potential from the $`U(1)`$ links directly, without a further reduction to monopoles. This yields a string tension after cooling of 0.034(1), slightly high, but still consistent with the full $`SU(2)`$ numbers. The potentials from these two calculations are shown in Fig. (2). (The differing short range or Coulombic terms in the two potentials is easily explained by the fact that perturbative exchange of charged gluons is suppressed in the MAG.)

Putting these last two results together suggests that the problem lies neither with the idea of a topological explanation of confinement nor the use of gauge-fixing, but rather with our methods of location of topological objects.

## 5 Extended Objects

As just discussed, the $`U(1)`$ field obtained via Abelian projection on cooled lattices retains the full $`SU(2)`$ string tension. The usual expectation is that the confining part of such a $`U(1)`$ field can be characterized in terms of the magnetic current of monopoles. However, our attempts to find this current have failed so far. In addition to the standard approach described in Sec. 4, we have made two other attempts, both looking for monopoles on a larger scale. The first method begins by casting the cooled $`SU(2)`$ configurations into the MAG as before, but then looking for ‘extended’ monopoles by applying the Toussaint-DeGrand method to 2-cubes, rather than 1-cubes.  A second attempt was to block the cooled $`SU(2)`$ configurations in a standard way , gauge-fix to the MAG on the blocked lattice, followed by monopole location, also on the blocked lattice. In both attempts, the resulting monopole string tension is still $`30\%`$ lower than the corresponding full $`SU(2)`$ string tension. (Our previous work  on a $`20^4`$ lattice held out some hope that blocking would restore the lost string tension, but the present work on $`24^4`$ does not support this.)

Likewise, although the signed Wilson loops carry the full $`SU(2)`$ string tension, we have been unable to characterize these signed loops in terms of P-vortices. We have also applied blocking here, taking the cooled, blocked $`SU(2)`$ configurations into DCG and ICG. The resulting P-vortex string tensions are again $`30\%`$ low.

To summarize, on the positive side, we have shown that the maximum Abelian gauge and Abelian projection itself survive cooling, as does the method of dealing with vortices which does not try to pin down their locations. However, we have also shown, on a suitably large lattice, that present methods of locating topological objects are unstable against smoothing. This is a serious problem for claims that these objects correctly identify the confining degrees of freedom in $`SU(2)`$ lattice gauge theory.

## Acknowledgments

The work of J. Stack and W. Tucker was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The work of A. Hart was supported by PPARC (UK).

## References