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# Comment on “Theory and computer simulation for the equation of state of additive hard-disk fluid mixtures”

## Abstract

A flaw in the comparison between two different theoretical equations of state for a binary mixture of additive hard disks and Monte Carlo results, as recently reported in C. Barrio and J. R. Solana, Phys. Rev. E 63, 011201 (2001), is pointed out. It is found that both proposals, which require the equation of state of the single component system as input, lead to comparable accuracy but the one advocated by us \[A. Santos, S. B. Yuste, and M. López de Haro, Mol. Phys. 96, 1 (1999)\] is simpler and complies with the exact limit in which the small disks are point particles.

In a recent paper, Barrio and Solana proposed an equation of state (EOS) for a binary mixture of additive hard disks. Such an equation reproduces the (known) exact second and third virial coefficients of the mixture and may be expressed in terms of the EOS of a single component system. They also performed Monte Carlo simulations and found that their recipe was very accurate provided an accurate EOS for the single component system (in their case it was the EOS proposed by Woodcock) was taken as input. The comparison with other EOS for the mixture available in the literature indicated that their proposal does the best job with respect to the Monte Carlo data. Among these other EOS for the binary mixture, only the one introduced by us a few years ago also shares with Barrio and Solana’s EOS the fact that it may be expessed in terms of the EOS for a single component system. What we want to point out here is that the comparison made in Ref.  is flawed by the fact that it was not performed by taking the same EOS for the single component system in both proposals.

Let us consider a binary mixture of additive hard disks of diameters $`\sigma _1`$ and $`\sigma _2`$. The total number density is $`\rho `$, the mole fractions are $`x_1`$ and $`x_2=1x_1`$, and the packing fraction is $`\eta =\frac{\pi }{4}\rho \sigma ^2`$, where $`\sigma ^n_{i=1}^2x_i\sigma _i^n`$. Let $`Z=p/\rho k_BT`$ denote the compressibility factor, $`p`$ being the pressure, $`T`$ the absolute temperature, and $`k_B`$ the Boltzmann constant. Then, Barrio and Solana’s EOS for a binary mixture of hard disks, $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )`$, may be written in terms of a given EOS for a single component system, $`Z_\text{s}(\eta )`$, as

$$Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )=1+\frac{1}{2}(1+\beta \eta )\left(1+\xi \right)\left[Z_\text{s}(\eta )1\right],$$
(1)
where $`\xi \sigma ^2/\sigma ^2`$ and $`\beta `$ is adjusted as to reproduce the exact third virial coefficient for the mixture $`B_3`$, namely

$$\beta =\frac{B_3}{(\pi /4)^2\sigma ^2^2(1+\xi )}\frac{b_3}{2}.$$
(2)
Here, $`b_3=4(4/3\sqrt{3}/\pi )`$ is the reduced third virial coefficient for the single component system while $`B_3`$ is given by

$$B_3=\frac{\pi }{3}\left(a_{11}x_1^3\sigma _1^4+3a_{12}x_1^2x_2\sigma _{12}^4+3a_{21}x_1x_2^2\sigma _{12}^4+a_{22}x_2^3\sigma _2^4\right),$$
(3)
where

$$a_{ij}=\pi +2\left(\sigma _i^2/\sigma _{ij}^21\right)\mathrm{cos}^1(\sigma _i/2\sigma _{ij})\sqrt{4\sigma _{ij}^2/\sigma _i^21}(1+\sigma _i^2/2\sigma _{ij}^2)\sigma _i^2/2\sigma _{ij}^2$$
(4)
and $`\sigma _{ij}=(\sigma _i+\sigma _j)/2`$.

The EOS for the mixture, consistent with a given EOS for a single component system that we introduced recently reads

$$Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )=\left(1\xi \right)\frac{1}{1\eta }+\xi Z_\text{s}(\eta ).$$
(5)
We stress the fact that Eq. (5) is simpler than Eq. (1) \[which must be complemented with Eqs. (2)–(4)\]. In addition, the structure of Eq. (5) is valid for any number of components, while the third virial coefficient is known exactly only for binary mixtures.

In Table I, we show the results of Eqs. (1) and (5) when Woodcock’s EOS  for the single component system \[cf. Eq. (15) in Ref. \] is used as input in both, as well as the available MC data. Although not shown, we have also performed the comparison using other EOS for the single component system, namely the one by Henderson , ours , and the very accurate Levin(6) approximant of Erpenbeck and Luban. In all instances, it is fair to say that both recipes are of comparable accuracy with respect to the Monte Carlo results, their difference being generally smaller than the error bars of the simulation data. Nevertheless, in the particular case of using Woodcock’s EOS for $`Z_\text{s}(\eta )`$, as seen in Table I, $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )`$ performs slightly better than $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )`$. This may be fortuitous since it is known that the Levin(6) approximant gives the most accurate approximation to $`Z_\text{s}(\eta )`$  and when using it in Eqs. (1) and (5) the apparent (slight) superiority of $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )`$ is no longer there. For instance, the theoretical values of Table I corresponding to the packing fraction $`\eta =0.6`$ are increased by about 0.03 when the Levin(6) approximant rather than Woodcock’s EOS is used as input, so that in this case the accuracy of $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )`$ is slightly better than that of $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )`$.

Let us try to understand why both EOS give practically equivalent results. First, it may be shown that $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )`$, while not reproducing the exact third virial coefficient $`B_3`$, yields a very good estimate of it . If we replace that estimate into Eq. (2), we get

$$\beta \frac{1\xi }{1+\xi }\left(1\frac{b_3}{2}\right).$$
(6)
By using this estimate in Barrio and Solana’s EOS, we have

$$Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )\left(1\xi \right)\mathrm{\Delta }(\eta ),$$
(7)
where

$$\mathrm{\Delta }(\eta )\frac{1}{2}\left[1+\left(1\frac{b_3}{2}\right)\eta \right]\left[Z_\text{s}(\eta )1\right]\frac{\eta }{1\eta }.$$
(8)
According to the approximation involved in Eq. (7), the difference $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )`$ is small if the asymmetry of the mixture is small ($`\xi 1`$) and/or $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\eta )`$ is small. The function $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\eta )`$ is plotted in Fig. 1 for the cases where $`Z_\text{s}(\eta )`$ is given by Henderson’s EOS, by Woodcock’s EOS, and by the Levin(6) approximant. In all instances it is practically zero up to $`\eta 0.2`$ but then it grows rapidly. The most disparate mixture considered in Barrio and Solana’s simulations corresponds to $`x_1=0.25`$, $`\alpha \sigma _2/\sigma _1=1/3`$, which yields $`\xi =0.75`$. This explains the fact that $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )0.05`$ in the simulated cases. It should be noted however that the right-hand side of Eq. (7) tends to overestimate the actual difference $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )`$, so that its main purpose is to illustrate the fact that both EOS yield practically equivalent results for not very asymmetric mixtures. On the other hand, more important differences can be expected for disparate mixtures, especially in the case of large densities. At a given density and a given diameter ratio $`\alpha 1`$ the smallest value of the parameter $`\xi `$ corresponds to a mole fraction $`x_1=\alpha /(1+\alpha )`$ for the large disks, namely $`\xi =4\alpha /(1+\alpha )^2`$. Thus, $`\xi 1`$ if $`\alpha 1`$ and, according to Eq. (7), $`Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )\mathrm{\Delta }(\eta )`$.

Let us consider now the limit in which the small disks become point particles ($`\alpha 0`$) and occupy a negligible fraction of the total area. In that case, the compressibility factor of the mixture reduces to

$$Z_\text{m}(\eta )\frac{x_2}{1\eta }+x_1Z_\text{s}(\eta ).$$
(9)
The first term represents the (ideal gas) partial pressure due to the point particles in the available area (i.e., the total area minus the area occupied by the large disks), while the second term represents the partial pressure associated with the large disks. In the limit $`\alpha 0`$ with $`x_1`$ finite (or, more generally, $`x_1\alpha `$), we have $`\xi x_1`$ and $`\beta (1b_3/2)x_2/(1+x_1)`$ \[note in that limit the approximation (6) is correct\], so that

$$Z_\text{m}^{\text{SYH}}(\eta )\frac{x_2}{1\eta }+x_1Z_\text{s}(\eta ),$$
(10)
$$Z_\text{m}^{\text{BS}}(\eta )1+\frac{1}{2}\left[1+x_1+x_2\left(1\frac{b_3}{2}\right)\eta \right]\left[Z_\text{s}(\eta )1\right].$$
(11)
Therefore, while Eq. (5) is consistent with the exact property (9), Eq. (1) violates it. In fact, the right-hand side of (7), with $`\xi =x_1`$, gives the deviation of Barrio and Solana’s EOS from the exact compressibility factor in the special case $`\alpha 0`$.

The research of M.L.H. was supported in part by DGAPA-UNAM under Project IN103100. S.B.Y. and A.S. acknowledge partial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología (Spain) through grant No. BFM2001-0718. They are also grateful to the DGES (Spain) for sabbatical grants No. PR2000-0116 and No. PR2000-0117, respectively.


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# The anomalous properties of Markarian 1460

## 1 Introduction

The global photometric properties of normal galaxies can be summarized by the following parameters: (1) absolute magnitude, (2) colours, (3) compactness, and (4) radial distribution and scale-length. To a first approximation, high-luminosity giant galaxies are either early-type (Elliptical or SO) and have a radial profile that is well-fit by a de Vaucouleurs (1948) $`r^{1/4}`$ law or late-type (spiral or irregular) and have a radial profile that is well-fit by an exponential law (Freeman 1970). Lower luminosity galaxies (dwarf irregulars and dwarf spheroidals) also have exponential light profiles (Binggeli & Cameron 1991) but have lower surface brightnesses. Many late-type galaxies have light profiles which can be decomposed into a bulge ($`r^{1/4}`$) and disk (exponential) part (Kormendy 1977, Kent 1985).

More subtle effects can be seen by examining correlations between the various parameters for a sample of galaxies (see Fig. 1): (1) Early type galaxies are redder and have older stars than late-type ones. (2) Luminous early-type galaxies tend to have higher surface-brightnesses than luminous late-type galaxies. They are more compact (there do exist, however, late-type galaxies with compact cores); (3) Late-type galaxies tend to have lower surface-brightnesses as their luminosity decreases. This trend continues into the regime of dwarf galaxies; (4) There is a tendency for more luminous early-type galaxies to have lower surface-brightnesses. This is characterized by the familiar fundamental plane for elliptical galaxies (Kormendy & Djorgovski 1989); (5) Most low-luminosity galaxies tend to be late-type galaxies in the field and dwarf spheroidal galaxies in clusters;

There do exist other, rarer galaxies which are not well-described by the parameterizations used for normal galaxies. Examples are huge low surface-brightness giants like those studied by Sprayberry et al. (1995), peculiar interacting galaxy systems like Arp 220 (Sanders & Mirabel 1996), and blue compact dwarfs, low-luminosity galaxies which appear to have been caught in a short burst of extreme star formation.

We now present observations of another kind of galaxy that appears to be anomalous. It is Markarian 1460 (hereafter Mrk 1460), which is a low-luminosity ($`M_B=14.5`$) blue emission-line galaxy with a $`r^{1/4}`$ light profile. This galaxy is anomalous since it looks morphologically like an elliptical galaxy and has no obvious sign of clumpiness (as do most blue emission-line low-luminosity galaxies which also have exponential light profiles; Telles, Melnick & Terlevich 1997). Its observed central surface-brightness is also much higher than that of most low-luminosity galaxies, about $`\mu _R`$ = 20 mag arcsec-2. This surface-brightness is characteristic of the most luminous elliptical galaxies. Mrk 1460 is, however, much bluer than normal ellipticals. Mrk 1460 was identified in a spectroscopic survey of galaxies with ultraviolet continuum by Markarian et al. (1984), who showed that it was an HII galaxy in the Ursa Major Cluster of galaxies (distance modulus = 31.35; Tully & Pierce 2000). It was subsequently included in the photometric survey of the Ursa Major Cluster of Tully et al. (1996). Its compactness was noticed by Tully & Verheijen (1997) who classify it as a blue example of a compact dwarf (“Type 5” in their notation).

In Section 2 of this paper we describe the observations of this galaxy from our recent optical and HI surveys, and present the photometric properties in Section 3 and discuss them in the context of the radio and spectroscopic measurements. In Sections 4 through 6 we discuss similarities between Markarian 1460 and various other astronomical objects and possible formation scenarios.

## 2 Observations and data reduction

### 2.1 Optical

In this work we use optical $`BRI`$-band images of Mrk 1460 from Tully et al. (1996) and deeper $`R`$-band data from Trentham, Tully & Verheijen (2001). The relevant telescopes and instruments, observing configurations, data-reduction strategies, and details of the photometric systems are given in those papers. The total magnitudes computed by Tully et al. (1996) are: $`B=16.89`$, $`R=16.06`$ and $`I`$=15.75. These values have been updated to include Galactic extinction corrections from the data of Schlegel, Finkbeiner & Davis (1998) and do not include a correction for internal extinction. An $`R`$-band image of this galaxy is presented in Figure 2.

Old corrected apparent magnitudes : 16.83 16.04 15.73 (Table 5)

Of course, in the end it doesn’t matter at all but you may want to drop the internal extinction correction and use the new Schlegel et al correction for Galactic extinction:

New Galactic extinction (Schlegel) : 0.09 0.06 0.04 New corrected apparent magnitudes : 16.89 16.06 15.75

### 2.2 Near Infrared

Mrk 1460 was imaged through a $`K^{}`$ filter (Wainscoat & Cowie 1992) using the QUIRC 1024 $`\times `$ 1024 InSb array (Hodapp et al. 1996, scale 0.19′′ pixel-1, field of view $`3.2^{}\times 3.2^{}`$) at the 2.24 m University of Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea on the night of January 23, 2000. Conditions were photometric for these observations with a median seeing of about 0.7′′ FWHM. Exposures were as a sequence of five, one-minute frames, dithered in order to reject bad pixels. Offset fields were observed with equal exposure time to the target fields in order to perform a sky subtraction. Flat-field images were constructed using dome flats and sky images were constructed from the offset blank sky frames. Individual frames were flat-fielded, sky-subtracted, and then registered and combined. Instrumental magnitudes were computed from observations of 5 $``$ 10 UKIRT faint standards (Casali & Hawarden 1992), giving a photometric accuracy of about 2%. A $`2\sigma `$ isophotal magnitude from this image was measured as $`K^{}=14.92`$. This will be somewhat fainter than the total magnitude since we are missing flux at large radii. If we estimate this flux from extrapolating the best-fit exponential light profile (as was done by Tully et al. 1996), the flux at large radius accounts for 0.58 magnitudes and the total magnitude is $`K^{}=14.34`$. For the best-fitting $`r^{1/4}`$ light profile (see Section 3.1 and Figure 3 below), the flux at large radius accounts for 0.87 magnitudes and the total magnitude is $`K^{}=14.05`$.

### 2.3 Radio

Mrk 1460 was observed with the VLA in its D-configuration by Verheijen et al. (2000, 2001) as part of a blind HI survey of the Ursa Major Cluster. The details of the observations are given there. The galaxy was detected in HI (see Fig.2 for the HI spectrum) and the observed width of the HI profile is 92 km s-1 at the 20% level. The total HI mass is $`2\times 10^7`$ M and the 1.4 GHz continuum flux density is 0.77 $`\pm `$ 0.43 mJy.

The emission is spatially unresolved given the 45′′ beam and it is unclear whether the width of the HI profile can be related to ordered rotation of a gas disk of unknown inclination in the gravitational potential of the galaxy. Consequently, estimating the dynamical mass from the width of the HI profile is not feasible. However, suppose the HI gas is distributed in a rotationally supported disk at an inclination of 60 degrees and that the maximum rotational velocity is reached at 1 kpc from the center which is roughly the observed optical extent. Correcting the width of the global HI profile for instrumental and turbulent broadening and inclination gives a rotational velocity of 41 km/s which translates to a total dynamical mass of $`4\times 10^8`$ M within a 1 kpc radius.

## 3 Observed Properties of Markarian 1460

### 3.1 Light distribution

As mentioned in the previous section, Mrk 1460 appears on a CCD image similar to a distant elliptical galaxy by virtue of its $`r^{1/4}`$ light profile and its central surface brightness of about 19.5 $`R`$ mag arcsec-2, which is characteristic of the central surface-brightnesses of luminous elliptical galaxies. It is far more compact than any of the other dwarf irregular galaxies in the Ursa Major Cluster samples of Trentham et al. (2001) and Verheijen et al. (2001).

The light profile is well fit by an $`r^{1/4}`$ profile (Fig. 3) in all passbands. It is smooth and only deviates from elliptical symmetry in the central 1.5 arcseconds; the flux peaks slightly to the northeast of the center as defined by the outer isophotes. Additionally, there is a modest and very low surface-brightness excess of light to the southwest. There is no sign of substantial clumpiness as is seen in the other low-luminosity galaxies in the Ursa Major sample of Trentham et al. (2001) with HI detections. An exponential law fails to fit the galaxy simultaneously at both small and large radii, at a high level of significance: the reduced $`\chi ^2`$ ($`\nu `$ = 10 degrees of freedom) for the $`r^{1/4}`$ and exponential fits in Figure 3 are 0.85 and 131 respectively. The central surface-brightness derived from the $`r^{1/4}`$ fit at radii larger than one arcsecond (corresponding to the seeing radius) is $`\mu _{0R}`$ = 15.2 mag arsec-2. This extrapolated value is very much higher than the measured central surface brightnesses of about $`\mu _{0R}`$ = 19.5 mag arsec-2.

### 3.2 Current star-formation rate and metallicity

We can infer the star formation rate in Mrk 1460 from measurements of the OII line equivalent width (46 Å; Pustilnik et al. 1999) and also the 1.4 GHz continuum flux (Section 2.3, Verheijen et al. 2001). Both sets of measurements directly probe high-mass stars and their remnants and derivations of the star formation rate from these measurements therefore require very substantial corrections for low-mass stars, which dominate the total mass. Assuming a Salpeter (1955) stellar initial mass function and the OII line calibration of Gallego (1998), the current star formation rate in Markarian 1460 is $`0.09\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{yr}^1`$. Assuming the same stellar initial mass function and the calibration of Cram et al. (1998), the 3$`\sigma `$ upper limit on the star formation rate derived from the 1.4 GHz measurements described in Section 2.3 is $`0.11\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{yr}^1`$.

Deriving abundances from emission-line properties is complicated and a detailed analysis requires many more measurements than are available for this galaxy (Stasinska & Leitherer 1996). However, the following simple analysis is suggested. From the flux ratios O\[II\]/H$`\beta `$ and O\[III\]/H$`\beta `$ (Pustilnik et al. 1999), the abundance ratios O+/H and O++/H are 3.7 $`\times `$ 10-5 and 4.6 $`\times `$ 10-5, leading to a value of the ionized gas oxygen abundance of O/H = 8.3 $`\times `$ 10-5. In this calculation we follow Tully et al. (1981) and adopt a normal Whitford (1958) reddening curve. If the heavy element abundance is proportional to the oxygen abundance, the total metallicity of the ionized gas in Mrk 1460 is then about 0.1 solar (Anders & Grevesse 1989).

### 3.3 Colours

The colours of this galaxy are: $`BR=0.83`$, $`RI=0.31`$, and $`IK^{}`$=1.91. The $`IK^{}`$ colour is derived using aperture magnitudes within the $`K^{}`$ 2-$`\sigma `$ isophote; this ensures that we are measuring the same part of the galaxy in both filters and does not require us to make corrections for light lost below the sky at large radius in the $`K^{}`$ image.

These optical colours suggest an age of approximately 1.3 Gyr if the galaxy has been forming stars either in an instantaneous burst at this time in the past or continuously with an exponential star-formation history profile with $`e`$-folding time 1 Gyr, given the models of Bruzual & Charlot (1993), assuming a Salpeter (1955) stellar initial mass function from 0.1 M to 100 M), negligible internal extinction and a metallicity of 0.4 solar. The $`IK^{}`$ colour above is, however, too red by about 0.7 magnitudes to be produced by the stars from this burst alone. This might suggest the presence of a population of older stars which only contribute in a small way to the optical fluxes. Probably the detailed star-formation history of this galaxy is too complex to derive from broadband colours alone, but it appears that a single recent star formation episode is unlikely since the optical–near infrared colour is so red. Indeed, the $`BK^{}=3.1`$ colour of this galaxy is redder than that of 31 of the 33 galaxies with Hubble Type $`T6`$ in the Ursa Major sample of Tully et al. (1996) that have near-infrared photometry, all of which have blue optical colours.

The colour gradients that we measure in this galaxy are fairly small: $`\mathrm{d}(BR)/\mathrm{d}r0.27\mathrm{mag}\mathrm{arcsec}^1`$ between 1 and 2 arcsec and $`\mathrm{d}(BR)/\mathrm{d}r0.13\mathrm{mag}\mathrm{arcsec}^1`$ between 2 and 4 arcsec (note that 12 arcsec corresponds to 1 kpc at the distance of this galaxy) along the major axis. The central colour that we measure within the seeing FWHM radius is $`BR0.5`$, about 0.3 magnitudes bluer than for the galaxy as a whole. This might suggest that the stars in the very center of the galaxy are slightly younger than average stars in the galaxy (we will return to this point in Section 5).

### 3.4 Total baryonic content

The total $`B`$-band solar luminosity is $`L_B=1.0\times 10^8\mathrm{L}_B`$, and the HI gas mass is $`M(\mathrm{HI})=2\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}`$. The ratio $`M(\mathrm{HI})/L_B`$ is then 0.2, which is lower than the values normally seen for very late-type emission-line galaxies (Young & Knezek 1989, Verheijen & Sancisi 2001). It therefore appears that Mrk 1460 is deficient in HI for a normal star-forming dwarf galaxy.

Given the star-formation rate and age in the previous two sections, the total stellar mass of Mrk 1460 is $`7\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}`$. This suggests that the HI gas only contributes about 20 per cent of the total baryonic mass. This last number depends on both the shape of the stellar initial mass function at low masses and on the normalization of Gallego’s (1998) calibration, both of which are very uncertain. However the low value of $`M(\mathrm{HI})/L_B`$ does suggest that the baryonic mass of Mrk 1460 is not heavily dominated by cold atomic gas.

The total baryonic mass is then about $`7\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}`$ (the mass in stars) plus $`2\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}`$ (the mass in HI) plus $`7\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}`$ (accounting for the helium mass fraction in the cold gas), totalling $`1\times 10^8\mathrm{M}_{}`$. This is comparable to the dynamical mass estimated in Section 2.3, which suggests that the baryons are self-gravitating, at least in the center of the galaxy.

## 4 Discussion

In this section we discuss similarities and differences between Markarian 1460 and other low-luminosity galaxies. We then argue that galaxies like this are rare and suggest possible reasons for why it is so different to the majority of low-luminosity galaxies.

Low luminosity galaxies can be discussed in the context of their surface brightness and age properties. (i) Tully & Verheijen (1997) have suggested that the separate regimes of low and high surface brightness can be distinguished on the basis of dynamical evidence as follows. In low surface-brightness systems the observed baryonic component cannot account for the observed rotation with reasonable mass-to-light choices and it is inferred that dark matter is dynamically dominant even near the galaxy centers. In high surface brightness systems the observed light and a reasonable association of mass-to-light comfortably accounts for the inner galaxy rotation and it can be concluded that the baryonic component is self-gravitating within the inner couple of exponential scalelengths; (ii) Systems with young populations still have cold gas and are still forming stars or have only just recently completed a major episode of star formation. They are blue, gas-rich and tend to have clumpy light distributions. Systems with only old populations do not have a gas reservoir and the old stars have little or no memory of the precise location of their birthplaces due to stellar-dynamical effects like phase mixing and violent relaxation.

Most low-luminosity systems with young populations are dwarf irregular galaxies, which are low surface-brightness systems. A detailed study of the morphologies of low-luminosity star-forming galaxies is performed by Telles et al. (1997). They found that the majority of their sample galaxies had azimuthally-averaged exponential light profiles (see their Section 3.5). This was also true of all the other galaxies in the Ursa Major sample of Trentham et al. (2001). Most of the star-forming galaxies in both the Telles et al. sample and in the Ursa Major sample also showed evidence for lumpy, irregular morphologies.

Low suface-brightness galaxies with only old stars are dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which are red, gas-poor, and have smooth light profiles that are also exponential. This is the type that is so numerous at faint magnitudes in the Virgo (Phillipps et al. 1998) and Fornax (Kambas et al. 2000) Clusters. The similarity in profile shapes and surface brightnesses (Binggeli & Cameron 1991, Binggeli 1994) between dwarf irregular and spheroidal galaxies is suggestive of an evolutionary link: for example, dwarf spheroidals may be dwarf irregulars that have blown out any residual gas via supernova-driven winds at some time in the distant past (e.g. Kormendy & Bender 1994).

Red compact dwarfs are also gas-poor and consist of old stars, but these have high surface-brightnesses. These normally have $`r^{1/4}`$ light profiles. The scatter in central surface-brightness of such objects is large, ranging from about 13 $`B`$ mag arcsec-2 for M32 (Binggeli & Cameron 1991) to about 19 $`B`$ mag arcsec-2 for UGC 6805 in the Ursa Major Cluster (Tully et al. 1996).

Markarian 1460 is the rare example of a high surface-brightness galaxy caught in transition between young and old. Like red compact dwarfs, it has a smooth $`r^{1/4}`$ light profile. Its central surface-brightness of 20.7 $`B`$ mag arcsec-2 is at the faint end of the range of central surface-brightnesses for elliptical galaxies and red compact dwarfs, hence its appearance similar to that of a distant luminous elliptical galaxy (consider just the filled circles in the upper left panel of Fig. 1). Like dwarf irregular galaxies, Mrk 1460 has young stars and an emission-line spectrum (Pustilnik et al. 1999). Blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxies with $`r^{1/4}`$ light profiles have been known to exist for some time (e.g. Kunth, Maurogodarto & Vigroux 1988). Doublier (1998) places a number of these objects on a magnitude vs. central surface-brightness plot, and finds that they lie close to the highest surface-brightness red compact dwarfs like M32, several mag arcsec-2 brighter than Mrk 1460. A well-studied example is NGC 1510 (Disney & Pottasch 1977, Kinman 1978), which also shows strong emission lines. Unlike Mrk 1460, however, this galaxy exhibits considerable clumpiness (Eichendorf & Nieto 1984). More generally, BCDs possess localized regions undergoing intense star formation burst where the surface brightnesses is extremely high. In Mrk 1460, however, the young stars exist on a galactic scale and are not just restricted to any particular star-forming region.

Galaxies with the properties of Mrk 1460 have not turned up in field optical spectroscopic (e.g. Ellis et al. 1996, Lin et al. 1996) or HI (e.g. Zwaan 1998) surveys (however see Drinkwater et al. 1988 for some possible counterparts in the Fornax Cluster). They are presumably very rare. This is not surprising, since the current star-formation rate of 0.1 M yr-1 exhausts the HI gas in $`2\times 10^8`$ yr, which is small compared to a Hubble time. It is likely that Mrk 1460 will evolve into an old high surface-brightness dwarf, albeit one at least two magnitudes fainter than UGC 6805 once fading is taken into account (this would be the lowest luminosity $`r^{1/4}`$ galaxy known). Its final surface brightness will probably be close to what it is now: Mrk 1460 does not possess enough cold gas (unless it is in molecular form, but there is no $`IRAS`$ detection at this position) to convert to stars via an extreme dissipative collapse, which is what would be required were Mrk 1460 to turn into a very high surface-brightness red compact dwarf like M32.

So what happened to cause this galaxy to have these anomalous properties? Making $`r^{\frac{1}{4}}`$ galaxies by violent relaxation on timescales short compared to stellar population evolutionary timescales does not seem to be a problem (Lynden-Bell 1967, van Albada 1982). However, why this happened in this particular case, and not in most low-luminosity star-forming galaxies (which have exponential profiles and lower surface brightnesses) is unclear. It might be an environmental effect: Tully & Verheijen (1997) suggest that tidal interactions can radially scramble the baryonic mass, presumably through gas collisions. The baryonic matter transferred inward during an encounter with another galaxy can become sufficiently concentrated that it becomes self-gravitating. A self-gravitating disk will then further rearrange itself into a radially stable configuration (Mestel 1963). The result is a high concentration of baryons towards the center of the galaxy, which in turn leads to the high surface brightness relative to what is seen in most low-luminosity galaxies. A related possibility is that Mrk 1460 formed out of a dense, self-gravitating gas cloud assembled via a hydrodynamic shock process (Barnes & Hernquist 1992), perhaps in proximity to another galaxy in the Ursa Major Cluster.

More generally, understanding the physical mechanisms at work would be helped significantly by obtaining a sample of objects like Mrk 1460. Such galaxies are distinctive in spectroscopic surveys since their surface brightnesses are high and their emission lines are strong. This will shortly be possible as large samples of galaxies with known redshifts and morphological information become available from the new generation of wide-field deep redshift surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2DF Survey.


text:
# I Introduction

## I Introduction

The center vortex picture of the Yang-Mills vacuum has recently experienced rapid development. Two advances figure prominently in particular. On the one hand, methods have been constructed which allow to extract vortices from lattice gauge configurations; on the other hand, it has been realized that the vortex picture not only can account for confinement, but also for the topological properties of the Yang-Mills field.

In more detail, center vortices can be extracted from lattice gauge configurations using a combined gauge fixing and projection procedure. The first such procedure was presented in ,,; it involves fixing the gauge up to transformations from the center of the gauge group, by demanding maximization of a gauge fixing functional,

$$\underset{G}{\mathrm{max}}\underset{i}{}\left|\text{tr}U_i^G\right|^2$$
(1)
under gauge transformations $`G`$, where the $`U_i`$ are the link variables specifying a lattice gauge configuration. This is called the (direct) maximal center gauge. It biases link variables towards the center of the gauge group, e.g. in the $`SU(2)`$ case considered henceforth, towards the elements $`\pm 1`$. Physically, the idea is to transform as much physical information as possible to the center part of the configuration, i.e. the part one obtains by subsequently projecting

$$U\text{sign tr}U$$
(2)
This projection step truncates physical information, and whether one has succeeded in retaining the relevant physics can usually only be answered a posteriori, by comparing the results obtained for a particular observable using either the center projected configurations or the full ones. If the results agree, this is called center dominance.

The observation of center dominance for large Wilson loops***This observation was subsequently extended to finite temperatures ,,. ,, sparked the recent renewed interest in the center vortex picture of confinement. Once one has defined a $`Z(2)`$ lattice configuration by the center projection step (2), one equivalently obtains an associated center vortex configuration in a canonical fashion: One considers all plaquettes of the $`Z(2)`$ lattice, and if the product of the links bounding a plaquette yields the value $`1`$, a vortex is defined to pierce that plaquette. These vortices form closed two-dimensional world-sheets in four-dimensional (Euclidean) space-time, and they can be thought of as being composed of plaquettes on the dual lattice, i.e. the lattice shifted by half a lattice spacing in all four directions with respect to the original one. Vortices contribute a phase factor $`1`$ to the value of any Wilson loop they are linked to. Center dominance equivalently implies vortex dominance.

Depending on the observable under consideration, the original or the dual lattice (vortex) language may be advantageous. Note that, while the formulation in terms of $`Z(2)`$ link variables still has a residual $`Z(2)`$ gauge invariance (the gauge fixing functional (1) contains no bias with respect to transformations $`GZ(2)`$), the vortex world-sheets on the other hand represent gauge-invariant variables under this residual gauge group. One advantage of the vortex language lies in the fact that it can be detached from an underlying space-time lattice; one can consider vortex world-surfaces in continuous space-time. This has proven particularly useful when considering the topological properties of vortex configurations, which initially are only defined in a continuum framework ,,. The topological winding number (Pontryagin index) $`Q`$ of an $`SU(2)`$ vortex surface configuration $`S`$ can be given in terms of its (oriented) self-intersection number

$$Q=\frac{1}{16}ϵ_{\mu \nu \alpha \beta }_Sd^2\sigma _{\alpha \beta }_Sd^2\sigma _{\mu \nu }^{}\delta ^4(\overline{x}(\sigma )\overline{x}(\sigma ^{}))$$
(3)
where $`\overline{x}(\sigma )`$ denotes a parametrization of the two-dimensional surface $`S`$ in four space-time dimensions, i.e. for any two-vector $`\sigma `$ from a two-dimensional parameter space, the four-vector $`\overline{x}`$ gives the corresponding point on the vortex surface in space-time. This parametrization furthermore implies an infinitesimal surface element

$$d^2\sigma _{\mu \nu }=ϵ_{ab}\frac{\overline{x}_\mu }{\sigma _a}\frac{\overline{x}_\nu }{\sigma _b}d^2\sigma $$
(4)
on the vortex surface. Note that the continuum surfaces thus must be specified not only with a location, but also an orientation, encoded in the sign of the surface element (4). In general, vortex surfaces consist of surface patches of alternating orientation; indeed, generic center projection vortices in the confining phase have been shown to be non-orientable , and therefore necessarily contain lines at which the orientation switches, i.e. patch boundaries. These lines can be associated with Abelian monopole trajectories . For $`Z(2)`$ lattice vortices, by contrast, the orientation information is initially lost and must be reintroduced before the topological charge can be evaluated . Note furthermore that (3) includes not only surface self-intersections in the usual sense (for which (3) is normalized such as to give a contribution of modulus $`1/2`$, as shown in ,), but all singular points of a surface ; these are all points where the set of tangent vectors to the surface spans all four space-time directions.

The continuum expression (3) for the topological charge has been implemented for vortex surfaces defined on a (dual) space-time lattice ; the detailed prescription is presented in section II. Using this construction, a random vortex surface ensemble defined such as to reproduce the confinement properties of $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills theory  was shown to simultaneously predict the correct topological susceptibility  as measured in lattice Yang-Mills experiments. The topological susceptibility $`\chi =Q^2/V`$, where $`V`$ is the space-time volume under consideration, e.g. determines, via the Witten-Veneziano estimate

$$m_\eta ^{}^2+m_\eta ^22m_K^2=2N_f\chi /f_\pi ^2$$
(5)
the anomalously high mass of the $`\eta ^{}`$ meson. These developments have given rise to the expectation that the vortex picture may be the first infrared effective framework capable of providing a consistent explanation of the entire spectrum of nonperturbative effects characterizing the infrared sector of Yang-Mills theory. Originally, the vortex picture was only proposed in particular to explain confinement . It received early corroboration through the observation that a constant Yang-Mills chromomagnetic field is unstable with respect to the formation of flux tube domains in three-dimensional space . Also in the lattice formulation, different possibilities of defining vortices were explored ,,. Notably, an alternative confinement criterion based on the vortex free energy was established  and measurements of this free energy have recently been carried out ,. The new developments highlighted further above have significantly enlarged the scope of the vortex picture beyond this by establishing the link to the topological properties of Yang-Mills theory.

The purpose of the present work is to combine the two recent advances discussed above: The construction of the topological charge for lattice vortex surfaces , hitherto only applied to an ensemble of random vortex surfaces , will be used to measure the topological susceptibility associated with the vortices extracted from lattice Yang-Mills configurations via the maximal center gaugeNote that up to now only the complementary experiment has been performed : An ensemble of Yang-Mills configurations from which all vortices had been removed was shown to belong exclusively to the topologically trivial sector $`Q=0`$.. These vortex configurations exhibit ultraviolet artefacts which have been noted before in other contexts, cf. the discussion in section III. These artefacts strongly influence the measurement of the topological charge, and it is consequently necessary to explore smoothing procedures applied to the vortices before the measurement. In this respect, the center projection framework is quite similar to full lattice Yang-Mills experiments. While the prediction for the topological susceptibility arrived at in this work is thus fraught with a measure of systematic uncertainty, the values obtained will be seen to be comparable with the full $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills topological susceptibility. This result is consistent with an interpretation of the topological charge of Yang-Mills configurations being generated by their vortex content.

Finally, a comment is in order regarding the gauge chosen to extract the vortices. The maximal center gauge to be used in the following has been the subject of recent debate due to pronounced Gribov copy effects. While most Gribov copies, i.e. local maxima of the gauge fixing functional (1), appear, as an ensemble, to generate center dominance for large Wilson loops, closer numerical scrutiny ,,, has indicated that the highest maxima may not. This actually is not entirely surprising in view of the continuum limit of the maximal center gauge , which always leads to a trivial center projection, with no vortex content. One remedy suggested in  is to consider altered functionals,

$$\underset{G}{\mathrm{max}}\underset{i}{}f\left(\left|\text{tr}U_i^G\right|\right)$$
(6)
with monotonously rising $`f`$; any such functional implements the general idea of concentrating physical information onto the center of the gauge group. It is in fact quite straightforward to construct functions $`f`$ which, in the continuum, avoid the singularities leading to the absence of vortices in the case of the gauge fixing functional (1). Another alternative type of gauge which allows to identify vortices is the Laplacian center gauge ,,,, which is free of Gribov copies. A further possibility of circumventing the Gribov problem lies in reinterpreting the maximal center gauge fixing procedure used on the lattice. Instead of insisting on convergence to the global maximum of (1), which in practice is rarely achieved, one can allow for an averaging over different local maxima. Formally, this is akin to the well-known procedure of introducing a gauge-fixing term with a finite gauge fixing parameter into the action, without insisting on any particular limit for this parameter ,.

While it is ultimately desirable to develop better-defined alternative gauge fixing procedures such as highlighted above, these procedures are just beginning to be exploredFor some first results using the Laplacian center gauge, cf. ,,,; note e.g. the as yet unclear interpretation of the vortex density in the Laplacian center gauge, which does not seem to scale properly with the renormalization group and seems to extrapolate to an infinite continuum value .. For this reason, in this work, the usual maximal center gauge overrelaxation algorithm ,, will be used to define the gauge fixing image, in recognition of the fact that it does not strictly correspond to the condition (1), but rather to some reinterpretation such as suggested above.

## II Topological charge of lattice vortex surfaces

Given vortex surface configurations composed of plaquettes on a (dual) hypercubic lattice, such as e.g. extracted via center projection from $`SU(2)`$ lattice Yang-Mills configurations, the Pontryagin index cannot immediately be evaluated. For one, as mentioned above, orientations first have to be assigned to the plaquettes making up the surface configuration. In the case of center projection vortices, one could use an indirect version of the maximal center gauge ,, in which one first transforms to the maximal Abelian gauge, extracts the Abelian monopoles via Abelian projection, and subsequently fixes the residual Abelian U(1) gauge freedom such as to reach the maximal center gauge. The monopoles define the edges of the oriented patches making up the vortex surfaces. However, this gauge fixing procedure does not strictly locate the monopoles on the surfaces; there remains a small fraction of monopole links which do not lie on a vortex§§§In this respect, the Laplacian center gauge ,,, is more advantageous, since it can be constructed such as to explicitly locate monopoles on vortex surfaces. . In anticipation of the fact that the topological charge varies very little under most (topologically allowed) deformations of the monopole trajectories (the reason for this is discussed in detail in section IV), in this work a simpler prescription was applied. Namely, vortex surfaces were identified by transforming directly to the maximal center gauge; then, random initial orientations were assigned to the vortex plaquettes, and sweeps through the lattice were performed in which plaquettes were reoriented such as to either maximize or minimize the monopole density. The topological susceptibility was evaluated for both cases and turns out to be equal within the statistical error of the measurement, even though the monopole density varies by a large factor; numerical values are given in section IV.

The oriented vortex surface configurations defined in this way contain two types of ambiguities as to their precise continuum interpretation, which must be resolved before the Pontryagin index can be evaluated. One ambiguity lies in the fact that the vortex surfaces generically intersect along whole lines, as opposed to points, as they do in the continuum. Similarly, monopole trajectories on the surfaces (at which the surface orientation switches) intersect singular points (at which topological charge is generated) with a finite probability; in the continuum, assuming a random distribution of lines and points on a surface, the two sets are generically disjoint. These ambiguities arise due to the coarse-graining enforced by the lattice; to resolve them, one defines the vortex configurations on a finer lattice and allows for random small deformations of the surfaces and of the monopoles until the ambiguities are resolved . This is reminiscent of inverse blocking prescriptions in full Yang-Mills theory. In summary, one arrives at the following algorithm for evaluating the Pontryagin index of the lattice vortex surfaces (the reader interested in further details of the construction is referred to ):

* Transfer the given lattice surface configuration onto a lattice of $`1/3`$ the lattice spacing and sweep once through the lattice, applying so-called elementary cube transformations whenever this allows to remove one of the links along which two vortex surface segments intersect, i.e. to which more than two vortex plaquettes are attached. An elementary cube transformationElementary cube transformations are also the basic building blocks of the smoothing procedure discussed in section III B, albeit with a different acceptance criterion; Fig. 2 in section III B displays particular examples of elementary cube transformations used in the context of smoothing. is a particular elementary update of a lattice surface configuration; it is carried out on all six plaquettes of an elementary three-dimensional cube of the lattice. If any of these plaquettes were part of a vortex before the update, then they are removed from the vortex after the update, and vice versa. Note that an elementary cube transformation preserves the closed character of the surfaces. The orientations of the updated plaquettes should be chosen such as to conserve the number of monopole links as much as possible. In practice, it is sufficient to carry this procedure out twice, i.e. one ends up with a lattice of $`1/9`$ the original lattice spacing. As a result, the surface configuration only self-intersects at points, but not anymore along lines.
* For each lattice site $`n`$, make a copy of all attached plaquettes, and transform the copy as follows. After finding an initial plaquette which is part of a vortex, iteratively reorient further vortex plaquettes sharing links with previously considered ones such as to remove all monopole lines. If there are two independent surface segments present, i.e. two sets of vortex plaquettes which share only the lattice site under consideration, then carry out this procedure for each segment independently. The result of this procedure is that all monopole lines are deformed away from the lattice site being scrutinized. Using the transformed vortex plaquettes, one can now obtain the contribution $`q_n`$ to the Pontryagin index from the site $`n`$ in question, cf. eq. (3) and the discussion following. Namely, each pair of mutually orthogonal vortex plaquettes, i.e. with combined tangent vectors spanning four dimensions, contributes $`\pm 1/32`$ to the Pontryagin index. The sign depends on the relative orientation of the two plaquettes; the magnitude $`1/32`$ can be inferred from the fact that an intersection point in the usual sense contains $`16`$ such pairs, and carries topological charge $`q_n=\pm 1/2`$, cf. ,.
* The total Pontryagin index is the sum $`Q=_nq_n`$.

Applying this procedure to general surface configurations on a hypercubic lattice, i.e. a space-time torus, one obtains a Pontryagin index quantized in half-integer units, which is exactly as it should be ; this is nontrivial in view of the fact that the magnitudes of the individual site contributions $`q_n`$ can be as small as $`1/16`$ (for surfaces in a space-time continuum, the contribution from any particular singular point can even be arbitrarily small).

## III Elimination of ultraviolet artefacts

Using the above algorithm, the Pontryagin index of an arbitrary lattice center projection vortex configuration can be evaluated. However, such thin vortex surfaces exhibit ultraviolet artefacts which strongly contaminate the measurement. Specifically, in the vortex picture of Yang-Mills theory, thick physical vortices are conjectured to characterize the infrared properties of the vacuum. By contrast, the thin vortices obtained by center projection from full Yang-Mills configurations only approximate the aforementioned thick vortices on infrared length scales coarser then a scale related to the physical vortex thickness. On the other hand, within the thick profile of the physical vortex it corresponds to, the thin center projection vortex in general exhibits spurious gauge-dependent ultraviolet fluctuations, cf. Fig. 1. This has been noted before in several contexts. For one, in  explicit examples were constructed showing that the precise location of a center projection vortex on scales finer than the physical vortex thickness depends on the gauge fixing function $`f`$ in (6). Similarly, in  it was observed that this location varies as different Gribov copies of the maximal center gauge fixed configurations are considered.

Moreover, in lattice experiments, the ratio between the string tension and the center projection vortex density is substantially suppressed compared to what one would expect from a random vortex ensemble ; motivated by this, the correlations between intersection points of center projection vortices with a given space-time plane were investigated in . On ultraviolet length scales, up to about $`0.4`$ fm, the binary correlation function between these points indeed is strongly enhanced. Also this finding can be understood in terms of the aforementioned short wavelength fluctuations of the center projection vortices. Consider a plane which cuts a thick vortex, such as depicted in Fig. 1, along a (smeared-out) line, and consider furthermore intersection points of the associated center projection vortex with this plane. Due to the transverse fluctuations of the projection vortices, one will find a strongly enhanced probability of detecting such intersection points close to one another (compared with the probability one would expect from the mean vortex density). Note that this picture also clarifies the origin of the low ratio of the string tension to the center projection vortex density mentioned further above; the vortex density relevant for the area law behavior of the Wilson loop is the density of thick vortices, which would be well represented by smooth thin vortex cores, cf. Fig. 1, as opposed to the rough center projection vortices. Indeed, the smoothing procedure to be discussed in section III B has been shown to keep the string tension approximately fixed while depleting the vortex density by eliminating ultraviolet fluctuations ; ultimately, one reaches a ratio compatible with the one expected in a random vortex ensemble.

As a consequence of these observations, it is necessary to explore methods to eliminate the spurious ultraviolet fluctuations of the center projection vortices; only then can one expect to extract the physical topological content of the configurations, without contamination by ultraviolet artefacts. Before discussing these methods, it is worth noting that the problems discussed above would be exacerbated by using the Laplacian center gauge instead of the maximal center gauge. In the latter, the center projection vortex density and its binary correlations measured in  scale properly under the renormalization group, such as to extrapolate to a finite physical result in the continuum limit, albeit with strong correlations in the ultraviolet, as discussed above. By contrast, it has recently been noted that in the Laplacian center gauge, the vortex density does not scale to a finite continuum limit, but appears to extrapolate to an infinite continuum density . In a sense, the Laplacian center gauge may suffer from its own efficiency. As observed in , vortices extracted via the Laplacian center gauge at least partly reproduce the short-range Coulomb potential between static charges, whereas this effect is completely truncated when projecting from the maximal center gauge. In terms of the underlying degrees of freedom, this presumably means that, in addition to the infrared structure of the theory, Laplacian center gauge fixing attempts to also partially represent ultraviolet perturbative gluons by vortices. This may be the reason for the unphysical renormalization group behavior observed for the density of Laplacian center gauge vortices .

### A Blocking

A simple way to eliminate ultraviolet fluctuations of the center projection vortices obtained in the maximal center gauge is to apply blocking steps such as to transfer the vortex configurations onto new coarser lattices, while always preserving their chromomagnetic flux content on length scales larger than the new lattice spacing. Such blocking steps are easily implemented starting on the original lattice, i.e. before constructing the vortex surfaces on the corresponding dual lattice.

Consider a new coarse lattice with $`n`$ timesIn practice, $`n=2,3`$ and $`4`$ were used. the spacing of an old fine lattice, superimposed on the latter such that all sites of the coarse lattice coincide with sites of the fine lattice. The gauge phases associated with plaquettes on the coarse lattice then are defined to be equal to the $`n\times n`$ Wilson loops on the old fine lattice to which these plaquettes correspond. Equivalently, if an odd number of vortices pierces the $`n\times n`$ Wilson loop on the old fine lattice, then one vortex is defined to pierce the corresponding plaquette on the new coarse lattice; if an even number of vortices pierces the $`n\times n`$ Wilson loop on the fine lattice, then no vortex pierces the corresponding plaquette on the coarse lattice. Note that, in practice, this procedure (and also the smoothing procedure discussed further below) was applied to the center projected lattice configurations before defining the orientations of the vortex surfaces in the manner described at the beginning of section II. Note also that blocking manifestly preserves the values of all Wilson loops (as far as they can still be defined on the coarse lattice). Thus, blocking leaves the string tension induced by a thin vortex ensemble invariant.

In section IV, the behavior of the topological susceptibility as a function of the coarse lattice spacing reached by blocking is discussed. Of course, the question arises which scale defines the separation between spurious ultraviolet fluctuations to be eliminated, and relevant infrared information on vortex degrees of freedom to be kept. Obviously, this scale is related to the thickness of the physical vortices thought to be present in the full Yang-Mills configurations; however, the precise relation is a priori unclear. Certainly, the blocking procedure should not be carried so far as to deplete the density of thick vortices relevant for the asymptotic string tension. An estimate of this density, discussed in , leads to the conclusion that the centers of neighboring thick vortices, on the average, are $`0.6`$ fm apart. This therefore constitutes an upper bound on the length scales to be eliminated by the blocking procedure. On the other hand, the ultraviolet correlations measured in , interpreted above to be a consequence of the spurious short wavelength fluctuations of the center projection vortex surfaces, extend to distances up to about $`0.4`$ fm. Thus, the authors estimate that the separation scale, i.e. the new lattice spacing which should be reached by blocking, roughly lies between $`0.4`$ fm and $`0.6`$ fm. This is also compatible with the findings in a random vortex surface model  adjusted to reproduce the confinement properties of $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills theory; there, two neighboring vortices can be identified as distinct down to a minimal distance of $`0.4`$ fm.

It should be emphasized that the above estimates do not exclude the chromomagnetic flux of the vortices being smeared out considerably further; i.e., the flux of neighboring thick physical vortices may to a certain extent overlap . The flux of a physical vortex has been argued to extend transversally over a distance of a little over $`1`$ fm ,, in order to account e.g. for the Casimir scaling behavior of adjoint representation Wilson loops .

### B Smoothing

Another way to remove the artificial ultraviolet fluctuations of the center projection vortices is the smoothing procedure first discussed in . It operates using elementary cube transformations of the type already introduced in section II in connection with the removal of topological ambiguities in the lattice vortex surface configurations. The difference lies in the condition for accepting an elementary cube transformation. The smoothing procedure is defined by accepting such an elementary update whenever it implies a net decrease in the number of vortex plaquettes, and it can be further split up into a progression of steps characterized by the precise way in which the update affects the vortex surface, as displayed in Fig. 2. Note also that repeated smoothing sweeps through the lattice are performed, until no further elementary cube transformations of the type under consideration are possible; thus, smoothing can propagate information over distances of more than one lattice spacing.

This smoothing procedure depletes the center projection vortex density while keeping the long-range static quark potential largely intact, in accordance with the interpretation of the center projection vortices discussed above in connection with Fig. 1. However, in contrast to the blocking procedure presented in the previous section, preservation of the string tension is not an exact property of smoothing. Thus, invariance of the static potential can be used as a criterion to determine how far the smoothing procedure can be applied before it begins to truncate relevant physical information about the confining thick vortex structures, and should therefore be stopped.

The effect of the different smoothing steps on Creutz ratios is displayed in Fig. 3. The Creutz ratios are clearly unaffected by the smoothing steps a) through c), whereas a suppression is seen after step d). At first sight, therefore, steps a) through c) only remove spurious ultraviolet fluctuations from the vortex configurations, whereas step d) begins to truncate relevant information. However, two trends are visible in Fig. 3 which deserve further comment. For one, the suppression effect becomes weaker as one progresses to larger Wilson loops. This is natural; a finite number of local smoothing steps, which propagates information over a finite distance, cannot influence correlations on scales larger than that distance\**\**\**Note that an analogous argument applies with regard to cooling steps applied to lattice Yang-Mills configurations.. Thus, strictly speaking, the asymptotic string tension is not modified by smoothing. However, already the medium range behavior of the confining static quark potential constitutes relevant nonperturbative information, e.g. through its influence on hadronic properties. In this sense, smoothing step d) does truncate important nonperturbative effects carried by the vortices.

On the other hand, according to Fig. 3, the suppression of the Creutz ratios by smoothing step d) also weakens as the inverse coupling $`\beta `$ is increased. This can be understood from the fact that smoothing is not defined in a renormalization group invariant manner. Elementary smoothing operations are defined locally on the scale of one lattice spacing; as one increases $`\beta `$, this spacing decreases. Therefore, some fluctuations of the vortex surfaces which occur on the scale of one lattice spacing at low $`\beta `$ (and are therefore removed by smoothing) remain unaffected by smoothing at higher $`\beta `$ because they then extend over more than one lattice spacing††††††Renormalization group invariance would presumably be restored by considering smoothing steps of increasingly nonlocal nature as $`\beta `$ is augmented.. The trend visible in Fig. 3 suggests that, at $`\beta =2.5`$, one roughly reaches the point where smoothing step d) just stops truncating relevant physical information (and, presumably, still removes spurious ultraviolet fluctuations). At higher $`\beta `$, smoothing step d) can be expected to even leave some of these ultraviolet fluctuations intact.

As a consequence of the above discussion, the authors conclude that, at $`\beta =2.3`$, the topological susceptibility measured from center projection vortices before applying smoothing step d) constitutes an upper limit on the physical susceptibility carried by the confining thick physical vortices characterizing infrared Yang-Mills theory; the measurement after smoothing step d) constitutes a lower limit. At $`\beta =2.5`$, on the other hand, the value measured after smoothing step d) should give a rough indication of the aforementioned relevant physical thick vortex susceptibility. It will be seen that these characterizations at different $`\beta `$ are consistent with each other.

## IV Numerical Measurements and Discussion

Having presented all the elements employed in the analysis, the complete procedure used to extract the topological susceptibility can be summarized as follows:

* Generate an ensemble of $`SU(2)`$ lattice Yang-Mills configurations.
* Transform the configurations to the maximal center gauge and perform center projection.
* Remove ultraviolet fluctuations of the center projection vortex surfaces by either blocking or smoothing, cf. section III.
* Randomly assign orientations to the dual lattice plaquettes making up the surfaces, with a choice of bias which either maximizes or minimizes the monopole line density, cf. the beginning of section II.
* Remove ambiguities in the vortex surfaces, i.e. lines along which vortices intersect and monopole lines coinciding with singular surface points, cf. section II.
* Evaluate the topological charge carried by the singular points, cf. section II.

Fig. 4 depicts the results for the topological susceptibility $`\chi `$ of the different center projection vortex ensembles considered. Measurements are displayed as a function of the blocking scale (i.e. the spacing of the blocked lattice), and as a function of the smoothing steps. The fact that the $`\beta =2.3`$ and the $`\beta =2.5`$ values in the right-hand panel in Fig. 4 do not lie on a universal curve (as opposed to the left-hand panel) is natural, since the smoothing steps defining the horizontal axis are not constructed in a renormalization group invariant manner, cf. the discussion in the previous section.

The vertical error bars in Fig. 4 are compounded from three sources: The statistical uncertainty of the susceptibility measurement, the statistical uncertainty of the string tension measurement, and a systematical uncertainty stemming from the vortex surface ambiguity removal procedure discussed in section II. The latter was estimated as follows: The ambiguity removal procedure systematically increases the vortex surface density; the densities before and after this procedure were recorded. To obtain a measure for the uncertainty introduced by this alteration of the surface configurations, the variation of the topological susceptibility was determined which would result from readjusting the physical scale such as to equate the aforementioned densities. Under such a rescaling, the topological susceptibility varies as the square of the vortex density, in view of the dimensions of the two quantities. The variation of the susceptibility extracted in this way was compounded only into the downward uncertainty of the measurements displayed in Fig. 4, since surface ambiguity removal systematically increases the vortex density. Consequently, as is markedly visible in the left-hand panel in Fig. 4, the downward error bar is always larger than the upward error bar. Evidently, for blocked configurations, the systematical uncertainty dominates over the statistical one. Presumably, the coarse lattice, onto which the surface configurations are forced by blocking, does not allow the vortices to avoid one another, thereby inducing a large density of lines on which vortex surfaces intersect. These ambiguities subsequently have to be removed again by correspondingly abundant applications of elementary cube transformations, as described in section II. The strong alteration of the surfaces implied by this leads to a large systematical uncertainty of the type discussed above. In marked contrast to this, in the case of smoothing, cf. Fig. 4 (right), the difference between the upward and the downward uncertainties is not appreciable. Smoothing thus seems to constitute a good preconditioner for the vortex surface ambiguity removal procedure.

In addition to these uncertainties in $`\chi /\sigma ^2`$, the left-hand panel in Fig. 4 also displays horizontal error bars stemming from the statistical error in the lattice measurement of $`\sigma a^2`$, which was used to determine the lattice spacing $`a`$ by equating $`\sqrt{\sigma }=440`$ MeV.

Before proceeding to interpret Fig. 4, a discussion of the monopole density dependence of the results is in order. The measurements displayed in Fig. 4 were obtained using the maximal monopole density reached via the biased vortex plaquette reorientation procedure described at the beginning of section II. If one conversely minimizes the monopole density, the values shown in Fig. 4 only vary by at most 1%, i.e. by considerably less than the uncertainty of the measurement. Thus, for practical purposes, the topological susceptibility is independent of the monopole density. To illustrate the significance of this result, Fig. 5 displays the aforementioned maximal and minimal monopole line densities considered for each measured data point in Fig. 4. For comparison, the zero-temperature monopole line density measured in full $`SU(2)`$ Yang-Mills theory in the maximal Abelian gauge  amounts to $`\rho _{mag}=64/\text{fm}^3`$.

The phenomenon that the topological susceptibility is independent of the monopole density has been observed before in the random vortex surface model . Also the reasons for this independence there and here are similar. Most importantly, the dominant proportion of the topological charge is carried by so-called writhing points of the vortex surfaces as opposed to intersection points in the usual sense. The former class of singular points is distinguished from the latter as follows: At intersection points, two distinct surface segments share one point, but one cannot reach one surface segment from the other by proceeding along plaquettes which share a link. Writhing points on the other hand are characterized precisely by the opposite; all plaquettes attached to such a point can be connected by proceeding along plaquettes which share a link. In this sense, there is only one surface segment at a writhing point. As a consequence of this structure, the associated contribution to the Pontryagin index is manifestly invariant under changes of the monopole configuration: Encircling a writhing point by a monopole loop implies inverting the orientations of all plaquettes attached to the point, since they are all connected via links. As a result, all pairs of orthogonal plaquettes retain their relative orientation, and the Pontryagin index is unchanged .

The topological susceptibility therefore must be independent of the monopole density to the extent that it is dominated by the contributions from writhing points. To corroborate this dominance, Fig. 6 displays the topological susceptibility $`\overline{\chi }`$ obtained by discarding writhing points (in all other respects, Fig. 6 is completely analogous to Fig. 4). Evidently, the fourth root of this truncated susceptibility is only roughly half as large as the fourth root of the full one; i.e., the contribution of intersection points to the full topological susceptibility is suppressed compared with the contribution from writhing points by roughly a factor $`2^4`$.

Note furthermore that Fig. 6 was again obtained using the maximal monopole density reached via the biased vortex plaquette reorientation procedure of section II. If one instead uses the minimal monopole density, the variation of the results in Fig. 6 still is rather weak; it amounts to no more than 5%, which is comparable to the statistical uncertainty of the measurement. This at first sight surprisingly weak dependence is presumably due to the high degree of non-orientability of the vortex surfaces. This non-orientability enforces a certain minimal monopole density which cannot be removed by the aforementioned vortex reorientation procedure. Evidently already this minimal density suffices to randomize the signs of the intersection point contributions to the Pontryagin index to such an extent that additional random changes of the signs, induced by adding monopole loops on the vortex surfaces, do not strongly influence the associated topological susceptibility.

The fact that the topological susceptibility is virtually independent of the monopole density allows to predict the former without going to the trouble of explicitly determining the monopole content of each lattice Yang-Mills configuration considered. The remaining task lies in extracting from Fig. 4 the physical value of the topological susceptibility obtained after eliminating spurious ultraviolet fluctuations of the center projection vortex surfaces. Starting with the left-hand panel in Fig. 4, the discussion in section III A led to the conclusion that the residual susceptibility $`\chi `$ at a blocking scale of 0.4 fm represents an upper limit for the physical susceptibility $`\chi _{phys}`$, whereas the value at 0.6 fm constitutes a lower limit. In the extreme cases admitted by the error bars, this implies

$$(150\text{MeV})^4\chi _{phys}(224\text{MeV})^4,$$
(7)
where $`\sqrt{\sigma }=440`$ MeV was used. Likewise, in the right-hand panel in Fig. 4, the $`\beta =2.3`$ data extracted using smoothing steps a) through c) limit the physical susceptibility from above, whereas the $`\beta =2.3`$ data obtained using smoothing steps a) through d) limit it from below, cf. the discussion in section III B. Therefore, one has in the extreme cases admitted by the error bars

$$(166\text{MeV})^4\chi _{phys}(230\text{MeV})^4.$$
(8)
This is furthermore consistent with the value obtained at $`\beta =2.5`$ using smoothing steps a) through d), namely $`\chi ^{1/4}=(187\pm 3)`$ MeV (only statistical error quoted).

In summary, the results for the topological susceptibility carried by the physical thick vortex content of lattice Yang-Mills configurations, as estimated within the different schemes of eliminating spurious ultraviolet fluctuations of the associated thin center projection vortices, are consistent with one another. While considerable systematic uncertainties are inherent in all these determinations, they correspond well with values extracted from the full $`SU(2)`$ lattice Yang-Mills configurations . The latter values are located roughly at the center of the range admitted by (7) and (8). This suggests that the topological properties of the Yang-Mills ensemble can be accounted for in terms of the vortex content of the gauge field configurations, just as is the case for the confining properties. The vortex picture appears suited to provide a unified description of these two different nonperturbative aspects of Yang-Mills theory.

## Acknowledgments

M.E. acknowledges informative discussions with K. Langfeld and, especially, H. Reinhardt, in particular concerning their results in  together with A. Schäfke, prior to publication of that work. M.E. furthermore acknowledges DFG financial support under grant DFG En 415/1-1, including the funding of a collaborative stay at TU Wien; also the hospitality of the Institut für Kernphysik there is acknowledged. R.B. reciprocally is grateful for the hospitality during a stay at the Institut für Theoretische Physik at Tübingen, funded by DFG under grant DFG Al 279/3-3, in the course of which this work was finalized. M.F. and R.B. are supported by Fonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung under P13997-TPH.