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# Experiment Design and First Season Observations with the Degree Angular Scale Interferometer

## 1 Introduction

The use of the CMB angular power spectrum to constrain cosmological parameters has been the subject of much recent literature (see, e.g., Hu & White 1996, for a discussion of salient features of the power spectrum). We are at a point where the ability to resolve fine-scale structure in the power spectrum is no longer limited primarily by detector sensitivity, but by experiment design, understanding of calibration uncertainties and careful control of systematics. The comparison of complementary measurements by experiments of radically different design will prove critical to an understanding of what exactly the CMB is telling us.

Because they directly sample Fourier components of the sky, interferometers are uniquely suited to measurement of the CMB power spectrum and offer a completely independent technique, free of many of the systematics which must be carefully controlled in scanning experiments. The Degree Angular Scale Interferometer (DASI), along with its companion instrument the CBI (Pearson et al. 2000), and the VSA (Jones 1996), is one of a new generation of ultra-compact microwave interferometers designed to measure anisotropy in the CMB. With 13 elements operating in ten 1-GHz bands from 26–36 GHz, DASI provides dense sampling of the power spectrum from $`l=100`$ to $`l=900`$, angular scales spanning the first three harmonically related acoustic peaks in $`\mathrm{\Omega }1`$ cosmologies.

This paper describes details of the instrument, design of the experiment, and calibration and reduction of the Fourier-plane visibility data. Analysis of these data and extraction of the angular power spectrum are presented in Halverson et al. (2001, hereafter Paper II), while limits on cosmological parameters from the DASI data are given in Pryke et al. (2001, hereafter Paper III).

In sections §2 and §3 of this paper, we discuss details of the instrument design. A description of the site is given in §4. We discuss foregrounds in §5. The CMB observations are described in §6 and §7. Data reduction and analysis are presented in §8 and §9, and results are presented in §10.

## 2 Instrument

### 2.1 Telescope Mount

The telescope is situated atop the inner of two concentric towers attached to the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO), 0.7 km from the geographic South Pole. The inner tower is mechanically isolated from the outer tower to minimize vibrations transmitted from the building to the telescope. Although diurnal variations in the ambient temperature at the Pole are extremely small (see §4), the legs of the inner tower are insulated to minimize tilt of the azimuth ring from differential thermal expansion by direct solar heating during the summer months.

A room beneath the telescope, attached to the outer tower, houses helium compressors, drive amplifiers, and an air handling unit for managing waste heat from the telescope and compressors. The interior of the telescope opens directly onto the compressor room, providing access to drive systems, receivers and electronics even in mid-winter, when the darkness and extreme cold (as low as $`80\mathrm{°}`$ C ambient) severely restrict outside activity. An insulated fabric bellows permits motion in the elevation axis while maintaining the interior of the telescope and drive assemblies at room temperature using only waste heat from the telescope systems. Tested for flexibility to $`100\mathrm{°}`$ C, the bellows has thus far functioned perfectly at polar temperatures.

The telescope mount is an altitude-azimuth design, employing a counterbalanced gear and pinion elevation drive, for tracking and pointing stability. Heavy box steel construction lends the mount extreme rigidity and immunity to flexure; the combined weight of the telescope, when fully equipped and operational, is approximately 35,000 lbs.

The absolute pointing of the telescope is derived from observations of bright stars made with a small optical camera mounted on the faceplate. In an automated procedure, approximately 80 positions for stars distributed throughout the sky are acquired using a frame grabber. These observations are fit with an eight parameter pointing model, yielding $`20^{\prime \prime }`$ rms residuals. Limits on the deviation of the radio pointing from this model are discussed in §9.

### 2.2 Faceplate

The interferometer has 13 primary antenna elements, arranged in a three-fold symmetric pattern on a rigid faceplate attached to the elevation cradle. The locations of the antennas in the faceplate were numerically optimized to provide nearly uniform sampling over the multipole range probed by DASI, $`l100`$–900 (see Figure 2). The rigid faceplate greatly simplifies the design of the correlator, since unlike conventional tracking arrays, projected baseline lengths for a co-planar array are independent of the pointing center, and tracking delays are not required.

The faceplate can also be rotated about its axis. In combination with the three-fold symmetry, this feature provides important diagnostic capabilities, for instance permitting discrimination of spurious signals due to cross-talk between the antenna elements. Since the antenna pattern repeats with every $`120\mathrm{°}`$ of rotation, any signal in the far-field remains unchanged by such a rotation; signals due to cross-talk, however, will rotate with the faceplate. Moreover, at the South Pole, celestial sources track at fixed elevation, and the ability to simulate parallactic angle rotation provides a powerful consistency check for observations of calibrator sources, as described in §7.2. For purposes of imaging, the rotation also allows dense sampling of the Fourier plane (see §3).

### 2.3 Primary Antenna Elements

Each antenna consists of a 20-cm aperture, $`30\mathrm{°}`$ semi-flare angle corrugated horn with a lens to correct the phase front and achieve a diffraction-limited beam on the sky. To make the array maximally compact, the receiver dewars were designed to fit entirely within the footprint of the horns; the shortest baseline is $`25.1`$ cm. Unlike Cassegrain elements, horns provide unobstructed apertures, with lower sidelobe response and better cross-talk characteristics, important for a compact array in which the elements are nearly touching. Each antenna element is further surrounded by a corrugated shroud, yielding a measured monochromatic crosstalk level of less than $`100\mathrm{dB}`$ in laboratory measurements of the horn-lens combination (Halverson & Carlstrom 2001). To further suppress cross-talk from correlated amplifier noise, the receivers are also equipped with front-end isolators.

Each element is equipped with a high density polyethylene lens, resulting in a high aperture efficiency, $`83.5\%`$, and permitting an extremely compact horn design. At polar temperatures, the lens contributes less than $`2.5\mathrm{K}`$ to the system temperature.

The beam pattern, which determines the field of view of the interferometer, has been characterized in range measurements at 26, 30 and 36 GHz and in each case found to agree closely with the predicted pattern, both in the sidelobe response, which is typically $`20\mathrm{dB}`$ at the first sidelobe, and in the main beam width, which is $`3\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}4`$ FWHM at 30 GHz (Halverson & Carlstrom 2001). From the agreement between these measurements and the theoretical beam pattern, we adopt the theoretical value as our estimate of the true aperture efficiency and assign a fractional uncertainty of $`4\%`$, as shown in Table 1.

### 2.4 Signal Chain

Each receiver employs a cryogenically cooled, 4-stage InP HEMT amplifier operating from 26–36 GHz. These amplifiers were constructed at the University of Chicago, after a design developed at NRAO (Pospiezalski et al. 1995). Receiver temperatures range from 15–26 K at the center of the band, increasing to an average of $`30\mathrm{K}`$ at the band edges. These noise temperatures include the HEMTs, isolator and polarizer (all at 10 K), and warm throat, horn and lens. Including CMB and atmosphere, we achieve typical system temperatures of 26 K at band center, for an rms sensitivity per visibility of approximately $`60\mathrm{Jy}\mathrm{s}^{1/2}`$ in a 1 GHz band.

The 26–36 GHz RF signal from each antenna is mixed down to 2–12 GHz IF band using a local oscillator (LO) tuned to $`38`$ GHz. The IF signal is split into ten 1-GHz wide bands, each of which is further mixed down to 1–2 GHz. The 13 signals at each frequency are fed to one of 10 identical analog correlators (Padin et al. 2001), where the 78 complex multiplications are formed, digitized and integrated for 0.84 s in a digital accumulator. A copy of each input signal is phase-shifted by $`90\mathrm{°}`$, and multiplications are performed simultaneously for the real and imaginary Fourier components. A $`180\mathrm{°}`$ phase switch is applied to each LO in a Walsh sequence on a $`25.6\mu \mathrm{s}`$ clock interval and is demodulated by the accumulators, to remove any offsets or slowly varying pickup. To further reduce residual offsets, a second, slower level of $`180\mathrm{°}`$ Walsh switching is applied to the LOs, and is demodulated in software with a switching period equal to the readout interval. The multiplier gains and quadrature errors are periodically calibrated by injection of a correlated broadband noise source at the input to each receiver.

Each analog correlator is integrated onto a single full-depth VME card, and the entire 10 GHz correlator fits into a crate approximately 75 cm on a side. Filtering and down-conversion of the IF signal is accomplished in a similar crate, and both rotate with the antennas on the underside of the telescope faceplate. The short fixed distance from the receivers to the downconverter and correlator eliminates flexure of cables carrying phase-sensitive signals, resulting in excellent phase stability; observed instrumental phase drifts are less than $`10\mathrm{°}`$ over a period of many weeks.

## 3 Interferometer Characteristics

An interferometer directly measures components of the Fourier transform of the sky brightness. The response on the sky for a two-element interferometer is an interference fringe pattern, with the sinusoidal variation oriented parallel to the baseline vector b connecting the two elements. The spacing of the fringe pattern is $`\lambda /b`$, where $`\lambda `$ is the observing wavelength and $`b`$ is the magnitude of the projection of b perpendicular to the line of sight. Each baseline of a multi-element array therefore probes a point $`𝐮`$ in Fourier space whose coordinates are given by $`(u,v)=(b_x/\lambda ,b_y/\lambda )`$, or in terms of multipole moment, $`l2\pi b/\lambda `$ (for $`l60`$) (White et al. 1999); shorter baselines measure larger angular scales, and vice versa.

The fringe pattern on the sky is enveloped by the primary beam of the array elements, $`A(𝐱,\lambda )`$, where $`𝐱`$ is a direction on the sky. The output of the interferometer, the visibility, is the time-averaged integral of this pattern, multiplied by the sky brightness, and is the fundamental data quantity discussed in these papers. For observations of the CMB in the Rayleigh-Jeans limit, the visibility in the flat-sky approximation is given by

$$V(𝐮)=\frac{2k_BT}{\lambda ^2}_{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}𝑑𝐱A(𝐱,\lambda )\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }T}{T}(𝐱)e^{2\pi i𝐮𝐱}.$$
(1)
Since the CMB power spectrum is directly related to the Fourier transform of the brightness $`\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Delta }T}(𝐮)`$,

$$C_l|_{l=2\pi |𝐮|}\left|\frac{\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Delta }T}}{T}(𝐮)\right|^2,$$
(2)
appropriate for $`|𝐮|10`$ (White et al. 1999), a simple estimator for the $`C_l`$ can be constructed from the variance of the visibilities (see Paper II for a more formal discussion).

With 13 elements, the DASI array yields 78 distinct baseline vectors; the frequency dependence of the $`(u,v)`$ coordinates means that with 10 frequency channels, DASI samples 780 different points in the Fourier plane (see Figure 2), although visibilities from neighboring frequencies of the same baseline are highly correlated. The 3-fold symmetry of the faceplate reduces the number of unique baseline lengths to 26, each pointing of the telescope producing 3 independent measurements of the same multipole at each frequency. With baseline separations ranging from 25.1–120.7 cm, DASI samples multipole moments from $`l=140`$ at the lowest frequency to $`l=900`$ at the highest. Array parameters are summarized in Table 1.

Images of the sky can be produced from an interferometer by simple Fourier inversion of the visibilities. The transform of the $`(u,v)`$ sampling defines the effective resolution of the image, the so-called synthesized beam; for DASI, the instantaneous $`(u,v)`$ coverage produces a synthesized beam width of approximately $`20^{}`$ (FWHM), with radial sidelobes due to the radial structure of the $`(u,v)`$ sampling (top right of Figure 2).

Rotation of the faceplate preserves the baseline lengths, but rotates the fringe patterns on the sky. This feature can be used to obtain additional independent samples of the same multipole moment in a given field, or for purposes of imaging, to reduce sampling artifacts in the synthesized beam by filling in the $`(u,v)`$ plane. With the 3-fold redundancy, the pattern of $`(u,v)`$ coverage repeats with each $`60\mathrm{°}`$ of rotation, allowing the same Fourier component to be measured by independent baselines.

| TABLE 1 | |
| --- | --- |
| Summary of Array Parameters | |
| Primary antenna elements | $`13`$ |
| Aperture Diameter | $`20\mathrm{cm}`$ |
| Beamwidth (30 GHz) | $`3\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}4\pm 0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}07`$ |
| Aperture Efficiency | $`0.835\pm 0.033`$ |
| Gain | $`9.5\pm 0.4\mu \mathrm{K}/\mathrm{Jy}`$ |
| Band | 26–36 $`\mathrm{GHz}`$ |
| Correlator IFs | $`10\times 1\mathrm{GHz}`$ |
| Rms Sensitivity (1 GHz band) | $`60\mathrm{Jy}\mathrm{s}^{1/2}`$ |
| $`B_{\mathrm{min}}`$ | $`25.1\mathrm{cm}`$ |
| $`B_{\mathrm{max}}`$ | $`120.73\mathrm{cm}`$ |

## 4 The South Pole Environment

Located high on the Antarctic plateau at an altitude of 2.8 km, the South Pole station offers a unique astronomical environment, ideal for HEMT-amplified CMB experiments where long integration times are required to detect signals millions of times weaker than the typical system temperature. Situated less than a kilometer from the geographic South Pole, DASI can track fields continuously, with no variation in airmass. Sunrise and sunset at the Pole occur once per annum, at the equinoxes; for six months of the year the sun is below the horizon. Rising and setting of the moon occur once every month, yielding two weeks per month of continuous dark time. (Naturally, these sources never rise higher than $`23\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$ above the horizon.) The slow variation in astronomical conditions at the Pole contributes to the extreme stability of the local environment; the peak-to-peak diurnal temperature change, averaged over 1999–2001, is less than $`6\mathrm{°}`$C.

The Antarctic plateau is one of the driest deserts on the planet, with annual precipitation averaging less than 8 g/cm2. Moreover, cooling over the poles flattens the troposphere, so that the polar atmosphere has a lower water column density than other sites of the same physical altitude; radiosonde measurements above the Pole indicate that the tropopause occurs between 8 and 9 km, compared to 11–13 km nearer the equator. The precipitable water vapor column above the pole varies between $`0.25`$ and $`0.7\mathrm{mm}`$ annually (Chamberlin 2001).

The polar airmass is also very stable, with surface winds dominated by a weak katabatic flow from gently sloping higher terrain several hundred kilometers away (see discussion in King & Turner 1997). Measured fluctuations in atmospheric emissivity at microwave frequencies are minimal, making the South Pole a premier site for degree scale imaging of the CMB (Lay & Halverson 2000). Our data confirm the superiority of the site—less than 5% of the data from the first season of observations is rejected due to weather (see §8).

Opacities were measured with DASI from skydips performed daily during May–November 2000. The mean opacity determined from these data rises from $`\tau =0.012`$ to $`\tau =0.023`$ over the DASI frequency band (26–36 GHz), with little day-to-day variation; at the lowest frequency, $`95\%`$ of the measured opacities are $`<0.015`$, while at the highest frequency, $`95\%`$ are $`<0.028`$ (see Fig 3). At typical ambient temperatures during the winter ($`60\mathrm{°}`$ C) these results indicate that over much of the DASI band, the CMB and the atmosphere contribute roughly equal amounts to our system temperatures.

## 5 Foregrounds

### 5.1 Diffuse Foregrounds

Any experiment intended to measure temperature fluctuations in the CMB must contend with a variety of diffuse Galactic foregrounds. Chief among these are synchrotron emission from the coupling of relativistic electrons to the Galactic magnetic field, thermal-brehmstrahlung (free-free) emission from ionized plasmas, and various emission mechanisms associated with Galactic dust.

All-sky maps at frequencies below $`10`$GHz will be dominated by synchrotron emission, since the flux density scales with frequency as $`\nu ^{0.8}`$ (Platania et al. 1998), with evidence for spectral steepening to $`\nu ^{1.0}`$ at frequencies above 1–2 GHz (Banday & Wolfendale 1991). If we assume that all the emission in the maps of Haslam et al. (1981) at 408 MHz is due to synchrotron, application of the more conservative of these scaling laws implies that synchrotron can contribute at most a few percent of the CMB anisotropy signal over DASI’s $`l`$-range (Tegmark et al. 2000). The DASI fields are moreover selected to lie at high Galactic latitude, corresponding to the minimum of the 408 GHz maps.

Although the frequency dependence of free-free emission from Galactic plasma ($`\nu ^{0.15}`$) makes it potentially the most serious and the most difficult to constrain of the diffuse contaminants, its contribution to the anisotropy signal can be estimated by scaling from $`H\alpha `$ maps, assuming an average electron temperature of $`10^4`$K (see, e.g., Kulkarni & Heiles 1988). Maps of the southern sky in $`H\alpha `$ (Gaustad et al. 2000; McCullough 2001) indicate that the signal from free-free should make a negligible contribution to the DASI power spectrum.

While thermal emission from dust will be insignificant at $`30`$GHz for any reasonable range of dust emissivities and temperatures (Finkbeiner, Davis, & Schlegel 1999), observations reported by the OVRO Ring experiment (Leitch et al. 1997) suggest that non-thermal emission associated with the dust may contaminate anisotropy measurements at a level comparable to the CMB signal in the $`l600`$ range, at least at frequencies near 15 GHz. Although little is known about the amplitude or homogeneity of this component, the strong spatial correlation with IRAS 100 micron maps indicates that it is well traced by the thermal dust emission; field positions are therefore chosen to coincide with the minimum in the IRAS 100 micron map of the southern sky (see Figure 4), where typical dust intensities are a factor of $`5`$ lower than in the OVRO fields.

While the current state of our knowledge of all of these Galactic foregrounds implies that the CMB will dominate the anisotropy signal at the frequencies and angular scales to which DASI is sensitive (see, e.g., Tegmark et al. 2000, for a comprehensive review), we employ an additional check which is independent of the assumptions and scaling laws presented above. As discussed in Paper II, when extracting the CMB power spectrum from the visibility data, we project out foregrounds on the basis of their spatial template alone, with no assumptions about the intensity of the various components at centimeter wavelengths. These constraints restrict the contribution of any of these diffuse foregrounds to be less than $`3\%`$ of the CMB signal, assuming only that the 26–36 GHz counterparts to these foregrounds have the same spatial distribution as they do at frequencies where the foregrounds are dominant; it is assumed that each diffuse foreground can be described with a constant single spectral index in a given DASI field.

### 5.2 Discrete Sources

As expected for cm-wave, small angular scale experiments, point sources are the dominant astronomical foreground for DASI (see, e.g., Tegmark & Efstathiou 1996), and the dominant contributor to the measured anisotropy. The method described above for projecting out diffuse foregrounds can be applied to point sources as well, since they produce a unique spatial signature in the visibility data. To null the effect of point sources through this technique, we therefore require only the positions of the sources, not their fluxes.

Positions for the brightest point sources are determined from the DASI data themselves; the procedure for identifying bright point sources is described in detail in §9 below. Positions for point sources below the DASI detection threshold are determined from the PMN catalog (Wright et al. 1994); in all, we constrain every point source from the PMN survey whose 5 GHz flux density, when modulated by the DASI primary beam, exceeds 50 mJy.

For sources below the PMN flux cutoff, we require a statistical correction to the power spectrum. These corrections, given explicitly in Paper II, are determined by Monte Carlo simulation of a point source population with $`dN/dS`$ given by the PMN catalog, and whose spectral index distribution is determined by observation of a complete sample of PMN sources with the OVRO 40-meter telescope at 26–36 GHz (paper in preparation).

### 5.3 Ground Contamination

Astronomical foregrounds aside, the presence of ground contamination at a level much greater than the expected cosmological signal places the most stringent constraint on our observing strategy. Although DASI was intended to operate with a ground shield, the panels could not be installed until the 2000–2001 austral summer and were not in place while the data described here were collected.

The signature of the ground is visible even in short integrations; as fields are tracked over the full azimuth range, excluding the MAPO building, variations as large as $`7\sigma `$ above the expected thermal noise ($`\sigma 4`$ Jy) can be seen in 5-minute integrations, while directly over the roof of MAPO, 20-$`\sigma `$ signals are seen on a few of the shortest baselines. However, these fluctuations are strongly dependent on baseline length, falling sharply with increasing $`(u,v)`$ radius; on the longest baselines, the raw visibilities are consistent with thermal noise at all frequencies, even when observing directly over the MAPO building.

Although the ground shows a strong azimuthal dependence, repeated 24-hr tracks demonstrate that the signals are quite stable over time. When data taken as much as five days apart are differenced, the residuals are consistent with the thermal noise, even on the shortest baselines, and over the full azimuth range, including directions towards MAPO and other station buildings.

## 6 Observations

### 6.1 Field Selection

Because the ground signal exhibits long-term stability, our strategy was to observe independent fields over a narrow azimuth range on timescales short enough that the ground could be expected to remain constant. Observations were divided among groups of 8 fields separated by 1 h of RA, each group at a constant elevation. Each field in a group was observed over a fixed 1-hr azimuth range; over the course of 8 hours, these observations yield 8 samples of the CMB sky, and 8 independent samples of the same ground, allowing a constraint on the common mode (and reducing the effective number of degrees of freedom available for constraining the CMB power spectrum). Observations were timed so that data from each field sampled precisely the same ground. Azimuth ranges were selected which avoided lines of sight passing over any of the South Pole station or science buildings, or the communications antenna field.

Four such rows of 8 fields, referred to as the A–D rows, were arranged on a hexagonal grid (to facilitate eventual mosaicing of the fields), spaced by 1 h in RA and $`6\mathrm{°}`$ in declination. The grid of fields was positioned at high elevation ($`49\mathrm{°}`$), to further reduce the signal from the ground. Besides permitting a constraint on ground contamination, as discussed above, the spacing of 1 h in RA results in negligible inter-field correlations, greatly simplifying the analysis described in Paper II. Declinations and right ascensions of the first field in each row are given in Table 2.

| TABLE 2 | | | |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| CMB Field Row Positions111Field positions are obtained by adding 0–7 h to the RA listed for each row. | | | |
| Row | RA (J2000) | Dec (J2000) | Days Observed |
| A | $`\mathrm{22\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | $`\mathrm{61\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | 14 |
| B | $`\mathrm{21\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}30\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | $`\mathrm{67\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | 24 |
| C | $`\mathrm{22\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}30\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | $`\mathrm{55\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | 28 |
| D | $`\mathrm{23\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | $`\mathrm{49\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}00}`$ | 31 |

### 6.2 Observing Schedule

As described above, in each 24-hr period, we obtained a total of 16 hours of integration on 8 CMB fields: 8 hours over each of two azimuth ranges. The remainder of a 24-hr period was divided among various calibration tasks. Every 8-hr period was bracketed by 1.5-hr scans on a calibrator source, as discussed in the next section, and these 11-hr periods were in turn bracketed by skydips, yielding two independent measures of the atmospheric opacity daily. These data are described in §4. Finally, at the beginning and end of every 24-hr period, the noise source was used to calibrate the complex correlator, as described in the next section.

## 7 Calibration

Several kinds of calibrations are performed for each of DASI’s 78 baselines, in each of the 10 bands: 1) calibration of the complex multipliers to correct for non-orthonormality of the real and imaginary visibility response, 2) absolute calibration of the flux scale for each baseline, which is transferred to a celestial source and 3) regular observations of celestial calibrators, to refer visibility amplitudes to the absolute flux scale and visibility phases to a phase center.

The second and third of these calibration tasks are described in separate sections below. The first, the calibration of the complex multipliers, was accomplished by injection of a strong signal from the correlated noise source. This calibration was performed at the beginning and end of every 24-hr period, although for $`95\%`$ of all baselines, the rms variation of the relative gain and phase offset between real and imaginary multipliers were less than $`2\%`$ and $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}2`$, respectively, over 97 days.

### 7.1 Absolute Calibration

The relative scarcity of sources whose flux densities are known at high frequencies makes absolute calibration of any microwave experiment a challenging proposition, as does the generic steepness of most radio source spectra. Additionally, of the sources which are well studied, few are accessible from the South Pole. Planets never rise more than $`23\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}5`$ above the horizon, and the best studied of these, Jupiter and Mars, were either very low or below the horizon throughout the 2000 observing season. Moreover, with DASI’s 20-cm apertures, beam dilution makes it inherently difficult to detect all but the brightest point sources; with a gain of approximately $`10\mu \mathrm{K}/\mathrm{Jy}`$, to achieve a S/N $`1`$ per visibility on a 1 Jy source requires about an hour of observation.

Consequently, the absolute calibration of DASI is based on measurements of beam-filling external thermal loads of measured temperature. The noise source power level (which is separately monitored for drift) was calibrated for each receiver from these measurements, and a calibration of correlated noise source power was derived for each baseline. This calibration was immediately transferred from the noise source to a celestial source.

For the transfer observations, the source was tracked for 3 hours at each of six faceplate rotations, separated by $`60\mathrm{°}`$, with a reference field observed for ground subtraction. Due to the three-fold symmetry of the antenna locations, this procedure yielded six independent measurements of each $`(u,v)`$ point from different baselines with different contributions from the ground. The source model was averaged over these observations to reduce any residual systematics, resulting in a determination of the flux for each baseline with a statistical uncertainty of $`<2\%`$.

The load measurement and transfer procedure was conducted once during the austral summer of 2000 and again in the summer of 2001. The calibration of 2001, on which the absolute scale of the DASI observations is based, was transferred directly to PKS J0859-4731. The 2000 calibration was transferred without ground subtraction to the Carina Nebula and later to PKS J0859-4731 through interlaced observations of the two sources. We estimate the statistical uncertainty on the overall flux scale resulting from the load measurement procedure and transfer observations to be $`<1\%`$, averaged over baselines. Consistent with this estimate, the average ratio of fluxes derived from the independent calibrations of 2001 and 2000 is $`0.997`$. The systematic uncertainty common to these two calibrations, resulting mainly from uncertainty in the determination of antenna coupling to the loads and in the effective load temperatures, we estimate to be $`3\%`$, and is the dominant contribution to the total $`3.5\%`$ uncertainty in the overall flux scale.

### 7.2 Celestial Calibrators

As previously noted, each 8-hr period of CMB observations was bracketed by 1.5-hr scans of celestial calibrators to refer the visibility amplitudes to the absolute flux scale and to refer the phases to a common phase center. In addition, the correlated noise source was injected every hour to track short-term system stability. In practice, the instrumental phase and amplitude response were quite stable; over 97 days of observation, the phases showed a typical rms variation of less than $`15\mathrm{°}`$.

For the fields referred to as the A row in Table 2, the amplitude calibrator used was the Carina Nebula, a well-known Galactic HII complex. The Carina Nebula’s free-free spectrum makes it a good high frequency calibrator; the source is bright enough that its flux can be measured to a few percent on most baselines in approximately 15 minutes. However, the source is dominated by an extended central region, with much weaker flux on smaller scales, necessitating significantly longer integrations on the longest baselines to achieve uniform accuracy.

These considerations led us to use PKS J0859-4731, a more compact Galactic HII region, as the flux calibrator for the B–D row observations. Although its integrated flux is lower than that of the Carina Nebula (see Leitch et al. 2000), the source is readily detectable, with nearly uniform flux ($`150\mathrm{Jy}`$) out to the longest baselines; for $`(u,v)`$ radii $`>80\lambda `$, the source is considerably stronger than Carina.

Although PKS J0859-4731 is partially resolved by the longest baselines, observations of the source while rotating the faceplate show that the rms phase variation with parallactic angle, averaged over all baselines, is less than $`10\mathrm{°}`$. These observations indicate that PKS J0859-4731 is sufficiently point-like (or at least radially symmetric) that the source can be used as a phase calibrator. Although PKS J0859-4731 is located in the Galactic plane, these observations also demonstrate that any contaminating flux is small.

Thus, for the B–D row data, each 1.5-hr scan was spent observing PKS J0859-4731, which was used as both amplitude and phase calibrator. For the A-row observations, this time was split between the Carina Nebula and the extragalactic source Centaurus A, which served as the phase calibrator. On all but the longest baselines of the A-row data, these observations yielded measurements of both phase and amplitude to better than $`2\%`$.

## 8 Data Reduction

The data presented in this paper (and analyzed in Papers II and III), comprise 97 days of observations obtained during 05 May–07 November 2000, divided among 32 fields, as described in §6.1. These data represent an observing efficiency of approximately $`85\%`$ of the time devoted exclusively to CMB observations; the remainder of the time was lost to hardware maintenance and reliability. Because our ability to constrain the ground depends critically on uniform sampling of a fixed azimuth range for each of 8 fields, as described in §5.3, a draconian pre-edit is applied to the CMB data – the loss of all data for a single field for any reason results in the rejection of the entire 8-hour period for that baseline and correlator band.

Visibilities are accumulated from each correlator in 8.4-s integrations, along with monitor data from the telescope drive systems and receivers. Prior to combination for input to the power spectrum analysis described in Paper II, various edits are applied to these data, falling into three general categories: cuts on monitor data, cuts derived from the visibility data themselves, and calibration edits.

In the first category, data are rejected when a receiver is not operating, when a receiver LO loses lock, or when either the 10 or 50 K cryogenic receiver stages shows a gross warming trend; these cuts typically reject $`5\%`$ of the data. Next, data are edited on the quadrature errors in the complex multipliers, determined twice daily by injection of a broad-band noise source. Baselines for which the relative gain between the real and imaginary multipliers falls outside the range $`0.9\pm 0.3`$ (deviation of the mean value from 1 reflects the signal path asymmetry introduced by the hybrid splitters), or for which the phase offset falls outside the range $`0\mathrm{°}\pm 20\mathrm{°}`$, are rejected. These ranges are determined from the empirical distribution of quadrature errors and reflect the values at which the distributions become significantly non-Gaussian; these data are interpreted as evidence for microstrip termination errors or malfunctioning multiplier chips and showed little variation throughout the 2000 season. When the raw visibilities are calibrated for these offsets, data are rejected if the bracketing values differ by more than $`10\%`$. Cuts on the quadrature errors collectively reject $`11\%`$ of the data.

The closest approach of the moon to the DASI fields during their observation is $`36^{}`$. Fringing from the moon is evident on the shortest baselines, and for $`(u,v)`$ radii $`<40\lambda `$, we reject all data when the moon is above the horizon. The D-row observations were made from 11 September–11 October, bracketing the sunrise, with an additional week obtained in early November; data for the D-row fields are also excluded for $`(u,v)`$ radii $`<40\lambda `$ when the sun is above the horizon.

In the second category of edits, the raw visibilities are combined into 1-hr bins, and the baseline-baseline correlation matrix is computed separately for each correlator. Large off-diagonal elements of the correlation matrix are interpreted as evidence for contamination by atmospheric fluctuations. By comparison of data for the same field from different azimuth ranges on the same day, or from different days, we find that the precise threshold of the correlation cut does not strongly affect data consistency, and we reject an 8-hr observation for which any off-diagonal element exceeds $`\pm 0.36`$, affecting $`5\%`$ of the data.

In the last category, data are edited on the quality of the associated observations of celestial phase and amplitude calibrators. Data are rejected when the bracketing calibrator amplitudes vary by $`>10\%`$, or when the bracketing phases change by $`>30\mathrm{°}`$. Data are also rejected when previous edits have reduced the sensitivity on a calibrator scan by $`>\sqrt{2}`$, resulting in a statistical error of $`>3\%`$. On average, these cuts reject $`20\%`$ of the data. Overall, the combined edits from all categories reject a total of 40% of the data.

For input to the power spectrum analysis described in Paper II, the edited and calibrated data are combined into 1-hr integrations, yielding a maximum of 1560 visibilities per field (78 complex baselines$`\times `$10 correlator channels) for each observation.

## 9 Point Sources

The brightest point sources in our fields are obvious in the synthesized maps (see Figure 2), even without ground subtraction. However, as discussed in Paper II, and in §5 above, to extract the CMB power spectrum from the visibility data, we employ a method capable of projecting out point sources on the basis of their positions alone. As described in Paper II, we construct the list of point sources to null using a combination of source positions derived from the DASI data, as well as positions of sources in the PMN southern catalog. Here we describe the procedure used to find sources in the DASI data.

For each set of fields, images are made from ground-subtracted visibilities using the DIFMAP imaging package (Shepherd, Pearson, & Taylor 1994). When making the images, baselines $`<64\lambda `$ are excluded; this cut removes the bulk of the CMB power in the data, significantly increasing the S/N for point source detection. The maps are then divided into annular bins around the field center; the pixel rms in each bin, averaged over 8 fields, is fit to a noise model, consisting of a signal with the shape of the primary beam, added to a flat detector noise floor (as in the bottom right panel of Figure 5). Each image is then divided by the fitted noise model to produce an effective S/N map. The highest peaks, multiplied by a copy of the synthesized beam, are then iteratively subtracted from the image until no peaks $`>4.5`$ remain; we estimate that in the absence of point sources, 0.03 peaks above this threshold should occur in each set of 8 fields.

Using this technique, we can detect a 40 mJy source at beam center with $`>4.5`$-$`\sigma `$ significance. In the 32 DASI fields, we find 28 sources, whose estimated $`S_{31}`$ fluxes range from 80 mJy to 7 Jy. Correlating these locations with the PMN catalog, we find $`S_5>100`$ mJy counterparts for them all, with probabilities for accidental association $`0.01`$. Positional errors are typically several arcminutes. However, note that the PMN survey will resolve some of the closest sources, yielding positions which may differ from the effective position as seen by DASI. This limits the determination of our absolute pointing error, but we estimate it to be better than $`2^{}`$.

Fitting the position of the very brightest sources for each day of data over the observations of a given set of fields shows that pointing drift over $`30`$ days is $`<1^{}`$. Servo tracking jitter is $`1^{}`$ and the fact that point sources appear in the maps with exactly the shape of the synthesized beam confirms this.

## 10 Results

Although Fourier plane visibilities are the natural data product of an interferometer, image-plane analysis provides a valuable consistency check on the data quality. Shown in Figure 5 are a subset of the DASI fields, after point source removal and ground subtraction. In these images, point sources identified in the DASI data were removed by subtraction of a delta function model from the visibilities, while ground contamination has been removed by subtraction of a mean visibility, averaged over 8 fields, from each of the 1-hr field integrations. Artifacts of the $`(u,v)`$ sampling have been reduced in these maps by a variant of the CLEAN algorithm (Högbom 1974), restricted to the $`10\mathrm{dB}`$ contour of the primary beam, similar to the procedure described in §9 for finding point sources.

For an interferometer, each visibility is convolved with the autocorrelation of the antenna aperture; in the image plane, this translates into an enveloping of the image by the primary beam. Here the images have been deliberately extended to radii well beyond the central beam area, so that detector noise should dominate near the edges. As can be seen qualitatively in Figure 5, after a simplistic removal of the ground and point source signals, every field shows residual structure in the central region of the beam; as demonstrated in the lower right panel, the rms in radial bins follows the beam profile, tapering to the theoretical noise floor, typically $`10\mu \mathrm{K}`$ (at $`20^{}`$ resolution), far from the beam center.

Images of the same fields observed at different epochs show repeatable structure, and when images are constructed from visibilities divided into two frequency ranges, the ratio of pixel values is consistent with a thermal spectrum (see Leitch et al. 2000); rigorous, Fourier-plane analogues of these tests are described in Paper II.

The entire complement of 32 DASI fields is shown in Figure 6, after ground and point source removal. Here we show only the central FWHM of each field, corrected for the primary beam taper at the center of the band. Although the S/N is high enough in all these maps that the apparent structure is real, note that the sensitivity is not uniform across the images, but decreases by a factor of 2 at the edges due to the primary beam correction.

We stress that these images are for presentation purposes only; no images are used in our power spectrum analysis, nor are point sources or ground ever subtracted from the visibility data; these foregrounds are modeled in a self-consistent way as part of the constraint matrix formalism presented in Paper II.

## 11 Conclusions

We have described the instrumentation, observations and first year data from DASI, a novel interferometric experiment to measure anisotropy in the CMB. During its first season of operation, the instrument functioned extremely well, producing 97 days of high-quality data on 32 CMB fields, for an average of 24 hours of integration per field, and achieving close to the theoretical noise limits.

With these data, we are able to image $`400`$ square degrees of sky to a typical rms sensitivity of $`10\mu `$K (at $`20^{}`$ resolution); we detect structure in the CMB with high S/N in every field. Although the ground has proven to be our largest contaminant, the slowly varying character of this foreground and careful experiment design enables us reliably to recover the CMB component, even in the presence of near-field signals many times the amplitude of the intrinsic fluctuations. As detailed in Paper II and Paper III, these data yield a sensitive new measurement of the CMB power spectrum and provide important constraints on cosmological parameters.

We express our gratitude for the support provided by the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA), in particular the efforts of Al Harper, Stephan Meyer, Fred Mrozek, Nancy Odalen, Bob Pernic, Dave Pernic, Joe Rottman and Mark Thoma. We thank Antarctic Support Associates and the 1999–2000 South Pole Station construction crew for extraordinary on-site support, and Eric Chauvin at Vertex/RSI for professional excellence in the design and delivery of the telescope mount. We thank the observatory staff of the Australia Telescope Compact Array, in particular Bob Sault and Ravi Subrahmanyan, for their generosity in providing initial point source observations of the DASI fields. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement (OPP 89-20223) with CARA, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. Support at Caltech is provided by NSF grants AST 94-13935 and AST 98-02989.


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# The Environmental Dependence of the Infrared Luminosity and Stellar Mass Functions1

## 1. Introduction

The shape of the stellar mass function (SMF) is a fundamental property of the galaxy population because it constrains the baryon content of galaxies, the fraction of all baryons in stars, and the chemical evolution of galaxies. Until recently, however, observational work has been unable to provide a reliable, direct estimate of the SMF. This failure arises primarily because the conversion of the luminosity function (LF) into the SMF requires the poorly-constrained optical mass-to-light (M/L) ratio, which in turn depends sensitively on both the stellar populations and the spatial distribution of dust and stars, neither of which is known for a substantial sample of galaxies. Complex models of dust and star formation are therefore required to compare the observations with theoretical predictions (Cole et al. (2000a); Granato et al. (2000)).

It is now possible to mitigate these difficulties by combining spectroscopic catalogs with large infrared (IR) surveys. The sensitivity of M/L to stellar populations and extinction, which has plagued the transformation of the optical LF to a SMF, is lessened at IR wavelengths. M/L varies by only a factor of $``$ two over a large range of star formation histories (e.g., Gavazzi, Pierini & Boselli Gavazzi et al. (1996); Bell & de Jong Bell and de Jong (2001); Cole et al. (2000a)) and is nearly insensitive to the presence of dust at the levels expected in most galaxies (the typical internal extinction at $`K_s`$ is $`0.05`$ mag; Silva et al. (1998)).

Three recent developments motivate us to attempt the measurement of the SMF’s environmental dependence. First, large IR surveys are an entirely new resource, due to the advent of large format detectors, dedicated survey telescopes, and significant human and material resources. Second, the availability and uniform analysis of large optical and IR surveys has led to a consensus on the shape of the global galaxy LF at both optical and IR wavelengths. Although controversy persisted for many years regarding differences between the optical LFs obtained by different investigators (e.g., Loveday et al. (1992); Efstathiou et al. (1988); Marzke et al. (1994b); Lin et al. (1996); Zucca et al. (1997); Ratcliffe et al. (1998)), these differences have now largely been resolved (Blanton et al. Blanton and the SLOAN collaboration (2000)). At IR wavelengths, agreement among different samples has been extraordinarily good (Mobasher et al. (1993); Glazebrook et al. (1995); Gardner et al. (1997); Szokoly et al. (1998); Loveday (2000); Kochanek et al. (2000b); Cole et al. Cole et al. (2000b)). This long-awaited concordance makes it possible to confidently proceed and investigate variations in the LF for different galaxy types, different environments, and different redshifts. Third, the availability of large, cosmological simulations allow the dependence of the SMF on environment to be modeled with some reliability. However, the translation from the dark matter halo mass function to the SMF still depends on such complicated and ill-understood factors as the bias function (White et al. (1987); Narayanan et al. (2000)), the gas cooling rate (Rees and Ostriker (1977)), and reheating due to feedback from star formation (e.g., Larson Larson (1974); Cole Cole (1991); Balogh et al. Balogh et al. (2001)).

A dependence of the SMF on galaxy type would not be surprising, due to the distinctly different star formation histories of late- and early-type galaxies. In addition, we can expect an environmental dependence of the SMF because (1) the merging history (e.g., Lacey and Cole (1993)) and bias level (Bardeen et al. (1986); Narayanan et al. (2000)) of halos in clusters are different from those of isolated halos, (2) there are physical processes, such as galaxy harassment (Moore et al. (1999)), that may operate in dense cluster environments and alter the halo mass function, and (3) the stellar populations of cluster galaxies are different from those of field galaxies, perhaps indicative of different star formation histories (e.g., Dressler et al. (1985); Balogh et al. (1997, 1998); Poggianti et al. (1999); Moss and Whittle (2000)).

Such expectations have already received some support from observations. It is well known that the optical LF depends on galaxy morphology (e.g., Loveday et al. (1992); Binggeli et al. (1988); Marzke et al. (1994a, 1998)), primarily in the sense that it steepens toward later galaxy types. Analogous trends are also seen if the population is divided by emission line strength (Ellis et al. (1996); Lin et al. (1996); Loveday et al. (1999); Christlein (2000)), color (Marzke and da Costa (1997); Lin et al. (1996); Treyer et al. (1998)), or principal spectral components (Bromley et al. (1998); Folkes et al. (1999)). In addition to the dependence on type, optical observations also indicate that the dwarf-to-giant ratio steadily increases with increasing environmental density (Sandage et al. (1985); de Propris et al. (1995); Ferguson and Sandage (1991); Bromley et al. (1998); Zabludoff and Mulchaey (2000); Christlein (2000)).

The trends seen in the optical LFs must be explored in the IR to determine whether they reflect underlying variations in the SMF or in M/L. In one recent example of such work, Kochanek et al. (Kochanek et al. (2000b)) find that the $`K_s`$band LF of galaxies has the same dependence on morphology as seen at optical wavelengths. This finding is strong evidence that the galactic SMF is not universal, and that early-type galaxies cannot simply be an unbiased subsample of late-type galaxies in which star formation has ceased. Our primary purpose is to further explore in the IR the trends found in the optical. The compilation of the data we use is described in §2. In §3, we calculate the $`J`$ and $`K_s`$ band galaxy luminosity functions as a function of environment and spectral type. We find that the trends in optical data are also present in the IR data, and more significantly in the stellar mass function. The implications are explored in §4, and we summarize our conclusions in §5.

## 2. Data

To construct infrared luminosity functions, we use photometry from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS; Jarrett et al. (2000)), and redshifts from the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS; Shectman et al. (1996)). The LCRS consists of over 25,000 galaxies with redshifts, approximately covering the magnitude range $`R_c=15`$ to $`R_c=17.7`$, where $`R_c`$ is the “hybrid” Kron-Cousins $`R`$ system described in Lin et al.  (Lin et al. (1996)). The survey includes some fields observed with a 50 fiber configuration, and other, later fields observed with a 112 fiber configuration. The 50 fiber data are problematic because the sampling fraction is lower and the apparent magnitude range of the targeted galaxies is typically less than 1.5 magnitudes. Galaxies with high central surface brightnesses are excluded from the redshift survey, and this limit is about 0.7 mag fainter in the 50 fiber data. To ensure a homogeneous and maximally complete sample, we restrict ourselves to the 112 fiber data, as did Lin et al. (Lin et al. (1996)) for their fiducial computation of the optical LF.

We use the second incremental data release of the 2MASS catalog, which contains photometry in $`J`$, $`H`$ and $`K_s`$ bands of both extended and point sources. The overlap of this release and the 112-fiber LCRS fields is patchy, covering only about 40% of the LCRS. Cross-correlation between the catalogs is done by matching galaxy astrometric positions. Following the example of Cole et al.  (Cole et al. (2000b)), we allow matches between galaxies whose positions differ by less than 0.75 times the $`J`$-band Kron radius, to allow for the greater positional uncertainty of larger galaxies.

### 2.1. Spectral Classification

Zabludoff et al. (Zabludoff et al. (1996)) measured the rest frame equivalent width of the \[OII\]$`\lambda `$3727Å emission line, $`W_{}`$(OII), and the strength of the Balmer break, $`D_{4000}`$. We use $`W_{}`$(OII) to divide the sample into broad spectral classes: emission line (EL) galaxies with $`W_{}`$(OII)$`5`$ Å and non-emission line (NEL) galaxies with $`W_{}`$(OII)$`<5`$Å. Two caveats accompany this division. First, the \[OII\] line correlates with $`H\alpha `$ emission, albeit with considerable scatter, suggesting that it is a good indicator of star formation in an average sense (e.g., Kennicutt (1992)). However, $`W_{}`$(OII) also depends on metallicity and ionization, and on extinction if dust is non-uniformly distributed (i.e., more prevalent in HII regions; Charlot and Longhetti (2001)). All of these properties are expected to depend on galaxy luminosity. The correlation between \[OII\] and H$`\alpha `$ does indeed have a luminosity dependence (Tresse et al. (1999); Jansen et al. (2001)). Second, although, the fibers used in the LCRS are quite large (3$`\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}`$5), Kochanek (Kochanek et al. (2000a)) suggests that aperture effects may still be important. We address this issue in §3.1.

### 2.2. Environment Classification

Group and cluster catalogs have been generated by Christlein (Christlein (2000)) from the LCRS using a friends-of-friends algorithm to search for overdensities in redshift space. For each association, the one dimensional velocity dispersion, $`\sigma _1`$, is computed. We define galaxy clusters to be those with $`\sigma _1>400`$ km/s, corresponding to a virial temperature of about 1 keV. Associations with smaller $`\sigma _1`$ are termed “groups” and any galaxy not found to be in an overdense region is assigned to the “field” sample. Only associations with at least three members are retained in the final catalog; we discuss the possibility of biases related to this effect both below and in §2.4.

Velocity dispersions computed from small samples are biased low due to insufficient sampling of the wings of the distribution and the poor, biased determination of the mean (Zabludoff and Mulchaey (1998)). This bias results in some fraction of the associations that properly belong in the “cluster” sample being incorrectly placed into the “group” sample. Furthermore, identification of groups with low velocity dispersions is sensitive to the linking length used in the cluster-finding algorithm, and such groups are more likely to be contaminated by interlopers. This contamination results in some groups that are false detections, and the galaxies in those “groups” should be properly identified as isolated galaxies. To the degree that the environments are misclassified, any underlying differences among environments will be diluted.

### 2.3. Completeness

We compute the luminosity functions in both the $`K_s`$ band, which is commonly used, and the $`J`$ band, where the 2MASS photometry is deepest. In $`J`$, we use the Kron aperture magnitudes as the best estimate of the total magnitude. Cole et al.  (Cole et al. (2000b)) demonstrate that the most robust $`K_s`$ magnitudes are obtained by combining the Kron $`J`$-magnitudes with the default $`JK_s`$ colors. This nonintuitive result arises because the $`J`$ images have a higher signal-to-noise ratio and allow a more accurate determination of the Kron aperture size. We adopt this magnitude definition of $`K_s`$. A small fraction (2.2%) of the galaxies in the LCRS within our magnitude range (defined below) are misclassified as stars in 2MASS. For these galaxies, we use the 8″ aperture magnitudes in the point source catalog.

It is important to check the overall completeness of the matched LCRS-2MASS catalog used in our analysis. In Figure 1 we show the fraction of the galaxies in 2MASS for which a successful match is made with a galaxy in the LCRS. We restrict our comparison to the largest ($`20^{}\times 1.5^{}`$) contiguous patch covered by both surveys, which includes about 1300 galaxies. The LCRS is not intended to be complete, but is a random sample of a magnitude-limited survey. The dashed line shows the effect of applying the weights necessary to correct for this incompleteness. At $`K_s>12.2`$ and $`J>13.2`$, the corrected completeness is close to 100%. At brighter magnitudes, the completeness drops, due primarily to the LCRS’s upper magnitude cutoff ($`R15`$); we therefore limit the sample to magnitudes fainter than this limit. Cole et al.  (Cole et al. (2000b)) show that 2MASS is highly complete and is not missing a substantial number of low surface brightness galaxies. By association there can be no significant incompleteness in low surface brightness galaxies in the matched LCRS-2MASS catalog, at least to the relatively bright lower magnitude limit of 2MASS.

The 2MASS catalog is complete to $`K_s=13.2`$, and $`J=14.5`$, as shown by Cole et al. (Cole et al. (2000b)). Up to about 0.5 mag fainter than these limits, the incompleteness is primarily due to misclassification of faint galaxies as stars and small biases in the magnitude measurements. We mitigate some of this incompleteness by using the LCRS to identify galaxies that 2MASS has classified as stars. Furthermore, because our sample is considerably smaller than that of Cole et al. , we are less concerned with systematic biasses of order $`0.1`$ mag, and we can maximize our useful sample size by considering fainter magnitude limits.

One other way to test the completeness of our sample is by considering the distribution of $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$. For a galaxy at redshift $`z`$, $`V\left(z\right)`$ is the volume between it and the lowest redshift $`z_{\mathrm{min}}`$ at which it would still have been selected in the sample (due to the bright magnitude limit). $`V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ is the volume between $`z_{\mathrm{min}}`$ and $`z_{\mathrm{max}}`$, where $`z_{\mathrm{max}}`$ is the redshift at which the galaxy would drop out of the sample due to the faint magnitude limit. For a uniform spatial distribution of objects the mean value of $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ is 0.5. Although galaxies are clustered, we expect that over the large volume surveyed here the distribution can be thought of as uniform. In Figure 2 we show the distribution of $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ for the $`K_s`$ band sample, limited at $`K_s=13.7`$, and the $`J`$ band sample, limited at $`J=15.0`$. With these limits, the distribution of $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ is approximately uniform, though there is a systematic variation of about 15%. The mean value of $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ is about 3$`\sigma `$ larger than the value of 0.5, which it would be for a statistically complete sampling of a spatially uniform population. This appears to be partly due to a deficit of galaxies with $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}<0.3`$, perhaps a consequence of Malmquist bias becoming important at $`K_s>13.5`$. Indeed, moving the magnitude limit brighter by 0.2 mag does make the distribution of $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ more uniform. None of the trends we discuss in this paper are affected by decreasing the magnitude limit, although the uncertainties are increased and, consequently, the significance of the results is diminished. To maximize the useful sample size, we therefore restrict the $`K_s`$ sample to $`12.2<K_s<13.7`$, which consists of 2673 galaxies (including 274 cluster galaxies and 954 group galaxies). In $`J`$, we consider the sample of 3408 galaxies with $`13.2<J<15.0`$ (including 346 cluster galaxies and 1202 group galaxies).

### 2.4. Potential Biases and Systematic Uncertainties

Clusters and groups (associations) are defined by identifying friends-of-friends in redshift space. Only associations with three or more members are retained in the final catalog. A concern is that near this cutoff, associations with steeper faint end slopes $`\alpha `$, or brighter characteristic magnitudes, might be preferentially included in the catalog because more member galaxies would be above the magnitude limit. This could bias the final LF; however, we expect the overall effect to be small because the majority of the associations in our catalogue have more than the minimum three members, and are unlikely to drop below this threshold given reasonable variations in the LF. To test for this potential effect, we have constructed mock catalogs, as described in Christlein (Christlein (2000)), by adding $``$350,000 artificial associations to the LCRS catalog. In one catalog, the associations have LFs with steep faint end slopes of $`\alpha =1.2`$, and in another they have shallow slopes, $`\alpha =0.6`$. As expected, we find no evidence from this experiment that the recovery fraction of associations with steeper faint-end slopes is higher than for those with flatter slopes. Thus, this potential bias does not have a significant effect on our selection, even when considering mock samples containing many more galaxies than the actual data.

There is a potential bias in any redshift catalog to be more complete in emission line galaxies because it is easier to measure redshifts for these galaxies than for non-emission line galaxies. This bias is particularly acute for the faintest galaxies in the sample. The magnitude ranges of the LCRS and 2MASS are not well matched, so only the brightest galaxies in the LCRS are included in our sample. In particular, most of the galaxies have $`15<R_c<16.5`$, well above the completeness limit of the LCRS. Because the magnitude range is small, and because we are far from the magnitude limit of the LCRS, there is little danger that a weak magnitude-dependent completeness function of the NEL galaxies has much effect on our analysis. In Figure 3 we show the $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}`$ distributions for the NEL and EL galaxies in the $`K_s`$ selected sample. For the emission line galaxies, $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}=0.515\pm 0.008`$, while for the NEL galaxies $`V/V_{\mathrm{max}}=0.525\pm 0.008`$. There is no evidence that the completeness of the EL sample differs from that of the NEL sample.

## 3. Results

We compute the luminosity functions using both the non-parametric method of Efstathiou, Ellis & Peterson (Efstathiou et al. (1988), EEP) and by assuming a Schechter (Schechter (1976)) function shape as described by Sandage, Tamman & Yahil (Sandage et al. (1979), STY). Luminosities are calculated assuming an $`\mathrm{\Omega }=1`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$ cosmology, with the Hubble constant parametrized as $`H_{}=100h`$ km s-1 Mpc-1. Where not explicitly shown, we use $`h=1`$. K-corrections are taken from Poggianti (Poggianti (1997)); they are small (less than 0.1 mag at $`z=0.1`$) and nearly independent of galaxy type. We neglect evolutionary corrections and extinction effects, both of which affect the magnitudes at less than the 0.1 mag level (e.g., Cole et al.  2000b).

We do not compute volume densities to normalize the luminosity functions. An estimate of the global normalization has already been presented in Cole et al. (Cole et al. (2000b)). For the field galaxies and the total sample, we normalize the luminosity functions to the weighted number of galaxies brighter than $`M_{K_s}=21.5`$ and $`M_J=20.5`$. For the group and cluster environments, we divide by the number of associations to obtain the number of galaxies per group or cluster that are brighter than this limit.

In Figure 4 we show the $`J`$ and $`K_s`$-band luminosity functions for the full sample. Both are well fit by Schechter functions with parameters $`M_{K_s}^{}`$$`=23.48+5\text{log}h`$, $`\alpha _{K_s}`$$`=1.10`$, and $`M_J^{}`$$`=22.23+5\text{log}h`$, $`\alpha _J`$$`=0.96`$. In the non-parametric method, the uncertainties are determined from the information matrix (EEP). The uncertainties in the Schechter parameters are determined from contours of the likelihood function, and are shown as 67% confidence elliptical contours in Figure 5. In Figure 5, we compare our result with recent measurements by Kochanek et al. (Kochanek et al. (2000b)) and Cole et al. (Cole et al. (2000b)). As shown in Cole et al. , the small difference between their result and that of Kochanek et al.  is mostly due to the difference in the magnitude definition (we use that of Cole et al. ). For the $`K_s`$ sample, we are in good agreement with Cole et al.  For the $`J`$ sample, the 1$`\sigma `$ contours do not overlap, which may reflect the incompleteness introduced by including galaxies 0.5 magnitudes fainter than the nominal 2MASS completeness limit. We recover the Cole et al.  result if we impose the same magnitude limits. While statistically significant, the difference in the $`J`$ band results is small, and does not affect our conclusions based on subdividing the sample according to spectral type and environment.

### 3.1. Dependence on Spectral Type

In Figure 6 we present the LFs divided by spectral type. In $`J`$ and $`K_s`$ the NEL galaxies have a significantly flatter faint-end slope than the EL galaxies; this result is also evident from the error ellipses in Figure 5.

Kochanek (Kochanek et al. (2000a)) has recently suggested that the fixed angular size of the fibers used to obtain the spectra leads to a substantial aperture related bias. To address the significance of this effect we show the fraction of NEL galaxies as a function of redshift, $`f_{\mathrm{NEL}}\left(z\right)`$, in four bins of absolute magnitude (Figure 7). There is a weak trend, in the expected sense that more distant galaxies are more likely to have spectra with emission lines because the fixed aperture includes more of the galaxy (we have already shown, in §2.4, that this is not due to a redshift dependent incompleteness in NEL galaxies). Although low luminosity galaxies tend to be physically smaller than high luminosity galaxies, they also lie at preferentially lower redshifts in a magnitude-limited sample. Thus, we expect the two effects to partially cancel out and reduce the size of this bias.

### 3.2. Environmental Dependence

As described in §2, we divide our sample into three environmental categories, corresponding to field, groups, and clusters. In Figure 8 we show the luminosity functions of these three classes of galaxies, compared with the best fit Schechter functions for the full sample; the 67% confidence error ellipses on the Schechter parameters are shown in Figures 9 and 10. The Schechter parameters of the $`J`$band cluster LF are inconsistent with those of the field LF at the 95% confidence level, as determined from the likelihood contours. The trend is more significant in the $`J`$band due to the larger sample size as a consequence of the deeper photometry. The difference is in the sense that the cluster LF has a brighter $`M_J^{}`$ and a steeper $`\alpha _J`$; however, given the degeneracy between these parameters it is not clear precisely how the LF shape varies. If we restrict the Schechter fit to a limited luminosity range (e.g., brighter than $`M_J=20.5`$, or fainter than $`M_J=23.5`$), the best-fit parameters change along the major axis of the error ellipse. However, both the cluster and field parameters move in the same direction, and the difference between them is approximately maintained. It appears, therefore, that the environmental dependence of the LF is not restricted to just the bright or faint end.

The differences among the LFs of different environments are larger when only the NEL galaxies are considered, as shown in Figure 9. In the field, the LF of NEL galaxies is much flatter than that of the full sample, but in clusters the LFs of EL and NEL are statistically indistinguishable. We discuss this result further in §4.3. The Schechter parameters of the $`J`$ and $`K_s`$ luminosity functions, for each data subsample, are tabulated in Table 1.

## 4. Discussion

### 4.1. Comparison with Literature

It is encouraging that the global luminosity functions measured here, based on redshifts from the LCRS, are in such good agreement with recent determinations by Cole et al.  (Cole et al. (2000b)) and Kochanek et al.  (Kochanek et al. (2000b)). As shown by those authors, all infrared LFs derived from large samples are consistent (e.g., Mobasher et al. (1993); Glazebrook et al. (1995); Gardner et al. (1997); Szokoly et al. (1998); Loveday (2000)). This concordance is in contrast with the historical situation at optical wavelengths, where there has been considerable disagreement between results in the literature. In particular, optical LFs derived from the LCRS (Lin et al. (1996); Christlein (2000)) are generally shallower than most other measurements, and it has recently been shown that this difference results from an underestimation of galaxy magnitudes due to the shallow isophotal limit of the LCRS photometry and from the exclusion of low central surface brightness galaxies (Blanton et al. Blanton and the SLOAN collaboration (2000)). The fact that we do not find a shallow slope in the infrared LF supports the interpretation that, at least over the relatively narrow, bright magnitude range of 2MASS, it is the $`R`$ magnitudes, and not the survey selection itself, that is responsible for the discrepancy in the optical.

Analysis of the optical LF dependence on environment was done by Christlein (Christlein (2000)), using the LCRS sample. Although the LCRS magnitudes are systematically biased due to the bright isophotal limit, this bias applies uniformly to the whole sample and is therefore unlikely to affect the trends discussed in that paper. Christlein found strong evolution of the LF with environment, with the Schechter parameters changing along the major axis of the ellipse, toward steeper $`\alpha `$ and brighter $`M^{}`$ with larger $`\sigma `$. The magnitude and sense of this change are fully consistent with the results presented in §3.2. The fact that Christlein finds such a continuous dependence on $`\sigma `$ (something we are unable to investigate due to our smaller sample size) provides encouraging support that the effect is real. Zabludoff & Mulchaey (Zabludoff and Mulchaey (2000)) found similar evidence for steep, bright $`R`$-band LFs in X-ray selected groups ($`\alpha =1.3`$). Because these groups generally have $`kT1`$ keV, many would be considered “clusters” by our criteria, and their results for steeper optical LFs in these systems are very similar to our results for the cluster infrared LFs.

Previously published evidence for an environmental dependence of the infrared LF is not as strong as for the optical LF. Both De Propris et al.  (de Propris et al. (1998)) and Andreon & Pelló (Andreon and Pelló (2000)) find a steep faint end slope in the $`H`$ band LF of the Coma cluster, but only at magnitudes fainter than our sample probes. Trentham & Mobasher (Trentham and Mobasher (1998)) find no evidence for a difference between the $`K`$-band LFs of cluster and field galaxies, over $`24<M_K<22`$, although the uncertainties are large. Our sample is the first that is large enough to detect this weak effect at these luminosities. We look forward to dramatically improving the precision of this result when the full 2MASS catalog is released.

### 4.2. The Stellar Mass Function

Do the observed dependencies of the infrared LF on environment and spectral type necessarily imply an analogous difference in the stellar mass functions? The infrared light is a good, but not perfect tracer of the stellar mass; the mass-to-light ratio (M/L) can be expected to increase by about a factor of two between early- and late-type galaxies (e.g., Bell and de Jong (2001)). To estimate M/L, constraints on the mean stellar age are required. The optical-IR colors of our sample are unreliable due to the shallow isophotal limit of the LCRS, and the IR colors alone are insensitive to stellar population differences. The best indicator available to us is therefore the $`D_{4000}`$ spectral index from the LCRS spectra. We use the solar-metallicity models of Fioc & Rocca-Volmerange (Fioc and Rocca-Volmerange (1997)) to generate spectra from a given star formation history. We then compute $`D_{4000}`$ directly from the spectra, using the same definition as Zabludoff et al. (Zabludoff et al. (1996)). The correlation between $`M/L_J`$ and $`D_{4000}`$ depends only weakly on star formation history. Figure 11 shows model results for a single burst, simple stellar population (SSP) and for a galaxy with a constant star formation rate, using a Kennicutt (Kennicutt (1983)) initial mass function. The two models can differ by as much as 40%, over a narrow range of $`D_{4000}`$, but the ranking with $`M/L`$ is unchanged. $`D_{4000}`$ is sensitive to metallicity and reddening, which we neglect, but is less sensitive than optical colors. For example, an extinction of $`A_\mathrm{V}=1.5`$ magnitudes only reddens $`D_{4000}`$ by about 0.2.

In Figure 12 we show the 67% and 95% error ellipses on the Schechter parameters for the stellar mass functions derived using the M/L corrections derived from the SSP model. The differences observed in the luminosity functions are exacerbated in the stellar mass functions. Thus, we conclude that the stellar mass function is not universal, but depends on both galaxy type and the local environment.

### 4.3. Implications and Speculations

Both Christlein (Christlein (2000)) and Zabludoff & Mulchaey (Zabludoff and Mulchaey (2000)) find that the change in the optical LF shape with environment is due almost exclusively to the NEL galaxies. We confirm that the difference in the infrared cluster LF, relative to the field, is dominated by this population. It is interesting that the faint end slope of the NEL galaxies in clusters, as parametrized by $`\alpha `$, is similar to that of the overall field faint end slope. One interpretation for this similarity is that the bulk of the cluster population is built up by accreting field galaxies with little effect other than the cessation of star formation, as modeled for example by Balogh, Navarro & Morris (Balogh et al. (2000)). However, from only the agreement of the LFs, we cannot exclude scenarios in which the similar initial progentors of faint galaxies in various environments began forming stars at different times (the cluster ones earlier by virtue of originating near a large mass perturbation). In the latter scenario, one expects the field LF to evolve to the cluster LF in time, as gas is consumed by galaxies and their star formation stops.

In Figure 13 we show the fraction of NEL galaxies as a function of luminosity for the global sample. This Figure shows a strong trend that, unfortunately, is difficult to interpret because metallicity and extinction also correlate with luminosity in a way that makes \[OII\] stronger in low luminosity galaxies (e.g., Jansen Jansen et al. (2001)). We cannot infer the extent to which this relation indicates an inherent correlation between galaxy mass and instantaneous star formation rate — a correlation that would be an important test of galaxy formation models. In particular, a variation in the fraction of currently star forming galaxies with mass could indicate that the dominant mode of star formation (i.e., burst-like or continuous) for a galaxy in the field is mass dependent (e.g., Kauffmann, Charlot & Balogh, in preparation).

## 5. Conclusions

We have measured the $`J`$ and $`K_s`$-band galaxy luminosity functions from the 2MASS, using redshifts from the LCRS, and divided the sample based on spectral type and environment. We draw the following conclusions:

* In non-cluster environments, the infrared luminosity function of emission line (EL) galaxies is steeper than that of non-emission line (NEL) galaxies.
* There is a statistically significant difference between the cluster and field galaxy infrared luminosity functions, in the sense that $`M^{}`$ is brighter, and the faint end slope $`\alpha `$ is steeper, in clusters.
* Using the $`D_{4000}`$ spectral index from the LCRS spectra to aid us in converting from infrared luminosity to stellar mass, we conclude that the results just described also hold for the stellar mass functions and, in fact, the differences are more pronounced.
* The shape of the NEL galaxy stellar mass function in clusters is similar to that of the global stellar mass function in the field. One explanation of this trend is that the cluster is mostly built up of field EL galaxies, in which star formation has ceased either because (1) the galaxies consumed all their gas (either through accelerated star formation due to the cluster environment, or by forming earlier due to their proximity to a large mass perturbation); or (2) they lost some or all their gas through processes like ram pressure stripping.

## Acknowledgements

We thank Guinevere Kauffmann for suggesting the idea of comparing the 2MASS and LCRS catalogs. We are also grateful to the LCRS collaboration for making the spectra available. MLB acknowledges support from a PPARC rolling grant for extragalactic astronomy and cosmology at Durham. DC and AIZ acknowledge financial support from NASA grant GO0-1007X. DZ acknowledges financial support from a NSF CAREER grant (AST-9733111), and a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.


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# Spectroscopic evidence for the binary nature of AM CVn

## 1 Introduction

AM CVn (HZ 29) was found as a faint blue object by Humason & Zwicky (1947) and shows broad He i absorption lines (Greenstein & Matthews, 1957) and no hydrogen. Periodic brightness variations on a period of $``$18 min. (Smak, 1967) and flickering (Warner & Robinson, 1972) suggested mass transfer in a very compact binary. A model in which a degenerate helium white dwarf transfers helium to another white dwarf, driven by the loss of angular momentum due to gravitational wave radiation was proposed by Paczyński (1967) and Faulkner, Flannery & Warner (1972). See for details on the models for AM CVn stars and a list of the 8 currently known systems Nelemans et al. (2001).

Since the discovery of the periodic brightness variations and the flickering, AM CVn has been extensively studied with high speed photometry (e.g Skillman et al., 1999; Solheim et al., 1998) yielding multiple periodicities on 1051, 1011 and 1029 s (see also Solheim et al., 1991; Harvey et al., 1998). Spectroscopic observations (Patterson, Halpern & Shambrook, 1993) show a 13.38 hr periodicity in the skewness of the He i absorption lines.

According to Solheim et al. (1998) the dominant 1051 s photometric period is the orbital period and the 1029 s a beat between the orbital period and the 13.38 hr precession period of the accretion disc. However, Skillman et al. (1999) argue that 1029 s is the orbital period and 1051 s is the beat period. In the latter case, the system would be similar to the permanent superhump systems among the hydrogen rich cataclysmic variables (Skillman et al., 1999).

To discern between these two possibilities and to establish beyond doubt the binary nature of AM CVn, a spectroscopic signature at either period is needed. In this article we describe a spectroscopic study of AM CVn in which we found a clear signature on the 1029 s period, proving that this is the orbital period of the system.

## 2 Data reduction

We analysed archival spectroscopic data obtained on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope on February 26 and 27, 1996, with the ISIS spectrograph. In the first night a dichroic was used with both the ISIS red and blue arm. Because of ripples in the blue part of the spectrum introduced by the dichroic, it was removed on the second night and only blue spectra were taken. Because of the ripples and the lack of flat-fields of high quality for the first night we mainly discuss the data taken on the second night. In the blue arm the spectra were obtained with the R600B grating covering 3960-4760 Å at a resolution of 2.0 Å.

There are 403 spectra taken on the second night (173 on the first), each with an integration time of 30 s. Wavelength calibration lamp exposures were taken approximately every 50 spectra (about every 40 minutes). The spectra were reduced using the standard data reduction package MIDAS. After bias subtraction and flatfielding the spectra were extracted and wavelength calibrated. The wavelength calibration was very stable (less than half a pixel change between the subsequent arc spectra) and the calibration of each arc spectrum was used for the 25 spectra taken before and the 25 spectra taken after the arc without interpolation. The flat-field for the first night was taken at the beginning of the second night and had to be corrected for a small wavelength shift.

The continuum of the wavelength calibrated spectra was fitted with a cubic spline of order 3 to line-free areas and used to normalise all spectra with respect to their continuum level. In Fig. 2 we show the resulting spectra of the second night after averaging them into 10 groups over the whole night.

## 3 Data analysis

### 3.1 A period search

In order to search for line profile variations on the uncertain orbital period of the binary, an equivalent width (EW) lightcurve was constructed using the combined EW of the four strongest He i lines. A Lomb-Scargle power spectrum (Fig. 4) reveals a clear peak around 3.5 cycles/hour, close to the expected orbital period of 17 minutes.

Because the accuracy of the candidate orbital periods as derived from the photometric studies of AM CVn exceeds the accuracy of our period determination using the EW lightcurve, we folded the data set on the two proposed orbital periods, 1028.73 s (Skillman et al., 1999) and 1051.2 s (Solheim et al., 1998). Both periods lie very close to the peak in our power spectrum.

An emission component is seen to be moving periodically through the line profiles when the spectra are folded on 1029 s, but not when they are folded on 1051 s (Figure 6). This S-wave is a characteristic signature in the line profiles of accreting binaries caused by the impact of the gas stream onto the accretion disc around the primary (e.g. Marsh, 1990; Spruit & Rutten, 1998; Marsh, 1999). The phase resolved spectroscopy thus provides a definite spectroscopic signature of the true orbital period of AM CVn, and firmly establishes its binary nature.

The S-wave is most clearly visible in the He i lines at 4387 and 4471 Å, but can also be discerned in the line at 4143 Å. The He ii lines at 4686 and 4199 Å, however, do not show any evidence for S-waves on the orbital period. The S-wave is strongest moving from redshift to blueshift, but only barely present when moving from blue to red. This reflects the fact that the hotspot is mainly visible when it is at the front of the system as observed from Earth. Note that when the spot comes to the front the velocity of the stream and of the disk at the impact point are directed away from the observer and thus redshifted.

### 3.2 Doppler tomography

As a next step we applied Doppler tomography in order to reveal the velocity structure in the lines as well as to establish the exact velocity of the S-wave. Doppler mapping (Marsh & Horne, 1988) uses the time dependent line profile shapes to reconstruct the distribution of line emission/absorption in the corotating frame of the binary. It is a widely applied tool in the study of the strong emission lines in CVs. It has revealed a variety of structures associated with the accretion disc around the primary in interacting binaries such as bright spots, spiral arms and magnetic streams (see for a review Marsh, 2001).

So far we have used an arbitrary zero point for our orbital phases since the absolute phase is not known from the photometry. In order to estimate the absolute orbital phase of the binary, where phase 0.0 is defined as superior conjunction of the primary star, we analysed the line profile behaviour when folded on the 1029 s orbital period. The line profiles are complex with a mix of absorption and emission components present at any given time. The He ii 4686 Å line is an exception and consist of a single emission component superimposed on an absorption trough, and shows no evidence for an S-wave. We fitted the He ii emission component with a simple Gaussian, in order to measure its radial velocity as a function of binary phase. The radial velocity of the He ii line shows a systematic variation with an amplitude of $`53\pm 6`$km s-1 when fitted with a simple sine-function (Fig. 8). If the emission is associated with the accretion flow around the primary, this gives us an indication of the motion of the primary white dwarf. Care must be taken since asymmetries in the distribution of the He ii emission around the primary also introduces apparent radial velocity shifts. So rather than assuming that the derived velocity is indeed the projected velocity of the white dwarf ($`K_1`$), we merely use the relative phasing in order to construct a more reliable zero point for our phases. The derived velocity amplitude can be taken as an upper limit to the projected velocity of the white dwarf. Using the convention that orbital phase zero corresponds to superior conjunction of the primary, we then derive the following orbital ephemeris for AM CVn;

* $`T_0(HJD)=2450140.6135(2)+0.011906623(3)E`$

with the formal uncertainty of the zero point indicated between brackets and the period taken from Skillman et al. (1999). In all plots, the orbital phases shown are the result of folding using the above ephemeris.

There are two methods of calculating Doppler tomograms from phase resolved spectroscopy. One is a straightforward back projection in conjunction with a Fourier filter (Horne, 1991), the other applies maximum entropy regularisation (Marsh & Horne, 1988). Our goal is to isolate the weak emission components in the cores of the He i absorption lines. To this end the filtered back projection method is preferred, since a maximum entropy reconstruction requires pure emission line profiles. Although more prone to reconstruction artifacts, the back-projection method can be applied to the complex line profiles of AM CVn without additional data processing. The results of back projecting the line profiles of the He i 4471 Å line are plotted in Fig. 10. Again we compare the back projection of the line profiles folded on the two periods; 1029 s and 1051 s. In the case of 1029 s, the S-wave maps into a prominent spot in the Doppler tomogram that is absent when folded on 1051 s. The location of the emission spot is where hotspot emission is expected, giving us confidence in the orbital ephemeris that is derived and our previous interpretation of the S-wave as due to the hotspot on the outer edge of the accretion disc.

### 3.3 The radial velocity of the mass donor

Apart from the hotspot itself, a weak ring of emission is visible in Fig. 10 from the rest of the accretion disc. At higher velocities this weak emission turns into absorption which produces the broad deep absorption wings in the lines. Having established the true orbital period of AM CVn, we can also constrain other system parameters using the position of the bright spot. The hotspot is the result of local heating and dissipation at the outer rim of the disc where the infalling gas stream impacts. In most cases, the emission has the velocity of the free falling stream (e.g. Marsh & Horne, 1990). However, in other cases the velocity of the hot spot gas appears to be a mix of the fall velocity as well as the local velocity flow in the disc at the impact point (Marsh, 1990). This unfortunately means that a straightforward fit to the position of the hotspot using single particle trajectories is unreliable. However, some interesting limits can still be obtained. First of all the velocity amplitude of the spot itself ($`403\pm 15`$ km s-1) provides an upper limit to the possible projected velocity of the mass donor star ($`K_2`$), since the velocity of its centre of mass cannot be larger than that of the hotspot itself. Very low values of $`K_2`$ also lead to gas stream trajectories that are incompatible with the data. For a given choice of $`K_1,K_2`$, we can calculate the trajectory of the gas stream as well as the velocity vector of the disc flow in order to isolate those parts in the tomogram where hot spot emission is possible. We shall see later that the mass ratio $`q(=M_2/M_1)`$ of AM CVn is most likely 0.087, which means that for a given choice of $`K_2`$, $`K_1`$ is derived from $`K_1=qK_2`$.

If we assume that the hotspot velocities in AM CVn reflect the velocity of the ballistic gas stream, we can achieve a good fit to the observed tomogram using $`K_2=260`$ km s-1 and $`K_1=23`$ km s-1 (Fig. 12). If we relax our assumptions and only require that the observed velocities of the hotspot lie anywhere between the trajectory of the gas stream, and that of the disc, we can constrain $`K_2`$ to lie between 210 and 265 km s-1. The assumed value of the mass ratio has only a small effect on the derived values for $`K_2`$.

The least constrained range for $`K_2`$ is obtained if we also consider the zero point of our orbital phases to be a free parameter. Then, in principle, $`K_2`$ can lie between 200 and 400 km s-1. Note, however, that in order to fit the data with $`K_2`$ $`>`$ 280 km s-1, we need to apply an arbitrary phase shift in order for the stream to cross the hotspot, which also leads to an unrealistic impact radius that is very close to the white dwarf. We can thus firmly constrain the value of $`K_2`$ to lie between 210 and 280 km s-1.

### 3.4 Disc precession and superhumps

Patterson et al. (1993) have found a 13.38 hr period in the skewness of the He i absorption lines. From Fig. 2 we see indeed that the shape of the absorption lines changes during the 5 hrs of the total observation. This can be interpreted as the varying double peaked absorption profiles of a precessing accretion disc (Patterson et al., 1993). We measured the skewness of the line profiles in our data by fitting multiple Gaussians to the absorption lines as follows. Since there is evidence for emission in the line cores, which modulates on the much shorter orbital period compared to the slow changes in the absorption lines on the precessing periods, the central emission was masked. Double Gaussians were fitted to the absorption components in order to measure the relative strength of the blue shifted absorption relative to the redshifted absorption. The spectra of both nights were grouped into bins of 10 consecutive spectra to improve signal to noise and the line asymmetry was measured accordingly. This double Gaussian method was found to be more reliable than calculating the formal skewness of the line as a whole since the emission components can be masked so as not to distort the measurements. Fig. 14 plots the derived line asymmetry together with a sinusoidal least squares fit. We do not cover the full precession cycle, so cannot improve on the precession period derived by Patterson et al. (13.38 hours) and fixed the period in the fit. The asymmetry is expressed as the ratio between the depths of both Gaussians. The relative contribution of the red versus blue shifted side of the disc thus changes with an amplitude of 33% across the precessing cycle. Adopting the very simple picture sketched in Patterson et al. (1993) using their $`\varphi _0`$ as phase, we coved phases 0.3 – 0.75 on the first night and phases 0.2 – 0.6 on the second night.

## 4 Discussion

The fact that AM CVn behaves very similarly to the hydrogen rich superhump systems (Patterson et al., 1993) suggests that the superhump phenomena has the same origin (Warner, 1995). It could be explained by precession of an eccentric disk, which is caused by a tidal resonance between the disc and the companion which is found for mass transferring systems with a mass ratio smaller than 0.22 Whitehurst (1988) up to 0.33 (Murray, 2000). Simpson & Wood (1998) find a more complex behaviour of the disk, including disk shape changes and spiral shocks in the disk, but a similar ‘precession’ period. The numerical simulations of Hirose & Osaki (1990, 1993) show that there is a relation between the precession period, the orbital period and the mass ratio (Warner, 1995)

$$\frac{P_{\mathrm{prec}}}{P_{\mathrm{orb}}}=A\frac{1+q}{q}$$
(1)
where $`A3.73`$ for systems with $`q<0.1`$. Because of the tidal origin of the phenomenon there is no reason to expect a different relation for helium discs. Using 1028.73 s for the orbital period and 13.38 hr for the precession period, this relation gives a mass ratio for AM CVn of 0.087.

From the well known fact that for a Roche lobe filling star the period only depends on the mass and radius of the donor we can calculate the mass of the donor in AM CVn from the period and the mass – radius relation. From the two evolutionary scenarios that are proposed to lead to AM CVn stars, two mass – radius relations for the donor stars are found (Warner, 1995; Nelemans et al., 2001). From the mass ratio the companion mass is found. In Table 2 we give the two solutions for AM CVn using the mass – radius relation as given in Nelemans et al. (2001).

From the system parameters we can calculate the radial velocities of the two components, which we can compare to the values of $`K_2`$ as derived from the Doppler tomograms. In Table 2 we give the expected values of the radial velocities ($`K_{1,2}/\mathrm{sin}i`$) and the resulting values for the inclination assuming $`K_2=260`$ km s-1.

The derived inclinations are low, consistent with the fact that no eclipses are observed (which means $`i<78^{}`$ for $`q=0.087`$). The only clue to discern the two mass – radius relations (and thus the formation scenario) may be the fact that the hotspot is obscured when moving from blue to red, implying not too low inclination. This would slightly favour the fully degenerate mass radius relation. However the mass ratio derived from the superhump period is too uncertain to draw firm conclusions.

The value of $`K_1`$ derived from the mass ratio of 0.087 (23 km s-1) seems incompatible with the interpretation of the radial velocity of the He ii line as being caused by the motion of the primary. However it could be that the mass ratio determined from the superhump period is incorrect for AM CVn. For example for a mass ratio of 0.2, the value of $`K_1`$ would be 52 km s-1. This also would bring the mass of the primary down, which rules out the fully degenerate mass – radius relation, but gives somewhat more realistic value for the primary mass in the case of the semi-degenerate mass – radius relation (see for more details Nelemans et al., 2001).

Evidence for time variability of the strength of the hot spot was found by folding both nights separately. Using the the first night only, no discernible S-wave could de identified. However, the second night alone, resulted in a clearly visible S-wave in several lines. Maybe the hot spot strength varies with the precession period, allthough the precession phase shift between the two nights is small. The poor quality of the data of the first night makes it for the moment impossible to draw conclusions. Better sampling of the precession period offers opportunities to study the strength and position of the hot spot as a function of the precession cycle, allowing a better determination of the hot spot position and thus the mass ratio provided adequate signal to noise can be obtained.

## 5 Conclusion

We found a clear S-wave in spectra of AM CVn when folded on a period of 1029 s, confirming the binary nature of AM CVn beyond any possible remaining doubt and establishing 1028.73 s as the true orbital period.

The dominant photometrical period of 1051.2 s can be interpreted as the beat between the orbital period and the 13.38 hr period that has been found in the skewness of the absorption lines, making the system the helium equivalent of the permanent superhump systems. The 13.38 hr period then is interpreted as the precession period of the accretion disc. The shape of the absorption lines in our data set changes on the same period.

By applying Doppler tomography we were able to constrain the value of $`K_2`$ between 210 and 265 km s-1, which given the formation channels implies a low inclination (between $`15^{}`$ and $`25^{}`$).

Our results open a new field of studying the details of these intriguing ultra-compact binaries by phase resolved spectroscopy and Doppler tomography.

## Acknowledgments

We thank Tom Marsh for motivating discussion and the use of the MOLLY data reduction package and the referee M. Wood for valuable comments. The William Herschel Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by the Isaac Newton Group in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canaria. This paper makes us of data obtained from the Isaac Newton Group Archive which is maintained as part of the Astronomical Data Centre at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. GN is supported by NWO Spinoza grant 08-0 to E. P. J. van den Heuvel, DS is supported by a PPARC Fellowship and PJG is supported by a CfA fellowship.