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# Chandra finds X-ray jets are common in low-power radio galaxies

## 1 Introduction

Radio observations of low-power FRI (Fanaroff & Riley 1974) radio galaxies are best interpreted by models in which the jet plasma slows from relativistic ($`v0.9c`$) to sub-relativistic ($`v0.1c`$) speeds within a few kpc of the nucleus (Laing et al. 1999). Decreasing jet asymmetries at sub-kpc to kpc distances from the nucleus can then be understood as the diminishing effect of Doppler boosting. The jets at termination blend into the lobe plasma they supply. In contrast, the jet asymmetry seen in powerful, FRII, sources supports velocities as large as $`0.7c`$ at tens of kpc or more from their cores (Wardle & Aaron 1997). Bright hotspots mark jet termination in these objects.

The relativistic particles responsible for the jets in FRI and FRII sources are expected to emit elsewhere in the electromagnetic spectrum, and the X-ray is no exception. However, it is jet features of the powerful FRII sources which have so far yielded the largest number of X-ray detections. These are (a) hotspots in Cyg A (Carilli, Perley and Harris 1994), 3C 295 (Harris et al. 2000), and 3C 123 (Hardcastle, Birkinshaw & Worrall 2001a), where the X-rays have been interpreted as due to synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission of plasma at minimum energy, (b) hotspots in 3C 390.3 (Prieto 1997), 3C 120 (Harris et al. 1999), and Pic A (Wilson, Young & Shopbell 2001), where the interpretation is less clear, and (c) emission associated with large-scale jets in 3C 273 (Marshall et al. 2001), PKS 0637-752 (Schwartz et al. 2000), and Pic A (Wilson et al. 2001).

Low-power radio galaxies typically reside in group-scale X-ray emitting atmospheres (Worrall & Birkinshaw 2000). While the evacuation of the hot X-ray plasma from the radio lobes has apparently been seen in sources such as NGC 1275 (Böhringer et al. 1993), 3C 449 (Hardcastle, Worrall & Birkinshaw 1998), and M 84 (Finoguenov & Jones 2001), and evidence for inverse Compton X-rays from the lobes in Fornax A (Feigelson et al. 1995), jet X-ray emission has been reported only in the two nearby low-power sources Cen A (Döbereiner et al. 1996; Kraft et al. 2000) and M 87 (Biretta, Stern & Harris 1991; Böhringer et al. 2001).

We have embarked on a high spatial-resolution study with Chandra of the X-ray emission from the inner regions of typical low-power radio galaxies, where the radio-emitting plasma is expected to have relativistic bulk motion. Our targets are drawn from the bright B2 sample, which is the complete subset of 50 sources from the B2 radio survey identified with elliptical galaxies brighter than $`m_{\mathrm{ph}}=15.7`$ mag and well matched to BL Lac objects in extended radio properties and galaxy magnitudes (Colla et al. 1975; Ulrich 1989). ROSAT pointed observations with either the PSPC or HRI (or in some cases both) have been made for 80 per cent of the sources in the bright B2 sample (Canosa et al. 1999), making this the largest unbiased sample of exclusively low-power radio galaxies with sensitive X-ray data. We used a correlation of core unresolved (to ROSAT) X-ray and radio emission to argue for a component of soft X-ray emission associated with the inner radio jets (Canosa et al. 1999). However, the spatial resolution and sensitivity were insufficient to distinguish between truly small-scale non-thermal emission and small-scale hot gas possibly associated with cooling flows, and most observations were with the ROSAT HRI with which no spectral information was available. Here we present results for the first three B2 sources to have been observed with Chandra. They indicate that resolvable X-ray jets are common even in low-power radio galaxies.

## 2 Chandra Observations

We observed B2 0206+35, 0331+39 and 0755+37 with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) on board the Chandra X-ray Observatory on the dates given in Table 1. The targets were near the aim point on the back-illuminated CCD chip S3, shifted slightly from the original aim point to avoid sitting on a boundary between readout nodes. The observations were made in window mode with frame times of 0.44 s for B2 0331+39 and 0.87 s for the other two sources, in order to guard against the effects of pile-up should all the flux which was unresolved to ROSAT be unresolved also to Chandra. The data provided to us had been processed using version R4CU4UPD7.4 (for B2 0206+35) and R4CU5UPD2 (for the other two sources) of the pipeline software, and we followed the “science threads” from the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) for CIAO v 1.1.5 to make the recommended corrections to these data, and in particular to apply the appropriate gain file, acisD2000-01-29gainN0001.fits. After screening out $``$ 15 per cent of each observation to avoid intervals of high background, the exposure times are as given in Table 1.

The radio core positions are known with high precision, and an overlay of the X-ray and radio images confirms that the astrometry in the pipeline software used on these X-ray data sets is imprecise (see http://asc.harvard.edu/mta/ASPECT/). The X-ray positions given in Table 1 have been shifted to align with the (accurate) radio positions also given in the table.

Since we are interested in features on scales close to Chandra’s spatial resolution, we have found it convenient to represent the Point Response Function (PRF) with an analytical function, and we give our fitted parameter values here as they may be of use to other workers. The procedure we followed was to use ciao/mkpsf and the CXC-released PRF library to create for each source an image of the PRF with 0.1 arcsec spatial binning and weighted (in four energy bins) according to the source spectrum between 0.4 and 5 keV (since these sources are relatively soft). We convolved the result with a Gaussian of $`\sigma =0.204`$ arcsec to mimic the effects of aspect smearing (see http://asc.harvard.edu/ciao1.1/caveats/acis2.html), and then used the iraf/imcnts task to extract the radial profile of the PRF. We found the 12-parameter function

$$P(r)=\underset{i=1}{\overset{3}{}}\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}a_{ij}r^{j1}e^{\frac{r^2}{2s_i^2}}$$

with $`r`$ in units of arcsec, to be a good representation of the PRF. We first fitted the functional form to a profile extracted from the low-resolution PRF library, to find the best parameter values for the PRF wings. We then fixed the parameters of the broadest Gaussian, and re-fitted to the radial profile from the high-resolution PRF library in order to find the best overall representation of the PRF for the observation. The energy weightings used for the three sources are given in Table 2 and the fitted parameter values are in Table 3. The resulting profiles are fairly similar, with half power diameter (HPD) between 0.78 and 0.86 arcsec, and full width half maximum (FWHM) between 0.53 and 0.62 arcsec.

## 3 X-rays from the galaxy, radio core and jet

Compared with the ROSAT PSPC, which preferentially detected group-scale gas (Worrall & Birkinshaw 2000), Chandra clearly sees small-scale emission from B2 radio galaxies. As seen in Figs 1 and 2, B2 0206+35 and 0755+37 are very similar, with asymmetric X-ray emission coincident with the dominant kpc-scale radio jet. B2 0331+39 (Fig. 3) shows no such asymmetry, but in this less powerful radio source there is no obvious radio jet, either because of a small viewing angle, which could superimpose the jet X-ray emission on the core, or because well-collimated kpc-scale plasma is simply absent in this source. The relatively high ratio of core (Table 4) to extended (Table 1) radio emission in this source might argue in favour of the former explanation.

The radial profile of B2 0331+39 gives a good fit to the PRF (Fig. 4). The central emission of the other two sources is weaker and partially extended: fits to the radial profile over a semi-circular region in the anti-jet direction in both cases finds an excess of counts over the PRF. Good fits (Table 5) are found for a combination of point-like and extended emission, modelled as a $`\beta `$ model with counts per unit area per unit time $`(1+\frac{\theta ^2}{\theta _{\mathrm{cx}}^2})^{0.53\beta }`$. Best-fit values of $`\beta `$ and $`\theta _{\mathrm{cx}}`$ are 0.7 and 1.15 arcsec, and 0.8 and 2.1 arcsec, for 0206+35 and 0755+37, respectively. The extended emission can be attributed to galaxy-scale gas with a luminosity of a few times $`10^{41}`$ ergs s-1. The cooling times of this gas are short compared with the Hubble time, with mass infall of about one solar mass per year (Table 5). Upper limits for B2 0331+39 allow for the presence of galaxy gas at a luminosity only a factor of a few below that measured in the other two sources. It is noteworthy that the galaxy in our sample without a kpc-scale radio or X-ray jet also has the least central, X-ray emitting, cooling, gas.

The X-ray spectral fits to the net counts within a radius of 10 arcsec around each source (Table 6) support the spatial modelling. While B2 0331+39 gives an acceptable fit to a power law, the other two sources either give unacceptable fits to single-component models (power law or Raymond-Smith thermal), or $`\chi ^2`$ improves significantly when the second component is added. The normalizations of the power-law and thermal models in the two-component fits imply a division of counts between core$`+`$jet and gas which agrees well with the spatial separation of components. The gas has a temperature reasonable for its luminosity as compared with the extrapolation of the temperature-luminosity relationship for the larger-scale group/cluster atmospheres around low-power radio galaxies (see figure 7 of Worrall & Birkinshaw 2001).

Our ROSAT studies of low-power radio galaxies had separated some of the PSPC emission into thermal gas associated with the group or cluster (Worrall & Birkinshaw 1994, 2000), and attributed the remaining compact emission, or that unresolved with the HRI (Canosa et al. 1999), to a component associated with the small-scale radio structures. Although Chandra resolves a fraction of the emission we previously associated with the AGN (compare table 4 of Canosa et al. 2000 with Table 5), our description of a low-power radio galaxy as emitting significant small-scale radio-related X-ray emission is confirmed. Chandra’s superior spatial resolution reveals power-law emission from an unresolved core in all three sources, and X-ray jets in the two sources with small-scale radio jets.

Although three is too small a sample to claim a correlation, it is interesting that the core radio flux densities (which are assumed typical in having flat radio spectra) are in the same rank order as the core X-ray flux densities. The core X-ray spectra are soft. A small intrinsic absorption of a few 1020 cm-2 is measured in B2 0331+39, and an upper limit for B2 0755+37 allows for comparable amounts. Such absorption is consistent with expectations from the dusty medium which HST finds to be typical in such radio galaxies: compare the detailed analysis of Ferrarese & Ford (1999) for one source with the general findings concerning dust in B2 radio galaxies of Capetti et al. (2000). It remains plausible that the core X-ray emission is associated with the relativistic particles directly responsible for VLBI-scale radio emission, as our earlier work suggested (Worrall & Birkinshaw 1994).

The galaxy-scale gas may play a role in the confinement, disruption, or slowing of the jets in the crucial region within a few kpc of the nucleus. Calculations of internal jet pressures are model dependent. In Table 4 we give values for the minimum pressure on the simplest assumption that the jets are in the plane of the sky and that relativistic effects can be ignored. The effects of relativistic beaming and projection will tend to reduce these values, by a factor of about four in the case of Bondi et al. (2000)’s model for B2 0755+35. It is interesting that the kpc-scale jet pressures are similar to the central gas pressures. Deeper Chandra X-ray observations are needed for detailed modelling of the interface between the gas and jet plasma, such as in our study of B2 0104+32 (3C 31: Hardcastle et al., in preparation).

## 4 Discussion and Conclusions

The Chandra observations of B2 radio galaxies support the general picture of a low-power radio galaxy having galaxy-scale gas, a compact X-ray core, and X-ray jet emission associated with fast, one-sided, kpc-scale, radio jets. The presence also of group- or cluster-scale gas is known from ROSAT, but this appears as structureless background in our high-resolution, reduced field-of-view, Chandra images.

For both sources with radio and X-ray jet emission, the jet emission is an appreciable fraction of the core emission (of order 20-50 per cent) in both the X-ray and radio. This similarity of X-ray to radio ratio for the jets and cores argues in favour of the core and jet X-ray components both being radio-related in origin, supporting our earlier conclusions (Worrall & Birkinshaw 1994).

Contending emission mechanisms for the jet X-rays are synchrotron radiation from particles of higher energy than those contributing the radio emission, or Compton scattering of jet-produced or external photons. The X-ray spectrum can help to decide between these possibilities, since it has a direct relationship to the spectrum of the particles responsible for the radiation. A steep X-ray spectrum would tend to rule out a Compton-scattering origin, and instead suggest synchrotron emission from high-energy electrons of steeper spectrum than those emitting in the radio. In B2 0331+39 the X-ray spectrum is indeed steep, but these shallow X-ray observations lead to constraints that are too poor to draw useful conclusions for B2 0206+35 and 0755+37. However, the X-ray flux levels of the jets are most easily explained by a synchrotron model. Synchrotron self-Compton emission with an equipartition magnetic field produces an X-ray flux density $`3`$ orders of magnitude below the observed value, using the jet parameters given in Table 4. FRI jets are generally thought to move too slowly (§1) for the effective energy density in microwave-background photons to be significantly increased by boosting (Tavecchio et al. 2000), and, even if the regions concerned do have very high flow velocities, the jets are unlikely to be close enough to the line of sight for the mechanism to be important. The dominant photon population in the jets is likely to be beamed radiation from the active nuclei, and although estimates of the inverse Compton X-ray yield are strongly model dependent, we find they are likely to fall short by an order of magnitude under plausible assumptions (Hardcastle, Birkinshaw & Worrall 2001b). A synchrotron model requires a steepening of the spectral index between the radio and X-ray if it is not to over-produce the X-rays, but such spectral breaks are observed in well-studied optical synchrotron jets such as M87 and 3C 66B, for which multiwavelength data are compiled in Hardcastle et al. (2001b).

It is easier to detect jet X-ray emission with Chandra than jet optical emission with HST, at least for sources with relatively high core dominances such as these. In two out of our three sample sources, and both of those with kpc-scale radio jets, X-ray jets are detected. In contrast, Capetti et al. (2000) report detection of only three of 57 representative B2 radio galaxies observed in an HST snapshot survey, even though roughly 45 per cent of all B2 radio galaxies have kpc-scale radio jets (Parma et al. 1987). Interestingly, B2 0755+37 is one of the three sources with detected optical jets, and so more detailed modelling of the spectral energy distribution of this jet will be possible.

We are currently analysing data for five other low-power radio galaxies that we have observed more recently with Chandra, two of which are from the B2 sample, and all five show jet features. At the spatial resolution possible with Chandra, X-ray jets are indeed common. As more data are forthcoming it should be possible to make a detailed study of the underlying physics which controls the strength of X-ray emission in these low-power jets.

## Acknowledgments

We thank Marco Bondi for the processed MERLIN image of B2 0755+37, John Biretta and Paola Parma for use of their VLA archival data on B2 0206+35 and B2 0331+39, respectively, and staff of the CXC for help concerning calibrations and the ciao and ds9 software.


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hep-th/0106209 SLAC-PUB-8869 NSF-ITP-01-

(A)dS Backgrounds from Asymmetric Orientifolds

Eva Silverstein

Department of Physics and SLAC, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305/94309

Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106

I present asymmetric orientifold models which, with the addition of RR fluxes, fix all the NS NS moduli including the dilaton. In critical string theory, this gives new AdS backgrounds with (discretely tunably) weak string coupling. Extrapolating to super-critical string theory, this construction leads to a promising candidate for a metastable de Sitter background with string coupling of order 1/10 and dS radius of order 100 times the string scale. Extrapolating further to larger and larger super-critical dimension suggests the possibility of finding de Sitter backgrounds with weaker and weaker string coupling. This note is an updated version of the last part of my Strings 2001 talk.

June 2001

1. Introduction

Because of bounds on Brans-Dicke forces and on time-dependence of couplings, it is of interest to fix the moduli in string/M theory. The diverse ingredients arising in modern string backgrounds, including branes and RR fields, introduce new sources of moduli as well as new forces which can help stabilize the moduli.

In §2 I will present a six-dimensional model where the NS-NS moduli (including the dilaton) are fixed, so that there are no runaway directions in moduli space. The strategy, as outlined in the last few minutes of my Strings 2001 talk, is to balance the first few terms in string perturbation theory off of each other by introducing large flux quanta and/or brane charges, in such a way that a minimum arises in the effective potential in a controlled regime at weak string coupling. The model of §2 has a minimum of the dilaton potential below zero, producing an $`AdS_6`$ vacuum (with a string-scale compactification from ten to six dimensions). This sort of approach has been studied in effective field theory in  and in general terms in string theory in e.g. ; similar models have been constructed geometrically in .

In §3 I will present a proposal for a construction of stringy dS space which involves much less well understood noncritical string theory. In particular, I will show how the naive scalar potential of supercritical string theory on an asymmetric orbifold in the presence of orientifold-antiorientifold pairs and RR fluxes leads to a minimum of the scalar potential above zero. In the simplest model I consider, starting from dimension $`D=12`$, the $`dS_4`$ radius that results is only larger than the string length scale by two orders of magnitude, and the string coupling $`g_s`$ is of order 1/10, so the construction depends on the absence of coefficients at higher orders in perturbation theory that might compensate these small but not arbitrarily small suppression factors. Modulo this issue, the closeness to the string scale raises the interesting possibility that a cosmological analogue of the correspondence principle  might account for the entropy suggested by the area of the cosmological horizon.

We will also see that extrapolating this construction to large super-critical dimensionality seems to give better control, in that the string coupling can be made weaker and weaker. This might jive with the idea that one should require more and more degrees of freedom to describe a dS minimum as it gets closer to a general relativistic regime .

However, it should be emphasized that it is not completely known how to calculate in non-critical dimensions, and I will make one or two assumptions along the way (which I believe are plausible given the older results of e.g. ). A complete worldsheet description of the backgrounds here would require explicit use of the Fischler-Susskind effect  since the dilaton is fixed by playing different orders of perturbation theory off of each other. Because the candidate $`dS`$ minimum we find is only metastable, it would probably be necessary to also understand the linear (in time) dilaton theory to which it non-perturbatively decays, which is the solution more traditionally studied, in order to obtain a completely satisfactory construction. However, perturbatively it might be interesting to study the metastable $`dS`$ minimum in its own right.

In , the problem of runaway directions toward weak coupling limits of moduli space was identified, assuming no miraculous small coefficients appear in the expansion around weak coupling. One way around that is to minimize the moduli at strong coupling, as was argued for some examples in . Another, as explored for example in the present work and previous works such as , is to introduce large ratios of coefficients via discrete choices of flux quanta and brane and orientifold charges.

This latter freedom is perhaps unsettling because it expands the arbitrariness of the vacuum (the vacuum degeneracy problem). However, it has the redeeming feature that it expands the model-building possibilities enough to plausibly provide quantum vacua with small cosmological constant, as argued in e.g. . As in these works, we will here not be able to provide any rationale for why the initial conditions of the universe favor the choices of discrete parameters that we use in our constructions, and in fact our constructions will not be realistic to begin with. I feel it is nonetheless useful to obtain as concrete a handle as possible on the range of possibilities, particularly before declaring either victory or defeat.

In that vein, before proceeding to the constructions, I would like to make a few comments on recent discussions in the literature on the issue of dS space (or more generally accelerating universes). On the one hand, we have observational evidence for a currently accelerating universe (with the dark energy just now having become commensurate with matter). On the other hand, if this were to persist indefinitely, then the dark energy would dominate in the future, and one would have a situation with cosmological event horizons with the concommitant difficulties involved in formulating observables (in particular the lack of an S-matrix) .1 Another argument often used against the possibility of having dS space in M theory involves the “no go” theorem of . However, the arguments there were directed not just at dS space, but at nontrivial warped compactifications including ones preserving Poincare invariance. In , the assumptions that went into this theorem are catalogued. These include the absence of orientifold planes, whose inclusion is known to yield warped compactifications . In our construction in §3, both orientifold planes and a tree-level potential coming from being away from the critical dimension will be crucial, and these are both elements of perturbative string theory which are excluded by the assumptions of . It seems to me that “no-go” arguments based mostly on supergravity (or on supergravity plus a partial list of known resolved singularities)–while very useful for pointing toward the need for non-supergravity model-building ingredients– are likely to be unreliable as indicators of what physics is possible within the full theory (as other examples in the past have illustrated ). These difficulties may well have resolutions , but if they do not, one can still have perfect agreement with observations in a universe which will tunnel or roll out of a dS phase in the future. In inflationary scenarios, there are mechanisms for our universe to have exited from inflation in the past, and it seems to me that a similar mechanism could occur in the future to prevent eternal acceleration.

Because of the tendency of string-theoretic effective potentials to decrease toward weak coupling , in the dS construction we will explore here, the minimum is indeed only metastable and would not pose as great a problem in terms of observables. However, as discussed by T. Banks, if it holds up (i.e. if the perturbative description does not break down), it may provide an inroad into the problem of understanding how a finite number out of the infinite available number of degrees of freedom arrange themselves to describe the physics associated with the dS minimum (though he points out that the dS minimum may not be accessible from the linear dilaton regime after all for reasons similar to those discussed in  for other backgrounds). Other proposals for dS constructions have appeared in .2 Arguments against accelerating cosmologies have also been made based on the fact that no satisfactory dS background has been built in string/M theory. To me such arguments about what has (not) been accomplished to date are weakened by the fact that there has been a preponderance of effort in the field directed (understandably) toward backgrounds with unbroken SUSY. It is also hard to make precisely the (supersymmetric) Standard Model in string theory (particularly including appealing elements such as unification of couplings), and it hasn’t quite been done, but few would argue at this point that the absence of such a construction portends a serious clash between string theory and experiment. The problem is messy, and because of the many moduli in string theory the problem of building a model describing even a temporarily accelerating universe is also grungy and may have resisted solution for that reason alone. In particular, one would expect the problem of fixing moduli in systems with low-energy supersymmetry breaking to require detailed knowledge of the full superpotential and Kahler potential in the regime of the minimum. These quantities are still in the process of being computed in most M-theoretic realizations of $`4d`$ N=1 supergravity.  (This work is related to comments made in the last few minutes of my Strings 2001 talk; the material in the bulk of that talk can be found in . There are independent and probably more elegant geometrical constructions of $`AdS`$ and/or $`dS`$ backgrounds in progress by other authors ).

2. An AdS orientifold model in six dimensions

I will here present a perturbative string model in which all the non-periodic (i.e NS-NS) moduli are fixed, so that there are no runaway directions. A subset of this model was studied in .

Begin with type II string theory on a square $`T^4`$ at the self-dual radius $`R`$. Mod out by the asymmetric orientifold group generated by the following actions on the left and right movers of the string:

$$g_1:(0,s^2)_1(0,s^2)_2(0,s^2)_3(0,s^2)_4$$

$$g_2:\mathrm{\Omega }I_4$$

$$g_3:(1)^F(0,s^2)_1(0,s^2)_2$$

$$g_4:(1)^{F_R}(1,s^2)_1(1,s^2)_2(1,1)_3(1,1)_4$$

Here $`s`$ represents an asymmetric shift so that $`(0,s^2)_j`$ acts as $`(1)^{m_j+n_j}`$ where $`m_j`$ and $`n_j`$ are momentum and winding numbers on the $`j`$th circle. $`I_4`$ denotes reflection on four coordinates. The first of these actions (2.1) generates the $`SO(8)`$ lattice from the $`SU(2)^4`$ lattice we started with, which is needed here for level-matching. The elements $`g_2`$ and $`g_2g_3`$ introduce orientifold 5-planes and anti-orientifold 5-planes at locations separated by the shifts. Important combinations of these elements include space-filling orientifolds and antiorientifolds $`\mathrm{\Omega }(1)^F,\mathrm{\Omega }(0,s^2)^2`$ and an element

$$h_1=I_4(1)^F.$$

Let us choose the discrete torsion such that $`g_3`$ projects out the NS-NS scalars from the $`|g_3g_4>`$ and $`|g_4>`$ twisted sectors (these are compatible in this model). Let us also choose the discrete torsion such that $`h_1`$ kills the twisted gravitini from the $`|g_3g_4>`$ twisted sector, and such that $`g_3g_4`$ projects out the NS-NS scalars from the $`|h_1>`$ twisted sector (these are compatible in this model, with the $`2\pi `$ rotations implicit in the $`(1)^F`$ actions acting in internal compactified directions, a distinction that affects the twisted sectors).

With these specifications, this model has no NS NS moduli. The element $`g_4`$ projects out all the untwisted NS-NS moduli of the torus. None reemerge from twisted sectors. In the $`g_3`$ sector, the lightest states are massless fermions. In the $`g_4`$ sector, one finds NS-NS moduli that are killed by the above choice of discrete torsion, as is the case in the $`|h_1>`$ sector. Similarly, in other sectors obtained by products of group elements (which are isomorphic to those already discussed), potential NS-NS moduli are projected out when they arise.

This theory includes RR fields. RR moduli do not lead to runaway behavior since they are periodic, and they only couple derivatively to the rest of the theory. The RR field strengths will also be important in the construction. In particular, we can include combinations of RR fluxes which respect the orbifold symmetries.

Including these ingredients, the potential energy of this theory is, in string frame

$$V_s(g_s)32\frac{T_O}{g_s}+F_{RR}^2+𝒪(g_s)$$

where $`F_{RR}`$ encodes the RR fluxes (each type of which integrates to an integer $`Q_{RR}`$ over cycles in the compactification which survive the orientifolding) and $`T_O/g_s`$ is the tension of a single orientifold or antiorientifold 5-plane (this first term in (2.1) also then includes the contribution of the T-dual $`O9`$-planes and $`\overline{O}9`$-planes). We are here taking the flux quanta to be large so that the one-loop contribution to the vacuum energy is dwarfed by the $`F_{RR}^2`$ contribution to the potential energy at order $`g_s^0`$. In the six-dimensional Einstein frame, the potential is

$$V_E(g_s)32T_Og_s^2+F_{RR}^2g_s^3+𝒪(g_s^4)$$

From (2.1) we see that if we introduce a large number of RR flux quanta, we can balance the first and second terms in this perturbation expansion off of each other and obtain a stable minimum of the potential energy . This minimum has negative potential energy and leads to an $`AdS_6`$ spacetime in the noncompact dimensions. It would be interesting to understand the dual $`5d`$ CFT determined by the string theory on this background. Since here the internal space is string-scale, there is no large “sphere” or more general Einsteins space component of the geometry, so the matter content and symmetries of this case are quite different from other examples of AdS backrounds.

Because here $`1<<1/g_sQ_{RR}^2<<1/g_s^2`$, the curvature AdS space in this model is much smaller than string-scale curvature $`m_s^2`$ (and therefore also much smaller than the compactification scale in this model). The mass of the dilaton is also much smaller than $`m_s`$. In realistic applications, this mass must be at least as big as an inverse millimeter (or nearly decouple at long distance for some other reason ). Of course this model is not realistic in any case because, because of the dimensionality and the sign of the cosmological constant (among other things).

3. A “noncritical” approach to dS space

Since all observational indications are that we have, at least currently, a positive cosmological term (scalar potential) with the dark energy having an equation of state $`p/\rho w0.66`$, it is of interest to either locally fix the moduli at a point where the potential is positive or find an extroardinarily flat potential to describe “quintessence”. One typically finds runaway behavior toward weakly-coupled boundaries of moduli space , so that the simplest possibility is a local minimum above zero obtained by playing the first three terms in perturbation theory off of one another. In this section we will discuss such a minimum in the context of noncritical string theory.

I will take the point of view (see e.g. ) that non-critical string theory may be formulated in any dimension as long as one solves the resulting string equations of motion in a reliable regime with a background that has no perturbative instabilities. In the simplest construction here, we will have a perturbative description controlled by dimensionless parameters of order 1/10 or 1/100, not ones that can be made arbitrarily small for a fixed dimensionality, so I will not be able to prove the background exists. I will simply assume that these ratios are sufficient to give a reliable perturbation expansion. However, even given this, it is worth saying from the start that the resulting background is not realistic due to the scales that emerge. Still, it is potentially worth pursuing this sort of solution because of the conceptual issues involved in formulating and studying accelerating cosmologies.

Consider a background with dimension $`D`$ not necessarily equal to the critical dimension $`D_c=10`$ and with orientifold planes and RR field strengths. In D-dimensional string frame, for regimes where effective field theory applies, one has an action

$$\begin{array}{cc}& S_{string}=\frac{1}{2\kappa _0^2}d^Dx\sqrt{G_s}e^{2\mathrm{\Phi }}\left[R\frac{2(DD_c)}{3\alpha ^{}}\right]\hfill \\ & \underset{O_p}{}T_{O_p}d^{p+1}\eta e^\mathrm{\Phi }\sqrt{\gamma _s}\hfill \\ & \frac{1}{4\kappa _0^2}d^Dx\sqrt{G_s}\underset{F_{RR}}{}|F_{RR}|^2\hfill \end{array}$$

where the second line involves a sum over all orientifold planes that are present in the background and the third line involves a sum over all RR field strengths $`F_{RR}`$ that are turned on in the background. Here so far the D-dimensional metric $`G_s`$ and the brane metric $`\gamma _s`$ are in the string frame.

In the absence of the last two lines of (3.1), one finds a linear dilaton background to solve the dilaton equation of motion arising from (3.1), a solution which is in fact exact in $`\alpha ^{}`$ . Much of the literature on noncritical string theory involves this solution. However in the presence of the other terms, there is a priori the possibility of other solutions. In particular, here we will argue that there are compactified solutions with meta-stabilized dilaton.

If we dimensionally reduce to four dimensions and switch to Einstein frame, we obtain an effective potential for $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$ of the form

$$U(\mathrm{\Phi })\left(ae^{2\mathrm{\Phi }}be^{3\mathrm{\Phi }}+ce^{4\mathrm{\Phi }}\right)$$

where $`a`$, $`b`$, and $`c`$ are positive constants read off from the first three lines of (3.1) which will be specified explicitly below given $`T_{O_p}`$. Extremizing this gives

$$e^{\mathrm{\Phi }_\pm }=\frac{3b\pm \sqrt{9b^232ac}}{8c}$$

If this potential is reliable, and if

$$9b^2>32ac$$

then there is a metastable minimum of the dilaton potential at $`\mathrm{\Phi }=\mathrm{\Phi }_+`$.

The other moduli of the string background can be stabilized in a manner similar to that employed in §2. In fact, starting in $`D=12`$ dimensions we can consider a simple generalization of the model of (2.1)- (2.1). That orbifold/orientifold group acted on four dimensions, giving a reduction of $`10d`$ critical string theory down to $`6d`$. With the same action on twice as many coordinates, we can reduce from $`D=12`$ to $`D=4`$, and again fix all the NS-NS moduli, leaving invariant some combinations of Ramond fields. This leaves us with a string-scale compactification manifold, and we can put Ramond flux along diagonal directions of the torus so as to yield a small separation of scales between the RR $`q`$-form field strengths and the inverse radii of the corresponding cycles. This gives

$$c\frac{1}{4}\frac{(Q_{RR}^{(q)})^2}{V_q}$$

where $`V_q`$ is the volume in string units of the cycle carrying $`q`$-form flux $`Q_{RR}^{(q)}`$.

In order to determine $`b`$ in (3.1), we need to know the orientifold tensions $`T_{O_p}`$ in (3.1). These will in general be a function of $`D`$ (or equivalently $`dD2`$) and the spatial dimension $`p`$ of the $`O_p`$-plane. We can start to analyze this by generalizing the calculations of D-brane tensions  to arbitrary dimension, following a similar analysis  of the closed string partition function and spectrum in noncritical dimensions. In the case of the superstring, this gives an NS-NS exchange between Dp-branes separated by a distance $`y`$

$$𝒜_{NSNS}=i\frac{V_{p+1}}{(8\pi ^2\alpha ^{})^{\frac{p+1}{2}}}_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑tt^{\frac{(pd+3)}{2}}e^{\frac{ty^2}{2\pi \alpha ^{}}}e^{\frac{d\pi }{8t}}(de^{\pi /t}+\mathrm{})$$

where $`\mathrm{}`$ represents an infinite series of terms suppressed relative to the first term in the $`t0`$ infrared limit in the closed-string channel. For the critical superstring case of $`d=8`$, this reduces to the formula (13.3.1) in , in which this leading exchange is massless. More generally, it describes noncritical strings propagating on a linear dilaton background, as in the corresponding closed-string analysis of partition functions in . In sub-critical dimensions $`d<8`$, the mode is effectively massive due to the linear dilaton, corresponding to the surviving exponential suppression $`e^{\frac{\pi }{t}\frac{(d8)}{8}}`$. On the other hand, for $`d>8`$ one finds the leading modes to be effectively tachyonic in the linear dilaton background. However, as discussed in , in an effective action description the fields all have nontachyonic $`m^2`$ as in the critical string; the instability for $`d>8`$ arises as a result of the effect of the dilaton coupling on the equation of motion.

We are interested in looking for solutions (3.1) in which the dilaton is fixed. In such a background, there is no linear dilaton and the masses are not even effectively tachyonic. I will now assume that in fact the only effect of stabilizing the dilaton on the calculation of D-brane and orientifold tensions is to shift the effective masses of the exchanged particles in (3.1), in particular shifting the graviton exchange to the massless level. In particular we will assume it does not change the normalization of the amplitude. In particular, this amounts to assuming that the multiplicities of particles, particularly the low-lying ones like the graviton, do not change when one considers a different solution of the dilaton equation of motion, which appears to me a reasonable assumption given that the effective action appears self-consistently reliable in the models we will study.

Doing this and comparing the result to the appropriate low-energy Greens function in D dimensions gives the result

$$T_p=\frac{2^{4d/4}\pi ^{1/2}}{\kappa _0(2\pi \alpha _{}^{}{}_{}{}^{1/2})^{p+1d/2}}$$

for the Dp-brane tension. One finds for the orientifold tensions

$$2^{(d+2)(p+1)}T_{Op}=\frac{2^{4+d/4}\pi ^{1/2}}{\kappa _0(2\pi \alpha _{}^{}{}_{}{}^{1/2})^{p+1d/2}}$$

where we have included all $`2^{(d+2)(p+1)}`$ orientifold p-planes present in $`d+2`$ dimensions on a torus.

In our model with $`D=d+2=12`$, let us take $`\kappa _0=(4\pi ^2\alpha ^{})^{5/2}`$. $`2\pi (\alpha ^{})^{1/2}=2\pi R_{sd}`$ is the linear size of the self-dual compactification manifold, so this amounts to setting the dimensionful coupling $`\kappa _0`$ to be at the self-dual compactification scale. The choice of $`\kappa _0`$ does not affect any physics. However, rescaling $`\kappa _0`$ does rescale the coefficients in the string coupling expansion, and in our problem we will not have the luxury of parametrically lowering the dilaton to achieve an arbitrarily well controlled series. Instead, as we will see, with this choice of $`\kappa _0`$, our string coupling will be of order 1/10. Because we picked a natural scale for $`\kappa _0`$, I expect generically the coefficients in the $`g_s`$ expansion to be of order one, so that our use of the first three terms only in will be valid. However, the possibility remains that large coefficients arise at higher orders in perturbation theory in which case our approximation would fail. In addition to factors of $`g_s1/10`$, higher orders in the loop expansion come with powers of $`1/2\pi `$ from loop momentum integrals, which aids our cause.3 On the other hand, another natural choice for $`\kappa _0`$ might be to take $`\kappa _0=R_{sd}^5=\alpha _{}^{}{}_{}{}^{5/2}`$. Doing this would cancel the powers of $`1/2\pi `$ from the loop momentum integrals, leaving us still with the suppression by powers of 1/10 only. In any case however, because of the fact that there are no arbitrarily negative contributions in the $`b`$ term at fixed $`d`$, we cannot tune the dilaton to be arbitrarily weak, and so cannot be completely sure that the candidate minimum we will study exists.

It is interesting to contemplate extrapolating to large dimensionality, in which case the negative contribution from (3.1) grows exponentially whereas the leading positive term grows only linearly (3.1). This may lead to better control, though going very far from the critical dimension might introduce even more subtleties.

The above results and assumptions lead to the following contributions to the effective potential in four-dimensional Einstein frame:

$$S_E=d^4x\sqrt{g_E}\frac{1}{(4\pi ^2\alpha ^{})^2}\left[ae^{2\mathrm{\Phi }}be^{3\mathrm{\Phi }}+ce^{4\mathrm{\Phi }}\right]$$

where $`a=8\pi ^2/3`$, $`b=\pi ^{1/2}2^{15/2}`$ (including a factor of two for the fact that there are two sets of orientifolds in our model) and $`c`$ is given by (3.1).

Let us choose the RR flux to get the smallest possible value of the string coupling $`e^{\mathrm{\Phi }_+}`$. This means taking $`c`$ such that $`32ac9b^2`$, so that

$$e^{\mathrm{\Phi }_+}\frac{4a}{3b}0.11.$$

Given this, we find the cosmological constant at the minimum, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }U(\mathrm{\Phi }_+)`$, to be bounded by

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }\frac{1}{(2\pi R_{sd})^4}(0.05)$$

so that the curvature radius $`L`$ of the dS space is greater than string scale $`(\alpha ^{})^{1/2}`$ by two orders of magnitude (using the relation that the general relativistic dimension two cosmological constant is given by $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{GR}=1/L^2=\mathrm{\Lambda }/M_4^2=(1/\alpha ^{})(0.03/4\pi ^2)`$, reading off $`M_4`$ from the $`4d`$ Einstein frame action).

Clearly, establishing completely the validity (and utility) of this approach to constructing dS space will require getting a handle on the worldsheet description of the CFT including the Fischler-Susskind  description of the competition between different orders in perturbation theory that is central to the mechanism. If this can be accomplished, it is intriguing that increasing the dimensionality (and therefore the naive number of degrees of freedom) seems to give a better and better perturbative description of dS space.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organizers of Strings 2001 for organizing such a stimulating conference. I would like to thank T. Banks, R. Bousso, S. Giddings, S. Gukov, W. Fischler, S. Hellerman, G. Horowitz, S. Kachru, N. Kaloper, J. Maldacena, J. Polchinski, A. Strominger, L. Susskind, and E. Witten, for interesting discussions on this and/or related topics. The upcoming work  has some overlap in technique with our work here at least with regard to AdS vacua, and I thank those authors for discussions. I would like to thank the Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB for hospitality and support, and the DOE (contract DE-AC03-76SF00515 and OJI) and the Sloan Foundation for support.

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# The Las Campanas/AAT Rich Cluster Survey I: Precision and Reliability of the Photometric Catalogue

## 1 Introduction

Panoramic surveys based upon systematic photographic imaging of large areas of the sky have under-pinned a large fraction of astrophysical research since the 1950s, with the three main Schmidt telescopes, at Palomar, Siding Springs and La Silla, completing at least 14 major surveys over this period. The full exploitation of these observations has been achieved through the digitization of the photographic plates on facilities such as the Automated Plate Measuring Machine (APM, Kibblewhite et al. 1984) at Cambridge, or COSMOS at Edinburgh (MacGillivray & Stobie, 1984).

While they cover impressively large areas, the photographic surveys have several drawbacks which makes them unsuitable for some applications. In particular, the low sensitivity and non-linear response of standard photographic plates means that the surveys have relatively bright surface brightness limits and require significant effort to reliably calibrate the magnitude scale over the whole range detected. Indeed repeated scans of individual plates using the measuring machines suggests a scatter in the measured magnitudes for sources of at least $`0.04`$ mags (Maddox et al. 1990a), before other contributions are included. The relatively poor spatial resolution achieved on the Schmidt plates also limits the reliability of star–galaxy separation, placing additional restrictions on the questions which can be addressed with these data.

Panoramic imaging surveys using CCDs circumvent many of the drawbacks of photographic surveys by virtue of their high quantum efficiency and good linearity of CCD devices. Large format CCDs (and mosaic cameras) are therefore now being used to undertake wide-field surveys, whose depth, resolution and photometric precision far exceeds those achieved using photographic plates.

This paper describes one such project – the Las Campanas/AAT Rich Cluster Survey (LARCS). LARCS is a long-term project to study a statistically-reliable sample of the most luminous X-ray clusters at intermediate redshifts ($`z=0.07`$–0.16) in the southern hemisphere. The goals of the project are to understand the influence of environment on the characteristics of galaxies, such as luminosity, star formation history and morphology. To achieve this we map the photometric, spectroscopic and dynamical properties of galaxies in rich cluster environments at $`z0.1`$, tracing the variation in these properties from the high-density cluster cores out into the surrounding low-density field, beyond the turn-around radius ($`>10`$ Mpc)111Throughout this work values of $`H_0=50h`$ km s-1 Mpc-1 and $`q_o=0.5`$ have been adopted.. For the most massive clusters at $`z0.1`$, the turn-around radius corresponds to roughly 1 degree and therefore we require panoramic CCD imaging covering 2-degree diameter fields, as well as spectroscopic coverage of similar fields. The former is achieved by mosaicing CCD images from the 1-m Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, while the latter comes from the subsequent spectroscopic follow-up with the 400-fibre 2dF multi-object spectrograph on the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT).

To ensure that the results from the survey can be reliably compared to theoretical models, well-defined selection criteria are used to identify the cluster sample used. The LARCS sample is selected from the X-ray brightest Abell Clusters (XBACs) catalogue of Ebeling et al. (1996) constructed from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey. XBACs is an all-sky, X-ray flux limited, sample of 242 Abell clusters and is effectively a complete sample of richest clusters at $`z<0.16`$ (Ebeling et al. 1996). We therefore restrict our sample to the most X-ray luminous ($`L_X3.7\times 10^{44}`$ erg s-1) southern clusters (with $`\delta 10\mathrm{deg}`$, so accessible from the AAT) lying in the redshift range $`0.07z0.16`$. These selection criteria result in 53 clusters in the XBACs sample and from these a random subsample of 21 is selected for our survey. LARCS has a sufficiently large sample that it should provide a statistically-reliable view of the properties of both the cluster galaxies and how these relate to the characteristics of the clusters themselves. A summary of the 21 galaxy clusters is presented in Table 1, together with the current state of observations made.

The project has completed panoramic ($`2\times 2`$ degree2) $`B`$ and $`R`$ broad-band imaging of the cluster sample from the 1-m Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, totaling over 70 square degrees of sky (O’Hely et al. 1998, O’Hely 2000). These images are used to select galaxies for the on-going spectroscopic survey using 2dF. The final goal is to obtain spectra for roughly 20,000 galaxies in the 21 clusters providing an unprecedented view of the dynamics of rich clusters and their galaxy populations within a region encompassing the core, halo and in-fall regions of the clusters.

This paper presents the details of the photometric reduction, calibration and analysis of the CCD imaging used in LARCS. In addition, as a test of the LARCS catalogues we compare our catalogues in the fields of four clusters that overlap with the plate-based galaxy catalogue from the APM, (Maddox et al. 1990a, 1990b) which is the basis of the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS, Colless et al. 1998; Maddox et al. 1998).

The plan of the paper is as follows: In §2 we discuss the imaging observations obtained for our survey, data reduction methods and quality tests. We test both the photometric properties and the star-galaxy separation of our catalogues. In §3 we compare the galaxy catalogues derived from our CCD imaging with those from the photographic APM catalogue used by the 2dFGRS (referred to as the GRS/APM catalogue in the following). §4 deals with the properties of the galaxy populations which are missing from the GRS/APM catalogue – including both compact, high surface brightness galaxies and lower surface-brightness galaxies, examining their magnitude, spatial and colour distributions. We summarize our main conclusions in §5.

## 2 Imaging Observations, Reduction and Analysis

Analysis of the clusters is based upon panoramic CCD imaging from the 1-m Swope telescope. High quality broad-band $`B`$ and $`R`$ CCD images of all the cluster were obtained over the course of three years, 1996–1998. These observations are summized in Table 1. The observations employed a thinned $`2048\times 2048`$, $`24\mu `$m pixel Tektronics CCD giving a pixel scale of 0.696′′/pixel and a field of view for each exposure of $`23.76^{}\times 23.76^{}`$. With 44′′ overlaps the total coverage of the $`5\times 5`$ mosaic of pointings is $`2`$ degrees diameter (the corners of the mosaic are omitted to give a total of 21 pointings per cluster). The total exposure time per pointing is 500 s in $`B`$ and 400 s in $`R`$, each split into two spatially-offset sub-exposures to facilitate cosmic-ray rejection and the removal of a small number of cosmetic features.

Here we have chosen to discuss in detail our optical analysis of four of the clusters: Abell 22, 1084, 1650 and 1651, which are also included within the region surveyed by the 2dFGRS. These clusters were observed in two runs: March 16th to 22nd 1996 and August 19th to 21st 1996. The details of these observations are in Table 2.

The imaging data are reduced in a standard manner using packages within iraf, steps undertaken include debiasing, preliminary flatfielding with twilight flats, creation of super-flats from independent stacks of the science frames and the application of these to the science frames, alignment and co-addition of data using a cosmic-ray reject algorithm. The accuracy of the alignment is better than one pixel in all cases.

To test the precision of the flatfielding, the iraf task imstat is used to obtain the mean background levels at various locations on each mosaic tile. The variation in the sky background is found to be $`1`$ percent in all cases.

Before constructing the object catalogues it is necessary to match the seeing of the $`B`$ and $`R`$-band tiles so that reliable aperture colours could be measured. The matching is achieved by degrading the tile with the better seeing to that of the worse. A first pass of SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996) is used to obtain a rough list of stellar sources on the $`R`$-band tiles, by taking objects with class\_star $`>0.9`$ (see §2.3). The seeing of the $`B`$ and $`R`$ tiles is estimated from the median value of the FWHM of these sources measured with the imexamine task. An initial estimate of $`\sigma `$, the value used to convolve the better seeing tile (typically the $`R`$-band images) to the worse one, is made and applied using the gauss task to create a new, degraded tile. The median seeing for the stars on the degraded tile is then measured using imexamine. The process is repeated iteratively to determine the correct value for $`\sigma `$ (within the 1-$`\sigma `$ scatter of the median FWHM) to match the seeing on the two tiles. Before convolution, differences of up to $`1^{\prime \prime }`$ may be present between the median FWHM of the $`R`$\- and $`B`$-band tiles. After convolution the difference between the median seeing is $`<0.1^{\prime \prime }`$ and colours can be reliably measured.

SExtractor is used to automatically analyse the tiles, detect sources and parametrize them. We catalogue the $`R`$-band frames, detecting sources having more than 12 contiguous pixels each $`3\sigma `$ of the sky above the background, equivalent to $`\mu _R23.3`$ mag. arcsec-2. The resulting catalogues have $`5\sigma `$ detection limits for galaxies of $`R=21.1`$–21.3. Spurious sources, such as satellite trails and diffraction spikes from bright stars, are cleaned manually from the resultant catalogues by visual inspection.

To derive colours for these sources phot within iraf is used and colours are measured in $`4^{\prime \prime }`$ diameter apertures (typically $`10`$ kpc at the cluster redshifts) from the seeing-matched frames. These colours are used in the following analysis to convert the $`R`$-selected sample to $`B`$-band to compare to the GRS/APM.

### 2.1 Photometry

The science frames are calibrated from the observations of standard stars selected from Landolt (1992), interspersed throughout each night. Typically we observed over 100 standard stars each night in each broad-band filter throughout the observing runs. We fit for colour terms each night from observations of the standards taken at the same airmass. Extinction is accounted for by fitting to the variation with airmass of the standard stars photometry in one night. On photometric nights, the variation in extinction coefficient and colour term are all within $`1\sigma `$ of each other. The photometric solutions for the photometric nights (Table 2) are typically accurate to better than 0.03 mags.

As some of the observations are made in non-photometric conditions it is necessary to independently calibrate such pointings. To achieve this, the photometry of sources appearing in the 44′′ inter-tile overlap regions is used to determine the magnitude offset between the non-photometric and photometric tiles in each passband. Only those sources which are unsaturated, not heavily blended or close to the chip’s edge are used to obtain these values. To optimally employ magnitude offset information across the whole mosaic we use the method of Glazebrook (1994, G94). Using a single step algorithm, G94 generates appropriate magnitude offsets to be applied to the non-photometric tiles, whilst keeping the zero-points of the photometric tiles fixed. After application of G94 we estimate that the typical tile to tile variation in zero-points is $`0.006`$ mags, as estimated from the scatter in the magnitude offsets from the duplicated sources in the overlapping regions. The maximum deviations between tiles is $`0.015`$ mags. The photometric zeropoint errors of 0.03 mags are the dominant ones and the tile-to-tile variation in zero-points is small by comparison.

Figure 1 shows the zeropoint offsets between each pointing of an example (non-photometric) mosaic as a grey-scale before and after correction using the G94 algorithm. After calibration the entire mosaic is close to uniform, with a tile-to-tile rms of only 0.005 mags.

Once both passbands are calibrated, the final catalogue is constructed by combining the catalogues for the individual 21 tiles across the entire mosaic. Duplicate sources (from the overlapping regions) are removed by averaging their critical SExtractor parameters (e.g. total magnitude).

### 2.2 Astrometry

Astrometry is performed individually on each pointing of the mosaic. Approximately 60 bright ($`B<18.0`$) stars per pointing are tied to the positions from the APM (http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/apm/). The positions of the rest of the sources (galaxies and uncatalogued stars) are then obtained using the astrom package. As a quality test, we compare the astrometrical solution of sources within the 44′′ overlap regions of the 2 degree mosaics. Our internal accuracy is found to be better than $`0.3^{\prime \prime }`$, adequate for the needs of spectroscopy on 2dF.

### 2.3 Star–Galaxy Separation

Accurate star–galaxy separation is essential in extragalactic surveys. Robust separation is vital for minimizing stellar contamination, while at the same time retaining compact galaxies and optimising the efficiency of spectroscopic follow-up of the survey.

Following Reid et al. (1996) we construct a plot of the magnitude difference between 4.0′′ and 2.0′′ diameter apertures ($`\mathrm{\Delta }_{2^{\prime \prime }4^{\prime \prime }}`$) on the $`B`$-band exposures versus total $`B`$ magnitude (Fig. 2). In such a diagram, stars should trace a horizontal locus due to their fixed profile shape (the telescope PSF) and therefore a fixed proportion of light in the two apertures. The horizontal sequence is seen in Figure 2 at $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{2^{\prime \prime }4^{\prime \prime }}0.1`$. Galaxies, which exhibit a range of more extended profile shapes, will show a wider range of $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{2^{\prime \prime }4^{\prime \prime }}`$ values. Close to the completeness limit of the frames, the galaxy and star loci overlap due to low signal-to-noise. Examination of Fig. 2 reveals that our CCD imaging can readily differentiate stars from galaxies down to a magnitude of at least $`B20.5`$.

We examine the potential of four further SExtractor parameters for usage in star–galaxy separation. Ellipticity is obtained from SExtractor’s estimates of the semi-major and semi-minor axes for sources. The class\_star parameter ($`P^{}`$) is SExtractor’s own estimate of stellarity and uses shape information fed into a neural-network classifier that has been trained a priori on other images. Finally, we use two estimates of the compactness of the image profile: the concentration index (Abrahams et al. 1993) and FWHM. Plotted in Figure 3 are these critical parameters for both stars and galaxies from Abell 22. The other clusters follow the same distribution of sources on these planes. For the ellipticity and concentration index, the stars and galaxies, as defined with the $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{2^{\prime \prime }4^{\prime \prime }}`$ cut, overlap somewhat, whilst the converse is true for $`P^{}`$ and the FWHM measurements. Therefore both the FWHM and $`P^{}`$ are useful in differentiating stars and galaxies.

Three criteria are used to generate a robust and stringent definition of galaxies: $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{2^{\prime \prime }4^{\prime \prime }}>0.2`$, FWHM $`>2`$” and $`P^{}<0.1`$. In adopting these criteria, we must accept that a small number of stars and galaxies will be mis-classified. However, as demonstrated in Figures 2 and 3, the number of stellar sources fulfilling these rigorous criteria is small, $`3`$ percent.

## 3 Comparison of the GRS/APM Galaxy Catalogue with LARCS

To test the reliability of the LARCS cataloging, photometry and star–galaxy separation, we now compare our sample to the galaxy catalogue from the APM survey, which is used by the GRS/APM.

The APM survey (Maddox et al. 1990a, 1990b) is constructed from photographic plate materials taken at the UK Schmidt Telescope Unit in Australia. Approximately 390 photographic IIIa-J plates are scanned by the APM. The APM scans uses a 16-$`\mu `$m pixel with a sampling rate that produces a 0.54′′ pixel scale. Magnitudes are defined using the Kodak emulsion in combination with a GG395 filter and zeropointed with Johnson $`B`$-band CCD photometry. The rms random error in each galaxy magnitude is 0.1–0.2 mags to a depth of $`b_J=20.5`$ (Maddox et al. 1990a). Subsequent field corrections are applied to the APM catalogues to account for non-photometric observations, vignetting and differential desensitization. Maddox et al. (1990b) argue that the rms plate zero-point error in the final matched survey catalogue is 0.04 mags. Objects in the overlapping regions between the plates are utilized for establishing the plate-to-plate variation and the zeropoints are iteratively corrected to remove these offsets.

Image surface brightness profiles are used in the APM to achieve star-galaxy separation. The residual differences between a given image profile and a stellar profile at the same magnitude are calculated, resulting in brighter stars being readily identified. At fainter magnitudes, the lower signal-to-noise in the images makes robust separation impossible. Maddox et al. (1990a) estimate that the catalogue’s completeness is $`98`$ percent for $`b_J<19.5`$, with a stellar contamination rate of 5–10 percent at the same depth depending upon proximity to the galactic plane.

The 2dFGRS is an ambitious project to collect high quality redshifts and spectra for $``$ 250,000 galaxies brighter than $`b_J=19.45`$ (extinction corrected). Galaxies are robustly selected from the extended version of the APM galaxy catalogue (Maddox et al. 1990a) covering a region of over 1700 square degrees in both the Northern and Southern Pole regions and used as the input to the 2dFGRS (Colless et al. 1998; Maddox et al. 1998; Folkes et al. 1999).

Of the LARCS clusters, four overlap with the 2dFGRS parent catalogue from the APM. The details of these cluster catalogues (Abell 22, 1084, 1650 and 1651) are presented in Table 3. The 0.3′′ accuracy within the LARCS astrometry is more than adequate for identifying source matches with the APM catalogues.

### 3.1 Matching LARCS to GRS/APM

Here, we compare the GRS/APM catalogue down to the 2dFGRS magnitude cut-off of $`b_J=19.45`$ (extinction corrected) across the LARCS/GRS overlap area of 12.3 square degrees.

The APM catalogue is divided into two distinct areas: Northern and Southern Galactic Pole regions. There are 2754 GRS/APM galaxies in the overlap of the GRS/APM with the four clusters in Table 3. One of the clusters (Abell 22) lies in the Southern Galactic Pole Region, whilst the other three overlapping clusters are in the Northern Galactic Pole Region.

The GRS/APM galaxy catalogue is matched to the full LARCS catalogues using a search radius of 3′′. Virtually all sources ($`95`$ percent) in the GRS/APM have corresponding matches within LARCS. Those sources for which matches are not found are all visually inspected–their APM positions are over-plotted upon the corresponding LARCS mosaic pointings. In most cases the unmatched sources result from differences in blending and deblending of close sources between the two surveys. Most are resolved in the LARCS CCD imaging, whereas the APM sources appear as a blend of a number (typically 2–3) of LARCS sources (both galaxy-galaxy and galaxy-star blends). The centroiding for the astrometric solution is thus affected, resulting in the source lying outside the 3′′ search radius. Only three sources are found within the GRS/APM catalogue that do not have any likely counterpart in the LARCS imaging. These very rare sources ($`<0.1`$ percent) are examples of APM mis-detections perhaps caused by plate flaws or moving/variable sources. Table 4 summarizes the results of the matches with the total number of sources within each catalogue.

We further investigate the nature of the GRS/APM sources that are matched using the star–galaxy separation criteria of LARCS as presented in §2. The number of matched sources which satisfy all of the ‘LARCS galaxy criteria’ are presented in Table 4. Broadly $`80`$ percent of matched sources defined as galaxies by the GRS/APM are also classified as galaxies by LARCS. We note that $`80`$ percent is the lower limit of the number of galaxies as our galaxy determination is very strict.

We are also able to place a lower limit on the stellar contamination by inverting the star-galaxy selection criteria discussed previously. Conservatively, stars can be defined as having $`\mathrm{\Delta }_{2^{\prime \prime }4^{\prime \prime }}<0.2`$, FWHM $`<2.0`$” and $`P^{}>0.9`$. Of the matched GRS/APM galaxies, $`3`$ percent are defined as stars by LARCS. Therefore at minimum, the stellar contamination of the APM is 3 percent, whilst at maximum it is 20 percent. Our result is close to the original estimation of 5–10 percent stellar contamination by Maddox et al. (1990a).

### 3.2 Photometric comparison

In this section we examine the magnitudes of sources in the LARCS and GRS/APM catalogues–searching for zero-point differences between the four cluster fields, as well as between the Northern and Southern Galactic Pole regions of the GRS/APM.

To undertake such a comparison, one must convert LARCS’ $`R`$-selected sample to the $`b_J`$ system used by the APM. To obtain $`b_J`$ magnitudes we first convert the $`R`$-band magnitudes from SExtractor’s best\_mag to total magnitudes. The correction factor, $`R_{tot}=\mathrm{best}\mathrm{\_}\mathrm{mag}0.021\pm 0.010`$, is calculated from the median magnitude difference between SExtrator’s best\_mag magnitude and a large (15′′ diameter) aperture magnitude for isolated sources. The correction is applied to all sources to convert their best\_mag magnitudes to true total magnitudes. Next, we convert these total $`R`$-band magnitudes, $`R_{tot}`$, to total $`B`$-band magnitudes ($`B_{\mathrm{tot}}`$) using $`B_{\mathrm{tot}}=R_{\mathrm{tot}}+(BR)`$, where $`(BR)`$ is the colour measured from the seeing-matched tiles in a $`4^{\prime \prime }`$-diameter aperture.

The APM uses photographic $`b_J`$ magnitudes, and we therefore require a colour transformation to convert our CCD-based Johnson $`B`$-band magnitude into $`b_J`$. Metcalfe et al. (1995) and a number of other authors, including Colless (1989) and Bardelli et al. (1998), provide conversions from $`B`$ to $`b_J`$: $`b_J=B(0.28\pm 0.04)(BV)`$. From fitting the predicted colours of galaxies across the range of redshift covered by the LARCS clusters with non-evolving spectral energy distributions, we derive the relation between $`(BV)`$ and $`(BR)`$ to be $`(BR)=(1.66\pm 0.03)(BV)`$. Hence to convert from the $`B`$ magnitudes used in LARCS to the $`b_J`$ APM magnitudes, we use $`b_J=B(0.17\pm 0.05)(BR)`$. This conversion is consistent with the correlation between $`Bb_J`$ and $`(BR)`$ colour found for matched sources between the APM and LARCS data (see Figure 4), where the calculated fit is $`b_J=B(0.16\pm 0.03)(BR)+(0.04\pm 0.02)`$.

In our comparison we use corrected (i.e. including a correction for galactic extinction, Schlegel et al. (1998)) $`b_J`$ magnitudes from the APM and corrected total $`B`$-band magnitudes from LARCS, converted to $`b_J`$. Differences in the magnitudes of matched sources are examined as functions of LARCS mosaic pointing and magnitude.

Figure 5 shows the difference between LARCS $`b_J`$ and the total APM $`b_J`$ magnitude for each of the four clusters. The medians and the associated errors are also indicated on the panels. Based on repeat scans of the plate material, Maddox et al. (1990a) suggest an intrinsic uncertainty in the zeropoint of individual plates of 0.04 mag. Of the four clusters, Abell 1650 and Abell 1651 show very good agreement between the two photometric systems, Abell 1084 shows a larger offset (but only at the $`2.5\sigma `$ level), while Abell 22 has a $`3\sigma `$ difference ($`\mathrm{\Delta }=0.12`$ mags). We note that Abell 22 is the only one of the four clusters which falls in the SGP area of the GRS/APM.

We next investigate the precision of individual galaxy measurements. Maddox et al. (1990a) and Folkes et al. (1999) state that the random error associated with the $`b_J`$ magnitudes is $`\pm 0.2`$ mag for the range $`17.0b_J19.45`$. In Figure 6 we plot the magnitude difference in $`b_J`$ between LARCS and the APM galaxies against LARCS magnitude. Excluding regions of the plot close to the selection limits, we find that the fit is consistent with a slope of zero, hence the APM demonstrates a linear photometric scale over at least the range $`17<b_J<19`$. The RMS scatter is also consistent with the random error previously stated by Maddox et al (1990a).

In summary, therefore, we see slight evidence for systematic variations in the zero points of the GRS/APM and LARCS photometry across the four clusters, but such variations are within the limit imposed by the combined errors on the GRS/APM and LARCS zero points and thus are not significant. We also find no evidence for systematic variations between the photometry of the SGP and NGP regions of the GRS/APM at levels $`0.1`$ mag. We further note that there is no evidence for a magnitude offset between individual pointings of the mosaic tiles within LARCS at the level of $`>0.02`$ mags (consistent with the photometric errors on the sources used in the comparison).

## 4 Comparison of the LARCS Galaxy Catalogue with the GRS/APM

We now compare the LARCS and GRS/APM catalogues in the reverse sense: that is we construct a “complete” galaxy catalogue from LARCS and determine the overlap with the GRS/APM.

Because the faint magnitude limit of the GRS/APM input catalogue is $`b_J=19.45`$, we generate a bright LARCS sample for each of the four clusters. As we confirmed in §3.2, the typical photometric errors for galaxies in the GRS/APM is 0.2 mag. To ensure the most complete comparison therefore we select all sources from the LARCS catalogues which are at least $`3\sigma `$ (0.6 mag) away from the limit of the GRS/APM: $`b_J=19.45`$. This imposes a magnitude limit of $`b_J=18.85`$ and we list the number of sources in each field in this “bright” sample in Table 5. Our bright comparison is thus well above the completeness limit and the random scattering of sources above/below the cut-off used for the GRS/APM catalogue. Based upon the scatter at brighter magnitudes (see Figure 6) selecting our sample at $`b_J=18.85`$ should exclude at most $`3`$ percent of the population. We further apply our conservative galaxy selection criteria (see §2) to the catalogues to create bright galaxy catalogues for comparison to the GRS/APM input catalogue.

In principle, all of the galaxies contained within these bright LARCS galaxy catalogues should be present in the GRS/APM. Again, we employ a search radius of 3′′ for the matching algorithm and we give a summary of the results in Table 5.

The GRS/APM identifies the majority of the galaxies contained within the bright LARCS galaxy sample. However, the GRS/APM is missing 10–20 percent of the galaxies at all magnitudes: Figure 7 presents a distribution of the percentage of bright galaxies missing from the GRS/APM as a function of $`b_J`$ magnitude, overlaid with the total number of matched galaxies. The missing population represents approximately a fixed fraction of the total population across the whole magnitude range.

To investigate the properties of the missing galaxy population we compare the characteristics of the matched and unmatched galaxies in terms of their morphologies, brightnesses, spatial distributions and $`(BR)`$ colours.

### 4.1 Morphologies of the Missing Populations

Figure 8 shows the distribution of maximum surface brightness ($`\mu _{MAX}`$) versus concentration index for the matched and missing populations; late-types typically lie towards lower right and early-types populate the upper left of this plane (Abraham et al. 1994). Figure 8 demonstrates that, whilst the missing galaxy population broadly follows that of the matched population, there exist distinct classes of galaxies that are missed in the GRS/APM.

Figure 9 displays a sample of some of these bright galaxies missed from the GRS/APM. We visually classify the unmatched galaxies and define four broad classes absent from the GRS/APM:

* Blends. There are many examples of blended galaxies (see the top two rows of Figure 9). Due to the proximity of a close neighbour or neighbours (either other galaxies or stars), the galaxy is excluded from the GRS/APM catalogue.
* Resolved. There are several apparently ‘normal’, resolved galaxies missing from the GRS/APM (see the third and fourth rows of Figure 9).
* Normal. There are also small, mostly compact, galaxies which have been missed, the bulk of these are likely to be mis-classified as stellar in the APM and missed from the galaxy survey input catalogue (see the penultimate row of Figure 9).
* LSB. There are a small number of low surface brightness galaxies (see the bottom row of Figure 9).

Blends are the dominant component of the missing galaxy population, comprising $`60`$ percent of it, resolved galaxies $`20`$ percent, normal galaxies $`15`$ percent and low surface brightness galaxies $`5`$ percent (see Table 6).

The majority of the missing population are galaxies blended with a secondary source; both with galaxies (e.g. a1084r09\_1155 in Figure 9) and stars (e.g. a22r13\_839). In one or both of the APM passbands (http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/$``$apmcat/) these blends have a merged flag set. Moreover, as the APM data are scanned from many different plates, the plate quality varies from cluster to cluster. In principle, the plates should be of top quality, but subjective grading of plate quality and variable focus would cause the median separation between blended sources to vary and hence affect the success of deblending. Table 7 presents the median separation of the missing, merged galaxies. Clearly there are differences in plate quality (and hence the deblending) across the APM, with one plate (containing Abell 1084) having a significantly smaller median blend offset than other plates and the fewest number of blends.

There exists a number of apparently ‘normal’, resolved galaxies that the GRS/APM misses (e.g. a22r03\_1196). These account for $`20`$ percent of the missing populations. We investigate these resolved galaxies by inspecting them in the online APM catalogues (see http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/$``$apmcat). The Resolved galaxies have classification flags set in one or both passbands to ‘noise’, ‘merged’ or ‘stellar’ (e.g. a1651r05\_790 has classification flags set to ‘non-stellar’ and ‘stellar’ in the B and R-scans of the APM).

Whilst issues of blending account for $`60`$ percent of the missing APM galaxies, $`15`$ percent of the remainder are bright and relatively compact in nature. With the poorer resolution of the APM, these galaxies are likely to be classified as stellar and indeed most are typed as ‘stellar’ according to their classification flag in the APM catalogues (e.g. a1084r03\_50 has classification flags in both passbands set to ‘stellar’). Drinkwater et al. (1999) found evidence for a similar population of small, high surface brightness, compact galaxies within the Fornax cluster. They argue that such galaxies are readily overlooked in many surveys because they are simply misclassified as stars. We confirm that the GRS/APM is systematically missing these compact galaxies from the galaxy catalogue.

The remaining $`5`$ percent of the missing galaxies are low surface brightness systems (LSB). The few examples of the LSB class that are found at all in the on-line APM catalogues are classified as ‘noisy’, but the majority are missing (e.g. a1651r18\_227 has classification flags set to both ‘noise-like’ and ‘merged’ in the red and blue APM passbands respectively). Cross et al. (2000) present the bivariate brightness distribution (BBD) for the 2dFGRS survey, which confirms that the majority of these LSB galaxies found in LARCS are outside 2dFGRS’s detection limits in surface brightness.

### 4.2 Magnitude Distribution of the Missing Populations

The missing galaxies appear to be a fixed fraction, about 10–20 percent, of the total population at all magnitudes (see Figure 7, upper panel). The proportion of missing galaxies at the brightest magnitudes, $`b_J<17`$, increases to 20 per cent.

Because the missing Blended population dominates the total missing population number, these objects exhibit the same behaviour as the whole missing population across the entire magnitude range. There is no strong dependence on brightness when galaxies are lost from the GRS/APM due to blending.

The missing Resolved galaxies occur more frequently at brighter magnitudes, with few if any fainter than $`b_J18.7`$. Many of these brighter normal galaxies are misclassified in one or both APM passbands as blends due to slight asymmetries or irregularities in their morphology.

In contrast, the missing Normal and LSB galaxies are primarily found at fainter magnitudes, $`b_J>18`$, relatively uniformly distributed between $`b_J18`$ and the magnitude limit of the GRS/APM. Each of these two sub-classes makes up about 1–2 percent of the total population at $`b_J>18`$ or fainter. The sensitivity limits of the plate material used in the APM survey means that it preferentially misses faint LSBs, but the dominant factor for distinguishing between faint compact galaxies and stars is the spatial resolution of the APM.

### 4.3 Spatial Distribution of Missing Populations

The spatial distribution of the missing galaxies is presented in Figure 10. The galaxies are spread evenly throughout the four LARCS clusters. We show the radially-averaged distribution of the different missing galaxy classes for the combined sample from the four clusters (Figure 11). We see that the missing galaxies represent a constant fraction of the whole population at all radii. Although it might be expected that in the crowded clusters cores the proportion of blended galaxies missing from the GRS/APM would increase there is no evidence for this.

### 4.4 Colours of the Missing Populations

Histograms of the $`(BR)`$ colours of the ‘missing’ population are presented in Figure 12 together with the colours of the ‘matched’ population. The excess $`(BR)=1.6`$ galaxies in the matched population are the early-type cluster members; they account for only $`10`$ percent of the galaxies matched in the bright comparison. The missing galaxies span the whole range in colours seen in the matched population, with a slight bias against galaxies with colours similar to early-type galaxies in the clusters and a slightly enhanced number of blue galaxies. The population of Blends dominates the total missing galaxy population. It broadly follows the matched population except for a slight (but not significant) enhancement in the population of very blue galaxies. The Resolved population of missing galaxies traces that of the matched fairly well. Finally, the distributions of missing Normal and LSB galaxies both show shifts to the blue compared to the matched population. This is more pronounced for the missing LSBs, but is still statistically significant for the missing Normal population (likelihood $`<10^4`$).

We conclude that the colour biases in some of the populations missing from the GRS/APM are relatively modest as compared to the matched galaxies, especially for the Blended population which dominates the missing sample.

## 5 Conclusions

We present the imaging dataset for the Las Campanas and Anglo-Australian Observatories Rich Cluster Survey. This programme is a panoramic CCD-based imaging and spectroscopic study of 21 of the most X-ray luminous clusters of galaxies at $`z=0.07`$–0.16. Our imaging extends out to radii of 10 Mpc at the median redshift of our survey–sufficient to encompass the infall region around the clusters. We describe the details of the data reduction pipeline and calibration; our photometry is accurate to $`0.03`$ mags and our astrometry to better than 0.3′′, as determined from cross-comparisons between overlapping mosaic tiles. We develop a reliable star-galaxy separation technique to provide a low ($`2`$ percent) stellar contamination in the final galaxy catalogues.

We compare the results from the LARCS survey for four fields that overlap with the 2dFGRS survey, which is based upon photographic plates scans from the APM. The comparison covers an area $`12.3`$ square degrees on the sky and includes roughly 2500 galaxies brighter than $`b_J=19.45`$.

The photometric accuracy of LARCS is accurate to better than 0.03 mag with the internal tile-to-tile photometric match being $`0.005`$ mag. There is no evidence for a significant offset ($`0.1`$mag) between fields in the LARCS survey or between the disconnected regions of the Northern and Southern APM catalogues.

The APM magnitudes are linear across at least two magnitudes in $`b_J`$ and the random photometrical errors are found to be consistent with the value of 0.2 mag estimated by Maddox et al (1990a).

The stellar contamination within the GRS/APM is found to be about 3–20 percent, close to the range of 5–10 percent originally estimated by Maddox et al. (1990a).

The number of false detections within the APM is very small, at the $`0.1`$ percent level.

There are several populations of galaxies that are not present within the APM input catalogue: these comprise roughly 10–20 percent of the total galaxy population at all magnitudes. The missing galaxies can be divided in to four broad categories: Blends ($`60`$ percent), Resolved galaxies ($`20`$ percent), Normal galaxies ($`15`$ percent) and Low Surface Brightness galaxies ($`5`$ percent).

* The Blends can readily be explained. Due to the resolution of the photographic plates, the APM has not been able to cleanly deblend two sources. As a result these sources are flagged as ‘Merged’ and removed from the GRS/APM input catalogue. The higher spatial resolution and dynamic range available in the CCD-based LARCS survey allows us to reliably deblend these systems and to investigate the properties of the missing galaxies.
* The missing population of Resolved galaxies has classification flags set in one or both of the APM passbands as stellar, merged or noise. Therefore they are not included in the input catalogue of the 2dFGRS.
* The relatively compact Normal galaxies missing from the GRS/APM input catalogue are classified as stars due to the modest spatial resolution of the plates.
* The Low Surface Brightness galaxies are not present as the APM mostly classifies them as ‘noisy’ if they are detected. Indeed, the work of Cross et al. (2000) suggests that the majority of them will lie beyond the surface brightness detection limit of the 2dFGRS. These galaxies only represent 5 percent of a magnitude-limited sample and so their absence is less of a concern than the other classes of missing galaxies.

To summarise, the APM input catalogue to the 2dFGRS survey has a stellar contamination of about 5–10 percent as originally estimated, but misses 10-20 percent of all galaxies at all magnitudes. In terms of their magnitudes, surface brightnesses, colours and compactness, the majority (80 percent of the missing fraction, or $`10`$ percent of the total galaxy population) of these missing galaxies are similar to those included in the GRS/APM and so their absence could be corrected for by simply assuming they represent a random selection of the matched population. However, the remaining 5 percent of the missed galaxy population consists of either LSB or Normal galaxies–these have significantly different properties than the matched population and so their absence cannot be easily corrected for in the 2dFGRS catalogue.

This paper is the first in a series based upon the LARCS survey. Our next paper will focus on the variation in the colours of the cluster population with environment (Pimbblet et al., in prep).

### Acknowledgments

We thank Simon Driver and Nicholas Cross for getting the APM catalogue to us. We thank Shaun Cole and Peder Norberg for useful and stimulating discussion. KAP acknowledges support from his PPARC studentship. IRS and ACE acknowledge support from Royal Society fellowships. WJC and EOH acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council throughout the course of this work. AIZ acknowledges support from NASA grant HF-01087.01-96. We thank the the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington for their generous support of this survey. This research has made extensive use of the University of Durham’s STARLINK computing facilities and the facilities at Las Campanas Observatory.