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# Wide field weak lensing observations of A1689

## 1 Introduction

Clusters of galaxies provide several methods of constraining cosmological and dark matter models. Two of the most important properties of the clusters in constraining these models are the total mass and the mass profile. The three most common techniques in measuring the masses of clusters are dynamical measurements from the line-of-sight velocity dispersion of cluster galaxies, the X-ray luminosity and temperature of intra-cluster gas, and measurement of the distortion of background galaxy images by the cluster potential. In recent years, the dispersion of the masses measured by the various techniques has been reduced by improved data and the reduction of systematic errors, so that in many clusters the mass measurements are in good agreement. There are a few clusters, however, in which the three mass measurement techniques are not in agreement, one of the most striking of which is Abell 1689.

Abell 1689 is one of the richest clusters ($`R=4`$) in the Abell catalog, but the number counts may be enhanced by a number of lower redshift groups in the field (Teague et al. 1990). A velocity dispersion of 2355 $`{}_{183}{}^{}{}_{}{}^{+238}`$ km/s has been measured from 66 cluster members (Teague et al. 1990), although a more conservative criteria for cluster membership reduced the velocity dispersion to 1848$`\pm 166`$ km/s (Gudehus 1989). By using a technique which identifies substructure from both redshift and positional information, Girardi et al. (1997) divide the cluster galaxies into three distinct groups each with velocity dispersions of 250-400 km/s, which would coadd to a mass equivalent to an $`560`$ km/s isothermal sphere.

A set of giant arcs $`45\mathrm{}`$ from the brightest cluster galaxy (hereafter BCG) provide a best-fit model of a 1400 km/s isothermal sphere centered on the BCG and a 700 km/s isothermal sphere located 1$`\mathrm{}`$ northeast of the BCG (Miralda-Escudé & Babul 1995). Analysis of the depletion of background galaxies around the cluster core, due to the deflection and magnification of the galaxies by the gravitational potential, results in a best-fit velocity dispersion of 2200$`\pm `$500 km/s, but is also well fit by the double isothermal sphere model from strong gravitational lensing (Taylor et al. 1998). An analysis of the change in the background galaxy luminosity function has measured a mass of $`(0.48\pm 0.16)\times 10^{15}h^1\mathrm{M}_{}`$ at a $`0.25h^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$ radius from the cluster core, which is consistent with the depletion mass model (Dye et al. 2001). Weak lensing shear analysis of the cluster core gives a mass estimate similar to that of the strong lensing (Kaiser 1996), but suggests that the mass profile is best fit by a power law with index $`n=1.4\pm 0.2`$ (Tyson & Fischer 1995). X-ray observations give a gas temperature of 9-10 keV and best-fit velocity dispersions of 1000-1400 km/s (Allen 1998).

A standard model used to explain these observations involves one or more structures (second cluster, filament extending along the line of sight, etc) located at a redshift only slightly larger than the cluster (Taylor et al. 1998). This would result in line of sight dynamical velocity dispersion measurement larger than the actual velocity dispersion of the cluster due to the misinterpretation of cosmological redshift to be velocity. It would also result in the lensing mass measurement being higher than the mass of the cluster core as the lensing measures the total mass surface density of all the structures along the line of sight. The X-ray measurements would thus provide the best estimate of the true mass of the cluster core, as the small mass structures would provide only a small perturbation to the cluster X-ray luminosity and gas temperature. If, however, the additional structure is undergoing a merger event with the cluster then the gravitational interaction could create shock heating of the gas and render invalid the assumptions about isothermality and hydrostatic equilibria on which the X-ray models are based. Also, if the Tyson & Fischer (1995) result of the mass profile of the cluster being steeper than that of an isothermal sphere is correct, then the models which convert the dynamical line-of-sight velocity dispersion and X-ray measurements to mass estimates are incorrect. This result, however, is based on a relatively small field and is therefore uncertain due to the mass sheet degeneracy and the breakdown of the weak lensing approximation near the cluster core.

Due to the new wide-field mosaic CCDs (Luppino et al. 1998) it is now possible to obtain a weak lensing signal from low-to-medium redshift clusters out to large radii ($`2h^1`$ Mpc) in only a few hours of telescope time. Here we report on observations of A1689 made with the Wide Field Imager on the ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope on La Silla. In Section 2 we discuss the image reduction and object catalog generation. We analyze the weak lensing signal in Section 3. Finally, in Section 4 we compare our mass estimates to others and present our conclusions. Unless otherwise stated we assume a $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{m}=0.3,\mathrm{\Lambda }=0.7`$ cosmology and $`H_0=100`$ km/s/Mpc.

## 2 Observations and Data Reduction

Twelve 900 second exposures in $`R`$-band were obtained with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope on the night of May 29, 2000. The images were taken with a dithering pattern between exposures which filled in the gaps between the chips in the CCD mosaic. The resulting image covers a $`34\stackrel{}{.}7\times 33\stackrel{}{.}4`$ area centered on the cluster with $`82.5\%`$ of the area having the full exposure time and the remaining $`17.5\%`$ of the area receiving less than the full exposure time due to the area being out of the field of view or in the gap between the chips during some of the exposures. The final image has a FWHM on unsaturated stars of $`0\stackrel{}{.}72`$ and a $`1\sigma `$ sky noise of 28.1 mag/sq arcsec on the areas having the full exposure time. Object counts at a $`3\sigma `$ detection limit in the regions containing the full exposure time are complete to $`R=24.9`$ for $`2\mathrm{}`$ radius aperture magnitudes, as measured by the point where the number counts depart from a power law.

During the image reduction process, each chip in the CCD mosaic was treated separately for the steps detailed below. We first de-biased the images using a master bias taken at the beginning of the night and corrected for bias drift in each exposure using the overscan strip. The images were then flattened by a polynomial fit to a twilight flat taken during the evening twilight. The polynomial fitting was done using a 9th by 17th order two-dimensional polynomial $`f(x,y)=_{l=0}^9_{m=0}^{17}a_{lm}x^ly^m`$ with $`a_{lm}=0`$ if $`(l/9)^2+(m/17)^2>1`$ to accurately mimic the large-scale variations in quantum efficiency while removing the small scale variations in the twilight flat caused by fringing. The ratio of powers in the $`x`$ and $`y`$ directions were chosen so as to have the same density of inflection points in the polynomial across the rectangular CCD. A medianed nightsky flat was then made from all of the long-exposure, twilight-flattened $`R`$-band images taken that night. The nightsky flat showed a peak-to-peak fringing amplitude of $`10\%`$ ($`[\mathrm{max}\mathrm{min}]/[0.5\times (\mathrm{max}+\mathrm{min})]0.1`$ in adjacent minima and maxima).

We tried two different techniques to remove the fringing and flatfield the images with the nightsky flat. The first technique was to fit the nightsky flat with a 9th by 17th order two-dimensional polynomial and flatten the images with the polynomial. The flattened images were then medianed to produce another nightsky flat, which was assumed to contain only the fringing pattern. This fringing pattern was then scaled to the sky level in each image and subtracted. The second technique was to simply flatten the images with the original nightsky flat, fringes included. Neither technique is strictly correct as in the former case we are subtracting small-scale changes in the quantum efficiency (dust, chip defects, etc) instead of dividing by them, while in the latter case we are treating the interference-based fringe pattern as a variation in the quantum efficiency. We used both sets of flattened images to create two different final images and performed all further analysis on both images. In each case, the results for both images were statistically identical (differences between the images were at least one order of magnitude smaller than the $`1\sigma `$ error bars of the measurement). For the rest of the paper we discuss only the results from the first technique image, but none of the conclusions change when using the second technique image.

One problem with the WFI is that bright stars can have several reflection rings, many of which are not centered on the star which causes them. In this field there are 16 stars of sufficient brightness to cause noticeable reflection rings on the final image. Each star has two small rings, outer radii $`48\mathrm{}`$, offset from each other by a few pixels. These rings are typically a few arcseconds from the star radially away from the center of the field, with the separation getting larger with the star’s distance from the field center. The brightest five stars also have a much fainter third ring, outer radius $`92\mathrm{}`$, which is centered about twice as far from the star as the smaller rings in the same radial direction. These reflection rings have structure not only in both radial and tangential directions from the center of the ring, but also random structures similar to, and probably caused in part by the removal of, the fringing in the sky. As a result, we were unable to remove these rings while preserving the haloes of any objects inside them. The regions containing the reflections rings were therefore removed from all further analysis below.

The sky level of each image was determined by detecting minima in a smoothed image, and fitting the minima with a 7th by 15th order two-dimensional polynomial. The resulting sky fit was subtracted from each image, which allowed the removal of extended haloes from saturated stars without affecting the profiles of individual galaxies.

The next step in the image reduction was to move each image into a common reference frame while simultaneously removing any distortion in the image introduced by the telescope optics. To do this we assumed that each CCD of the mosaic could be mapped onto a common detector plane using only a linear shift in the $`x`$ and $`y`$ directions and a rotation angle in the $`x`$-$`y`$ plane, and that these mappings are the same for each image. In doing so we assume that the detectors are aligned well vertically and thus no change in the platescale, distortion, etc. occurs across chip boundaries and that the chips do not move relative to each other while the instrument is subjected to thermal variations and/or varying flexure from pointing to different parts of the sky. We justify these assumption later using analysis of the resulting PSF ellipticities. We then used a bi-cubic polynomial to map the detector plane for each exposure to a common reference frame. The parameters for the two sets of mapping were determined simultaneously by minimizing the positional offsets of bright, but unsaturated, stars among the various images and with the USNO star catalog. A downhill simplex minimization method was employed to minimize the 21 free parameters in the individual CCDs to detector plane mapping, and at each step the detector plane to common reference plane mapping parameters were determined for each image using LU decomposition of a $`\chi ^2`$ minimization matrix. The resulting best fit mappings had a positional rms difference of .06 pixels ($`0\stackrel{}{.}015`$) among the images and $`0\stackrel{}{.}55`$ between the image positions and USNO star catalog positions. No significant deviations from zero average positional differences were seen in any large area of any image. We also attempted the mapping from detector plane to common reference plane for each image using 5th and 7th order two-dimensional polynomials, but the resulting rms dispersions in stellar positions did not improve over the bi-cubic polynomial mapping. A discussion of this technique in greater depth can be found elsewhere (Clowe & Schneider 2001).

Each CCD was then mapped onto the common reference frame using a triangular method with linear interpolation which preserves surface brightness and has been shown to not induce systematic changes in the second brightness moments of objects in case of a fractional pixel shift (Clowe et al. 2000). The images were then averaged using a sigma-clipping algorithm to remove cosmic rays. The final image is shown in Fig. 1.

## 3 Lensing Analysis

The first step in performing weak lensing analysis is detecting and measuring the second moments of the surface brightness of faint background galaxies. This was done using the IMCAT software package written by Nick Kaiser (http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/$``$kaiser/imcat). In addition to obtaining the centroid position and second moments of the surface brightness of all detected objects, the software package also measures a Gaussian smoothing radius at which the object achieves maximum significance from the sky background (hereafter $`r_\mathrm{g}`$ and $`\nu `$ respectively), the average level and slope of the sky around each object, an aperture magnitude and flux, and the radius which encloses half of the aperture flux ($`r_\mathrm{h}`$). The software also calculates the shear and smear polarizability tensors ($`P_{\mathrm{sh}}`$ and $`P_{\mathrm{sm}}`$) which define how the object reacts to an applied shear or convolution with a small anisotropic kernel respectively (Kaiser et al. 1995, hereafter KSB, corrections in Hoekstra et al. 1998).

Unsaturated stars brighter than $`R=24`$ were selected by their half-light radius and used to model the PSF. The half-light radius, ellipticity, and the shear and smear polarizabilities of the stars varied systematically across the field. The half-light radius and the trace of the shear and smear polarizabilities across the entire field were fit well with a two-dimensional fifth-order polynomial, while the two ellipticity components were fit best with two-dimensional seventh-order polynomials.

It is important to note that in both the final combined frame and each input image neither the best fit polynomials for the stellar ellipticities nor the residual ellipticities of the stars after subtracting the fit show any indication of a sudden change in the ellipticity across CCD boundaries. Because each CCD has three degrees of freedom with respect to the vertical level of the focal plane, some areas on each chip will be somewhat out-of-focus. While this will result in some smooth variation of stellar half-light radii and ellipticities over a single chip, it can also result in sudden changes in both values across a chip boundary (Kaiser et al. 1998). That no such distortions occur across chip boundaries in this data implies that the chips in the WFI are sufficiently aligned vertically that they are sampling the same depth in the focal plane. This also means that there should not be sudden change in plate-scale across the chip boundaries, which allows us to use just a linear transformation between individual chip coordinates and the common detector plane coordinates as discussed above. Finally, because of the $`100`$ pixel gap between chips in the mosaic, a similar sudden change in the PSF can occur in the gap areas using dithered exposures which have different PSFs. All twelve of the individual exposures coadded in this data set, however, have sufficiently similar stellar ellipticities and half-light radii that no change in the final PSF can be detected in the regions missing one or more of exposures being coadded.

The ellipticities of the galaxies were corrected using $`e_\mathrm{c}=e_\mathrm{o}(\mathrm{tr}𝒫_{\mathrm{sm}}^{})^1𝒫_{\mathrm{sm}}e_\mathrm{f}^{}`$ (KSB) where $`e_\mathrm{f}`$ is the fitted stellar ellipticity field evaluated at the position of the galaxy, $`e_\mathrm{o}`$ is the original measured ellipticity of the galaxy, and $`\mathrm{tr}𝒫_{\mathrm{sm}}^{}`$ is the fitted trace of the stellar smear polarizability evaluated at the position of the galaxy. The effects of circular smearing by the PSF can then be removed from the galaxies using $`g=(𝒫_\gamma )^1e_\mathrm{c}`$ (Luppino & Kaiser 1997) where $`𝒫_\gamma =𝒫_{\mathrm{sh}}𝒫_{\mathrm{sm}}\mathrm{tr}𝒫_{\mathrm{sh}}^{}(\mathrm{tr}𝒫_{\mathrm{sm}}^{})^1`$, for which the $`\mathrm{tr}𝒫^{}`$ denote the fitted traces of the stellar shear and smear polarizability evaluated at the position of each galaxy. The resulting $`g`$’s are then a direct estimate of the reduced shear $`g=\gamma /(1\kappa )`$, where both the shear $`\gamma `$ and convergence $`\kappa `$, the dimensionless mass density, are second derivatives of the gravitational potential. Because the measured $`𝒫_\gamma `$ values are greatly affected by noise, we fit $`𝒫_\gamma `$ as a function of $`r_\mathrm{g}`$, and $`e_\mathrm{c}`$. Because the PSF size varied slightly over the image, we divided the background galaxies into 4 bins based on the stellar $`r_\mathrm{h}`$ in their vicinity, and did the $`𝒫_\gamma `$ fitting separately for each bin. Simulations have shown that this technique reproduces the level of the observed shear to better than one percent accuracy (van Waerbeke 2000; Erben et al. 2001; Bacon et al. 2001).

We choose for our catalog of background galaxies those with magnitudes between $`R=23`$ and $`R=25.5`$ which have a maximum signal-to-noise over the object, as detected by the peak finding algorithm, greater than 9. From this sub-sample we removed objects with raw (uncorrected for PSF smearing) ellipticities greater than 0.5, half-light radii similar to or smaller than stellar, sky backgrounds greater than $`3\sigma `$ of the mean for objects in the catalog, sky background slopes greater than $`3\sigma `$ of the mean, or with a shear estimate greater than 2. We also manually removed from the catalog any sources which appeared to be a superposition of two or more objects. The final catalog had 27,288 objects with a density of 25.9 objects/sq arcmin.

The resulting background galaxy catalog was then used to measure the gravitational shear present in the field. In Fig. 1, overlayed in solid contours on the R-band image, is the resulting massmap from a noise-filtering reconstruction (Seitz & Schneider 1996). As can be seen, there is a strong detection of the cluster mass, the centroid of which is coincident with the position of the brightest cluster galaxy. The flux-weighted distribution of galaxies with magnitudes $`16.7<R<22`$ is also shown in Fig. 1 overlayed in dashed contours. As can be seen, the distribution of bright galaxies has a shape very similar to the mass distribution, with both having extended wings to the north-west and south-east of the cluster. The galaxy distribution does, however, have a greater extension to the north-east in the cluster core than is seen in the mass reconstruction. Because we do not have color information on the galaxies, we cannot distinguish which galaxies are cluster members and which could be unrelated galaxies in projection.

In Fig. 2 we plot the azimuthally-averaged reduced tangential shear using the position of the brightest cluster galaxy as the center of the cluster. As can be seen in the figure, we have an observable shear signal from $`1\mathrm{}<r<15\stackrel{}{.}6`$, and the shear in the outer bin, which extends from $`13\stackrel{}{.}8<r<15\stackrel{}{.}6`$, is significant at greater than $`4\sigma `$. Our shear profile agrees well with that of Kaiser (1996) over the $`1\mathrm{}<r<5\mathrm{}`$ aperture common to both data sets. Recent work by King et al. (2001) has shown that cluster substructure, both in terms of departures from sphericity of the cluster mass on the whole and putting some of the mass in discrete galaxy haloes, has little effect on the radial shear profiles and their best fit parameters.

The radial shear profile is fit well by both a singular isothermal sphere and a “universal CDM profile” (Navarro et al. 1997, hereafter NFW), with both profile’s best fit models having a $`13.4\sigma `$ significance from a zero mass model. As can be seen in Table 1, the mass of the best fit profiles are slightly dependent on the assumed mean redshift of the background galaxies used to measure the shear. The models plotted in Fig. 2 assume $`z_{\mathrm{bg}}=1`$, but the significance of the models do not change with the assume background galaxy redshift. Using the same magnitude cuts on a HDF-South photometric redshift catalog (Fontana et al. 1999) as were used in the background galaxy catalog results in a mean galaxy redshift of 1.15. The average redshift, however, is measured from only 48 galaxies, and thus is highly uncertain from both Poissonian noise and cosmic variance. The parameters of the best fit models were not significantly changed by either increasing the inner or reducing the outer limiting radius of the fit. Using an F-test (Bevington & Robinson 1992) to compare the 1 parameter SIS model and the 2 parameter NFW profile results in the NFW providing a better fit with 95.5% confidence. The errors on the shear were calculated by measuring the rms dispersion of the ellipticity component of the background galaxies $`45\mathrm{deg}`$ to the tangent with the cluster center (0.30 in this case) and dividing this by the square root of the number of galaxies in each bin.

Also in Fig. 2, we plot $`\kappa `$ as a function of radius, as measured using

$$1\kappa (r)=\frac{1}{1g(r)}\mathrm{exp}\left(\underset{r}{\overset{r_0}{}}\frac{2g(x)}{x[1g(x)]}𝑑x\frac{2g(r_0)}{\alpha }\right)$$
(1)
which assumes that at $`r>r_0`$ the reduced shear behaves as a power-law, $`g(r)r^\alpha `$, and that $`lim_r\mathrm{}g=lim_r\mathrm{}\kappa =0`$ (Schneider & Seitz 1995). For the values plotted in Fig. 2, we assume that the SIS profile continues at large radii, and thus $`\alpha =1`$. If we assume instead that there is no mass outside the limits in Fig. 2, then $`\alpha =2`$ and the resulting profile has $`\kappa `$ at roughly one-quarter the value shown in Fig. 2 at large radii, but nearly identical $`\kappa `$ at small radii. This effect can also be seen in the masses of the best fitting SIS and NFW models, in that while they measure similar masses at small radii, at the edge of the field the NFW model, which has a steeper slope in the reduced shear outside the image, has a lower total mass than the SIS model.

## 4 Discussion

We have shown in Section 3 that we have detected a weak lensing signal at high significance centered on the BCG of A1689. The best fit SIS mass model, however, has a velocity dispersion of $`1028_{36}^{+34}`$ km/s, which is significantly below that measured using other techniques. While one could try to explain the higher mass estimates from X-ray emission and cluster galaxy dynamics by invoking shock-heated gas and extended spatial structure respectively, it is much harder to reconcile the weak lensing shear measurement with the large Einstein radius obtained from strong lensing. Because lensing measures the integrated mass along the line of sight, or more precisely the integrated $`\rho (z)/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{\mathrm{crit}}(z)`$, any model for the strong lensing which involves multiple mass components at similar redshifts would result in a weak lensing signal with a mass profile equal to the sum of the individual model mass profiles. The 1400 km/s and 700 km/s dual isothermal sphere strong lensing model would be detected as a 1560 km/s isothermal sphere outside of a few arcminutes from the cluster core.

One possible method to have the large Einstein radius with the lower mass weak lensing signal is to have two clusters causing the strong lensing with the second at high redshift ($`z>0.6`$). As the background galaxies used in the weak lensing analysis are probably at a redshift not much larger than the higher-redshift cluster, the second cluster would not contribute greatly to the weak lensing signal. This model, however, has two problems. The first is that the strong lensing arcs would need to be at fairly high redshift ($`z>1.5`$) for the high-redshift cluster to significantly contribute to the strong lensing, and the relatively high surface brightness of the arcs in the A1689 system would suggest a lower redshift. Second, the high-redshift cluster would itself be lensed by the low-redshift cluster, which, even if the clusters were arranged so that none of the high-redshift cluster galaxies were strongly lensed by the low-redshift cluster, would result in an overdensity of faint galaxies immediately outside the Einstein radius of the low-redshift cluster. We do not detect any such overdensity of faint galaxies immediately outside the observed cluster core.

We know, however, that the mass profiles given in Section 3 are lower limits to the true mass. Because we have only a single passband for the field, we were only able to select the background galaxy catalog on the basis of magnitude, size, and significance. As such, the catalog contains not only the high-redshift galaxies we use to measure the weak lensing signal, but also dwarf galaxies from both the cluster and foreground populations. As a result, one would need to correct the observed signal for the fraction of galaxies which are not at high-redshift ($`z0.3`$ in this case). We consider three different correction methods below.

For the first correction method, we assume that the fraction of non-background galaxies is constant over the field, and so we multiply the reduced shear estimate in each bin by a constant factor. In order to obtain a best fit SIS velocity dispersion of 1560 km/s (at a radius $`>3\mathrm{}`$), assuming the background galaxies have an average $`z=1`$, the multiplication factor for the shear estimate would be $`2.5`$. This would mean that only $`40\%`$ of the galaxies in the catalog are actually background galaxies. Obtaining a best fit SIS profile which has the Einstein radius at $`45\mathrm{}`$ (1470 km/s using $`z_{\mathrm{bg}}=1`$) would require that only $`44\%`$ of the galaxies are background galaxies. If the strong lensing arcs are at higher redshift, then a slightly lower cluster mass is needed to make the $`45\mathrm{}`$ Einstein ring (1375 km/s for $`z_{\mathrm{bg}}=3`$) which means that $`52\%`$ of the galaxies in the weak lensing catalog are background galaxies with $`z1`$. In order to have a $`45\mathrm{}`$ Einstein radius and not need negative mass just outside the Einstein radius to obtain the observed weak shear profile, one needs to have that at most $`67\%`$ of the observed galaxies are background galaxies.

For the second correction method, we assume that the boost factor for each bin is proportional to the mass in that bin. This is equivalent to assuming that the cluster dwarf galaxy population traces the mass at the outskirts of the cluster, but falls off relative to the mass as one gets closer to the core of the cluster. To do this correction we first measure the reduced shear in each bin, and use Eq. 1 to determine $`\kappa `$ in the bin. Each bin’s shear value was then multiplied by a constant times $`\kappa `$, where the same constant was used for all bins, and a new $`\kappa `$ was calculated from the modified shear. This was repeated until convergence. In order to have a $`45\mathrm{}`$ Einstein radius without negative mass anywhere in the profile, the reduced shears required a boost of $`1.25\times \kappa `$, which resulted in the background galaxy/observed galaxy count ratio varying from $`63\%`$ at $`1\mathrm{}`$ radius to $`98\%`$ at $`14\mathrm{}`$ radius. In order to have a profile where $`\kappa `$ continues to increase between the $`1\mathrm{}`$ minimum weak lensing radius and the $`45\mathrm{}`$ Einstein radius, one must use a minimum boost factor of $`3.8\times \kappa `$, which results in a background galaxy fraction which varies from $`30\%`$ at $`1\mathrm{}`$ radius to $`95\%`$ at $`14\mathrm{}`$ radius. It should be noted, however, that there is not any boost factor using this technique which results in a SIS or NFW profile which provides a good fit to both the resulting reduced shear profile and the $`45\mathrm{}`$ Einstein radius. We also tried assuming that the dwarf galaxy population traces the mass everywhere in the cluster, but this results in several bins consisting of only cluster galaxies.

For the final correction method, we selected objects from the master catalog which had $`17.4<R<19.4`$ and half-light radii larger than stars, which are presumably a field galaxy population and cluster galaxy population with $`0.5L_{}L3L_{}`$ (Kodama et al. 1998). By assuming the galaxy density at the edge of the field is that of the field galaxies across the image, we calculated the galaxy density of the cluster galaxies in the same radial bins shown in Fig. 2. Using the cluster galaxy luminosity function of Trentham (1998), we scaled these galaxy counts to the magnitudes of the background catalog, assuming the incompleteness of the faint end would be the same for the cluster galaxies as background galaxies and the cluster dwarf ellipticals have the same $`BV`$ color as the $`L_{}`$ cluster ellipticals. In Fig. 3 we plot the detected galaxy density as a function of radius in the $`23<R<25.5`$ catalog and the cluster galaxy counts scaled to this magnitude range. As can be seen, this would result in all of the detected galaxies within $`2\stackrel{}{.}5`$ of the BCG being cluster galaxies, and the fraction dropping off with radius.

The detected galaxy number density, however, actually decreases slightly as the radius decreases towards the BCG. Thus, any increase in the density of cluster dwarf galaxy density towards the cluster core would result in an even more substantial decrease in background galaxy number density with decreasing radius. Studies of galaxy counts in random fields give a typical slope of $`\mathrm{d}\mathrm{log}N/\mathrm{d}m=0.334`$ for $`22<R<27`$ (Hogg et al. 1998). In a magnitude-limited sample, this slope would result in the competing effects of magnification and displacement of background galaxies nearly canceling, and making only a very small decrease in galaxy counts with increasing lensing strength (Broadhurst et al. 1995). However, as our faint end cutoff of the galaxy sample is a signal-to-noise cut rather than a magnitude cut, the depletion of the background galaxies towards the core of the cluster should be somewhat stronger than that of a magnitude limited sample. This is due to the lensing preserving the surface brightness of the background galaxies but increasing the area. Thus, while the total luminosity of the lensed galaxy is increased by a factor $`\mu `$, the signal-to-noise is increased by only $`\sqrt{\mu }`$. Therefore, a galaxy which would have been magnified past a magnitude cut might not be included in a signal-to-noise cut.

Applying a model to this to measure the mass of the cluster from the depletion signal, however, would require a knowledge not just of $`\mathrm{d}\mathrm{log}N/\mathrm{d}m`$, but of $`\mathrm{d}^2\mathrm{log}N/\mathrm{d}m\mathrm{d}a`$, where $`a`$ is a measure of the intrinsic size of a galaxy. When we instead use a galaxy catalog with $`23<R<24.2`$, for which we are magnitude limited on the faint cut, we no longer see evidence of a depletion towards the core and instead have a small increase in number density towards the center of the cluster. If this small increase is taken as faint cluster galaxies, however, it would result in a correction factor to the shear measurement in the inner part of the cluster of less than $`10\%`$. From this we suggest that the large mass measured from the depletion by Taylor et al. (1998) might be in part due to the loss of faint magnified galaxies from the catalog due to a signal-to-noise cut in the detection algorithm, unless their faint magnitude cut was sufficiently bright so that galaxies slightly larger than those detected would still be above the minimum signal-to-noise detection criteria.

One argument against the large field-wide correction factor needed to increase the shear signal to the strong-lensing mass models is that in a photometric redshift survey based on the VLT deep images of the HDF-S, Fontana et al. (1999) find that of the 73 objects they detect with $`23<R<25.5`$, 60 are galaxies with $`z>0.3`$, one is a galaxy with $`z0.05`$, and the remaining twelve objects are faint stars. As we were unable to distinguish stars from faint galaxies based on their half-light radii for $`R>24`$, eight of these stars would have been included our object catalog, giving a background galaxy fraction of $`87\pm 5\%`$. A1689 is at a slightly higher galactic latitude than the HDF-S, so the faint stellar fraction from the HDF-S should not be a severe underestimate of that of the A1689 field. Correcting the reduced shear profile for an $`87\%`$ background galaxy fraction results in a best fitting SIS velocity dispersion $`\sigma =1095_{38}^{+37}`$ km/s ($`z_{\mathrm{bg}}=1`$ assumed).

Further, other weak lensing studies using both a similar magnitude range for background galaxies and similar techniques for deriving the shear field from the background galaxy ellipticities have measured masses for clusters in agreement with both X-ray and dynamical mass measurements (Squires et al. 1996a, b, 1997). Weak lensing studies of high redshift clusters have found that either the majority of galaxies with similar magnitudes to those used here have redshifts beyond 1, or MS1054.4$-$0321, MS1137$+$6625, and RXJ1716$+$6708, all at $`z0.8`$, are the most massive clusters known (Luppino & Kaiser 1997; Clowe et al. 2000). While color selection was used to select only blue galaxies for the lensing analysis of the high redshift clusters, the selection removed fewer than $`20\%`$ of the faint galaxies in the catalog.

In summary, we have measured a shear signal around A1689 with the ESO/MPG WFI between 1′and 15′from the BCG. This shear profile is fit well by both a 1030 km/s SIS model and a $`r_{200}=1.28\mathrm{Mpc},c=6`$ NFW model. If we assume that 87% of the faint objects in our catalogs are galaxies with $`z>0.3`$ then the best fit mass model increases to a 1095 km/s velocity dispersion. Both models have masses well below the mass measured from the radius of the strong lensing arcs (1375-1560 km/s depending on the model and redshift of the arcs), but in agreement with the masses measured from X-ray observations (1000-1400 km/s). The velocity dispersion of the cluster galaxies has been measured from 560 km/s to 2355 km/s depending on how much of the redshift dispersion is caused by spatially extended substructure along the line of sight.

In order to resolve the discrepancy between the weak and strong lensing masses, we suggest the following needs to be done: First, spectroscopic redshifts should be obtained for all of the strong lensing arcs visible in the deep HST image (HST Proposal 6004) and a detailed strong lensing model using the position, redshift, and shape information of the arcs allowing for substructure both in the cluster and along the line of sight needs to be made. Second, wide field imaging of the cluster in multiple passbands, both optical and infra-red, should be performed. This will allow determination of photometric redshifts for all objects in a given magnitude range, and thus allow one to remove foreground stars and cluster dwarfs from the lensing catalog. Finally, multi-color deep imaging around the cluster core should be done with HST to increase the number counts of usable background galaxies immediately outside the strong lensing radius and allow the measurement of the mass profile in the transition region between strong and weak lensing with the lowest possible noise.

Finally, we have run simulations to determine how many background galaxies will be needed to distinguish NFW and SIS models with large radii weak lensing shear profiles. Using input assumptions of the galaxy rms ellipticity of 0.31, number density of 25 galaxies/sq arcmin, cluster redshift of 0.186, background galaxy redshift of 1, and a profile radius range of 1′to 15′, we find that on average a cluster with a NFW density profile with $`r_{200}=1.28\mathrm{Mpc},c=6`$ profile will be able to be distinguished from an SIS model using an F-test with 94% confidence (with the 95.5% confidence we measured within the dispersion of results for a single realization). If three such clusters were stacked, then the two models could be distinguished with 99.65% confidence, and 99.9998% confidence if ten such clusters were stacked. If the outer radius of the profile is increased to 30′, then a single cluster’s models could be distinguished at 98.3% confidence and three stacked clusters best fit models at 99.98% confidence. If the inner 4′were to be imaged to allow a number density of 100 galaxies/sq arcmin and the profile minimum radius decreased to $`0\stackrel{}{.}66`$, then with a single cluster one could distinguish the NFW and SIS best fit models with 99.7% confidence, and 99.9999% confidence with three stacked clusters. If the input model is an SIS, then the NFW and SIS best fit models are statistically indistinguishable over these radii, although the best fit are generally not in agreement with the typical profiles seen in N-body simulations (Navarro et al. 1997).

###### Acknowledgements.

We wish to thank and acknowledge Lindsay King and Neil Trentham for help and useful discussions. We also wish to thank the referee, Genevieve Soucail, for her comments which improved the quality of the paper. This work was supported by the TMR Network “Gravitational Lensing: New Constraints on Cosmology and the Distribution of Dark Matter” of the EC under contract No. ERBFMRX-CT97-0172.


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# Confined states in two-dimensional flat elliptic quantum dots and elliptic quantum wires

## I Introduction

Quantum dots have been the subject of both experimental and theoretical research in recent years. They have been successfully created experimentally by applying lithographic and etching techniques to impose a lateral structure onto an otherwise two-dimensional electron system. These structures introduce electrostatic potentials in the plane of the two-dimensional electron gas, which confine the electrons to a dot region. The energy levels of electrons in such a quantum dot are fully quantized like in an atom, and therefore they are also referred to as artificial atoms. For a theoretical description of such systems it is essential to know the confinement potential. Often a parabolic potential is used. Another simple model, which also has the advantage of representing a finite confinement, is a piecewise constant potential with a circular boundary. This type of potential represents more closely the situation in self-assembled quantum dots. The latter model is used, but extended to an asymmetric situation, i.e. an elliptic dot.

There have been many calculations of energy levels in rectangular dots and wires, see for example , but in general, the problem of even one particle confined in such a potential profile is not exactly solvable, because the corresponding Schrödinger equation is not separable. Nevertheless one usually assumes separability, although this approximation is only acceptable for deep wells, where only a negligible part of the wave function is situated outside the dot. In our study we use an elliptically shaped potential profile for which exact solutions can be found, even when we take $`\mathrm{\Psi }|_{\text{interface}}0`$, or a potential $`V_0\mathrm{}`$ outside the dot. We are especially interested in the results for elongated dots, which could then be compared with the case of a rectangular slab or even a quantum wire. Our results are also applicable to elliptic quantum wires.

In the literature one can find many references to calculations on elliptic problems, we found one particularly useful, in which the diffraction of waves by ribbons and by slits is studied exactly. The problem of a three-dimensional ellipsoidal (3D) quantum well has been solved exactly in Refs.  and  for $`\mathrm{\Psi }|_{\text{interface}}=0`$. To our knowledge, the corresponding 2D problem for finite potential barriers has not been solved.

The paper is organized as follows. In Sec. II, we obtain the analytical solution for the energy and the wave functions. The numerical results are presented in Sec. III. Our conclusions are given in Sec. IV. A representation for the Mathieu functions is listed in the appendix.

## II The problem and equations

A particle with mass $`m`$ is confined in a two-dimensional hard-wall potential well of finite height with elliptic shape as shown in Fig. 1. The potential profile we consider is constant everywhere, $`V(x,y)=0`$ inside the dot (i.e. $`x^2/a^2+y^2/b^2<1`$) and $`V(x,y)=V_0`$ outside the dot. Stationary energy levels and wave functions are found by solving the time-independent Schrödinger equation

$$\frac{\mathrm{}^2}{2m}^2\mathrm{\Psi }(x,y)+V(x,y)\mathrm{\Psi }(x,y)=E\mathrm{\Psi }(x,y).$$
(1)
Transformation from Cartesian to elliptical coordinates $`x=f\mathrm{cosh}u\mathrm{cos}v,`$ $`0u\mathrm{},`$ $`y=f\mathrm{sinh}u\mathrm{sin}v,`$ $`0v2\pi `$, where $`f=\sqrt{a^2b^2}`$ is the focal length, enables us to write the boundary of the ellipse in a one-variable equation $`u=U=arctanh(b/a)`$. Introducing the electron momentum $`k^2=\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}(EV)`$ the equation to be solved becomes

$$\frac{^2\mathrm{\Psi }}{u^2}+\frac{^2\mathrm{\Psi }}{v^2}+\frac{f^2k^2}{2}\mathrm{cosh}2u\mathrm{\Psi }\frac{f^2k^2}{2}\mathrm{cos}2v\mathrm{\Psi }=0.$$
(2)
Proposing a solution $`\mathrm{\Psi }(u,v)=F(u)G(v)`$ we find that the problem is separable in two equations in $`u`$ and $`v`$, coupled by a separation constant $`c`$ and the variable $`k`$. Denoting $`q=f^2k^2/4`$ we obtain,

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d^2F(u)}{du^2}}(c2q\mathrm{cosh}2u)F(u)`$ $`=`$ $`0,`$ (4)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{d^2G(v)}{dv^2}}+(c2q\mathrm{cos}2v)G(v)`$ $`=`$ $`0,`$ (5)
which are the characteristic equations for the Mathieu functions. Physical solutions to these equations are well-known

$`G_l(v,q)`$ $`=`$ $`\{\begin{array}{c}ce_l(v,q),\\ se_l(v,q),\end{array}`$ (9)
$`F_l^{\text{in}}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`\{\begin{array}{c}Mc_l^{(1)}(u,q_1),\\ Ms_l^{(1)}(u,q_1),\end{array}`$ (12)
$`F_l^{\text{out}}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`\{\begin{array}{c}Mc_l^{(3)}(u,q_2),\\ Ms_l^{(3)}(u,q_2),\end{array}`$ (15)
where $`l=0,1,2,\mathrm{}`$.The normalization factors are discarded and will be incorporated later in the total wave function $`\mathrm{\Psi }(u,v)`$. The Mathieu functions $`ce_l(v,q)`$ and $`se_l(v,q)`$ are respectively even and odd in $`v`$ and are the analogue of the cosine and sine functions in the angular solution of the circular dot problem. For the $`u`$-problem we make a distinction between solutions inside and outside the dot. The former show oscillatory behavior and are the analogue of the Bessel functions $`J_l(\rho )`$ in the radial solution of the circular problem. The latter are monotonically decaying functions and are the analogue of the modified Bessel functions $`K_l(\rho )`$ in the circular problem. In choosing these particular functions we used the boundary conditions that the wave functions need to be finite when $`u=0`$ and $`u\mathrm{}`$ for obvious normalization reasons. Outside the dot $`E<V_0`$ and the variable $`q`$ becomes negative, which we noted explicitly. In the appendix explicit expressions for the Mathieu functions are given.

The wave function $`\mathrm{\Psi }(u,v)`$ and its derivatives must be continuous everywhere. This condition requires that at every point on the border $`(U,v)`$ of the quantum dot we have

$$\frac{F_l^{\text{in}}(u,q)/u|_{u=U,q=q_1}}{F_l^{\text{in}}(U,q_1)}=\frac{F_l^{\text{out}}(u,q)/u|_{u=U,q=q_2}}{F_l^{\text{out}}(U,q_2)},$$
(16)
where the $`u`$-independent functions $`G_l(v,q)`$ cancel out.

We introduce $`\sigma =\sqrt{ab}`$, which is related to the area of the ellipse and define

$$\xi =\sigma k_{1,}\eta =\sigma k_{2,}\gamma =\sigma \sqrt{\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}V_0}\text{ ,}$$
(17)
with $`k_1^2=\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}E`$ and $`k_2^2=\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}(V_0E)`$. The energy levels will be expressed in units of $`V_0`$. Clearly $`\xi ^2+\eta ^2=\gamma ^2`$ and $`q_1=\frac{f^2k_1^2}{4}=\frac{1}{4}\frac{f^2}{\sigma ^2}\xi ^2=\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})\xi ^2`$. We are therefore left with two equations for even and odd solutions in one variable $`\xi `$ to be solved numerically

$`{\displaystyle \frac{Mc_l^{(1)}/u(u,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})\xi ^2)|_{u=U}}{Mc_l^{(1)}(U,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})\xi ^2)}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{Mc_l^{(3)}/u(u,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})(\gamma ^2\xi ^2))|_{u=U}}{Mc_l^{(3)}(U,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})(\gamma ^2\xi ^2))}},`$ (19)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{Ms_l^{(1)}/u(u,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})\xi ^2)|_{u=U}}{Ms_l^{(1)}(U,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})\xi ^2)}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{Ms_l^{(3)}/u(u,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})(\gamma ^2\xi ^2))|_{u=U}}{Ms_l^{(3)}(U,\frac{1}{4}(\frac{a}{b}\frac{b}{a})(\gamma ^2\xi ^2))}}.`$ (20)
Solutions are indexed $`\xi _{n,l},n=1,2,\mathrm{};l=0,1,\mathrm{}`$. The energy spectrum is then given by

$$E_{n,l}=\frac{\mathrm{}^2}{2m}k_{1_{n,l}}^2=\frac{\xi _{n,l}^2}{\gamma ^2}V_0.$$
(21)
In the limit of an infinitely high barrier, $`V_0\mathrm{}`$, the boundary condition will simply become $`F_l^{\text{in}}(u=U,q_1)=0`$, or equivalently,

$`Mc_l^{(1)}(U,{\displaystyle \frac{1}{4}}({\displaystyle \frac{a}{b}}{\displaystyle \frac{b}{a}})\xi ^2)`$ $`=`$ $`0,`$ (23)
$`Ms_l^{(1)}(U,{\displaystyle \frac{1}{4}}({\displaystyle \frac{a}{b}}{\displaystyle \frac{b}{a}})\xi ^2)`$ $`=`$ $`0.`$ (24)
When the particle has a different effective mass inside ($`m_1`$) and outside the dot ($`m_2`$) the boundary condition Eq. (16) has to be modified into

$$\frac{F_l^{\text{in}}/u(u,q_1)|_{u=U}}{m_1F_l^{\text{in}}(U,q_1)}=\frac{F_l^{\text{out}}/u(u,q_2)|_{u=U}}{m_2F_l^{\text{out}}(U,q_2)}\text{ .}$$
(25)
The explicit expressions for the wave functions are, for the even functions,

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_{n,l}^e(u,v)=\{\begin{array}{c}N_{n,l}^eMc_l^{(1)}(u,q_{1_{n,l}})ce_l(v,q_{1_{n,l}}),uU,\\ N_{n,l}^eMc_l^{(3)}(u,q_{2_{n,l}})ce_l(v,q_{2_{n,l}}),u>U,\end{array}$$
(26)
and for the odd functions,

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_{n,l}^o(u,v)=\{\begin{array}{c}N_{n,l}^oMs_l^{(1)}(u,q_{1_{n,l}})se_l(v,q_{1_{n,l}}),uU,\\ N_{n,l}^oMs_l^{(3)}(u,q_{2_{n,l}})se_l(v,q_{2_{n,l}}),u>U,\end{array}$$
(27)
where $`N_{n,l}^e`$ and $`N_{n,l}^o`$ are determined by normalization of the complete wave function.

## III Numerical results

In Fig. 2 we show the dependence of the energy of the bound states on the strength of the well $`\gamma =\sqrt{\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}abV_0}`$, which depends both on the potential height $`V_0`$ and on the area of the dot $`ab`$. For clarity we have limited all our graphs to $`l7`$. For $`a/b=1`$ the results coincide with our calculations for a circular dot. When the ratio $`a/b`$ increases, the degeneracy of the $`l0`$ energy levels is lifted and they split in separate levels. This is a result of a decrease in symmetry of the system in the transition from a circular to an elliptic dot. With increasing $`a/b`$, energy levels corresponding with even states lower, while those corresponding with uneven states rise in energy. This behavior is more clearly visible in Fig. 3, where we have plotted the energy levels against the ratio $`a/b`$, with $`\gamma `$ fixed. For small and narrow dots, only the even $`n=1`$ states remain, while the uneven states become unbound. The total number of states stays approximately equal. In Fig. 3 it is also clear that even the smallest and narrowest dot holds at least one confined state. The energy of this lowest state is shown in Fig. 4 as a function of the eccentricity $`a/b`$. There is only a small increase of the energy level with increasing eccentricity.

The asymptotic behavior for the energy of the ground state in a shallow 2D well can be obtained analytically. Because of the weak dependence of this energy on the eccentricity we assume for simplicity $`a/b=1`$. Outside the well the wavefunction is then given by the modified Bessel function,

$$\mathrm{\Psi }\left(\rho \right)=K_0\left(\sqrt{\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}\left|E_0\right|}\rho \right)\text{,}$$
(28)
where $`\left|E_0\right|=V_0E`$ is the binding energy in the well and $`\rho =\left(x^2+y^2\right)^{1/2}`$. For small $`\left|E_0\right|`$ this wave function can to first order be approximated by

$$\mathrm{\Psi }\left(\rho \right)\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{e^g}{2}\sqrt{\frac{2m}{\mathrm{}^2}\left|E_0\right|}\rho \right)\text{,}$$
(29)
with $`g=0.57721\mathrm{}`$ the constant of Euler-Mascheroni. Inside the potential well the ground state wave function is almost constant. Integrating this function over the Schrödinger equation we obtain the binding energy

$$\left|E_0\right|=\frac{4}{e^{2g}}\frac{\mathrm{}^2}{2ma^2}\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{2\mathrm{}^2}{mV_0a^2}\right)$$
(30)
with the prefactor $`4/e^{2g}=1.26096\mathrm{}`$. In Figs. 2 and 3 the ground state energy for small $`\gamma `$ can be approximated by

$$E/V_0=1\frac{1.26}{\gamma ^2}e^{4/\gamma ^2}\text{.}$$
(31)
The results for an infinitely high confinement potential are shown in Fig. 5. The behavior is comparable to the finite well case, except that all the energy levels will eventually rise with increasing eccentricity.

Notice that in Fig. 5 we find that for large eccentricity the energy levels appear in bands where the levels are practically equidistant. This can be understood from the following simple consideration. If $`b/a1`$ we can use an adiabatic approximation and assume that the motion along the $`y`$-direction is much faster than along $`x`$. For $`\left|x\right|<a`$ the electron feels a hard wall potential along the $`y`$-direction of width $`W=2b\sqrt{1x^2/a^2}`$ which has energy levels $`E_y=\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{2mW}n_y^2`$. This results into a potential along the $`x`$-direction $`V(x)=\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{8mb^2}\frac{n_y^2}{(1x^2/a^2)}\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{8mb^2}n_y^2(1+x^2/a^2)`$ which near its minimum is parabolic. The resulting energy levels become $`E_{n_x,n_y}=\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{8mb^2}n_y^2+\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{2mab}n_y\left(n_x+1/2\right)`$, which for fixed $`n_y`$ results into an equidistant set of levels as found in Fig. 5 for $`a/b1`$. The dependence on the eccentricity becomes more clear if we introduce $`\sigma =\sqrt{ab}`$, which was taken fixed in Fig. 5, into the above expression, which leads to

$$E_{n_x,n_y}=\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{8m\sigma ^2}n_y^2\frac{a}{b}+\frac{\pi ^2\mathrm{}^2}{2m\sigma ^2}n_y\left(n_x+1/2\right)\text{.}$$
(32)
Notice that the linear increase with $`a/b`$ results from the zero point motion along the $`y`$-direction.

To see the effect of different well ($`m_1`$) and barrier ($`m_2`$) masses we present in Fig. 6 the results for the bound states in the case of three different mass ratios $`\mu =m_2/m_1=0.5,1`$ and $`2`$. There is a decrease of the energy levels, i.e. increase of binding, when the effective mass of the electron outside the dot is higher than inside the dot. The $`l=0`$ levels become bound at the same value for $`\gamma `$, while this is no longer the case for $`l>0`$.

The density distribution of the wave functions corresponding to the different bound states, denoted by $`(n,l)^e`$ or $`(n,l)^o`$, are shown in Fig. 7 for $`a/b=5`$ and $`\gamma =11`$. The even $`n=1`$ states form the lowest levels and they have all their extrema of the wave function located along a row in the direction of the longest axis of the ellipse. In this particular case, a second row of extrema appears only at the sixth state $`(1,1)^o`$, which is odd. When $`n=2`$, we see three rows appear. In all cases the number of extrema in a row is determined by $`l`$. The general pattern is that the lowest levels are those for which the position of the extrema of the wave function best fit the shape of the quantum dot.

## IV Conclusions

By expressing the wave functions in the appropriate coordinate system, viz. elliptical coordinates, we were able to find analytical solutions for the Schrödinger equation describing an elliptical quantum dot with finite height hard walls. These functions are the Mathieu functions. The condition of smoothness of the wave function at the boundary of the dot, results in an expression for the energy levels. The main effect of the elongation of the dot from a circular to an elliptic shape is a lifting of the degeneracy of the $`l>1`$ levels. We found exact results for the energy levels and the wave functions for arbitrary quantum numbers. The basic solutions found here may be the basis for more advanced problems with elliptic geometry, e.g. many particle quantum dots and quantum dots in a magnetic field. The results can readily be expanded to the case of an elliptic wire. The particle can then move freely along the $`z`$-direction of a wire with an elliptic cross-section. For the energy states we find

$$\stackrel{~}{E}_{n,l,k_z}=\frac{\mathrm{}k_z^2}{2m}+E_{n,l}\text{,}$$
(33)
where $`E_{n,l}`$ are the above discussed levels and the wave functions are

$$\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Psi }}(x,y,z)=e^{ik_zz}\mathrm{\Psi }_{n,l}(x,y)\text{.}$$
(34)
## Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Flemish Science Foundation (FWO-Vl), IUAP-IV, and the ”Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds van de Universiteit Antwerpen”. F. M. P. acknowledges discussions with J. M. Worlock in the initial stage of this work.

## Appendix

Solutions to Eq. (5) are found in the form of a Fourier series. Physically relevant solutions obey periodic boundary conditions

$`G(v)`$ $`=`$ $`G(v+\pi ),`$ ()
$`G(v)`$ $`=`$ $`G(v+2\pi ).`$ ()
Even periodic solutions are expanded in a Fourier series of cosine functions, while odd periodic solutions are expanded in a Fourier series of sine functions. In this way, we find the four fundamental solutions, which are called the Mathieu functions

$`ce_{2l}(v,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}A_{2j}^{2l}(q)\mathrm{cos}2jv,`$ ()
$`ce_{2l+1}(v,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}A_{2j+1}^{2l+1}(q)\mathrm{cos}(2j+1)v,`$ ()
$`se_{2l+1}(v,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}B_{2j+1}^{2l+1}(q)\mathrm{sin}(2j+1)v,`$ ()
$`se_{2l+2}(v,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}B_{2j+2}^{2l+2}(q)\mathrm{sin}(2j+2)v.`$ ()
By substituting these series into Eq. (5), we find a set of recursion relations for the expansion coefficients, e.g. for $`A_{2j}^{2l}(q)`$

$`cA_0^{2l}qA_2^{2l}`$ $`=`$ $`0,`$ (36)
$`(c4)A_2^{2l}q(2A_0^{2l}+A_4^{2l})`$ $`=`$ $`0,`$ ()
$`\left[c(2l)^2\right]A_{2j}^{2l}q(A_{2j2}^{2l}+A_{2j+2}^{2l})`$ $`=`$ $`0(j2).`$ (37)
Numerical methods to calculate the Mathieu functions are described in detail in the literature. Solutions to Eq. (4) are written as an expansion in Bessel functions. With $`u_1=\sqrt{q}e^u`$ and $`u_2=\sqrt{q}e^u`$ we find

$`Mc_{2l}^{(1)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{A_0^{2l}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}(1)^{j+l}A_{2j}^{2l}(q)J_j(u_1)J_j(u_2),`$ ()
$`Mc_{2l+1}^{(1)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{A_1^{2l+1}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}(1)^{j+l}A_{2j+1}^{2l+1}(q)\left[J_j(u_1)J_{j+1}(u_2)+J_{j+1}(u_1)J_j(u_2)\right],`$ ()
$`Ms_{2l+1}^{(1)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{B_1^{2l+1}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}(1)^{j+l}B_{2j+1}^{2l+1}(q)\left[J_j(u_1)J_{j+1}(u_2)J_{j+1}(u_1)J_j(u_2)\right],`$ ()
$`Ms_{2l+2}^{(1)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{B_2^{2l+2}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}(1)^{j+l}B_{2j+2}^{2l+2}(q)\left[J_j(u_1)J_{j+2}(u_2)J_{j+2}(u_1)J_j(u_2)\right],`$ ()
and

$`Mc_{2l}^{(3)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2i}{\pi }}{\displaystyle \frac{(1)^{l+1}}{A_0^{2l}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}A_{2j}^{2l}(q)I_j(u_1)K_j(u_2),`$ ()
$`Mc_{2l+1}^{(3)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2}{\pi }}{\displaystyle \frac{(1)^{l+1}}{B_1^{2l+1}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}B_{2j+1}^{2l+1}(q)\left[I_j(u_1)K_{j+1}(u_2)I_{j+1}(u_1)K_j(u_2)\right],`$ ()
$`Ms_{2l+1}^{(3)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2}{\pi }}{\displaystyle \frac{(1)^{l+1}}{A_1^{2l+1}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}A_{2j+1}^{2l+1}(q)\left[I_j(u_1)K_{j+1}(u_2)+I_{j+1}(u_1)K_j(u_2)\right],`$ ()
$`Ms_{2l+2}^{(3)}(u,q)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2i}{\pi }}{\displaystyle \frac{(1)^l}{B_2^{2l+2}(q)}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}B_{2j+2}^{2l+2}(q)\left[I_j(u_1)K_{j+2}(u_2)I_{j+2}(u_1)K_j(u_2)\right].`$ ()
To obtain the derivatives of the Mathieu functions we used these series expansions of the Mathieu functions and applied the analytical formulas for the derivatives of Bessel functions.


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# Quantum neural network

## Abstract

It is suggested that a quantum neural network (QNN), a type of artificial neural network, can be built using the principles of quantum information processing. The input and output qubits in the QNN can be implemented by optical modes with different polarization, the weights of the QNN can be implemented by optical beam splitters and phase shifters.

Since it was first proposed by Feynman , that quantum mechanics might be more powerful computationally than a classical Turing machine, we have heard a lot of quantum computational networks , quantum cellular automata , but only a little about quantum neural networks . The possible reason for the omni-penetrating ideas of quantum information processing (QIP) to avoid the field of artificial neural networks (ANN), is the presence of a nonlinear activation function in any ANN. For very similar reason, a need for nonlinear couplings between optical modes was the main obstacle for building a scalable optical QIP system.

It was shown recently , that quantum computation on optical modes using only beam splitters, phase shifters, photon sources and photo detectors is possible. Accepting the ideas of , we just assume the existence of a qubit

$$|x=\alpha |0+\beta |1,$$
(1)
where $`|\alpha |^2+|\beta |^2=1`$, with the states $`|0`$ and $`|1`$ are understood as different polarization states of light.

Let us consider a perceptron, i.e. the system with $`n`$ input channels $`x_1,\mathrm{},x_n`$ and one output channel $`y`$. The output of a classical perceptron  is

$$y=f(\underset{j=1}{\overset{n}{}}w_jx_j),$$
(2)
where $`f()`$ is the perceptron activation function and $`w_j`$ are the weights tuning during learning process.

The perceptron learning algorithm works as follows:

1. The weights $`w_j`$ are initialized to small random numbers.
2. A pattern vector ($`x_1,\mathrm{},x_n`$) is presented to the perceptron and the output $`y`$ generated according to the rule (2)
3. The weights are updated according to the rule

$$w_j(t+1)=w_j(t)+\eta (dy)x_j,$$
(3)
where $`t`$ is discreet time, $`d`$ is the desired output provided for teaching and $`0<\eta <1`$ is the step size.

It will be hardly possible to construct an exact analog of the nonlinear activation function $`f`$, like sigmoid and other functions of common use in neural networks, but we will show that the leaning rule of the type (3) is possible for a quantum system too.

Let us consider a quantum system with $`n`$ inputs $`|x_1,\mathrm{},|x_n`$ of the form (1), and the output $`|y`$ derived by the rule

$$|y=\widehat{F}\underset{j=1}{\overset{n}{}}\widehat{w}_j|x_j,$$
(4)
where $`\widehat{w}_j`$ become $`2\times 2`$ matrices acting on the basis ($`|0,|1`$), combined of phase shifters $`e^{ı\theta }`$ and beam splitters, and possibly light attenuators, (cf. eq.1 from ); $`\widehat{F}`$ is an unknown operator that can be implemented by the network of quantum gates.

Let us consider the simplistic case with $`\widehat{F}=1`$ being the identity operator. The output of the quantum perceptron at the time $`t`$ will be

$$|y(t)=\underset{j=1}{\overset{n}{}}\widehat{w}_j(t)|x_j.$$
(5)
In analogy with classical case (3), let us provide a learning rule

$$\widehat{w}_j(t+1)=\widehat{w}_j(t)+\eta (|d|y(t))x_j|,$$
(6)
where $`|d`$ is the desired output.

It is easy to show now, that the learning rule (6) drives the quantum perceptron into desired state $`|d`$ used for teachning. In fact , using the rule (6) and taking the module-square difference of the real and desired outputs, we yield

$$|d|y(t+1)^2=|d\underset{j=1}{\overset{n}{}}\widehat{w}_j(t+1)|x_j^2=(1n\eta )^2|d|y(t)^2$$
(7)
For small $`\eta `$ ($`0<\eta <1/n`$) and normalized input states $`x_j|x_j=1`$ the result of iteration converges to the desired state $`|d`$. The whole network can be then composed from the primitive elements usinng the standard rules of ANN architecture.

The learning rule (6) may cause questions, for it does not observe the unitarity in general (in contrust, say, to the ideas proposed in ), and thus not only phase rotations but also light attenuation may take place. This a point for future consideration: formally we can observe the unitarity by substituting the learning rule (6) by one acting on unit circle basis $`e^{ım\theta }`$, but the model with attenuation of certain weight in QNN seems more reasonable for learn-ability of the network, and more perspective for simmulation on classical computer.

The idea, this note was inspired by, was to suggest a neural network model, which takes into account the phase of the signal, rather than only the amplitude, as existing ANN. The idea seems to be very close no real biological neural nets, where the neurons are sensitive to the phase of the signal rather than the amplitude alone. In the later case, the matrix weights $`\widehat{w}_j`$ could be understood as complex impedances that attenuate the signal and change its phase.

\***

The author is thankful tp Dr. A.Vlasov for useful references and comments.


text:
# Hadronic and Quark-Gluon Excitations of Dense and Hot MatterInvited talk presented by W. Weise at the 3rd International Conference on Perspectives in Hadron Physics, ICTP, Trieste, 7-11 May 2001; Work supported in part by BMBF, GSI and DFG.

## 1 Phases of QCD

Exploring the QCD phase diagram is undoubtedly one of the great challenges in the physics of strong interactions. At temperatures exceeding $`T_C\mathrm{\Lambda }_{QCD}`$ 0.2 GeV, one expects a plasma of quarks and gluons released from their confining forces. At $`T<T_C`$ and at moderate baryon densities, the relevant QCD degrees of freedom are color-singlet hadrons. Chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken. The vacuum is a condensate of scalar quark-antiquark pairs. Pions act as Goldstone bosons. Their decay constant, $`f_\pi =`$ 92.4 MeV, determines the chiral scale $`4\pi f_\pi 1`$ GeV which governs the low mass hadron spectrum. The lightest vector mesons $`(\rho ,\omega )`$ can be seen as the lowest $`q\overline{q}`$ ”dipole” excitations of the QCD vacuum. Current algebra combined with QCD sum rules  connects their masses directly with the chiral scale, $`\sqrt{2}m_V=4\pi f_\pi `$, to leading order (and in the large $`N_c`$ limit).

Evidently, investigating the changes of the spectral distributions of pseudoscalar and vector (as well as axial vector) excitations of the QCD vacuum with changing temperatures and baryon densities, from moderate to extreme, is a key to understanding QCD thermodynamics, its phases and symmetry breaking patterns.

## 2 Chiral thermodynamics: selected topics

A central point in the discussion of the QCD phase diagram is the transition from the Nambu-Goldstone realization of chiral symmetry (with non-zero condensate $`\overline{q}q`$) to the ”restored” Wigner-Weyl realization in which the chiral condensate vanishes. Lattice QCD indicates that chiral restoration is probably linked to the transition between composite hadrons and deconfined quarks and gluons.

Spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking (together with explicit breaking by the small $`u`$\- and $`d`$-quark masses, $`m_{u,d}<10`$ MeV) implies the PCAC or Gell-Mann, Oakes, Renner (GOR) relation, $`m_\pi ^2f_\pi ^2=m_q\overline{q}q`$, to leading order in the quark mass $`m_q=(m_u+m_d)/2`$. The GOR relation continues to hold  in matter at finite temperature $`T<T_C`$ and baryon density $`\rho `$, when reduced to a statement about the time component of the axial current. For this component we denote the corresponding in-medium pion decay constant by $`f_\pi ^{}(\rho ,T)`$. One finds

$$f_\pi ^2(\rho ,T)m_\pi ^2=m_q\overline{q}q_{\rho ,T}+\mathrm{},$$
(1)
where $`\overline{q}q_{\rho ,T}`$ now stands for the T- and $`\rho `$-dependent chiral condensate. The ”melting” of this condensate by heat or compression therefore translates primarily into an in-medium change of the (timelike) decay constant of the pion, given that its in-medium mass $`m_\pi ^{}`$ is not much different from $`m_\pi `$ in vacuum, because of its Goldstone boson nature.

The chiral scale, $`4\pi f_\pi ^{}(\rho ,T)`$, is expected to decrease when thermodynamic conditions change toward chiral restoration. This scale defines a gap in the low-energy hadron spectrum. A decreasing chiral gap should imply characteristic observable changes in the meson mass spectrum.

Fig. 1 shows typical examples of calculated vector meson spectral distributions in nuclear matter at $`T=0`$ and, in contrast, their evolution with temperature at zero baryon density. Such spectra are used in calculations of lepton pair production rates from ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions as described in later sections. The main part of this presentation focuses on the quest for signals of the QCD equation of state through dilepton radiation from hot matter. Before exploring such extreme territory, we summarize two topics of current interest in chiral thermodynamics at more moderate conditions.

### 2.1 Thermodynamics of the chiral condensate

Suppose we start from a chiral effective Lagrangian, appropriate for the hadronic phase of QCD, with Goldstone bosons (pions) coupled to baryons (nucleons). Let $`𝒵`$ be the partition function derived from this theory, and $`\mu `$ the baryon chemical potential. The pressure is $`p(\mu ,T)=(T/V)ln𝒵`$, where $`V`$ is the volume. Given this equation of state, a variant of the Hellmann-Feynman theorem (with the quark mass treated formally as an adiabatic parameter) in combination with the GOR relation leads to the following density and temperature dependent chiral condensate :

$$\frac{\overline{q}q_{\rho ,T}}{\overline{q}q_0}=1+\frac{dp(\mu ,T)}{f_\pi ^2dm_\pi ^2}=1+\frac{1}{f_\pi ^2}\left[\frac{p(\mu ,T)}{m_\pi ^2}\frac{\sigma _N}{m_\pi ^2}\rho _S(\mu ,T)\right],$$
(2)
with the baryon and scalar densities, $`\rho =p/\mu `$ and $`\rho _S=p/M`$, and the nucleon sigma term $`\sigma _N=m_qM/m_q0.05`$ GeV, where $`M`$ is the nucleon mass.

At $`T=0`$ we have $`m_q[\overline{q}q_\rho \overline{q}q_0]=\sigma _N\rho _S`$. At low baryon density where $`\rho _S\rho `$, the magnitude of the condensate decreases linearly with density. This behaviour persists up to about the density of normal nuclear matter. Detailed calculations using self-consistent thermal effective field theory at the two-loop level  show that effects non-linear in $`\rho `$ take over at higher density such that the rapid decrease of $`|\overline{q}q_\rho |`$ is slowed down.

The temperature dependence of the condensate at $`\rho =0`$ is determined by thermal pion fluctuations. The result of our recent calculations  is close to that found in chiral perturbation theory  and quite similar to the result of lattice QCD , with a critical temperature $`T_C180`$ MeV (for two flavours). The tendency towards ”chiral restoration” indicated by the dropping condensate should have observable consequences, not only at extreme densities and temperatures, but also already in normal nuclear systems.

### 2.2 Pionic $`s`$-waves in the nuclear medium

Let us have a brief look at Goldstone bosons in the medium. In the exact chiral limit with $`m_q=0`$, pions are massless, and this feature persists at all temperatures and densities as long as one stays within the Nambu-Goldstone phase of spontaneously broken chiral symmetry. Explicit symmetry breaking causes characteristic deviations from this pattern. They become particularly interesting in highly asymmetric nuclear matter, with large excess of neutrons over protons.

There has been a recent revival of interest in $`s`$-wave pion-nucleus interactions, for several reasons. First, the observation of deeply bound pionic atom states in $`Pb`$ isotopes  has sharpened the quantitative constraints on the $`s`$-wave optical potential. Secondly, there is renewed interest in the theoretical foundations of this optical potential from the point of view of chiral dynamics .

To leading chiral order, at $`T=0`$ and in the low density limit, the self-energy for a $`\pi ^+`$ or $`\pi ^{}`$ at low energy $`\omega `$ and momentum $`\stackrel{}{q}=0`$ is simply given by the Weinberg-Tomozawa theorem:

$$\mathrm{\Pi }^\pm (\omega ,\stackrel{}{q}=0)=\pm \frac{\omega }{2f_\pi ^2}(\rho _p\rho _n)+\mathrm{},$$
(3)
so that the primary medium effect is a splitting of the $`\pi ^+`$ and $`\pi ^{}`$ masses, $`\mathrm{\Delta }m(\pi ^\pm )=\pm (\rho _p\rho _n)/4f_\pi ^2`$, in asymmetric nuclear matter. Systematic calculations of the $`\pi ^+`$ and $`\pi ^{}`$ mass shifts up to two-loop order using in-medium chiral perturbation theory  predict $`\mathrm{\Delta }m(\pi ^{})14`$ MeV and $`\mathrm{\Delta }m(\pi ^+)1`$ MeV at nuclear matter density and at a neutron-to-proton ratio $`N/Z=1.5`$ characteristic of the $`Pb`$ region. The repulsive shift found for the $`\pi ^{}`$ mass is however only half of what is required by the data on deeply bound ($`1s`$ and $`2p`$) states in pionic $`Pb`$ . Several options to repair this discrepancy exist. We believe  that an appealing one is the reduction of the pion decay constant in medium, following eq. (1). The replacement $`f_\pi f_\pi ^{}`$ in the pion self-energy comes naturally because in-medium chiral perturbation theory must now be performed relative to a modified vacuum with shifted chiral condensate. Systematic investigations of deeply bound pionic atoms with various isotopic chains of heavy nuclei will provide further insights into these challenging questions.

## 3 Dilepton production rates and thermal QCD

Lattice simulations with three light quark flavours indicate that QCD undergoes a phase transition at a temperature $`T_C`$ 150 MeV . It is hoped that it is possible to create the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase above $`T_C`$ in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions at CERN and RHIC. Dileptons ($`e^+e^{}`$ and $`\mu ^+\mu ^{}`$ pairs) are interesting probes in this context since they do not interact strongly but escape unthermalized from the hot and dense region formed in such collisions, the fireball. As the fireball expands, it cools off and hadronization sets in at $`T_C`$. In the hadronic phase, the main dilepton sources are pion and kaon annihilation processes which are enhanced due to the formation of the light vector mesons $`\rho ,\omega `$ and $`\varphi `$.

The differential dilepton emission rate from a hot domain in thermal equilibrium is given by

$$\frac{dN}{d^4xd^4q}=\frac{\alpha ^2}{\pi ^3q^2}\frac{Im\overline{\mathrm{\Pi }}(q,T)}{e^{q^0/T}1}$$
(4)
where $`\overline{\mathrm{\Pi }}`$ denotes the spin-averaged time-like self energy of a photon in the heat bath, $`q`$ is the photon four-momentum, $`\alpha =\frac{e^2}{4\pi }`$, and the lepton masses have been neglected. Later we compare our results with the CERES/NA45 data taken in Pb-Au collisions at 160 AGeV (corresponding to a c.m. energy of $`20`$ AGeV). This is done by integrating eq.(4) over the space-time history of the collision and, taking into account the experimental detector acceptance, over the transverse momentum $`p_T`$ and average over the rapidity $`\eta `$.

### 3.1 Quasiparticle description of the quark-gluon phase

Thermal QCD perturbation theory is presumably not applicable to evaluate Im$`\overline{\mathrm{\Pi }}`$, even at high temperatures. A way to proceed is to use input from finite temperature lattice simulations. We have shown recently  that it is possible to describe the equation of state (EoS) of such systems to a very good approximation in terms of a non-interacting gas of quasiparticles with thermally generated masses, incorporating confinement phenomenologically by a temperature-dependent effective number of active degrees of freedom.

From asymptotic freedom, we expect that at extremely high temperatures the plasma consists of quasifree quarks and gluons. Perturbative calculations find spectral functions of the form $`\delta (\omega ^2k^2m^2(T))`$ with $`m(T)g_sT`$. As long as the spectral functions of the thermal excitations at lower temperatures still resemble qualitatively this asymptotic form, a quasiparticle description is expected to be applicable. The thermal excitations can then be described by a dispersion relation $`\omega ^2(k)=k^2+m^2(T)`$.

We assume that the thermal quark and gluon quasiparticle masses still behave as $`\stackrel{~}{g}(T)T`$, with an effective coupling strength parametrized as

$$\stackrel{~}{g}(T)g_0\left(1\frac{T_C}{T}\right)^\gamma .$$
(5)
This form is guided by lattice results which indicate that the phase transition is weakly first order or second order, suggesting approximately $`m(TT_C)^\gamma `$ with some ”pseudocritical” exponent $`\gamma `$.

The second important element in this model is a temperature-dependent confinement factor which reduces the number of thermally active degrees of freedom as $`T`$ approaches $`T_C`$. In practice, the quasiparticle parameters are determined by reproducing lattice results for the entropy density. The pressure and the energy density then follow accordingly and are in excellent agreement with lattice data whenever a comparison can be made .

In the quark-gluon phase, the basic mechanism that produces $`e^+e^{}`$ pairs is $`q\overline{q}`$ annihilation. Assume now that these quarks and antiquarks are thermal quasiparticles, and that these quasiparticles couple to photons in the same way as bare quarks. We can then use the standard one-loop result for $`Im\overline{\mathrm{\Pi }}`$, with bare quark masses replaced by the thermal masses, $`m_q(T)`$. The essential QCD dynamics is supposed to be incorporated in these quasiparticle masses as they are in accordance with the lattice QCD equation of state.

### 3.2 The hadronic phase

Below $`T_C`$, confinement sets in and the effective degrees of freedom change to colour singlet, bound $`q\overline{q}`$ or $`qqq`$ states. The photon couples now to the lowest-lying ’dipole’ excitations of the vacuum, the hadronic $`J^P=1^{}`$ states: the $`\rho `$, $`\omega `$ and $`\varphi `$ mesons and multi-pion states carrying the same quantum numbers. The electromagnetic current-current correlation function can be connected to the currents generated by these mesons using an effective Lagrangian which approximates the $`SU(3)`$ flavour sector of QCD at low energies. We use the improved Vector Meson Dominance model combined with chiral dynamics of pions and kaons as described in . Within this model, the following relation between the imaginary part of the irreducible photon self-energy $`\text{Im}\overline{\mathrm{\Pi }}`$ and the vector meson self-energies $`\mathrm{\Pi }_V(q)`$ in vacuum is derived:

$$\text{Im}\overline{\mathrm{\Pi }}(q)=\underset{V}{}\frac{\text{Im}\mathrm{\Pi }_V(q)}{g_V^2}|F_V(q)|^2.$$
(6)
Here $`g_V`$ is the $`\gamma V`$ coupling constant and $`F_V`$ is the form factor for the coupling of the vector meson to the multipion and $`K\overline{K}`$ continuum.

Finite temperature modifications of the vector meson self-energies appearing in eq.(6) are calculated using thermal Feynman rules. The explicit calculations for the $`\rho `$\- and $`\varphi `$-meson can be found in ref.. At the one-loop level, the $`\rho `$ and $`\varphi `$ are only marginally affected by temperature even close to $`T_C`$ because of the comparably large pion and kaon masses: $`m_\pi T_C`$, $`m_K3T_C`$. The thermal spectral function of the $`\omega `$-meson has been discussed in detail in . Here, the reaction $`\omega \pi \pi \pi `$ was found to cause a considerable broadening of the $`\omega `$ spectral function, leading to $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\omega (T_C)7\mathrm{\Gamma }_\omega (0)`$. The resulting photon spectral function is displayed in figure 1 (left panel).

There is still considerable stopping of the interpenetrating nuclei at SPS energies, with a net baryon density $`\rho _B`$ in the central rapidity region. At RHIC, on the other hand, first measurements indicate that finite baryon density effects should not play an important role. For the evaluation of density effects at SPS, we use the results discussed in . The photon spectral function at finite density and zero temperature is depicted in figure 1 (right panel).

### 3.3 Fireball model

The fireball model is set up as follows: We assume a spatially averaged time and density profile throughout the evolution of the fireball at any given timeslice. Furthermore, we require the evolution of the system after the very initial stages to be isentropic. Given the value of the total entropy $`S_0`$ and the volume expansion of the fireball $`V(t)`$, the temperature profile $`T(t)`$ can then be constructed via the EoS of the system, depending on the relevant degrees of freedom. For temperatures above $`T_C`$, we use the results of the quasiparticle model described earlier. In the region below $`T_C`$, an interacting hadronic gas is an adequate description of the system.

We parametrize our insufficient knowledge close to $`T_C`$ by interpolating smoothly between two regimes. This approach is supported by the general shape of the EoS on the lattice for two light and one heavy quark, where a smooth crossover is indicated . The entropy density in our model is shown in figure 2. Additionally, at SPS conditions, finite chemical potentials for mesons and baryons have to be taken into account. The evolution is stopped in the model as soon as a common freeze-out temperature $`T_f125`$ MeV is reached. Given this basic framework, we adjust the remaining parameters of the model in such a way as to reproduce several hadronic observables such as the rapidity distribution of the produced hadrons, $`𝐩_t`$-spectra and particle ratios (for details see ).

### 3.4 Results

Initial temperatures are quite high in our approach (250 MeV for SPS conditions, 300 MeV for RHIC), and we find a significantly prolonged lifetime ($`10`$ fm/c at SPS and $`15`$ fm/c at RHIC) of the QGP evolution phase of the fireball as compared to the results obtained by other groups . This is a consequence of using the more realistic EoS of the thermal quasiparticle model rather than the one of the ideal quark-gluon gas.

The results for the fully integrated dilepton rates are shown in figure 3. Comparing to the CERES experiment, the model achieves a good overall description. We are also able to describe the existing data in separate $`𝐩_t`$-regions (larger or smaller than 500 MeV).

In figure 4, the different stages of the fireball evolution building up the dilepton yield are resolved in small time steps. For early times, the only contribution comes from the $`q\overline{q}`$ quasiparticle anihilation processes out of the quark-gluon phase. The movement of the invariant mass threshold reflects the temperature dependence of the quasiparticle mass, which gets light near the phase transition at $`t10`$ fm. One observes that, in spite of the growing fireball volume, the contributions from later timeslices to the total QGP yield become successively less important. This behaviour is enforced by the confinement factor which reduces the thermodynamically active degrees of freedom near the phase boundary. For times later than 10 fm/c, the system enters the hadronic evolution phase without going through a mixed phase. The most prominent feature is the rapid filling of the low invariant mass region through the density-broadened $`\rho `$ meson.

## 4 Summary

In our journey through different regions of the QCD phase diagram, we have first discussed the temperature and density dependence of the order parameter of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, the quark condensate. The in-medium evolution of this order parameter should manifest itself in a corresponding dropping of the pion decay constant. This in turn may lead to observable consequences for low-energy pion-nucleus interactions in systems with large neutron excess. New high-precision experiments producing deeply bound states of pionic atoms are a promising source of information to investigate these issues.

The major part of this presentation concentrated on the more extreme conditions encountered in heavy-ion collisions at CERN and RHIC. Signals of the expansion from a transient quark-gluon phase to the hadronic final states can in principle be observed by detecting lepton pairs from the expanding fireball produced in such collisions. We have emphasized the importance of using input and constraints from lattice QCD thermodynamics in the analysis of such signals.

We thank N. Kaiser, R. Rapp and J. Wambach for stimulating discussions.