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# Combining Propagation Information and Search Tree Visualization using ILOG OPL Studio 11footnote 1In A. Kusalik (ed), Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Logic Programming Environments (WLPE’01), December 1, 2001, Paphos, Cyprus. COmputer Research Repository (http://www.acm.org/corr/), cs.PL/0111040; whole proceedings: cs.PL/0111042.

## Introduction

Built upon the ILOG Views graphical components , ILOG OPL Studio was initially intended to provide an Integrated Development Environment for the OPL language (Optimization Programming Language) . Now it can also serve as a debugging environment for external ILOG Solver applications independently of the OPL language. Based on new facilities provided in ILOG Solver 5.0 , such as the search monitor and the trace mechanism, ILOG OPL Studio provides tools for graphically visualizing and debugging the execution of an ILOG Solver program. This paper explores both OPL program debugging and pure ILOG Solver application debugging using the ILOG OPL Studio debugger. However, the graphical features presented could be reused with other constraint solvers.

In CP programs there is a two-level architecture consisting of a constraint component and a programming component . The constraint component, also called constraint store, contains the constraints accumulated at a given computation step and provides basic operations that lead to domain reductions by means of constraint propagation. The constraint component is also responsible for maintaining constraint satisfaction and detecting failures. The programming component provides a means of combining the basic operations, often in a non-deterministic way, to guide the solver in the search for a solution. This two-level architecture leads to a two-level visualization. The programmed search part can be visualized as a direct representation of the Search Tree . The constraint propagation can lead to a representation of the impact on the domains of the decision variables  and to a trace of the events . This paper focuses on combining propagation and search information. Although ILOG OPL Studio provides several graphical facilities for domain visualization, these features are not presented here. First, we describe the Search Tree visualization. Next, we show how the Propagation Spy represents the propagation events. Finally, we show how to combine search tree and propagation information in terms of both user interaction and integrated visualization. Special attention is paid to providing an interaction mechanism familiar to users of debuggers for traditional languages. A new synthetic view is presented: the Christmas Tree, which combines statistics on domain reduction and propagation events with the Search Tree view.

## Visualization of the Search Tree

Different approaches to search tree visualization are possible, from dynamic visualization to post-mortem analysis . We choose the dynamic visualization approach so that we can monitor the exploration order. Because the educational aspect is important in such a tool, and because ILOG Solver exploration strategy is not limited to Depth-First Search (DFS) , we should be able to visualize which is the current visited node, in which order the tree is explored and in which state each node currently is. We use colors to indicate the state of the node and a yellow arrow to indicate the current node. When using exploration strategies other than the DFS you can see the yellow arrow jumping in the tree. The possible states of a node are: created but unexplored so far (white), explored (blue), pruned without exploration (black), solution (green), failure (red). When the yellow arrow points to the root, the algorithm is performing the initial domain reduction.

### Tree Reduction

Because the search tree can be very big, ILOG OPL Studio provides ways of obtaining a simplified version of the tree. For instance, it is possible to collapse or expand a subtree. A collapsed subtree is represented by a triangle following the same color conventions as the node representation (Figure 1). Also, OPL constructs provide a way to achieve search tree reduction by abstracting the internal binary tree as an n-ary tree provided that the search procedure contains the forall and tryall OPL keywords. forall is an iterated ”AND” and tryall is an iterated ”OR”, specifying an AND-OR tree . The reduction to the n-ary OR-tree is not obtained by applying abstraction operations on the initial binary tree as exposed in  but by means of interlaced goals keeping the information on the true common father of the choices. See Figure 2.

### The Choice Stack

Visualizing the shape of the tree is rarely sufficient for program debugging and performance tuning. One needs to know which choice occurred at a specific node and the list of choices made so far in the current branch. This leads to the notion of ”Choice Stack”. In OPL Studio, the Choice Stack is a panel describing the choices made from the root in the current branch. Figure 2 shows the Choice Stack and the Search Tree for a problem of warehouse location . Here, the choices are visible in the form variable = value. After double-clicking on a node in the Search Tree view, the corresponding frames are highlighted in the Choice Stack panel. In Figure 2, the first node below the root is selected and the corresponding frames in the Choice Stack show that the choice at the selected node is the value London set to the variable Supplier. The depth from the root is given between brackets.

## Visualization of Propagation Events

Constraint propagation is called before the search and at each Search Tree node. The propagation occurring before the search, at the root node, is called the initial propagation. The ILOG OPL Studio debugger provides a way of displaying the trace of the propagation events and the result of the propagation in terms of domain reduction: the Propagation Spy.

### The Propagation Spy

Based on the new Trace mechanism provided in ILOG Solver 5.0 , the ILOG OPL Studio debugger provides a panel called the ”Propagation Spy”. This is a special hierarchical sheet containing a tree hierarchy in the first column . Figure 3 shows the initial propagation for the ”Pheasants and Rabbits” problem . Each line is a Propagation Event, such as ”Set Max”, ”Set Value”, ”Post Constraint”, ”Propagate Constraint”, ”Constraint Fail”, etc. Each column contains the impact on one variable. Time passes vertically, from top to bottom. The textual description of the events is appended inside the first column. When an event line is selected the columns are rearranged so that the variables of interest are displayed first. The cell at the junction of an event line and a variable column is colored according to the type of event and shows the result of the event in textual form. Thus, the domain reduction history can be followed here.

Because the number of events can be very high, the Propagation Spy is not always active: it is activated on demand by the user. We describe the user interaction in more detail in the next section: Combining Search and Propagation Information. The Propagation Spy is convenient for propagation teaching and for failure analysis. When used with ILOG Solver add-ons such as ILOG Scheduler, a specific trace is inserted in the Propagation Spy  so that the program can be debugged at a higher level.

## Combining Search and Propagation Information

In this section we will show how the user interacts with the debugger with the two levels of information: the search and the propagation. Then we will propose a synthetic view combining statistical information about the propagation with the search tree.

### User interaction with the debugger

We took special care to provide an interaction mechanism familiar to users of debuggers for traditional languages (such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Karmira BugSeeker$`^{\text{TM}}`$ for Java or dbx on UNIX). In such debuggers, the user can interrupt the execution, step into, out of, or over a function, and restart. In debuggers for traditional languages the function call stack is a common abstraction of the flow of execution, and the current state of the variables can be inspected. Here, in the context of a CP program, these concepts are respectively replaced by the choice stack and the state of the domains. In Figure 4 we propose a specification for user interaction with a CP debugger such as the ILOG OPL Studio debugger and a mapping to traditional debugging concepts in a traditional debugger.

When the user launches a first execution, he sees the tree drawing itself in the Search Tree viewer. If necessary, he can interrupt the execution. The debugger stops at the beginning of a node visit. Then, if the user chooses to step into the node, each step is a propagation event. So a line is added to the Propagation Spy at each ”Step Into” command. He can then step out, that is, stop tracing the propagation and continue to the next visited node. Because of the non-deterministic nature of the CP search, it is not possible to draw the tree in advance. A second run is necessary to focus on a segment of the tree. After a first run, the user identifies interesting regions and places a breakpoint at an interesting node. At the second run, the tree nodes are ”laundered”, (i.e. they become white) and then recolored. The debugger stops at the breakpoint, that is, when the corresponding Search Tree node is visited.

### A synthetic view: the Christmas Tree

The Search Tree viewer of ILOG OPL Studio provides a way of combining statistics on propagation information with the tree representation. The information added to the tree is the number of propagation events and the effective global domain reduction at each node. It is important to distinguish between these two pieces of information because many propagation events can be triggered with little impact on the domain reduction. The size of the nodes becomes proportional to the number of propagation events fired at each node (which is highly correlated with the time spent at each node). The meaning of the colors remains unchanged, except that the color is lighter or darker depending on the effective domain reduction obtained during the propagation at this node. The Search Tree now has big and small balls with different colors, that is why we call it the ”Christmas Tree”. Figures 11 and 12 represent the Christmas Trees associated with the ”Golomb Ruler” problem . The statistical information connected with the initial propagation is concentrated at the tree root. It becomes obvious that all nodes are not equal. We can detect if, in failure nodes (red nodes), the failure is discovered early (small node) or late (large node).

## Principle of Operations

In this section we describe the basic implementation structure of the visual tools and their integration with user applications.

The architecture is a client-server architecture where the GUI is the server and the user application the client. The GUI is loosely coupled with the application. It could be reused with non-ILOG products, provided that the protocol between the GUI and the engine is respected. This protocol is based on XML messages exchanged via sockets. For ILOG based applications, this protocol is encapsulated in a C++ library called ”Debugger Library” which takes care of the communication layer and must be linked to the user application. The API is object-oriented, as is ILOG Solver . The application programmer must implement an IlcDebuggable interface, overriding two virtual methods, stateModel() and solveModel(). He must instantiate an IlcDebugger object passing as arguments the name of the machine and the port number on which the GUI server is listening. The Debugger Library has its own subclasses of the Search Monitor class and of the Propagation Trace class defined in ILOG Solver . These classes have a set of virtual methods for each search and propagation event. The Debugger classes take care of sending the appropriate Propagation and Search information to the GUI, wrapping it in XML messages.

## Experimentation

In this section, we will concentrate first on search procedure improvement with the regular Search Tree, using a scheduling problem expressed in OPL. Then, we will show how to use the Christmas Tree and the Propagation Spy to illustrate propagation issues with a pure ILOG Solver sample.

### Improving the search

The experimentation for search improvement is based on a Scheduling problem: job-shop 6 . The aim is to schedule a number of jobs on a set of machines to minimize completion time, often called the makespan. Each job is a sequence of tasks and each task requires a machine. Each intermediate solution found by OPL improves the objective function (minimize makespan) while satisfying the other constraints. Figure 6 shows the shape of the tree with the default search procedure of OPL. To begin with, we basically have the intuition that we must pay attention to right subtrees (Figure 5).

For a binary tree, if we consider that the right branch is the contradiction of the left branch, when right subtrees are developed one of the following two conclusions can be drawn. Either solutions are found in the right subtree, in which case the search could be improved since it is the contradiction of a choice that leads to a better solution. Or, solutions are not found in the right subtree, which is an indication that the propagation could be improved, because the back propagation of the cost should have pruned the subtree automatically. Therefore, the presence of right subtrees should be monitored. Next, when using the Depth First Search exploration order, the higher in the tree the right subtrees are, the more we should pay attention to them, because the tree is potentially exponential in its depth.

When we use the default search procedure of ILOG OPL Studio to solve the job-shop 6 problem (with Depth First Search as the exploration order), we notice that right subtrees exist in the higher part of the tree (Figure 6). These right subtrees contain solutions, therefore contradictions of the choices made by the default strategy of OPL lead to better solutions during the minimization process. In scheduling applications with unary resources, the general strategy is to rank each unary resource. Ranking a unary resource consists of finding a total ordering for all activities requiring the resource. Once activities are ordered, a solution can be found efficiently. The detected inefficiency of the default search procedure is due to the fact that it ranks a resource completely before selecting another resource to rank. The default search procedure is not opportunistic enough. The user-defined search procedure in Figure 7 tries to improve that.

First, we select the resource that has the smallest number of activities we could rank at first position. Then, we select among the tasks requiring this resource that are rankable first, the one which has the earliest starting time. The instruction tryRankFirst(tool\[r\],task\[t.i,t.j\]) is nondeterministic and has two alternatives. The first alternative adds the constraint that task\[t.i,t.j\] be ranked first among the unranked activities of the tool\[r\] resource. The second alternative (used when backtracking) adds the constraint that task\[t.i,t.j\] must not be ranked first among the unranked activities of tool\[r\]. We made a deliberate mistake in the task selection by ordering by latest starting time (decreasing keyword) instead of earliest starting time (increasing keyword). This leads to the Search Tree of Figure 8. The tree is worse in shape, with a lot of right subtrees.

Using the Choice Stack panel, we can identify which choice leads to right subtrees. Then, after ordering by the increasing earliest starting time, the shape of the tree is much better. There are fewer right subtrees and the overall size of the tree is smaller (Figure 9).

### Improving the propagation

The experimentation concerning the propagation improvement is based on the Golomb Ruler problem . The goal is to find a set of values representing the graduations of a rule such that the difference between each pair of graduations is always distinct, and such that the length of the rule is minimal. We use the alldifferent global constraint of ILOG Solver with two different levels of propagation. When using the basic filter level of this constraint, the solver guarantees that, at any computation point, the specified variables do not have the values of the already-assigned variables inside their domain. When using the extended filter level, the solver reasons on the domains instead of the values and guarantees that, for each value in the domain of any given variable, there exist values in the domains of the remaining variables such that the constraint is satisfied. So the extended level enforces a stronger pruning than the basic one.

Figure 10 represents the trees corresponding to the two filter levels. The basic filter level produces a bigger tree with additional right subtrees as compared to the extended filter level. These right subtrees have only failure leaves, a sign of lack of propagation. By just setting the filter level to the extended level these right subtrees are pruned. But does this mean that we saved time ? Here, the Christmas Tree gives us a picture of the cost and of the efficiency of this extended propagation.

Let us compare the number of propagation events in the first right subtree located in the frame in Figure 11 with the number of propagation events occurring at the corresponding big failure node in Figure 12. We see that the big node required two times fewer propagation events for detecting failure than the subtree. So, yes, the extended propagation saved time here. Yet, if we compare the initial propagation statistics by looking at the root node, we see that the efficiency of domain reduction is the same (63.25%). The extended propagation level triggered a few more events but with no result.

Now, let us enter into the details by using the Propagation Spy. By inspecting the Initial Propagation, we can see that the solver adds a hidden constraint when posting the alldifferent constraint. When tracing the propagation at the first big failure node of the extended filter level and comparing to the corresponding node of the basic filter level the Propagation Spy detects the extra propagation (Figure 13). On the left, with the basic filter level, the propagation stops after reducing the variable difference to the interval 7..11. On the right, with the extended level, the propagation of an additional internal constraint posted by the allDifferent constraint strongly reduces the domains by means of ”Set Min” events. This additional propagation leads to a failure, avoiding a subtree exploration.

However, by inspecting in detail we see that four ”Set Min” events are triggered on the difference variable where one should suffice. These ”Set Min” events are ”Remove Value” orders that have been translated by the solver into ”Set Min” because the value to remove was a bound. Then, we have the intuition that reasoning on bounds instead of on domains should be sufficient. If we tune the alldifferent constraint to the intermediate filter level, which reasons on bounds instead of on domains, we obtain the same search tree as compared to the extended filter level. The Propagation Spy shows that the difference variable at the same Choice Point is bound more quickly (Figure 14).

## Conclusion

We have presented an overview of the current state of the ILOG OPL Studio debugger capabilities for performance tuning of CP programs. The experimentation on improving the search procedure with the Search Tree visualization is promising. A graphic trace of the propagation events, in order to better understand the inner details of what happens at each node, has also been presented. Combining the two pieces of information by adding statistics on the ”weight” of each node in the Christmas Tree seems to be an important step toward visualizing where the time is spent.

### Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Laurent Perron for his help on the ILOG Solver search monitor and Jean-Charles Régin and Xavier Nodet for their explanations of the ILOG Solver and ILOG Scheduler trace mechanism. We would also like to thank Michel Leconte, Philippe Laborie and Veronica Murphy for their comments and ideas.


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# Critical dynamics of singlet and triplet excitations in strongly frustrated spin systems

\[

## Abstract

New data for the two-dimensional $`J_1J_2`$ \- model shows that the critical points for singlet and triplet excitations near $`J_2/J_10.38`$ are very close together, or coincident. We propose that this is a more general result: in strongly frustrated spin systems the critical dynamics of singlet and triplet excitations are closely related. An effective field theory for such a critical point, or points, is developed, and its implications discussed. The analysis suggests the existence of gapless or almost gapless singlet excitations in the magnetically disordered phase.

\]

Quantum phase transitions in quantum antiferromagnets have attracted a great deal of attention during the last decade. This field contains numerous previously unknown phenomena. Investigation of quantum phase transitions in quantum antiferromagnets is very important for quantum magnetism, but is of even wider importance because it allows one to construct and to analyze effective nonperturbative field theories that can be used in other parts of physics. In this paper we concentrate on rotationally invariant (2+1)D systems. Transitions described by the nonlinear O(N) field theory are very well understood, see, e.g., Refs.  The most widely known example is the O(3) theory that describes a real vector field $`𝐯`$ with Lagrangian density

$$_v=\frac{1}{2}\left[(_t𝐯)^2c_v^2(𝐯)^2m_v^2𝐯^2\right]\frac{u_v}{4}\left(𝐯^2\right)^2.$$
(1)
The effective mass vanishes at some critical point, $`m_v^2=a_v(gg_{cv})`$, where $`g`$ is some generalized “coupling constant”, and $`a_v`$ is some coefficient. It has been argued by Haldane  and Chakravarty, Halperin and Nelson  that this theory describes a quantum phase transition between the Néel state ($`g<g_{cv}`$) and the magnetically disordered state ($`g>g_{cv}`$) in a two-dimensional quantum antiferromagnet. Perhaps the simplest concrete example of such a system is the Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a double layer square lattice. In this case the “coupling constant” is equal to the ratio of interlayer and inlayer antiferromagnetic interactions, $`g=J_{}/J`$, $`g_{cv}2.525`$, see Ref. . For $`g>g_{cv}`$ the excitation spectrum of the system (1) is gapped, and for $`g<g_{cv}`$ the spectrum is gapless because of Goldstone spin waves.

The O(1) field theory describes a real scalar field $`s`$ with Lagrangian

$$_s=\frac{1}{2}\left[(_ts)^2c_s^2(s)^2m_s^2s^2\right]\frac{u_s}{4}s^4,$$
(2)
where $`m_s^2=a_s(g_{cs}g)`$. The field expectation value $`<s>`$ is zero at $`g<g_{cs}`$ and nonzero at $`g>g_{cs}`$. The spectrum is gapped in both cases. A simple example of such a system is a Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a ”planar pyrochlore” lattice where the entire low energy dynamics is driven by spin singlet excitations .

The situation in strongly frustrated spin systems is much more complicated because the dynamics of triplet and singlet excitations are not independent. The 2D $`J_1J_2`$ model is an ideal testing ground for understanding of such dynamics. The Hamiltonian of the model reads:

$$H=J_1\underset{nn}{}𝐒_i𝐒_j+J_2\underset{nnn}{}𝐒_i𝐒_j,$$
(3)
where $`J_1`$ is the nearest-neighbor, and $`J_2`$ is the frustrating next-nearest-neighbor Heisenberg exchange on a square lattice. Both couplings are antiferromagnetic, i.e. $`J_{1,2}>0`$ and the spins $`S_i=1/2`$. At small $`J_2`$ the system exhibits Néel ordering and at small $`J_1`$ it exhibits collinear ordering. There is also a general consensus on the disappearance of the magnetic ordering at $`0.38<J_2/J_1<0.6`$, see, e.g., Ref.. The structure of the magnetically disordered state is of great interest. An important insight into the disordered regime was achieved by field-theory methods  and dimer series expansions . The above works have shown that the ground state in this regime is dominated by short-range singlet (dimer) formation in a columnar pattern. More recent studies based on the Green function Monte Carlo method favored either a plaquette state  or a dimer state with plaquette modulation . And finally the same group that claimed stability of the plaquette state , now claims stability of the translationally invariant RVB state . The above series expansions , as well as Monte Carlo numerical calculations  in various forms, have difficulties in distinguishing between states with very close energies, as occurs in the $`J_1J_2`$ model. In such approaches one starts from some trial wave function (dimer, plaquette, RVB,…) and such an ansatz is always very restrictive: it is impossible to get a translationally invariant state using the dimer or plaquette expansions, and on the other hand it is impossible to get a spontaneous violation of the translational symmetry starting from the trial RVB state that is explicitly translationally invariant.

A novel approach was implicitly formulated in our work , see also Ref. . The idea of the approach is to use numerical calculations only in the well established Néel phase at $`J_2/J_1<0.38`$. This calculation allow us to find all the relevant quasiparticles in the system, and hence to determine the effective field theory describing the dynamics of the system. Since the transition is of the second order the same field theory describes the magnetically disordered phase and we have no problem to describe this phase. In the present work we explicitly formulate the approach, present new, much more accurate, numerical data, derive the effective Lagrangian of the model, and finally discuss implications of this effective Lagrangian.

For the $`J_1J_2`$ model we define the generalized coupling constant as $`g=J_2/J_1`$. It is well established that at $`g<g_{cv}`$ there is Néel ordering in the system. There are 3 independent estimates for $`g_{cv}`$. The first comes from dimer series expansions, $`g_{cv}0.38`$, see Ref. . However this estimate is problematic since it already assumes spin dimer order at $`g>g_{cv}`$. The second estimate, $`g_{cv}=0.4\pm 0.02`$, comes from Ising series expansions for the staggered magnetization in the Néel phase . The third estimate $`g_{cv}=0.38\pm 0.03`$ comes from the Ising series expansions for spin-spin correlators in the Néel phase . Using the second and the third estimates, and averaging them as independent ones we find

$$g_{cv}=0.39\pm 0.0160.39\pm 0.02.$$
(4)
The Néel ordering corresponds to the condensation of a vector field, therefore there is no doubt that some effective Lagrangian determines the dynamics of the field both at $`g<g_{cv}`$ and $`g>g_{cv}`$.

However the vector excitation is not the only relevant degree of freedom in the system. There are also the low energy singlet excitations. We do not have a reliable numerical technique for direct calculation of singlet excitations, but we do have a well developed series expansion technique for calculation of static susceptibilities. A static susceptibility is proportional to the corresponding Green’s function at zero frequency $`\chi _𝐪G_𝐪(\omega =0)Z_𝐪/\omega _𝐪^2`$, where $`\omega _𝐪`$ is the quasiparticle energy, and $`Z_𝐪`$ is the quasiparticle residue. So at the critical point $`1/\chi `$ must vanish approximately as $`(gg_c)^\gamma `$, with $`\gamma =\nu (2\eta )`$, where $`\nu `$ is the critical index for the spectral gap, $`\mathrm{\Delta }(gg_c)^\nu `$, and $`\nu \eta `$ is the critical index for the quasiparticle residue, $`Z(gg_c)^{\nu \eta }`$. For the simple O(1) Lagrangian (2) the critical index is $`\gamma 1.2`$ (see, e.g., Ref. ).

In this paper we use Ising series expansion techniques to compute the susceptibility of this system. The linked-cluster expansion method has been reviewed in a recent article, and will not be repeated here.

In Ref.  we have calculated the susceptibility of the Néel state with respect to the external field.

$$F_d=f\underset{i,j}{}(1)^i𝐒_{i,j}𝐒_{i+1,j},$$
(5)
where the coefficient $`f`$ gives the strength of the field. The susceptibility is defined in the usual way

$$\chi =\frac{1}{2}\frac{^2E}{^2f}|_{f=0},$$
(6)
where $`E`$ is the ground state energy. This susceptibility probes spin singlet excitations that correspond to a spin columnar dimerization. The susceptibility is diverging at $`g=J_2/J_10.4`$ and this is a clear indication of the critical singlet excitation.

Unfortunately convergence of the series expansion for $`\chi `$ is somewhat erratic and therefore the error bars in the numerical data  are rather large. In the present work we calculate susceptibilities $`\chi _z`$ and $`\chi _{}`$ with respect to the fields

$`F_{dz}=f{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}(1)^iS_{i,j}^{(z)}S_{i+1,j}^{(z)},`$ (7)
$`F_d=f{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}(1)^i\left(S_{i,j}^{(x)}S_{i+1,j}^{(x)}+S_{i,j}^{(y)}S_{i+1,j}^{(y)}\right).`$ (8)
Here $`z`$ is direction of the staggered magnetization in the Néel state. Both $`\chi _z`$ and $`\chi _{}`$ probe the same excitations as $`\chi `$. Using the Ising expansion about the Néel order, we have computed the series for $`\chi _z`$ and $`\chi _{}`$ in powers of exchange anisotropy to order 7 for given values of $`J_2/J_1`$. The calculations involve a list of 28474 distinct connected clusters up to 9 sites. We do not display the series here but can provide them on request. Fortunately convergence of the series for $`\chi _{}`$ and $`\chi _z`$ is much better than that for $`\chi `$. Let us note that the field $`F_d`$ can be represented as $`F_d=F_{dz}+F_d`$. However the susceptibility $`\chi `$ cannot be represented as a simple superposition of $`\chi _z`$ and $`\chi _{}`$, $`\chi \chi _z+\chi _{}`$. Therefore a relatively poor convergence of the series for $`\chi `$ does not contradict the better convergence for $`\chi _z`$ and $`\chi _{}`$. The results for $`1/\chi _z`$ and $`1/\chi _{}`$ are presented in Fig.1 and Fig.2. The susceptibilities are diverging at the critical point $`g_{cs}`$. From Fig.1 we conclude that $`g_{cs}=0.38\pm 0.04`$, and from Fig.2 we conclude that $`g_{cs}=0.41\pm 0.03`$. Considering these estimates as independent ones and averaging them we find

$$g_{cs}=0.40\pm 0.0240.40\pm 0.02.$$
(9)
We have also calculated the susceptibility $`\chi _p`$ with respect to the field

$$F_p=\underset{i,j}{}(1)^{i+j}\left(S_{i,j}^{(x)}S_{i+1,j+1}^{(x)}+S_{i,j}^{(y)}S_{i+1,j+1}^{(y)}\right),$$
(10)
that probes excitations of plaquette symmetry, but this is not coupled to the spin-dimer excitations. The Ising series for $`\chi _p`$ has been computed up to order 7. The calculations involve a list of connected clusters different from that for $`\chi _z`$ and $`\chi _{}`$ because the symmetry of the field is different. The number of cluster in this calculation is 28450, also up to 9 sites. The results of the Ising series expansion calculations for $`1/\chi _p`$ are shown in Fig.3. According to the data the plaquette excitation is not critical and hence is not relevant.

The susceptibilities (7) probe the real scalar field $`s`$ that corresponds to the spin columnar dimerization. The ground state expectation value of the field is zero at $`g<g_{cs}`$ (no spontaneous dimerization), but the susceptibilities are diverging at $`g_{cs}`$. Therefore one can say the effective Lagrangian for the field $`s`$ is given by Eq. (2). This is a possible scenario, but does not explain why the critical points for the scalar field (9) and for the vector field (4) coincide or at least are very close: in this scenario this is just a pure coincidence. To be absolutely correct we have to say that there is another scalar field $`s^{}`$ that corresponds to the replacement $`ij`$, $`ji`$ in Eqs. (7). So the symmetry of the transition is $`O(1)\times O(1)`$. However this additional $`s^{}`$-fiels is completely identical to $`s`$, and therefore it does not require a special consideration.

The fields $`𝐯`$, $`s`$ and $`s^{}`$ are not independent: they certainly interact with each other. Therefore there is an alternative scenario that naturally explains the coincidence of the quantum critical points. Consider the effective Lagrangian of an interacting massive vector field and two massless scalar fields.

$``$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\left[(_t𝐯)^2c_v^2(𝐯)^2m_v^2𝐯^2\right]{\displaystyle \frac{u_v}{4}}\left(𝐯^2\right)^2`$ (11)
$`+`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\left[(_ts)^2c_s^2(s)^2+(_ts^{})^2c_s^2(s^{})^2\right]`$ (12)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{u_s}{4}}(s^2+s^2)^2{\displaystyle \frac{u_s^{}}{4}}s^2s^2{\displaystyle \frac{u_{sv}}{4}}𝐯^2(s^2+s^2),`$ (13)
where $`m_v^2=a_v(gg_{cv})`$. This Lagrangian incorporates all the relevant degrees of freedom. At $`g<g_{cv}`$ the vector field develops the ground state expectation value $`<𝐯>=\sqrt{a_v(g_{cv}g)/u_v}`$. and, hence, because of the interaction the massless scalar fields attain an effective mass $`m_{eff}^2=a_v(g_{cv}g)u_{sv}/(2u_v)`$. Thus in this scenario the scalar susceptibilities are diverging exactly at the same point where the Néel order disappears, $`\chi 1/(g_{cv}g)`$. In the magnetically disordered phase at $`g>g_{cv}`$ both the scalar fields remain massless. This scenario corresponds to a translationally invariant spin liquid state. One can also introduce in Eq. (11) a small negative bare mass for the scalar fields, $`m_s^2=|m_s^2|`$. However due to Eqs. (4) and (9) this mass must be very small because it splits the critical points. In this case there is a region between the critical points where the spin-dimer and the Néel order coexist .

We mention, in this connection, that in one-dimensional systems the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM) theorem guarantees that a uniform phase in a quantum spin system is gapless and a gapped phase breaks translational symmetry . Extension of the LSM theorem to two dimensions was proposed  but not proven (see also Ref. ). We note that the effective Lagrangian (11) is in perfect agreement with the conjectured two-dimensional extension of the LSM theorem. If the bare singlet mass $`m_s^2`$ is zero then the magnetically disordered state is uniform and there are two gapless excitations in the state. If $`m_s^2=|m_s^2|0`$ then one of the scalar fields develops the ground state expectation value $`<s>=\sqrt{|m_s^2|/u_s}`$ (spontaneous dimerization) and another attains finite positive mass due to the interaction terms, $`m_{eff}^2=\frac{u_s^{}}{2u_s}|m_s^2|`$.

The effective Lagrangian (11) corresponds to the translationally invariant intermediate spin liquid state (SL) and in this part it is in agreement with the conclusion of the recent work . However, as we have shown, this SL state must have gapless singlet excitations. Therefore: 1) the dimer-dimer correlation function must fall off as $`1/r`$, where $`r`$ is the separation between dimers, 2) for a finite cluster of $`N`$ sites the static susceptibility with respect to the dimerization field (5) must scale as

$$\chi =\frac{1}{2f^2}\frac{|<0|F_d|s>|^2}{E_0E_s}\frac{1}{f^2}\frac{(f\sqrt{N})^2}{\left(1/\sqrt{N}\right)}N^{3/2}.$$
(14)
Both these conclusions disagree with results of Ref. . In our opinion this can be related to the variational nature of that calculation. We would like to stress that for calculation of the susceptibility the external field must be weak, $`f\sqrt{N}E_sE_01/\sqrt{N}`$. If this criterion is violated, the ground state energy shift is proportional to $`f\sqrt{N}`$ and the second derivative (6) vanishes.

It is more likely that the bare singlet mass $`m_s^2=|m_s^2|`$ is small, but non-zero. The dimer series expansions  clearly show two nonzero dimer order parameters in the SL phase. To avoid misunderstanding we stress that we do not claim that one can derive a translationally invariant ground state starting from the dimer basis. This is certainly impossible. However if the true state is a translationally invariant one then the dimer series must generate zero dimer order parameters as an indication that there is something wrong with the dimer state. This does not happen. In principle it is certainly possible that convergence of series is so peculiar that the standard Pade approximant method based on a limited number of terms does not give the right answer, but this is an unlikely event and there no examples of such behavior. In the case of the dimer ground state the static susceptibility of a finite cluster with respect to the dimerization field (5) must scale as

$$\chi =\frac{1}{2f^2}\frac{|<0|F_d|0>|^2}{\mathrm{\Delta }E}\frac{1}{f^2}\frac{(fN)^2}{\mathrm{exp}(aN)}N^2e^{aN}.$$
(15)
For the calculation the external field must be very weak, $`fN\mathrm{\Delta }E\mathrm{exp}(aN)`$. If this criterion is violated, the ground state energy shift is proportional to $`fN`$ and the second derivative (6) vanishes.

In conclusion we have demonstrated that the critical dynamics of singlet and triplet excitations in the two-dimensional $`J_1J_2`$-model are closely related. The critical points for singlet and triplet excitations are very close or coincide. This is a new type of critical behavior and we argue that this is a generic property of strongly frustrated spin systems. We have formulated the effective field theory describing the critical behavior. The analysis favors gapless or almost gapless singlet excitations in the magnetically disordered phase. The effective field theory deduced in our work supports the two-dimensional extension of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem conjectured some time ago.

This work forms part of a research project supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. We thank S. Sachdev for communicating important references. The computation has been performed on the AlphaServer SC computer. We are grateful for the computing resources provided by the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) National Facility.

.


text:
# Using Electrons on Liquid Helium for Quantum Computing

## I INTRODUCTION

A full description of quantum computing is beyond the scope of this paper. More complete descriptions are given elsewhere.

A classical computer has binary bits with values that are either $`0`$ or $`1`$. A quantum computer is operated with quantum bits, called qubits. Each qubit uses two energy levels of a quantum system for the components $`0`$ and $`1`$. However, a qubit can be in a state that is a superposition of these two components,

$$\mathrm{\Psi }=a|0+b|1;|a|^2+|b|^2=1$$
(1)
A quantum computer would use a superposition of many qubit states. An n-qubit system has $`2^n`$ basis vectors, $`|x_j`$, which can be taken as products of the basis vectors of each of the $`n`$ qubits. An arbitrary combination of these can be written as

$$\mathrm{\Psi }=\underset{j}{}\alpha _j|x_j;\underset{j}{}|\alpha _j|^2=1$$
(2)
An example of a basis vector for the five qubit case (for $`j=k`$) is, $`|x_k`$ = $`|01100`$.

The superposition states represented by Eqs. (1) and (2) are responsible for the great potential advantage of quantum logic operations relative to classical ones. In the classical case an operation starts, proceeds and ends with every qubit in a given state. In the quantum case, an operation can use qubits in a superposition of many possible basis states. Operation on such superposition states can be equivalent to performing a large number of computations in parallel. The difficulty in utilizing this advantage arises from the fundamental nature of measurement in quantum processes, namely that measurement of the energy of an individual qubit will necessarily collapse the wave function so that the result can be only either $`|0`$ or $`|1`$ for each qubit. This requires algorithms that can yield definite answers to computations even though the square of the coefficients $`\alpha _j`$ represent only probabilities.

For quantum logic operations with a physical system one must have
a) discrete states that can be identified with the components $`|0`$ or $`|1`$.
b) a method to prepare an initial state.
c) a method for operating quantum gates.
d) a readout mechanism.
e) a coherence time sufficient to undertake a large number of operations.
f) for practical computing the system must be scalable to a large number of qubits.

We describe here a proposed quantum computer with qubits made of electrons on the surface of a liquid helium film and describe our method for fabricating the qubits and the methods by which their quantum states can be manipulated and measured. This system was first proposed by Platzman and Dykman and has been described elsewhere.

## II ELECTRONS ON HELIUM

Electrons are bound to the surface of liquid helium by the dielectric image potential. A repulsive Pauli potential prevents them from penetrating into liquid helium. The hydrogenic-like potential is of the form

$$V=\mathrm{\Lambda }e^2/z;\mathrm{\Lambda }=(\kappa 1)/4(\kappa +1),$$
(3)
where $`z`$ is the coordinate normal to the surface, and $`\kappa `$ is the dielectric constant of helium. The energy levels form a Rydberg spectrum, $`E_n=R/n^2`$. We give parameters for liquid 3He; $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_3`$ = $`0.00521`$, $`R_3`$ = $`0.37`$ meV, and the Bohr radius for this problem is $`a_B`$ = $`10.2`$ nm. The average separation of the electron from the surface is $`z`$ = $`15.3`$ nm and $`61`$ nm for the ground and first excited state, respectively. The transition frequency between the ground and first excited state is $`70`$ GHz. These transitions can be shifted with a Stark field applied normal to the surface. The potentials with and without a Stark field are shown in Fig. 1.

## III DESIGN OF THE COMPUTER

We identify the ground and first excited states of these electrons with the states $`|0`$ and $`|1`$, respectively. In order to address and control the qubits each electron must be localized laterally. This will be accomplished by locating electrons above microelectrodes (posts) that are separated by about $`0.5`$ $`\mu `$m. The electrons will be separated from the tops of the posts by a $`0.5`$ $`\mu `$m thick helium film. The lateral confinement results from the image potentials of the posts and the electric field from the potential on the posts, and the electron will be in the ground state for lateral motion at low temperatures.

A schematic of posts and electrons for a two-qubit system is shown in Fig. 2. A voltage applied to a given post controls the Stark field for the corresponding electron. An array of posts fabricated at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility is shown in Fig. 3. A prototype with lead wires to the posts and an isolated ground plane to screen the field from the leads has also been fabricated. Numerical computations of the electric field from the posts and ground plane have been completed and fabrication of a final design is in progress. Note that this system is scalable to an arbitrary number of posts or qubits.

A schematic of our cell is shown in Fig. 4. The posts will be located in the bottom of a waveguide that transmits sub-mm radiation to the electrons. Superconducting microbolometers will be located at the top of the guide to detect electrons that are allowed to escape from the posts. A tunnel-diode electron-emission source will be located above the electron detectors. Electrons will be loaded onto the film through a hole in the detector chip, and one electron will be trapped over each post by an applied positive potential. The thickness of the helium film will be measured with a capacitor made of metal strips deposited on a part of the ground plane containing the posts that extends outside of the waveguide. The electrodes of the capacitor are in the shape of a comb with interwoven teeth spaced by approximately one micron. The system will be operated at $`10`$ mK to increase coherence times of the qubit states.

Our initial tests will be on a 3He film. The microwave setup for 3He is easier to work with because the transition frequencies are lower and the corresponding waveguide is larger. There a number of other advantages in using 3He. Liquid 3He has a large viscosity at low temperatures. This should severely dampen high-frequency ripplons involved in T1 and T2 processes, although new decoherence processes involving interactions with the bulk 3He may occur. Thermal contact between the sample chamber and 3He is much easier to achieve than for 4He, and the surface is less affected by microphonics. Finally, the larger separation of the electrons from the surface leads to a somewhat larger dipole interaction between neighboring states.

## IV OPERATIONS

The operation would normally begin with all qubits in the ground state. Then according to the requirements of the desired operations, each qubit would be prepared in some admixture of states $`|0`$ and $`|1`$ by Stark shifting individual qubits into resonance with microwave radiation for a predetermined time. The state of the qubit $`n`$ will be

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_n=cos(\mathrm{\Theta }_n/2)|0isin(\mathrm{\Theta }_n/2)|1,$$
(4)
where $`\mathrm{\Theta }_n=\mathrm{\Omega }\tau _n`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }=eE_{rf}1|z|2/\mathrm{}`$ is the Rabi frequency, $`E_{rf}`$ is the strength of the rf field, and $`\tau _n`$ is the time the $`n^{th}`$ qubit is in resonance with the microwave field.

In general, computations will be implemented by applying pulses of radiation to interacting qubits. We illustrate a potential operating mode of the system by describing two qubits operated as a swap gate. The interaction between qubits is via the Coulomb energy, which is much larger than the interaction between the induced dipole moment of each qubit. The dipolar component of the direct interaction potential between qubits $`i`$ and $`j`$ is

$$V(z_i,z_j)(e^2/8\pi \epsilon _0d^3)(z_iz_j)^2,$$
(5)
where $`d`$ is the electron separation, and $`z_i`$ is the separation of the $`i^{th}`$ electron from the helium surface. Start with one qubit in the state $`|0`$ and the other in the state $`|1`$. Next apply the same Stark fields to both qubits so that the states $`|01`$ and $`|10`$ would be degenerate. In this condition the system will oscillate between the two states at a frequency given by the interaction energy, which in first order is given by $`e^2a_B^2/4\pi \epsilon _0d^3`$. This frequency is $`1`$ GHz for a separation of $`0.5`$ $`\mu `$m. By leaving the electric fields in this condition for one half cycle of this oscillation, the two qubits will swap states. It will be difficult to tune neighboring qubits to precisely identical Stark shifts, and in practice we may sweep the Stark shift of one qubit through resonance with a neighboring qubit. In this case, the final state of the qubit will depend on the rate at which the electric field is swept through the resonance condition.

Readout. The wavefunction of the system of entangled qubits collapses when a measurement is made. Thus, the states of all qubits must be read within the time scale is set by the plasma frequency $`100`$ GHz. We describe here our initial proposal for a destructive readout pending research into other schemes. We will apply a short, $`1`$ ns, ramp of an extracting electric field to all qubits. The potential for a fixed value of extracting field is shown in Fig. 5. The tunneling probability is exponential in the time-dependent barrier height. All electrons in the upper $`|1`$ state will tunnel through the barrier within a short period of time when this probability becomes sufficiently large. The escape of an electron will be detected by the bolometer detector mentioned above. For this extracting field the tunneling probability will be negligibly small for electrons in the ground $`|0`$ state. After the ramp is removed the remaining electrons will be in the ground state. Subsequently, we plan to sequentially apply to each post an extracting field sufficiently large so that electrons in the ground state will tunnel from the surface. A $`|0`$ will be registered for each electron detected and a $`|1`$ for those states that are empty.

An alternate scheme would be to apply an extracting voltage to the post under one electron at a time. For small numbers of qubits in our initial exploratory experiments, the system would then be prepared in the same state repeatedly and a different qubit sampled each time the operation is carried out. Ultimately we hope to develop a non-destructive readout that will allow simultaneous measurement of the states of all qubits without allowing the electrons to escape.

## V DECOHERENCE

All logic operations must be accomplished in less time than it takes for the interactions of the qubit with the environment to destroy the phase coherence of the state functions. For electrons on 4He the lifetime of the excited state $`|1`$ is limited by interactions with ripplons. The electron-ripplon coupling Hamiltonian is

$$H_{er}=eE_{}\delta ,$$
(6)
where $`E_{}`$ is the normal component of the electric field that includes both the applied field and variations in the helium dielectric image field due to surface distortions, and $`\delta `$ is the amplitude of the surface height variation. The average rms thermal fluctuation of the surface is

$$\delta _\text{T}=(k_B\text{T}/\sigma )^{1/2}2\times 10^9cm$$
(7)
The transition from the excited to ground state requires a ripplon with a wave vector $`a_B^1`$. For a single electron on bulk helium a radiationless transition occurs with the energy absorbed by electron plane-wave states for motion parallel to the surface and momentum absorbed by ripplons. For this case a calculation of T1 yields

$$\text{T}_1^1\mathrm{\Delta }\nu (\delta _T/a_B)^2,$$
(8)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu `$ is the transition frequency. At T$`=10`$ mK, $`\delta _T/a_B10^3`$, and T1 $`10\mu `$s.

For electrons confined by posts, the lateral states are harmonic oscillator states of the image potential well of the posts. These are separated in energy by $`\mathrm{}\mathrm{\Omega }_1\mathrm{}(e^2/4\pi \epsilon _0md^3)^{1/2}300`$ mK. For an array of electrons there is a band of plasma oscillations associated with each harmonic oscillator level, which for an electron separation of $`0.5`$ $`\mu `$m on bulk helium has a band width that is greater than $`300`$ mK. The confining potential of the posts reduces the width of this band. Preliminary calculations suggest that the width may be sufficiently small to prevent conservation of energy in a radiationless transition. This is illustrated in Fig. 6 where the transition is shown to be incommensurate in energy with an excitation between the harmonic oscillator states. Suppression of this relaxation channel would lead to a very large value of T1.

If the confining potential does not sufficiently reduce the width of the plasma band, this will be accomplished with an applied magnetic field. A magnetic field confines the lateral states to Landau levels with a band of plasma oscillations of width $`\mathrm{}\mathrm{\Omega }_2h\omega _p^2/\omega _c`$. Here $`\omega _p`$ and $`\omega _c`$ are, respectively, the zone-boundary plasmon of the ordered qubit array and cyclotron frequencies. The transitions between Landau levels with the emission of one ripplon cannot conserve energy and momentum for $`B1.5`$ Tesla.

The two-ripplon process can either cause a transition to the ground state or lead to dephasing by an incoherent phase modulation due to quasi-elastic scattering within a ”hydrogenic level” by thermal ripplons with a wave vector equal to the inverse cyclotron radius. At $`10`$ mK and a field of $`1.5`$ Tesla, this leads to a dephasing time T2 of $`100`$ ms. Single operations can be made in $`1`$ ns. Thus, in principle, $`10^5`$ operations can be preformed in a decoherence time.

High frequency ripplons are strongly damped on a liquid 3He surface. Thus, it is possible that the values of T1 and T2 may be longer than for 4He. A possible dephasing mechanism for the case of 3He is via interactions of the electron with excitations on the Fermi surface of bulk 3He. Theoretical calculations of this mechanism have not been carried out.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to acknowledge Mark Dykman for helpful conversations. This work was supported in part by NSF grant EIS-0085922.


text:
# The Optical, Infrared and Radio Properties of Extragalactic Sources Observed by SDSS, 2MASS and FIRST Surveys

## 1. Introduction

The increasing availability of large scale digital sky surveys spanning many wavelengths offers an unprecedented view of the Universe. The positional matching of such surveys is of obvious scientific interest. Not only can wide wavelength coverage provide a comprehensive description of the various classes of astrophysical object, but characterizing the most populous families can help isolating more peculiar, and usually more interesting, objects. In this contribution we discuss the matching of early SDSS data with 2MASS and FIRST surveys. The details of this work are presented elsewhere (Finlator et al. 2000, Menou et al. 2001, Knapp et al. 2001, Ivezić et al. 2001, Ivezić et al. 2002) and here we summarize the most important results.

The SDSS (York et al. 2000, Stoughton et al. 2002, and references therein) is a digital photometric and spectroscopic survey which will cover one quarter of the Celestial Sphere in the North Galactic cap and produce a smaller area ($``$225 deg2) but much deeper survey in the Southern Galactic hemisphere. It utilizes five broad bands ($`u^{}`$, $`g^{}`$, $`r^{}`$, $`i^{}`$, $`z^{}`$) with central wavelengths ranging from 3550 Å to 8930 Å, and will detect about 108 stars and a similar number of galaxies brighter than $``$22m. For about one million brightest galaxies and 100,000 quasar candidates SDSS will also obtain high-quality spectra. The 2MASS (Skrutskie et al. 1997) surveyed the entire sky in near-infrared light ($`J`$, $`H`$, and $`K_s`$ bands) and catalogued $``$300 million stars, as well as several million galaxies. The FIRST survey (Becker et al. 1995) provides the most comprehensive view of the Universe at 20 cm and will detect about a million radio galaxies and quasars.

## 2.  SDSS Color-color and color-magnitude diagrams

Of the three surveys discussed here, SDSS provides the most detailed information about the detected objects due to its multi-color optical photometry, the highest angular resolution, and the spectroscopic data. The position of an object in SDSS color-color and color-magnitude diagrams can be efficiently used to constrain its nature. The color-color and color-magnitude diagrams which summarize photometric properties of SDSS sources are shown in Figure 1 (magnitudes are marked as $`m^{}`$ because the calibration is still uncertain within $``$5%). We use the “model” magnitudes, as computed by the photometric pipeline (“photo”, Lupton et al. 2002). The model magnitudes are measured by fitting an exponential and a de Vacouleurs profile, and using the formally better model in $`r`$ to evaluate the magnitude. Photometric errors are typically 0.03m at the bright end ($`r^{}<20^m`$), and increase to about 0.1m at $`r^{}21^m`$, the faint limit relevant in this work (for more details see Ivezić et al. 2000 and Strateva et al. 2001, hereafter S01).

The top two panels in Figure 1 display the $`g^{}r^{}`$ vs. $`u^{}g^{}`$ and $`r^{}i^{}`$ vs. $`g^{}r^{}`$ color-color diagrams for $``$ 300,000 objects observed in 20 deg2 of sky. The unresolved sources are shown as dots, and the distribution of resolved sources is shown by linearly spaced density contours. The low-redshift quasars (z $`<`$ 2.5), selected by their blue $`u^{}g^{}`$ colors indicating UV excess (0.6 $`<`$ $`u^{}g^{}`$$`<`$ 0.6, -0.2 $`<`$ $`g^{}r^{}`$$`<`$ 0.6), are shown as circles. Most of the unresolved sources marked as dots are stars. For a more detailed discussion of the stellar properties in SDSS photometric system see Finlator et al. (2000, hereafter F00) and references therein. Here we only briefly mention that the position of a star in color-color diagrams is mainly determined by its spectral type, as marked, and that the modeling of the stellar populations observed by SDSS (F00) indicates that the majority of these stars ($``$99%) are on the main sequence. The lower two panels in Figure 1 display the color-magnitude diagrams for unresolved (left) and resolved (right) sources, with the distributions shown by linearly spaced density contours. The distribution of galaxies in the SDSS color-color diagrams has been studied by Shimasaku et al. (2001) and S01. S01 found that galaxies show a strongly bimodal distribution of the $`u^{}r^{}`$ color, also visible in the upper left panel in Figure 1, and demonstrated that the two components can be associated with the spiral (blue component) and elliptical (red component) galaxies.

The aim of this work is to find out where in the diagrams shown in Figure 1 2MASS and FIRST sources are found, and how many 2MASS and FIRST sources are not detected by SDSS.

## 3.  The Positional Matching of SDSS and 2MASS Sources

The positional matching of SDSS and 2MASS sources is described by F00, who also discussed the optical and infrared properties of stars. The analysis of extragalactic sources observed by both SDSS and 2MASS will be described in detail by Ivezić et al. (2002). Practically all 2MASS sources ($``$98% for point sources from the PSC and $``$97% for extended sources from the XSC) are matched to an SDSS source within 2 arcsec. About $``$11% of the 2MASS PSC sources are optically resolved galaxies and the rest are dominated by stars. Practically all ($``$98%) sources from the 2MASS XSC are associated with an optically resolved source.

Figure 2 shows the color-magnitude diagrams for sources observed by both SDSS and 2MASS. The top two panels show representative optical and near-IR diagrams for $``$10,000 stars, and the bottom two panels show analogous diagrams for a similar number of galaxies. The vertical dashed lines at $`JK_s=1`$ in the two right panels roughly separate stars from galaxies in 2MASS data (only $``$22% of these galaxies are resolved in 2MASS images). The horizontal dashed line in the lower left panel shows the magnitude limit for SDSS spectroscopic galaxy survey. Practically all sources from the 2MASS XSC are brighter than that limit, and are shown as magenta dots (on top of blue dots that mark sources from the 2MASS PSC). The fraction of 2MASS galaxies in each of the regions in the $`r^{}`$ vs. $`g^{}r^{}`$ color-magnitude diagram that track different morphological types (shown by dashed lines in Figure 6, for details see Ivezić et al. 2002) is listed in Table 1. Based on the matched source density, we project that by the completion of SDSS the matched SDSS-2MASS sample will include about 107 stars and 106 galaxies. About half of these galaxies will be part of the SDSS spectroscopic survey, and about about 105 will have photometry better than 0.1 mag. in all 8 bands.

Figure 3 shows the color-color diagrams for stars and galaxies from Figure 2, which also have better than 10$`\sigma `$ detections in all three 2MASS bands. Stars are shown as blue and red dots, separated by $`g^{}r^{}`$=0.7 which approximately corresponds to K0 spectral type (F00). Galaxies are shown as green and magenta dots, separated by $`u^{}r^{}=2.22`$ which approximately separates spiral and elliptical galaxies (S01). The unresolved sources with optical colors indicative of low-redshift quasars are shown as blue circles (open for sources with better than 5$`\sigma `$ detections in all three 2MASS bands and solid for better than 7$`\sigma `$). Note that it is not possible to separate galaxies from stars using only optical colors (see upper left panel). However, the addition of IR data allows nearly perfect separation, and the lines shown in the two right panels outline the regions populated by stars, galaxies and low-redshift quasars (the $`i^{}`$-$`K_s`$ color is based on the “psf” $`i^{}`$ magnitude). This clean separation can be used to gauge the success of the SDSS star-galaxy separation at the bright end. We find that 99.3% of the sources deemed as resolved by SDSS photometric pipeline are found in the region marked as “galaxies”. The bottom left panel shows an infrared color-color diagram constructed with 2MASS data. Using SDSS data we find that sources with $`HK_s>0.3`$ are predominantly extragalactic, while the bluer sources are stars.

### 3.1. Search for Reddened Quasars Using SDSS and 2MASS

Dust-reddened quasars are hard to distinguish in optical color-color diagrams because the plausible reddening vectors are roughly parallel to the stellar locus. However, such objects may be more easily distinguishable from stars in optical-infrared color-color diagrams because the reddening moves objects from the region marked “QSOs” to the region marked “galaxies”, thus missing the stellar locus (because quasars have redder $`JK_s`$ colors than stars). Since SDSS imaging data can easily separate optically unresolved and resolved sources, selecting sources with e.g. $`JK_s>1`$ and $`g^{}i^{}>0.5`$ can in principle reveal dust-obscured quasars. In a pilot study, we have obtained spectra for 30 optically unresolved sources from the region marked “galaxies”. Most of them are M stars, and not a single one was confirmed to be a quasar. This null result places a strong upper limit on the fraction of reddened quasars.

Cutri et al. 2001 discuss the selection of red AGNs from the 2MASS PSC database using the condition that $`JK_s>2`$. These sources may be dust-reddened quasars with optical colors indistinguishable from those of stars and thus missed by SDSS spectroscopic targeting of quasars. We have analyzed a sample of 241 such candidates selected from a 220 deg2 large region (Ivezić, Cutri, Nelson, et al. 2002). The majority of these sources are optically resolved (226), and are dominated by red (elliptical) galaxies (194) with redshifts up to $``$0.4. Their very red $`JK_s`$ colors seem to be a consequence of the K correction. The majority of optically unresolved matches (13 out of 15) show UV excess indicative of quasars with redshifts $`<`$2.5 and thus are easily distinguishable from stars using optical colors alone. This is confirmed for 9 sources for which SDSS spectra are available. One of the remaining two unresolved sources is a confirmed L dwarf, and the other one has optical-infared colors consistent with also being an L dwarf. Consequently, this preliminary analysis indicates that the fraction of moderately reddened quasars ($`A_V<5`$) which are missed by SDSS quasar survey is small. While the precise value of this fraction is somewhat model-dependent, it seems to be less than $``$10%.

## 4.  The Positional Matching of SDSS and FIRST Sources

The positional matching of SDSS and FIRST sources is described in detail by Ivezić et al. 2001 (see also Menou et al. 2001 and Knapp et al. 2001). Optical identifications can be made for $``$31% of FIRST sources. The majority of the FIRST sources identified with an SDSS source are optically resolved, and their fraction among the matched sources is a function of the radio flux, increasing from $``$50% at the bright end to $``$90% at the FIRST faint limit (1 mJy). The cumulative fraction of the optically unresolved sources among the SDSS-FIRST matches is $``$16%. The colors of optically unresolved sources, as well as SDSS spectra for objects brighter than the flux cutoff for the spectroscopic targeting, indicate that they are dominated by quasars. Figure 4 compares the differential radio counts for SDSS-detected quasars, marked by dots, and galaxies, marked by triangles (we introduced an AB radio magnitude defined as $`t=2.5\mathrm{log}(F_{int}/3631\mathrm{J}\mathrm{y})`$, where $`F_{int}`$ is the total radio flux). The dashed lines show the best fits in the 11.5 $`<t<`$ 15.5 range: for quasars

$$\mathrm{log}(N)=2.24+0.14t,$$
(1)
and for galaxies

$$\mathrm{log}(N)=5.33+0.40t.$$
(2)
We find no significant differences in the counts of FIRST sources with and without an optical identification: they both follow $`\mathrm{log}(N)=C+0.3t`$ relations. To illustrate this point, we compare the sum of counts for quasars and galaxies (renormalized to account for the matching fraction), shown as open squares, to the counts of all FIRST sources, shown by the solid line. As evident, the two distributions are similar.

Based on the matched source density, by the completion of SDSS and FIRST the matched sample will include $``$250,000 galaxies and $``$50,000 quasars. As discussed in detail by Ivezić et al. 2001, the majority of these quasars are radio-loud.

### 4.1.  The Properties of Quasars Observed by SDSS and FIRST

One of the most important advantages of a radio-selected sample of quasars is that it can be used to estimate the fraction of quasars with stellar colors that are missed by optical surveys, such as SDSS. The majority of optically unresolved SDSS-FIRST sources have non-stellar colors. We find that the fraction of sources with colors indistinguishable from stellar is $``$10%, assuming that the colors of radio-loud ($`F_\nu ^{radio}>10F_\nu ^{optical}`$, for more details see Ivezić et al. 2001) quasars are similar to the colors of radio-quiet quasars. We do, however, detect a small but statistically significant difference between the colors of radio-loud quasars and radio-quiet quasars. The left panel in Figure 5 shows the dependence of QSO $`g^{}`$-$`i^{}`$ color on redshift (for a similar dependence of other SDSS colors on redshift see Richards et al. 2001). The distribution of optically selected and unresolved quasars with $`i^{}`$$`<`$ 19 is shown by contours. The 464 radio-loud quasars from the matched sample are shown as squares. The dashed line shows the median $`g^{}`$-$`i^{}`$ color of all optically selected quasars in the redshift range 1–2, which is subtracted from the $`g^{}`$-$`i^{}`$ color to obtain a color excess. The right panel compares the distribution of this color excess for all optically selected quasars in that redshift range, shown by circles, to the distribution for 225 radio-loud quasars, shown by squares. The $`g^{}`$-$`i^{}`$ color-excess distribution for radio quasars appears to be different from the distribution for the whole sample. First, the median excess for the radio subsample is redder by $``$0.05 mag, with about $`4\sigma `$ significance. Second, the fraction of objects with very large color excess is larger for the radio subsample. Adopting 0.5 mag for the minimum value of the color-excess, we find that 2.4$`\pm `$0.2% of quasars have such extreme $`g^{}`$-$`i^{}`$ colors, while this fraction is 7.1$`\pm `$1.8% for the radio-loud quasars.

### 4.2.  The Properties of Galaxies Observed by SDSS and FIRST

Figure 6 displays the $`r^{}`$ vs. $`g^{}r^{}`$ color-magnitude diagram for SDSS-FIRST galaxies, shown by dots, compared to the distribution of all SDSS galaxies, shown by linearly-spaced contours. The left panel shows the distribution of the SDSS-FIRST galaxies brighter than $`r^{}`$=21.5, and the right panel shows the distribution of galaxies for which SDSS spectra are available. For details about the spectroscopic targeting of SDSS galaxies see Strauss et al. 2001 and Eisenstein et al. 2001. The dashed lines outline regions with different galaxy morphology and fraction of radio galaxies, as listed in Table 1. At the bright optical end ($`r^{}`$$`<`$ 17.5) these radio-galaxies represent $``$5% of all SDSS galaxies, with the radio fraction for red galaxies $``$2 times higher than for blue galaxies. In the magnitude range 17.5 $`<`$ $`r^{}`$$`<`$ 20, $``$0.5% of SDSS galaxies are detected by FIRST, and the radio fraction of the reddest galaxies, dominated by giant ellipticals, is $``$40 times larger than the radio fraction of the bluest galaxies. We find that radio galaxies in a redshift-limited sample have statistically indistinguishable colors and luminosity distribution from other galaxies from the same volume. Nevertheless, the preliminary analysis of spectra indicates that the fraction of active galaxies is higher for the FIRST-detected galaxies than for all SDSS galaxies selected in the same regions of the optical color-magnitude diagrams. A more quantitative analysis of this effect will be presented in a future publication.

## 5.  Discussion

The preliminary analysis of sources in common to SDSS, 2MASS and FIRST surveys indicates the enormous potential of combining the modern digital sky surveys. The eight-color highly accurate photometry, the morphological information, radio properties, and redshift information for several orders of magnitude larger samples than previously available is bound to place the studies of extragalactic sources at an entirely new level. A good example of a result made possible by both a large sample and accurate photometry is the small, yet statistically significant, difference between the optical colors of radio-loud and radio-quiet quasars. Another result with potentially large astrophysical significance is the upper limit of 10% on the fraction of quasars with stellar colors, and finding that optical colors of FIRST-detected galaxies are not significantly different from other galaxies in a volume-limited sample.

Acknowledgments

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is a joint project of The University of Chicago, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, The Johns Hopkins University, the Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington. Apache Point Observatory, site of the SDSS telescopes, is operated by the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC). Funding for the project has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the SDSS member institutions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, and the Max Planck Society. The SDSS Web site is http://www.sdss.org/.


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# The Spectrum of the Th-Ar Hollow-Cathode Lamp Used with the 2dcoudé Spectrograph

## Part I Description

### Introduction

Thorium-Argon lamps are the most popular choice for wavelength calibration on high-resolution grating spectrographs. The wealth of emission lines, the lack of hyperfine splitting for the only isotope of thorium naturally occuring (232Th), and its heavy weight, that results in a very small Doppler broadening, makes of this actinide a good choice. Thorium (Z=90) is responsible for most of the emission lines observed in the optical spectrum emitted by a hollow-cathode Th-Ar lamp. In this type of lamp, an electric discharge ionizes Ar atoms, which are accelerated into the cup-shaped thorium cathode. The Ar II ions sputter Th atoms that get excited by collisions and then radiatively decay to lower levels.

Using a state-of-the-art CCD, a short exposure can register with high quality the spectrum of a commercial hollow-cathode lamp, even at very high dispersion. The appearance of the spectrum changes depending on the characteristics of the lamp (e.g. the vendor), the spectral resolution, the electric current applied, and also as a result of aging. For this reason, atlases of the spectrum of the calibration sources are commonly prepared for specific combinations of lamps/spectrographs. In fact, almost all recently developed spectrographs are provided with maps of the spectra of their wavelength-calibration sources. Often, these maps are accessible through the World Wide Web (WWW), taking advantage of the added flexibility compared to printed copies (e.g. UVES on the Very Large Telescope, FEROS on the ESO 1.52m, UCLES on the Anglo-Australian Telescope, MUSICOS on the Isaac Newton Telescope, the Coudé spectrograph on the KPNO 2.1m, or UES on the William Herschel Telescope).

To produce one such atlas for the 2dcoudé (Tull, MacQueen, Sneden & Lambert 1995) at a resolving power $`R`$ $``$ 60,000 is an easy task, as the cross-dispersion allows for a large spectral coverage – the complete optical range can be acquired in just two exposures. As part of a survey of nearby stars, we recently observed a number of standard stars that are likely of wide interest for other observers. With little more effort the Th-Ar exposures obtained for the survey were combined to produce an atlas.

The Th-Ar linelist commonly used for calibration in IRAF, (Willmarth 1992) provides standard (15o C, 760 torr) dry air wavelengths for 3056 features111A recent Th-Ar atlas produced by Willmarth et al. with the KPNO 2.1m coudé spectrograph is available online from http://www.noao.edu/kpno/specatlas/.. The line list seems to be a combination of the identifications of Palmer and Engleman (1983) for Th and Norlén (1973) for Ar. About 90 % of the lines are attributed to neutral or ionized Th. Palmer and Engleman used the Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) at Kitt Peak National Observatory. They quote an average accuracy for their wavenumbers of 0.002 cm-1, which is equivalent to 0.0002 Å at 3000 Å and 0.001 Å at 7000 Å. It became apparent that the McDonald spectra would provide similar, and in some cases improved, precision. For this reason, and because errors in the FTS measurements have a different dependence with wavelength or line strength than they do in our grating spectrograph, the wavelengths labeling lines in this atlas are those determined in the McDonald spectra.

Some users may be happy with this printed version of the 2dcoudé Th-Ar atlas. However, further advantages can be obtained from the digital version that is available through the WWW. With prior knowledge of the central wavelength or order, the presentation of the atlas can be changed interactively to match the actual spectral setup.

### Acquisition and Reduction of Data

The Th-Ar hollow-cathode employed is a Westinghouse lamp, Type WL-23418, powered with a 14 mA current. This lamp has been used at McDonald since December 1992. The detector was TK3, a thin $`2048\times 2048`$ Tektronix CCD with 24 $`\mu `$m pixels, which was installed at the $`R60,000`$ focus F3. We used grating E2, a 53.67 gr mm-1 R2 echelle from Milton Roy Co. We used slit #4, which has a central width of 511 $`\mu `$m (or approx. 1.2 arcsec on the sky). We refer the reader to Tull et al. (1995) for more details about the instrument.

The exposures used in this atlas were obtained in three different epochs (December 2000, May 2001, and September 2001), as part of a survey of nearby stars (Lambert, Allende Prieto & Cunha 2001). We scaled and combined 42 individual exposures obtained centering 5112 Å in order 67 in the middle of the CCD (blue setup), and 29 exposures obtained with 5178 Å (in the same order) at the center of TK3 (red setup). Figure 1 shows the area covered by the detector on the focal plane for each setup. Most of the exposures were 30s long, but some were up to a factor of three longer.

Using IRAF tasks, we removed the bias, estimated from the overscan area, and we extracted the spectra. The apertures for extraction were defined with the help of a standard star (tracing of the orders) and the spectrum of a quartz lamp that is normally used for flatfield correction (width of the orders). Each of the individual spectra was calibrated in wavelength using the Th-Ar linelist available within IRAF (thar.dat), identifying about 1000 lines per setup, and fitting a 4th order polynomial in the dispersion direction, and a 5th order polynomial in the cross-dispersion direction. The rms scatter was always in the range $`0.00160.0026`$ Å. No attempt was made to correct the instrumental response or the pixel-to-pixel sensitivity variations. Mixing observations from three different observing periods, with multiple changes between the two setups in each run, smoothes out most systematic sensitivity variations between nearby pixels, as the positioning mechanism for the grating is imperfect.

It is indeed desirable to keep corrections to a minimum, as the main goal of this atlas is helping 2dcoudé observers in the identification of the Th-Ar spectrum. As an example, there is a number of spurious features in the orders next to some very strong features in the red. These artifacts cannot be generally matched with wavelengths of thorium or argon features, and they tend to have a distinctive shape. Therefore, we could easily clean the spectra of these features, but in doing so we would be altering significantly the aspect of the lamp spectrum as extracted by an observer for calibration. Most observers do not removed scattered light from the Th-Ar calibration spectra. At a resolving power of 60,000 the stray light is significant only in the red (see Fig. 2), and it has little impact on the accuracy of the calibration. We have not removed it from our spectra. Finally, many strong lines present in the red part of the spectrum are saturated. Observers intentionally overexpose those features in order to bring out weaker lines in the blue and near infrared. Very short exposures and a filter can provide more reliable intensities and wavelengths for those lines, but would alter their aspect compared to typical observations. Thus, we have not taken any measure to correct this problem.

The center of the lines identified in the McDonald spectra were determined with the center1d algorithm in the IRAF task ecidentify. For each of the lines whose wavelength was measured at least in twice in one of the setups, the average and standard error of the mean were determined. Multiple measures of a line occur because of the availability of multiple exposures for each setup, the overlap between the two setups, and the wavelength overlap between adjacent orders. When average values were derived for a line measured in both the blue and red setups, which happened for half of the features, they were weighted with the inverse of the square of their standard errors, and averaged.

The final digital atlas available on the WWW222http://hebe.as.utexas.edu/2dcoude/ covers the region between 3611.9 and 10596.4 Å. However, as the line identification was based on Willmarth’s list, the pictorial atlas and the list of wavelengths was restricted to the interval 3642.2 Å – 9664.7 Å. To produce the pictorial atlas, we scaled the individual exposures by their level of counts, averaging them out after rejecting deviant pixels. We plotted the resulting spectrum in segments of 30 Å, and labeled the lines keeping only the relevant number of digits. Table 1 (Part III) lists the determined wavelengths and their uncertainty (standard error).

To determine the resolution of the Th-Ar atlas we selected 584 lines with a standard error in their wavelengths $``$ 0.0002 Å, and fitted a Gaussian profile with a constant background to the spectrum in an interval 0.4 $`\lambda (\mathrm{\AA })/3700`$ around the line center. Figure 3 displays the histogram of the lines as a function of the resolving power R$`=\lambda /\mathrm{FWHM}`$, which peaks at about 52,000. The intrinsic width of the lines only contributes about 10 % of the observed width.

### Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Ed Barker, David Doss, David Lambert, Bob Tull, and Russel White for help and guidance with the 2dcoudé and in the preparation of this atlas.

### References

* Lambert, D. L., Allende Prieto, C., & Cunha, K. 2001, in the proceedings of the 12th Cambridge Workshop on Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun, ASP Conf. Series, in press

(available at http://hebe.as.utexas.edu/poster.html)
* Norlén, G. 1973, Physica Scripta, 8, 249
* Palmer, B. A., & Engleman, R., Jr. 1983, Atlas of the Thorium Spectrum, LA-9615, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico
* Tull, R. G., MacQueen, P. J., Sneden, C., & Lambert, D. L. 1995, PASP, 107, 251
* Willmarth, D. 1992, A CCD Atlas of Comparison Spectra: Thorium-Argon Hollow Cathode 3180 Å – 9665 Å.

## Part II Pictorial Atlas

## Part III Table of Wavelengths


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# Status and preliminary results of the ANAIS experiment at Canfranc

## 1 INTRODUCTION

There is a substancial evidence to conclude that most of the matter in the Universe must be dark and that it consists mainly of cold non-baryonic particles. Weak Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are favourite candidates to such non-baryonic components. A convicing proof of the detection WIMPs, which are supposedly filling the galactic halo, would be to find unique signatures in the data, like seasonal asymmetries. ANAIS (Annual Modulation with NaI’s) is a large mass experiment intended to investigate the annual modulation effect which would be produced in the signal of galactic WIMPs due to the variations in the relative velocity between the Earth and the halo . It will be installed in the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, located in an old railway tunnel in the Spanish Pyrenees with an overburden of 2450 m.w.e., using up to 10 NaI(Tl) hexagonal crystals (10.7 kg each) as an improved scaled-up version of a previuos experiment . Before setting-up the whole experiment, a prototype is being developed in Canfranc in an attempt to obtain the best energy threshold and lowest radioactive background in the low energy region (2 to 50 keV), as well as to check the stability of the environmental conditions which influence on the detector response.

## 2 THE ANAIS PROTOTYPE

One single detector has been used in the ANAIS prototype; it consists of a NaI(Tl) crystal encapsulated inside 0.5-mm-thick stainless steel and coupled to a PMT through a quartz window. Some components of the photomultiplier have been removed because of their radioimpurities. The scintillator has been placed in a shielding consisting of 10 cm of archaeological lead (of less than 9 mBq/kg of 210Pb) followed by 20 cm of low activity lead, a sealed box in PVC (maintained at overpressure to prevent the intrusion of radon), 2-mm-thick cadmium sheets, and finally, 40 cm of polyethylene and tanks of borated water. An active veto made of plastic scintillators is covering the set-up.

The data acquisition system, based on standard NIM and CAMAC electronics, has two different parts following the two output signals implemented from the PMT; the fast signal is recorded using a digital oscilloscope while the slow signal is routed through a linear amplifier and analog-to-digital converters controlled by a PC through parallel interfaces, to register the energy of events up to $`1.7`$ MeV.

Parameters of the pulses used to reject the noise produced by PMT in the various previous NaI experiments are the mean amplitude , a ratio of area portions , etc. In the present work the filtering of noise uses the squared deviation of the digitalized pulse from the well-known theoretical shape of a scintillation event of the same area. To reject the noise, a safe cut at $`3\sigma `$ from the center of the gaussian distribution of this parameter for calibration events from 4 to 10 keV has been used.

By comparing the data recorded from December 2000 to August 2001 with the Monte Carlo simulations, it was possible to identify the main sources of background in the region of interest. The 210Pb 46.5 keV line as well as a peak due to the escape of X-rays of I at $``$ 16 keV seen in the spectrum, may be caused by the presence of radioimpurities in the stainless steel can and/or in the PMT. The area of the 1460.8 keV peak is compatible with an activity of 15 mBq/kg from 40K in the NaI crystal; these impurities produce an almost flat background in the low energy region due to their beta emission. A comparison between the spectra recorded with and without the neutron shielding does not show noticeable differences.

A pulse shape analysis has been carried out with the purpose of investigate the possible appearance of the so-called ”anomalous” or ”bump” events found in other NaI experiments . No evidence of such anomaly has been found in the distributions for background events, neither following the method of the UKDMC (fitting integrated pulses to calculate the decay time constant) nor using other parameters (like the first momemtum of the pulse).

Monitoring and stabilisation control of the environmental conditions (radon levels, $`N_2`$ flux, temperature in the laboratory and in the inner enceinte, photomultiplier working voltage, …) is underway. Using the data of the prototype, collected along almost 6000 hours, the stability of some parameters has been checked. The fluctuations of the ADC channels for the different peaks used to perform the energy calibration range from 1 to 1.5 %. With respect to the counting rates, the gaussian distributions of the deviations from the mean values have a sigma of 1.27 for the rate integrated above 6 keV and 1.47 for the rate above 100 keV.

## 3 FIRST RESULTS

The results presented here correspond to an exposure of 1225.4 kg$`\times `$day. Fig. 1 shows the raw spectrum and the spectrum after the noise rejection up to 100 keV. The energy threshold is of $`4`$ keV and the background level registered from the threshold up to 10 keV is about 1.2 counts/(keV kg day).

We have used this region to derive the corresponding limits for the WIMP-nucleon cross sections. The galactic halo is supposed to be isotropic, isothermal and non-rotating, assuming a density of $`\rho `$=0.3 GeV/cm3, a Maxwellian velocity distribution with $`v_{rms}`$=270 km/s (with an upper cut corresponding to an escape velocity of 650 km/s) and a relative Earth-halo velocity of $`v_r`$=230 km/s. The Helm parameterization  is used for the coherent form factor, while the approximation from  is considered for the SD case. Spin factors ($`\lambda _pJ(J+1)`$) 0.089 and 0.126 are assumed for Na and I respectively. Fig. 2 shows, in addition to the limits derived from the prototype results (solid lines), the estimates considering a flat background of 1 count/(keV kg day) from 2 to 8 keV after an exposure of 107 kg$`\times `$y both for raw data (dotted lines) and assuming PSD (dashed lines). The plots show the contour lines for each nucleus, Na and from I, as well as the NaI case. That is shown both for SI scalar interactions and SD WIMP-proton interactions. It should be noted that for SI interactions and using PSD techniques, ANAIS will be able to explore the region of WIMPs singled out by the possible annual modulation effect reported by the DAMA collaboration .

## 4 FUTURE PROSPECTS

The next steps in the development of the prototype of ANAIS, according to these first results, are the removal of the present PMT and the steel can and to install, instead, two ultra-low background PMT and a 1-cm-thick teflon enclosure filled with special mineral oil, as in the NAIAD experiment . A program of measurements to select high radiopurity materials is in course in Canfranc, using an ultra-low background Ge detector. The program includes the removal of components when neccesary to reduce, as much as possible, the various sources of background, to diminish the noise by using anticoincidence read-out (lowering so also the energy threshold) and improving the collection of the scintillation light.

## Acknowledgements

The Canfranc Astroparticle Underground Laboratory is operated by the University of Zaragoza under contract No. AEN99-1033. This research was funded by the Spanish Commission for Science and Technology (CICYT) and the Government of Aragón.


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# PLASMA EJECTIONS FROM A LIGHT BRIDGE IN A SUNSPOT UMBRA

## 1 INTRODUCTION

Characteristics of H$`\alpha `$ surges have been studied for many years (e.g. Roy 1973). Those are summarized by Bruzek and Durrant (1977) as follows: (1)H$`\alpha `$ surges are straight or slightly curved spikes that are shot out of a small mound, (2)On the solar disk, they appear usually in absorption, but in their initial phase, sometimes in emission, (3)They also show strong tendency to recur. Kurokawa (1988) and Kurokawa and Kawai (1993) have reported that H$`\alpha `$ surges are often found at the earliest stage of Emerging Flux Regions (EFRs) and continue recurrently for many hours. They have also suggested that magnetic reconnection between a newly emerging flux and a pre-existing magnetic field is the essential mechanism of H$`\alpha `$ surge production. Yokoyama & Shibata (1995) showed in their numerical simulation that such a reconnection really produces H$`\alpha `$ surges in EFRs.

Roy (1973) found that H$`\alpha `$ surges are also ejected from a light bridge of a sunspot umbra. However, no detailed study has been made of plasma ejections from a light bridge until now. We use the term “light bridge” to refer to a bright, long, and narrow feature penetrating or crossing a sunspot umbra. Light bridges are often seen in umbrae of mature and stable sunspots, and have been considered to have the same magnetic polarity as that of the sunspot umbrae, while their field strength is much weaker (Beckers and Schröter, 1969).

We found that conspicuous H$`\alpha `$ surge activities occurred along the light bridge of the sunspot umbra in the active region NOAA 8971 on 2000 May 02, with 60 cm Domeless Solar Telescope (DST) at Hida Observatory, Kyoto University. H$`\alpha `$ surge activities continued intermittently for about 6.5 hours, as long as the time span of our observation. Examining the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) images obtained with the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) (Handy et al., 1999; Schrijver et al., 1999), we found similar ejections from the light bridge in 171 Å (Fe ix/x) images. Such ejections from a light bridge have never been reported before in the EUV wavelength. From now on, we refer to the ejection seen in 171 Å images obtained with TRACE as “171Å-ejection”.

In this Letter, we report the morphological and the dynamical characteristics of the ejections from the light bridge, using the H$`\alpha `$ and the 171 Å images of high spatial and temporal resolution obtained with DST and TRACE, respectively. In §2, we summarize the observational data, and in §3, we present observational results and discussion. In §3.1, we report the features of the H$`\alpha `$ surges obtained with DST, and in §3.2, compare them with 171Å-ejections. Then we discuss the magnetic configuration of this region and possible mechanisms for the surge activity in the light bridge in §3.3. Our results are summarized in §4.

## 2 OBSERVATIONAL DATA

We have observed the surge activities along the light bridge in the active region NOAA 8971 (N20 , W55 ) with DST from 23:00 UT on 2000 May 01 to 05:30 UT on May 02. The H$`\alpha `$ monochromatic images were obtained with the Zeiss Lyot filter of 0.25 Å passband and SONY laservideo disc recorder sequentially in 3 wavelengths: H$`\alpha \pm 0.0`$ Å, $`+0.6`$ Å, and $`0.6`$ Å. The successive wavelength-change and recording were controlled with a personal computer, and the time capture for each wavelength was 12 seconds. In this study we mainly used the H$`\alpha 0.6`$ Å images, in which their ejecting motions are clearly seen.

The EUV images of this region obtained with TRACE are available from 04:30 UT to 06:00 UT on May 02. They also show conspicuous ejections along the light bridge. The TRACE 171 Å images were used to compare the features of the hot ejections of about 106 K with those of H$`\alpha `$ cool surges of about 104 K. To co-align the H$`\alpha `$ images with the EUV images, we used a TRACE 1600 Å image. There are a few soft X-ray images obtained with SXT (Soft X-ray Telescope) aboard Yohkoh (Tsuneta et al., 1991) during the time interval from 05:20 UT to 05:30 UT on May 02. To process the TRACE and Yohkoh SXT images, we used the solar software of IDL.

In Figure 1, the times of H$`\alpha `$ and EUV observations are summarized, where each time is represented by plus (+) sign. The second and the fourth rows show the times when the ejections along the light bridge are distinctly identified at H$`\alpha `$ and 171 Å, respectively, and numbered thick lines in both rows show that they are especially “conspicuous” ejections. We mainly studied the event which occurred at 04:46 UT on May 02 (#(7) in Figure 1, 2, and Table 1), because the ejection was clearly seen both in H$`\alpha `$ and in EUV.

## 3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

### 3.1 Motions of H$`\alpha `$ surges

During the observation of DST, which was about 6.5 hours, H$`\alpha `$ surges were ejected intermittently from the light bridge of the sunspot umbra in NOAA 8971 (see Figure 1). Figure 2 shows eight surges which extended to larger than 11,000 km in apparent length. They are the largest among a number of surges observed in this light bridge. In Figure 2, the top left is the image at H$`\alpha 5.0`$ Å, and the others are at H$`\alpha 0.6`$ Å. The mean apparent velocity of these surges is about 40 $`\mathrm{kms}^1`$, the mean apparent maximum length is about 17,000 km, and the mean lifetime is about 10 minutes. These features of the eight surges are listed in Table 1. We correct these values for the the projection effect. Assuming that the surges are vertically ejected from the solar surface, we get the velocity of 50 $`\mathrm{kms}^1`$ and the maximum length of 20,000 km. The surges we observed are a few times smaller in velocity and about an order of magnitude smaller in maximum length than those described by Tandberg-Hanssen (1995).

### 3.2 Comparison with TRACE and Yohkoh SXT images

We also found ejections from the light bridge in 171 Å images obtained with TRACE. These 171Å-ejections have occurred intermittently just as H$`\alpha `$ surges. For the event of 04:46 UT (#(7) in Figure 1, 2, and Table 1), we compared the H$`\alpha `$ surge with the 171Å-ejections with respect to their morphological and dynamical characteristics.

Figure 3 shows the evolution of the ejection in H$`\alpha 0.6`$ Å (top) and TRACE 171 Å (middle; negative). The bottom right panel is a Yohkoh SXT image overlaid with the contour of the sunspot umbra. The three panels in the bottom left box show the comparison of the appearance and the site of the ejections. The rightmost panel in the box gives the spatial relation among the sunspot umbra, the H$`\alpha `$ surge, and TRACE 171 Å loop, where they are displayed in dark gray, light gray, and black curved line, respectively. The timing and location of the ejections in TRACE 171 Å images are almost the same as those of the surges at H$`\alpha 0.6`$ Å. Furthermore, the velocity of the 171Å-ejection is about 40 $`\mathrm{kms}^1`$, and it is nearly equal to that of H$`\alpha `$ surge (see Table 1). However, the appearance of the ejections are different between the H$`\alpha `$ images and the EUV images; that of H$`\alpha `$ surge is like a jet, while that of 171Å-ejection looks like a reverse U-shaped loop.

The H$`\alpha `$ surges seem to be ejected along some open magnetic field lines of about 5,000 km in width, and about 12,000 km in length. On the other hand, the 171Å-ejections (hot plasma) are reverse U-shaped loops that trace the edge of H$`\alpha `$ surges (cool plasma) (see the bottom middle cartoon in Figure 3). The separation of two foot points of the loop is about 5,000 km, and the loop top is about 12,000 km in hight. The growth of the reverse U-shaped 171 Å loops indicates the existence of some bipolar magnetic polarities in the light bridge of the sunspot umbra. In addition, as will be discussed below with the magnetograms (§3.3), the emergence of some new magnetic flux is probably occurring there. We examined soft X-ray images for the same region obtained with Yohkoh SXT, which provide information of the plasma of much higher temperature (more than 3 MK). However, we did not find any SXT ejections according the locations of the H$`\alpha `$ surges and EUV ejection in the light bridge. Such difference between the appearance of cool (about $`10^4`$ K) surges in H$`\alpha `$ and hot plasma ejections in 171 Å (about $`10^6`$ K) and in soft X-ray (more than 3 MK) images indicate some dynamical and thermal characteristics of plasma ejection in the light bridge of the sunspot umbra. They should be explained by a proper model of the accelerating and heating mechanism.

### 3.3 Magnetic Configuration

The continuous surge activity, which was found in the light bridge of the sunspot umbra (§3.1), is considered to be evidence of emerging magnetic flux (e.g. Kurokawa & Kawai 1993). The reverse U-shaped loop seen in TRACE images (§3.2) also suggests the emergence of a bipolar magnetic flux.

Figure 4 shows the magnetograms on April 27 (top; near the disk center) and on May 02 (bottom; near the northwest limb, N20, W55) obtained with the Michelson Doppler Interferometer (MDI) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) (Scherrer et al., 1995). The sunspot has negative polarity (black). The polarity of the light bridge is also negative, though its field strength is much weaker than the main sunspot umbra (April 27 top). On May 02 (bottom), positive polarity (white) is seen at the location on the light bridge.

Since the sunspot is located close to the solar limb (55) on May 02, it is difficult to determine whether this opposite polarity is an indication of the newly emerging magnetic flux or whether it appears only due to the projection effect of the negative polarity field. We cannot exclude the possibility that some negative polarity which is inclined more than about 40 degrees from the normal produces the fake positive polarity. Nevertheless, we suggest that unresolved and small newly emerging magnetic flux plays an essential role in the long-lasting surge activity. To conclude that new bipolar magnetic fluxes really emerge in light bridges and produce such surge activities by magnetic reconnection, we need more precise observations of magnetic fields of light bridges, near the disk center and with higher spatial resolution.

## 4 SUMMARY

We studied dynamical characteristics of H$`\alpha `$ surges along a light bridge in a sunspot umbra with the DST at Hida Observatory. The surge activities continued intermittently for a long time, at least 6.5 hours. The apparent velocity of the surges was about 50 $`\mathrm{kms}^1`$ in average, and it is typical for that of an H$`\alpha `$ surge. We also studied the ejections from the light bridge observed in EUV coronal line of 171 Å with TRACE for the first time. The apparent velocities of 171Å-ejections were almost equal to those of H$`\alpha `$ surges. We could not find any ejections from the light bridge in Yohkoh SXT images. This means that the temperature of plasma ejected from the light bridge is lower than a few MK. We found morphological differences between H$`\alpha `$ surges and 171Å-ejections; the 171Å-ejections seem to be a loop, while the H$`\alpha `$ surges are like jets. Examining the magnetogram obtained with SOHO MDI, we suggest that the emergence of new flux occurs in the region, though we cannot exclude the possibility that the opposite polarity is due to a projection effect. We need more precise observations of magnetic fields of light bridges.

We first acknowledge an anonymous referee for his/her useful comments and suggestions that improved this paper much. We wish to thank Drs. K. Shibata and R. Kitai for fruitful discussions. We also thank Drs. T. T. Takeuchi, T. J. Wang, K. Yoshimura, H. Kozu, T. Morimoto, and H. Isobe for their helpful discussions and comments. We also thank all the members of Hida observatory for their support during our observation. We made extensive use of TRACE Data Center, SOHO MDI Data Service, and Yohkoh Data Center.