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# A Hubble Space Telescope Lensing Survey of X-ray Luminous Galaxy Clusters: III. A Multiply-imaged Extremely Red Galaxy at z=1.6

## 1 Introduction

The cores of massive galaxy clusters act as powerful gravitational lenses, providing a magnified view of serendipitously placed distant galaxies. Indeed, close alignment of a background galaxy behind a cluster lens can lead to multiple images being visible. This phenomenon, known as strong lensing, has been applied on numerous occasions to the study of high-redshift galaxies (e.g. Hammer & Rigaut 1989 ; Ebbels et al. 1996; Franx et al. 1997; Seitz et al. 1998; Pelló et al. 1999; Ellis et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2001a). A key feature of these studies is that the lens magnification enables intrinsically low-luminosity galaxies at remote epochs to be observed and studied in great detail.

One class of distant galaxy that may benefit from the enhanced sensitivity provided by a gravitational lens is Extremely Red Objects (EROs). The defining optical/near-infrared colours of EROs, $`(RK)5.3`$, should select either distant elliptical galaxies (e.g. Dunlop et al. 1996; Soifer et al. 1999) or heavily dust-obscured systems at $`z1`$–2 (Dey et al. 1999; Pierre et al. 2001; Afonso et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2001b). Here we concentrate on those EROs whose $`(RK)`$ colour is dominated by the $`4000\mathrm{\AA }`$ break of an evolved stellar population (i.e. “passive EROs”). Various authors (e.g. Kauffmann & Charlot 1998; Fontana et al. 1999; Daddi et al. 2000) have used observations of passive EROs and other $`K`$–selected samples to argue for or against monolithic collapse (e.g. Eggen et al. 1962; Larson 1975; Tinsley & Gunn 1976) or hierarchical assembly (e.g. White & Frenk 1991; Cole et al. 2000) theories of galaxy formation. Regardless of the details of this debate, both arguments implicitly assume that *all* passive EROs are elliptical galaxies.

The importance of EROs to our understanding of galaxy formation and the intrinsic faintness of these systems ($`R>23`$, $`K>18`$) recently motivated us to search for EROs in the fields of massive gravitational lenses (Smith et al. 2002a – S02a). In this letter, we present near-infrared spectroscopy of ERO J003707$`+`$0909.5, drawn from S02a’s sample. We describe our observations in §2, present our lens modelling in §3, describe our source-plane analysis in §4, discuss the diversity of passive EROs in §5, speculate on the evolution of ERO J003707 in §6 and finally summarize our conclusions in §7. We assume $`H_0=50`$kms-1Mpc-1, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$=1 and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_0=0`$.

## 2 Observations

ERO J003707 was first detected in *HST* 222Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. imaging of A 68 as part of our lensing survey of X-ray luminous galaxy clusters (Smith et al. 2001a; S02a; Smith et al. 2002b, in preparation – S02b). A 68 was observed with *HST*/WFPC2 for 7.5 ks through the F702W filter and 8.8 ks using UFTI on the 3.8-m United Kingdom Infrared Telescope333The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (UKIRT). We show a subset of these data in Fig. 1 and identify the three images of ERO J003707. We refer the reader to S02a and S02b for further details of these data and their reduction.

Our near-infrared spectroscopy targeted specific spectral features based on the likely nature of ERO J003707, and a crude estimate of its redshift. We first examined S02a’s $`RIJK`$–band photometry of ERO J003707 and found that it does not discriminate between old stars and dust-obscuration as the origin of the extreme colours of this galaxy. For simplicity, we therefore fitted an elliptical galaxy spectral template (Coleman et al. 1980) to S02a’s photometry of the central red component using hyper-z (Bolzonella et al. 1999) and obtained $`z_{\mathrm{phot}}1.7`$. Assuming that the near-infrared emission is dominated by old stars, we searched for the $`4000\mathrm{\AA }`$ break and CaII H and K absorption lines in the $`z`$–band. However, since S02a’s photometry is not conclusive, and ERO J003707 appears to be a disk-galaxy (§4), we also observed in the $`J`$– and $`H`$–bands, searching for H$`\beta `$, \[OIII\], H$`\alpha `$ and \[NII\] emission lines in addition to \[OII\] which should appear in the $`z`$–band if ERO J003707 is a star-forming galaxy at $`z1.7`$.

We observed ERO J003707 with CGS4 (Mountain et al. 1990) on UKIRT on 2001 September 15–18 in non-photometric conditions and $`1^{\prime \prime }`$ seeing with the slit centered on the $`K`$–band emission from ERO J003707$`+`$0909.5 ($`\alpha ,\delta (\mathrm{J2000})=\mathrm{00\hspace{0.17em}37\hspace{0.17em}07.37}+\mathrm{09\hspace{0.17em}09\hspace{0.17em}28.4}`$). We adopted a slit position angle of $`22^{}`$ to ensure that the $`K`$–band emission from image B (Fig. 1) also fell on the slit, although this meant that the disk light was not well sampled. Nodding along the slit, we obtained total integrations of 7.2 ks and 21.6 ks in the $`J`$– and $`H`$–bands respectively. These data were reduced in a standard manner using iraf tasks. The final reduced frames contained no strong spectral features, although a weak continuum was detected in the $`H`$–band. We also used the Keck-II 10–m telescope444Based on observations made at the W. M. Keck Observatory by Gemini staff, supported by the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., on behalf of the international Gemini parthership. The W.M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. to obtain $`z`$– and $`H`$–band spectra of ERO J003707$`+`$0909.5 with NIRSPEC (McLean et al., 1998) on 2001 November 20–21. Using the same target co-ordinates and slit position angle, we integrated for 7.2 ks and 3.6 ks in the $`z`$– and $`H`$–bands respectively, in clear and photometric conditions (FWHM$`0.8^{\prime \prime }`$). These data were also reduced in a standard manner using iraf tasks, including the wmkonspec package. These data confirm the absence of strong emission lines in the $`H`$–band. The $`z`$–band data also contain no strong emission lines, however they reveal a spectral break at $`1.04\pm 0.01\mu `$m. We show the $`z`$–band continuum in Fig. 2. Given the absence of strong emission lines in the $`zJH`$–bands and the fact that our observations primarily sample the central red component of this galaxy, we interpret the break in the $`z`$–band spectrum of ERO J003707 as the $`4000\mathrm{\AA }`$ break at a redshift of $`z=1.60\pm 0.03`$.

## 3 Gravitational Lens Modelling

The detailed construction of the lens model of A 68 is described by S02b; here we summarize its key features. The model contains a single lens plane at the cluster redshift ($`z=0.255`$) comprising 36 mass components: the cluster dark matter halo centered on the central galaxy; a second dark matter halo centered on the brightest galaxy of a group lying $`80^{\prime \prime }`$ North-West of the cluster center; and 34 cluster galaxies including the central galaxy. Each component is described by the parameters: position, ellipticity, orientation, core radius ($`r_{\mathrm{core}}`$), cut-off radius ($`r_{\mathrm{cut}}`$) and central velocity dispersion ($`\sigma _\mathrm{o}`$). The analytical expression used to describe each component is a smoothly truncated pseudo-isothermal elliptical mass distribution (Kneib et al. 1996 – K96). The center, ellipticity and orientation of each mass component is matched to the observed light distribution of the related cluster elliptical. The dynamical parameters ($`r_{\mathrm{core}}`$, $`r_{\mathrm{cut}}`$ and $`\sigma _\mathrm{o}`$) of the main cluster dark matter halo and the central velocity dispersion of the N-W dark matter halo and the central galaxy are kept as free parameters. The remaining dynamical parameters are scaled with the luminosity of their associated galaxy following K96.

The model parameters were constrained using the three images of the central red region of ERO J003707, as the appearance of these three images in the $`K`$–band frame allows us to unambiguously identify these as images of the same underlying region of the galaxy. We use a $`\chi ^2`$ estimator to quantify how well our lens model fits the observational data (K96). This estimator is minimised ($`\chi ^21`$) by varying the parameters of the model.

## 4 Source-plane Reconstruction and Analysis

We use our lens model to reconstruct the source-plane properties of ERO J003707. We threshold the $`R`$– and $`K`$–band frames at 1.5–$`\sigma `$ above the sky background and ray-trace each pixel to the source plane at $`z=1.6`$, thus creating $`R`$– and $`K`$–band source-plane maps of ERO J003707. We show, as an example, the source-plane reconstruction of ERO J003707$`+`$0909.5 (image “A” from Fig. 1) in Fig. 3b. We also simulate blank-field observations of ERO J003707 (i.e. without a magnifying gravitational lens) by adding the source reconstructions to noise maps from blank sky regions in the original science frames (Figs. 3c & 3d).

We measure the source-plane (i.e. “un-lensed”) apparent $`K`$–band magnitude of ERO J003707: $`K=19.8\pm 0.1`$. This translates into $`M_K25.0`$ (Fioc & Rocca-Volmerange 1997), which suggests that the $`K`$–band luminosity of ERO J003707 is comparable to a present day $`L^{}`$ galaxy (adopting $`M_K^{}=24.8`$ from Cole et al. 2001). We also measure the $`(RK)`$ colour, using an aperture equivalent to a $`2^{\prime \prime }`$–diameter in the source-plane. We transform the F702W photometry to Cousins $`R`$–band and correct for interstellar extinction (see S02a for details), to give $`(RK)=5.4\pm 0.1`$. This is $`1`$ mag bluer than measured by S02a because they did not correct their photometric aperture for lens amplification. S02a therefore measured the colour of the central red bulge in contrast to our photometry that also samples the rest-frame ultraviolet emission from the disk. We also compare our photometry with spectral energy distributions of local galaxies using pegase (Fioc & Rocca-Volmerange 1997), and find that if a present-day Sa galaxy were placed at $`z=1.6`$, it would have a similar $`(RK)`$ colour to ERO J003707.

The HST frame reveals a complex and irregular rest-frame ultraviolet ($`2700\mathrm{\AA }`$) morphology, comprising 5–6 knots indicating current or recent star formation (Fig. 3a). In contrast, the $`K`$–band morphology consists of a single centrally concentrated component, although there is some diffuse, low surface brightness $`K`$–band flux coincident with the knots of rest-frame ultraviolet emission (Fig 3a). Together with our spectroscopy (§2) and the robustness of S02a’s classification of ERO J003707 as an ERO after correction for gravitational lensing, this suggests that ERO J003707 is a disk-galaxy with a passively evolving central bulge and a modestly star-forming disk. We quantify the morphology by measuring the source-plane concentration ($`C`$) and asymmetry ($`A`$) (Abraham et al. 1996) of the rest-frame ultraviolet and $`I`$–band emission from ERO J003707 using our $`R`$– and $`K`$–band data. We estimate: $`C(2700\mathrm{\AA })=0.13\pm 0.02`$, $`C(8500\mathrm{\AA })=0.59\pm 0.09`$, $`A(2700\mathrm{\AA })=0.79\pm 0.05`$ and $`A(8500\mathrm{\AA })=0.56\pm 0.04`$. These measurements place ERO J003707 in the same region of $`C`$$`A`$ space as early-type spiral-galaxies in the local Universe when observed at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths (Burgarella et al. 2001; Kuchinski et al. 2001). We also measure the effective radius of the central bulge ($`r_\mathrm{e}`$) and the exponential scale-length of the disk ($`r_\mathrm{d}`$). At $`z=1.6`$, the $`4000\mathrm{\AA }`$ break falls in the $`z`$–band (§2) and so our $`R`$– and $`K`$–band observations are dominated by the stellar disk and the central bulge respectively. We therefore use our $`R`$– and $`K`$–band source-plane reconstructions (Fig. 3b) to estimate $`r_\mathrm{e}0.6`$ kpc and $`r_\mathrm{d}3.4`$ kpc. We compare these measurements with the observed $`r_\mathrm{e}`$$`r_\mathrm{d}`$ correlation for early-type disk-galaxies in the local Universe (e.g. Khosroshahi et al. 2000), and find that ERO J003707 is consistent with this correlation. Finally, we estimate that the rest-frame $`I`$–band bulge-to-total luminosity ratio, obtaining $`\mathrm{B}/\mathrm{T}0.80`$ – confirming that ERO J003707 is a bulge-dominated galaxy.

In summary, our source-plane photometric and morphological analyses reveal that ERO J003707 is similar to an $`L^{}`$ Sa galaxy from the local Universe that is observed at a look-back-time of $`10^{10}`$ years.

## 5 Diversity of Passive EROs

The extremely red colour of ERO J003707 is dominated by a central bulge of old stars, however ERO J003707 also appears to contain a weakly star-forming disk. Contrary to the popular assumption (§1), passive EROs therefore appear to comprise both elliptical galaxies and early-type spiral-galaxies at $`z>1`$ (Sa-EROs). Such Sa-EROs have probably not been identified in conventional blank-field ERO surveys (e.g. Daddi et al. 2000) due to the low surface brightness of the disk in these systems – the disk is only detected at $`<2`$$`\sigma `$ in our simulated blank-field observation of ERO J003707.

We attempt to constrain the surface density of Sa-EROs. Our analysis of ERO J003707 reveals a colour gradient (§4); we therefore search for this signature in the other 59 members of S02a’s sample. We first quantify the expected gradient using our simulated $`R`$– and $`K`$–band blank-field observations of ERO J003707 to measure its seeing-matched (FWHM$`0.4^{\prime \prime }`$) $`1^{\prime \prime }`$– and $`2^{\prime \prime }`$–diameter aperture $`(RK)`$ colours. Although the $`1^{\prime \prime }`$–colour is $`0.6\pm 0.3`$ mag redder than the $`2^{\prime \prime }`$–colour, the two colours are formally consistent within the uncertainties. We repeat this measurement ten times, each time using simulated images that incorporate different noise maps. These experiments confirm the $`<2`$$`\sigma `$ significance of the colour gradient in our simulated observations. We measure the $`1^{\prime \prime }`$– and $`2^{\prime \prime }`$–diameter aperture $`(RK)`$ colours of S02a’s ERO sample. We find that four EROs display bluer colours at larger radii consistent with the simulations described above and we note that S02a classified all four of these galaxies as having an irregular morphology. We therefore suggest that $`10`$ per cent of EROs with $`(RK)5.3`$ and $`K21`$ may be Sa-EROs, which translates into a surface density of $`0.2\mathrm{arcmin}^2`$, based on S02a’s counts.

## 6 Evolution of ERO J003707

We speculate on the evolution of ERO J003707. The rest-frame $`I`$–band luminosity of the central bulge is $`4.3\times 10^{10}L_{}`$. The strong $`4000\mathrm{\AA }`$ break (§2) suggests that the bulge stars in ERO J003707 formed a few billion years prior to the epoch of observation (e.g. Dunlop et al. 1996). We estimate the age of these stars using the $`\mathrm{D}_{4000}`$ index. We measure $`\mathrm{D}_{4000}=2.4\pm 0.5`$, which translates into an age of $`2.5`$ Gyr (Poggianti & Barbaro 1997; assuming solar metallicity), implying a formation redshift of $`z_\mathrm{f}>3.7`$ in a $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM cosmology, and $`z_\mathrm{f}>6.5`$ in a standard CDM cosmology (§1). This suggests that the bulge was formed in a short, but intense starburst at $`z_\mathrm{f}2`$. This event would have certainly disrupted and may have destroyed any existing disk. In contrast to its observed morphology, ERO J003707 was therefore probably a diskless galaxy at $`z3`$.

Turning to the disk component, we estimate the rest-frame $`I`$–band disk luminosity to be $`7.5\times 10^9L_{}`$ and the current star formation rate (SFR) to be SFR $`6\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{yr}^1`$ (Kennicutt’s 1998; assuming a Salpeter (1955) IMF integrated over 0.1–100 M and neglecting dust). Ignoring mergers, the future evolution of ERO J003707 will depend on the duration of star formation in its disk. If the gas becomes exhausted or expelled from the galaxy, then the star formation would cease and ERO J003707 would probably evolve into an E/S0 galaxy by the present day. On the other hand, semi-analytic models of galaxy formation (Baugh et al. 1996) predict that bulges and spheroids are formed from merging of disk-galaxies and subsequently may accrete gas, thus re-growing a disk component. We explore this “transvestite galaxy” hypothesis (Richard Bower, private communication) by estimating the timescale ($`\tau _{\mathrm{eq}}`$) over which, at the current SFR, the disk stellar mass will become comparable with the bulge stellar mass. We convert the bulge luminosity to a stellar mass (assuming $`M/L1`$; Bell & de Jong 2001) and divide by the disk SFR to obtain $`\tau _{\mathrm{eq}}6\times 10^9`$ yrs which is roughly equal to the look-back-time from the present day to $`z=1.6`$. This raises the intriguing possibility that the progenitors of a fraction of luminous spiral galaxies in the local Universe could have been EROs when observed at $`z>1`$.

## 7 Conclusions

We present near-infrared spectroscopy and optical *HST* imaging of ERO J003707$`+`$0909.5, the brightest of three gravitationally-lensed images of ERO J003707 in the field of the massive cluster A 68 ($`z=0.255`$). Our near-infrared spectroscopy reveals a break at $`\lambda _{\mathrm{obs}}=1.04\pm 0.01\mu m`$ in the spectral energy distribution of this galaxy. This feature arises from the redshifted $`4000\mathrm{\AA }`$ break of a centrally concentrated old stellar population, which places ERO J003707 at $`z=1.60\pm 0.03`$. We constrain a detailed model of the cluster lens and then reconstruct the source-plane properties of ERO J003707. Our main conclusions are as follows:

(1) The luminosity and $`(RK)`$ colour of ERO J003707 are similar to those of an $`L^{}`$ galaxy with a SFR comparable to an Sa galaxy in the local Universe.

(2) Morphological parameters ($`C`$, $`A`$, $`r_\mathrm{e}`$, $`r_\mathrm{d}`$, $`B/T`$) based on rest-frame ultraviolet and $`I`$–band emission confirm that ERO J003707 is an early-type disk-galaxy.

(3) The unique association of passive EROs with elliptical galaxies is clearly too simplistic. We estimate that $`10`$ per cent of EROs with $`(RK)5.3`$ and $`K21`$ may be Sa-EROs i.e. early-type disk-galaxies similar to ERO J003707.

(4) We estimate that the bulge stars in ERO J003707 formed $`2.5`$ Gyr ago and speculate that, if the current disk SFR ($`6\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{yr}^1`$) continues due to the cooling of gas onto ERO J003707 in the manner predicted by hierarchical galaxy formation models (Baugh et al. 1996), then ERO J003707 would evolve into a luminous spiral galaxy by the present day.

## Acknowledgments

GPS thanks Richard Bower for his encouragement and Olga Kuhn for her assistance with the UKIRT/CGS4 observations. We are grateful to Carlton Baugh, Arjun Dey, Alastair Edge and Rob Ivison for helpful discussions and assistance. We acknowledge an anonymous referee for exceptionally prompt feedback. We also thank Andy Adamson, John Davies and Tom Kerr for their support of the UKIRT observing programme. GPS acknowledges a postgraduate studentship from PPARC. IRS acknowledges support from the Royal Society and a Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellowship. JPK acknowledges support from CNRS. OC acknowledges support from the European Commission under contract no. ER-BFM-BI-CT97-2471. HE acknowledges support by NASA and STScI grants NAG 5–6336 and GO 5–08249. We also acknowledge support from the UK–French ALLIANCE collaboration programme #00161XM.


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# Can hadronic rescattering explain the large elliptic flow and small HBT radii seen at RHIC?

\]http://vdgus1.mps.ohio-state.edu/

## Abstract

Results from the data obtained in the first physics run of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have shown suprisingly large elliptic flow and suprisingly small HBT radii. Attempts to explain both results in a consistant picture have so far been unsuccessful. The present work shows that a thermal model + hadronic rescattering calculation can explain both elliptic flow and HBT results from RHIC. The calculation requires a very early hadronization time of about 1 fm/c after the initial collision of the nuclei.

Results of the Year-1 running of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) for Au+Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s}=130`$ GeV have shown suprisingly large pion elliptic flow Adler:2001a  and suprisingly small radii from two-pion Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometry (HBT) Adler:2001b ; Adcox:2002a . Attempts to explain both results in a consistant picture have so far been unsuccessful. Hydrodynamical models agree with the large elliptic flow seen in the RHIC data Kolb:1999a  but significantly disagree with the experimental HBT radii Rischke:1996a . On the other hand, relativistic quantum molecular dynamics calculations which include hadronic rescattering, for example RQMD v2.4 Sorge:1989a , significantly underpredict the elliptic flow seen in the RHIC data Sorge:1995a  but predict pion HBT radii comparable to the data Hardtke:1999a . A calculation has recently been made to extract HBT radii with a hydrodynamical model coupled with a hadronic rescattering afterburner with the result that the HBT radii are significanly larger than measurements Soff:2000a . This lack of a single model to explain both results has been our first big mystery from RHIC. It has been suggested that we should call into question our current understanding of what information pion HBT measurements give us Gyulassy:2001a .

In an effort to address this mystery, the present work explores a somewhat different picture of the nuclear collision than those presented above. In this picture, hadronization into a thermal equilibrium state occurs soon (about 1 fm/c) after the initial collision of the nuclei followed by hadronic rescattering until freezeout. The goal will thus be to test whether hadronic rescattering alone can generate enough general flow in the system to explain both the elliptic flow and HBT results from RHIC. Note that this approach, while similar to the relativistic quantum molecular dynamics calculations mentioned above, differs from them in the choice of the model of the initial state of the system before hadronic rescattering commences (e.g. the other models use a color string picture for the initial state) Sorge:1989a . The price for using the present method is that hadronic-like objects must exist during the high-energy-density ($`\rho >1`$ $`GeV/fm^3`$) phase of the collision. The discussion of this important point is deferred until later.

A brief description of the rescattering model calculational method is given below. The method used is similar to that used in previous calculations for lower CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) energies Humanic:1998a . Rescattering is simulated with a semi-classical Monte Carlo calculation which assumes strong binary collisions between hadrons. The Monte Carlo calculation is carried out in three stages: 1) initialization and hadronization, 2) rescattering and freeze out, and 3) calculation of experimental observables. Relativistic kinematics is used throughout. All calculations are made to simulate RHIC-energy Au+Au collisions in order to compare with the results of the Year-1 RHIC data.

The hadronization model employs simple parameterizations to describe the initial momenta and space-time of the hadrons similar to that used by Herrmann and Bertsch Herrmann:1995a . The initial momenta are assumed to follow a thermal transverse (perpendicular to the beam direction) momentum distribution for all particles,

$$(1/m_T)dN/dm_T=Cm_T/[\mathrm{exp}(m_T/T)\pm 1]$$
(1)
where $`m_T=\sqrt{p_{T}^{}{}_{}{}^{2}+m_{0}^{}{}_{}{}^{2}}`$ is the transverse mass, $`p_T`$ is the transverse momentum, $`m_0`$ is the particle rest mass, $`C`$ is a normalization constant, and $`T`$ is the initial temperature of the system, and a gaussian rapidity distribution for mesons,

$$dN/dy=D\mathrm{exp}[(yy_0)^2/(2\sigma _{y}^{}{}_{}{}^{2})]$$
(2)
where $`y=0.5\mathrm{ln}[(E+p_z)/(Ep_z)]`$ is the rapidity, $`E`$ is the particle energy, $`p_z`$ is the longitudinal (along the beam direction) momentum, $`D`$ is a normalization constant, $`y_0`$ is the central rapidity value (mid-rapidity), and $`\sigma _y`$ is the rapidity width. Two rapidity distributions for baryons have been tried: 1) flat and then falling off near beam rapidity and 2) peaked at central rapidity and falling off until beam rapidity. Both baryon distributions give about the same results. The initial space-time of the hadrons for $`b=0`$ fm (i.e. zero impact parameter or central collisions) is parameterized as having cylindrical symmetry with respect to the beam axis. The transverse particle density dependence is assumed to be that of a projected uniform sphere of radius equal to the projectile radius, $`R`$ ($`R=r_0A^{1/3}`$, where $`r_0=1.12`$ fm and $`A`$ is the atomic mass number of the projectile). For $`b>0`$ (non-central collisions) the transverse particle density is that of overlapping projected spheres. The longitudinal particle hadronization position ($`z_{had}`$) and time ($`t_{had}`$) are determined by the relativistic equations Bjorken:1983a ,

$$z_{had}=\tau _{had}\mathrm{sinh}y;t_{had}=\tau _{had}\mathrm{cosh}y$$
(3)
where $`y`$ is the particle rapidity and $`\tau _{had}`$ is the hadronization proper time. Thus, apart from particle multiplicities, the hadronization model has three free parameters to extract from experiment: $`\sigma _y`$, $`T`$ and $`\tau _{had}`$. The hadrons included in the calculation are pions, kaons, nucleons and lambdas ($`\pi `$, K, N, and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$), and the $`\rho `$, $`\omega `$, $`\eta `$, $`\eta ^{}`$, $`\varphi `$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$, and $`K^{}`$ resonances. For simplicity, the calculation is isospin averaged (e.g. no distinction is made among a $`\pi ^+`$, $`\pi ^0`$, and $`\pi ^{}`$). Resonances are present at hadronization and also can be produced as a result of rescattering. Initial resonance multiplicity fractions are taken from Herrmann and Bertsch Herrmann:1995a , who extracted results from the HELIOS experiment Goerlach:1992a . The initial resonance fractions used in the present calculations are: $`\eta /\pi =0.05`$, $`\rho /\pi =0.1`$, $`\rho /\omega =3`$, $`\varphi /(\rho +\omega )=0.12`$, $`\eta ^{}/\eta =K^{}/\omega =1`$ and, for simplicity, $`\mathrm{\Delta }/N=0`$.

The second stage in the calculation is rescattering which finishes with the freeze out and decay of all particles. Starting from the initial stage ($`t=0`$ fm/c), the positions of all particles are allowed to evolve in time in small time steps ($`dt=0.1`$ fm/c) according to their initial momenta. At each time step each particle is checked to see a) if it decays, and b) if it is sufficiently close to another particle to scatter with it. Isospin-averaged s-wave and p-wave cross sections for meson scattering are obtained from Prakash et al. Prakash:1993a . The calculation is carried out to 100 fm/c, although most of the rescattering finishes by about 30 fm/c. The rescattering calculation is described in more detail elsewhere Humanic:1998a .

Calculations are carried out assuming initial parameter values and particle multiplicities for each type of particle. In the last stage of the calculation, the freeze-out and decay momenta and space-times are used to produce observables such as pion, kaon, and nucleon multiplicities and transverse momentum and rapidity distributions. The values of the initial parameters of the calculation and multiplicities are constrained to give observables which agree with available measured hadronic observables. As a cross-check on this, the total kinetic energy from the calculation is determined and compared with the RHIC center of mass energy of $`\sqrt{s}=130`$ GeV to see that they are in reasonable agreement. Particle multiplicities were estimated from the charged hadron multiplicity measurements of the RHIC PHOBOS experiment Back:2000a . Calculations were carried out using isospin-summed events containing at freezeout about 5000 pions, 500 kaons, and 650 nucleons. The hadronization model parameters used were $`T=300`$ MeV, $`\sigma _y`$=2.4, and $`\tau _{had}`$=1 fm/c. It is interesing to note that the same value of $`\tau _{had}`$ was required in a previous rescattering calculation to successfully describe results from SPS Pb+Pb collisions Humanic:1998a . Figure 1 shows $`m_T`$ distributions for pions, kaons, and nucleons from the rescattering calculation for $`b=0`$ fm near midrapidity ($`1<y<1`$) fitted to exponentials of the form $`exp(m_T/B)`$, where $`B`$ is the slope parameter.

The extracted slope parameters shown in Figure 1 are close in value to preliminary measurements from the STAR experiment for the $`\pi ^{}`$, $`K^{}`$, and anti-proton of $`190\pm 10`$, $`300\pm 30`$, and $`565\pm 50`$ MeV, respectively Adler:2002a . Thus, we see that if all hadrons begin at a common temperature of 300 MeV, the hadronic rescattering alone is able to generate enough radial flow to account for the differences in slope among the pion, kaon, and nucleon $`m_T`$ distributions.

The elliptic flow and two-pion HBT observables are also calculated from the freeze-out momenta and space-time positions of the particles at the end of the rescattering stage. The elliptic flow variable, $`v_2`$, is defined as Poskanzer:1998a

$$v_2=cos(2\varphi );\varphi =\mathrm{arctan}(p_y/p_x)$$
(4)
where $`p_x`$ and $`p_y`$ are the $`x`$ and $`y`$ components of the particle momentum, and $`x`$ is in the impact parameter direction and $`y`$ is in the “out of plane” direction (i.e. $`xz`$ is the reaction plane and $`z`$ is the beam direction). The HBT pion source parameters are extracted from the rescattering calculation using the same method as was applied for previous SPS-energy rescattering calculations Humanic:1998a . The Pratt-Bertsch “out-side-long” radius parameterization is used Pratt:1990a ; Bertsch:1989a  yielding the four parameters $`R_{Tside}`$, $`R_{Tout}`$, $`R_{Long}`$, and $`\lambda `$, which represent two mutually perpendicular transverse (to the beam direction) radius parameters, a radius parameter along the beam direction, and a parameter related to the “strength” of the two-pion correlations, respectively.

Figure 2 shows the $`p_T`$ dependence of $`v_2`$ for pions and nucleons extracted from the $`b=8`$ fm rescattering calculation compared with the trends of the STAR measurements for $`\pi ^++\pi ^{}`$ and $`p`$ \+ $`pbar`$ at $`1145\%`$ centrality Adler:2001a , which roughly corresponds to this impact parameter.

As seen, the rescattering calculation values are in reasonable agreement with the STAR measurements. Thus, the same rescattering mechanism that can account for the radial flow seen in Figure 1 also can account for the magnitude and $`p_T`$ dependence of the elliptic flow for pions and nucleons.

The pion source parameters extracted from HBT analyses of rescattering calculations for three different impact parameters, $`b=0`$, $`5`$, and $`8`$ fm, are compared with STAR $`\pi ^{}`$ measurements at three centrality bins Adler:2001b  in Figure 3.

Note that the PHENIX HBT results Adcox:2002a  are in basic agreement with the STAR results. The STAR centrality bins labeled “3”, “2”, and “1” in the figure correspond to $`12\%`$ of central, the next $`20\%`$, and the next $`40\%`$, respectively. These bins are roughly approximated by the impact parameters used in the rescattering calculations, i.e. the average impact parameters of the STAR centrality bins are estimated to be within $`\pm 2`$ fm of the rescattering calculation impact parameters used to compare with them. In the left panel, the centrality dependence of the HBT parameters is plotted for a $`p_T`$ bin of $`0.1250.225`$ GeV/c. In the right panel, the $`m_T`$ dependence of the HBT parameters is plotted for centrality bin 3, for the STAR measurments, or $`b=0`$ fm, for the rescattering calculations. Although there are differences in some of the details, the trends of the STAR HBT measurements are seen to be described rather well by the rescattering calculation.

As shown above, the radial and elliptic flow as well as the features of the HBT measurements at RHIC can be adequately described by the rescattering model with the hadronization model parameters given earlier. The results of the calculations are found to be sensitive to the value of $`\tau _{had}`$ used, as was studied in detail for SPS rescattering calculations Humanic:1998a . For calculations with $`\tau _{had}>1`$ fm/c the initial hadron density is smaller, fewer collisions occur, and the rescattering-generated flow is reduced, reducing in magnitude the radial and elliptic flow and most of the HBT observables. Only the HBT parameter $`R_{Long}`$ increases for larger $`\tau _{had}`$ reflecting the increased longitudinal size of the initial hadron source, as seen in Equation 3. One can compensate for this reduced flow in the other observables by introducing an ad hoc initial “flow velocity parameter”, but the increased $`R_{Long}`$ cannot be compensated by this new parameter. In this sense, the initial hadron model used in the present calculations with $`\tau _{had}1`$ fm/c and no initial flow is uniquely determined with the help of $`R_{Long}`$.

At this point, it is appropriate to discuss how physical the initial conditions of the present rescattering calculation are. In order to use this picture, one must assume: 1) hadronization occurs very rapidly after the nuclei have passed through each other, i.e. $`\tau _{had}=1`$ fm/c, 2) the hadrons thermalize rapidly, and 3) hadrons or at least hadron-like objects can exist in the early stage of the collision where there are maximum values of $`T`$ and $`\rho `$ of 300 MeV and 8 GeV/$`fm^3`$, respectively.

Addressing assumption 3) first, in the calculation the maximum number density of hadrons at mid-rapidity at $`t=0`$ fm/c is 6.8 $`fm^3`$, rapidly dropping to about 1 $`fm^3`$ at $`t=4`$ fm/c. Since most of these hadrons are pions, it is useful as a comparison to estimate the effective volume of a pion in the context of the $`\pi \pi `$ scattering cross section, which is about 0.8 $`fm^2`$ for s-waves Prakash:1993a . The “radius” of a pion is found to be 0.25 fm and the effective pion volume is 0.065 $`fm^3`$, the reciprocal of which is about 15 $`fm^3`$. From this it is seen that at the maximum hadron number density in the calculation, the particle occupancy of space is estimated to be less than $`50\%`$, falling rapidly with time. One could speculate that this may be enough spacial separation to allow individual hadrons or hadron-like objects to keep their identities and not melt into quark matter, resulting in a “super-heated” semi-classical gas of hadrons at very early times, as assumed in the present calculation.

Assumptions 1) and 2) can both be motivated by the Color Glass Condensate model McLerran:2002a ; Kovner:1995a . Before the collision of two relativistic nuclei, the nuclei can be described as two thin (lorentz-contracted) sheets of Color Glass (a dense glass of gluons). The use of the term “glass” is not merely an analogy but is mathematically rigorous due to the time-dilated nature of the gluon field which behaves like a liquid on long time scales but a solid on short ones McLerran:2002a . In the usual picture, after the collision takes place the Color Glass melts into quarks and gluons in a timescale of about 0.3 fm/c at RHIC energy, and then the matter expands and thermalizes into quark matter by about 1 fm/c. The timescale in the Color Glass Condensate model for thermalized matter matches the timescale needed in the rescattering model for an initial thermalized hadron gas. Thus one is tempted to modify the collision senario such that instead of the Color Glass melting into quarks and gluons just after the collision, the sudden impact of the collision “shatters” it directly into hadronic fragments which then thermalize on the same timescale as in the parton senario due to the hadronic strong interactions.

In summary, a thermal model + hadronic rescattering picture is able to adequately describe the large elliptic flow and small HBT radii recently measured at RHIC. A feature of this picture is a very early hadronization time of about 1 fm/c after the initial collision of the nuclei.

###### Acknowledgements.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge Ulrich Heinz and Mike Lisa for their helpful suggestions regarding this work and Larry McLerran for illuminating discussions on the Color Glass Condensate model. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant PHY-0099476.


text:
# Optimal combinations of imperfect objects

\[

## Abstract

We consider how to make best use of imperfect objects, such as defective analog and digital components. We show that perfect, or near-perfect, devices can be constructed by taking combinations of such defects. Any remaining objects can be recycled efficiently. In addition to its practical applications, our ‘defect combination problem’ provides a novel generalization of classical optimization problems. PACS numbers: 71.35.Lk, 71.35.Ee

\]

Imperfection is an integral part of Nature, but it cannot always be tolerated. High-technology devices, for example, must be precise and dependable. The design of such dependable devices is the domain of fault-tolerant computing, where the goal is to optimize reliability, availability or efficiency of redundant systems . Such redundant systems are typically built from devices which are initially defect-free and hence pass the quality check, but may later develop faults.

A much less studied problem, but one of significant economic and ecologic importance, is what to do with a component which is already known to be defective. Components with minor defects are sometimes acceptable for low-end devices . The Teramac, a massively parallel computer, was built from partially defective conventional components; it uses an adaptive wiring scheme between the components in order to avoid the defects, and the wires themselves can be defective . More typically, however, a component that is known to be defective is considered ‘useless’ and is hence wasted.

Here we address this wastage issue by relating it to a novel optimization problem: given a set of $`N`$ imperfect components, find a combination, or subset, that optimizes the average error (analog components), or the number of working transformations (digital components). We employ methods from statistical physics to show that perfect, or near-perfect, devices can indeed be constructed, and remaining objects can be recycled efficiently with (almost) zero net wastage. Note however that combining simple analog devices such as thermometers, is not attractive since it is usually much easier and cheaper to subtract the errors from the outputs. But such active error-correction may not be practical in more complex systems, particularly for next-generation technologies in the ultrasmall nano/micro regime. Nanoscale devices such as Coulomb-blockade transistors may enable us to push back the limits of Moore’s law (see Ref.  for a review). However, the accuracy of the current produced at a given analog voltage will depend sensitively on the reliability of the nanostructure’s fabrication. Similarly, the discrete optical transitions in semiconductor quantum dots  can provide useful digital components for nanoscale classical computing . However, digital switching can only occur if the energy levels coincide with the external light frequency. The accuracy of these energy levels also depends on the precision of fabrication. However even in self-assembled quantum dot structures, such as the ground-breaking virus-controlled self-assembly scheme of Ref.  where quantum dots are mass-produced, no two individual dots will ever be identical - each will contain an inherent, time-independent systematic defect as compared to the intended design. Yet it would be highly undesirable to discard such nanostructures given the potential applications of such ‘bio-nano’ structures.

Consider an analog device such as a nanoscale transistor, registering a current $`A+a`$ given a particular applied voltage, with $`A`$ being the actual value and $`a`$ being the systematic error. Suppose fabrication has produced a batch of $`N`$ imprecise devices whose errors $`a_i`$ ($`i=1,2,\mathrm{}N`$) were created when the objects were built and remain constant; this amounts to drawing them from a known distribution $`P(a)`$. For simplicity, we suppose that $`P(a)`$ is Gaussian with average $`\mu `$ and variance $`\sigma =1`$. The most precise component has an error of order $`\frac{1}{N}`$. What should one do with the others? Generally speaking, one could combine them such that their defects compensate. Computing the average of all components leads to an error of order $`\mu \pm \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}`$ which vanishes very slowly for large $`N`$, and even then only if $`\mu =0`$. Nevertheless this method has been used in many contexts throughout history, for example by sailors who often took several clocks on board ship .

The optimal combination is actually obtained by taking a well-chosen subset of the $`N`$ components, i.e. a subset containing $`MN`$ devices whose errors compensate best. The problem therefore consists of selecting some of the numbers $`a_i`$ such that the absolute value of their average is minimized: hence the interesting quantity is

$$ϵ=\underset{\{n_i\}}{\mathrm{min}}\frac{|_{j=1}^Nn_ja_j|}{_{k=1}^Nn_k}=\underset{\{n_i\}}{\mathrm{min}}\frac{E}{M}.$$
(1)
Here $`n_j\{0,1\}`$ selects whether device $`j`$ is used or not, while $`M=_{i=1}^Nn_i`$ is the total number of devices used. Without division by $`M`$, this problem — which we call the defect combination problem (DCP) — would be similar to the subset sum problem or number partitioning problem (NPP) . Both problems are equivalent and known to be NP-complete: in the worst case, there is no method which finds the minimum in polynomial time, i.e. significantly faster than brute force enumeration (exponential time). However the typical, i.e. average, problem has a different behavior. It will undergo a transition between a computationally hard phase where the average error is greater than zero, and a computationally easy phase where the error is zero . The same applies in our present case. These two phases, and the transition between them, can be studied using statistical physics .

Figure 1 reports numerical results obtained by enumerating all possible $`\{n_i\}`$, where $`\mu =0`$. The resulting device precision can be quite remarkable. Our numerical simulations also confirm that $`M=N/2`$ for large $`N`$, i.e. the optimal configuration uses half the components on average. Strong fluctuations remain even for a large number of realizations and for large $`N`$, because of the non self-averaging nature of the problem: i.e. $`\sqrt{ϵ^2ϵ^2}/ϵ1`$.

The division by $`M`$ in Eq (1) makes the DCP much harder to tackle analytically than the NPP. Let us compare the DCP with $`\mathrm{min}E`$, the problem defined by finding the minimum of $`E`$. Numerical simulations show that for the latter problem $`M^{}_{a,\text{minE}}=\frac{N1}{2}`$ for sufficiently large $`N`$, where $`M^{}=_{j=1}^Nn_j^{}`$ is the number of selected components in the configuration $`\{n_i^{}\}`$ that minimizes $`E`$ . This makes sense, since in the DCP the division by $`M`$ favors configurations with a larger number of components. In addition both problems are related by the inequality

$$\underset{\{n_i\}}{\mathrm{min}}\left[\frac{E}{M}\right]\frac{\mathrm{min}_{\{n_i\}}E}{M^{}}.$$
(2)
Hence

$$ϵ\frac{C}{N}\underset{\{n_i\}}{\mathrm{min}}E$$
(3)
for some constant $`C`$. Computing the typical properties of $`\mathrm{min}E`$ hence yields an upper bound to the average optimal error. Following Ref. , we computed the partition function $`Z=_{\{n_i\}}\text{e}^{\beta |_jn_ja_j|}`$, which for large $`N`$ yields

$$Z2^N_{\pi /2}^{\pi /2}\text{e}^{NG(y)}$$
(4)
where $`G(y)=\mathrm{ln}(\mathrm{cos}(a\beta \mathrm{tan}(y)/2))`$. Using the saddle point approximation for $`Z`$ and an argument of positive entropy , we find $`\mathrm{min}_{\{n_i\}}E\sqrt{\frac{\pi N}{2}}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}^N`$. Hence there is a constant $`C`$ such that

$$ϵC\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}^N}.$$
(5)
Figure 1 shows the behavior of the analytically obtained upper-bound for the average error is consistent with the corresponding numerical results. The same calculus shows that the DCP will also exhibit a phase transition between hard and easy problems when $`b<N\mathrm{ln}(\pi N/6)/2`$, where $`b`$ is the number of bits needed to encode the $`a_i`$’s. Hence it is possible to obtain perfect error-free combinations of such imperfect objects for $`N`$ large and $`b`$ sufficiently small. When the defects are biased, i.e. $`\mu 0`$, the error increases as $`\mu `$ increases but remains low for $`\mu 1`$. When the errors of the components all have the same sign, only one component is used and the resulting error increases linearly with $`\mu `$.

We now consider the constrained DCP, where the number of components to be used is pre-defined to be a particular value $`M`$. If $`M=1`$, one selects the least imprecise component. The case $`M=N`$ amounts to computing the average over all $`N`$ components, hence $`ϵ=\sqrt{2/(\pi N)}`$. This problem is a more complicated version of the subset sum problem: in our case the numbers $`a_i`$ are no longer restricted to be positive and the cost function is the absolute value of the sum. Fig. 2 plots the average and median optimal error as a function of $`M`$ for $`N=10`$ and 20. An exponential fit of the minimum error for increasing $`N`$ gives $`\mathrm{min}_Mϵ\mathrm{exp}(KN)`$ where $`K=0.56\pm 0.01`$, to be compared with $`\mathrm{ln}2=0.693\mathrm{}`$ in the unconstrained case; the functional form of this quantity may however be more complicated than an exponential.

We have also applied Derrida’s random cost approach . Given the $`N`$ errors $`\{a_i\}`$, there corresponds one $`E`$ to each of the $`L=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{N}{M}\right)`$ sets $`\{n_i^{}\}`$ that obey the constraint $`_in_i^{}=M`$ . If the $`E`$ are independent, all properties of the problem are then given by the p.d.f. $`p_M(E)`$. In our case, the latter is straightforward to compute:

$$p_M(E)=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{N}{M}\right)^1\underset{\{n_i^{}\}}{}\delta (E|\underset{j}{}n_ja_j|),$$
(6)
where the prime means that $`_in_i^{}=M`$. Hence $`p_M(E)`$ is equal to the probability distribution of the absolute value of $`N`$ numbers drawn from $`P(a)`$, which is

$$p_M(E)=\frac{\mathrm{\Theta }(E)}{\sqrt{2\pi M}}\left[\text{e}^{\frac{(E\mu M)^2}{2M}}+\text{e}^{\frac{(E+\mu M)^2}{2M}}\right].$$
(7)
Let us concentrate on the non-biased case $`\mu =0`$ (the calculus is easily extended to the biased case). We are interested in the average value of the minimum $`E_1`$ of $`\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{N}{M}\right)`$ numbers drawn from $`P_M(E)`$. Using $`P(E_1)=\frac{\mathrm{d}}{\mathrm{d}E_1}[F_>(E_1)]^L`$, where $`F_>(E_1)=\text{erfc}(E_1/\sqrt{2M})`$ is the cumulative distribution function of $`P_M(E)`$, we find that

$$\frac{E_1}{M}=\sqrt{\frac{2}{M}}_0^{\mathrm{}}dt[\text{erfc}(t)]^{\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{N}{M}\right)}.$$
(8)
If $`M=N`$, one recovers the average over all components since $`_0^{\mathrm{}}dt\text{erfc}(t)=1/\sqrt{\pi }`$. By definition, the median is given by $`ϵ_{\text{med}}`$ such that $`_0^{ϵ_{\text{med}}}dE_1P(E_1)=1/2`$.

The left panel of Fig. 2 plots the average constrained error, obtained by numerical enumeration, and the analytical predictions of Eq (8), for two sizes of component set. The larger the component pool $`N`$, the better the precision. For $`M<<N`$ the random cost approach describes $`ϵ`$ well, however it fails dramatically for larger values of $`M`$. This is because the $`L=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{N}{M}\right)`$ values of $`E`$ become increasingly dependent as $`M/N`$ grows. At fixed $`N`$, as $`M`$ increases, particular samples have an increasing probability to contain a large fraction of defects $`a_i`$ with the same sign. Due to the constraint on $`M`$, one may therefore be forced to use components whose defects add instead of compensating each other. The median, which is less affected by such events, has its mimimum close to $`N/2`$ (right panel of Fig. 2): the random cost approach describes much better the behavior of the median than that of the average, although the discrepancy increases as $`M/N`$ increases.

Using a subset of defective components is also a powerful method for binary components such as quantum-dot optical switches . Suppose each component has $`I`$ input bits. If it can perform $`F`$ different logical operations on the input bits, it can perform $`P=F2^I`$ different transformations (i.e. truth table has $`P`$ entries). Let $`f`$ be the probability that for a given transformation $`l`$, component $`i`$ systematically gives the wrong output. e.g. because of inaccuracies in the energy-level spacings in the case of quantum dot switches. Mathematically, $`P(a_i^l=1)=f`$, $`1`$ labelling a defective ouput and $`1`$ a correct one. It becomes exponentially unlikely that one can extract a perfect component as $`f`$ increases, however subsets of the components may indeed produce the correct output. One therefore selects a subset of components from a pool of $`N`$, in order to maximize the number of transformation such that the majority of components give the correct answer. The maximal fraction of working transformations for a given set of components $`\{a_i\}`$ is

$$W(\{a_i\})=\frac{1}{P}\underset{\{n_i\}}{\mathrm{max}}\underset{l=1}{\overset{P}{}}\mathrm{\Theta }(\underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}a_j^ln_j)$$
(9)
where $`\mathrm{\Theta }(x)`$ is the Heaviside function. We measured $`\varphi =\delta _{W,1}`$, the average fraction of component sets with at least one perfect subset. Numerical calculations confirm that it is indeed possible to build perfectly working components even if $`f`$ is so high that no single component is perfect. Figure 3 shows numerical simulations of the probability $`\varphi `$ versus $`N`$ for three values of $`f`$. When $`\varphi >0`$, an efficient algorithm consists in first ranking (Heapsort) the components according to the number of working transformations and then enumerate all possibilities until a perfect combination is found, beginning with the less defective ones (see inset of Fig 3). Analytic results along the lines of  will presented elsewhere.

Admittedly, seeking optimal combinations implies an additional cost for two reasons. First, one has to find the optimal or near optimal combination; this can be done either by measuring all the defects and then finding the minimal error with a computer; or, skipping the labour-intensive step of measuring individual defects, by building combinations of objects such that we eventually minimize the aggregate error. Second, these objects have to be wired, and their output combined by an additional hopefully error-free device. However such wiring and selection of working subsets of components, is precisely what is already being done inside the Teramac . Given that defective components can be cheaply produced en masse, the cost of such wiring and selection of working combinations may not be an obstacle. Hence we believe that our two optimization problems may prove relevant in practice, in particular in emerging technologies where the fabrication of defect-free components may not be possible.

Our scheme implies that the ‘quality’ of a component is not determined solely by its own intrinsic error. Instead error becomes a collective property, which is determined by the ‘environment’ corresponding to the other defective components. Efficient recycling of otherwise ‘useless’ components now becomes possible. Suppose that a fabrication process produces a constant flow of defective analog or binary components. One can now perform the following scheme to generate a continuous output of useful devices: fix $`N`$ according to the desired average error (see Fig. 1, Fig. 2 or Fig 3); form the optimal subset; add fresh components to the unused ones; find the optimal subset, and repeat as desired. The quality of the subset fluctuates, but there is essentially no wastage. Although efficient algorithms for the analog case remain to be found, generalization of well-known algorithms  may be possible. We hope that our work inspires further academic research into this important practical problem.

We thank R. Zecchina and D. Sherrington for useful comments. D.C. thanks the Swiss National Funds for Scientific Research for financial support.


text:
# Effect of possible stronger neutrino interaction at 𝐸_𝜈_𝜇∼10¹¹GeV upon the extraction of sin²{𝜃_W} from the neutral-current cross section at NuTeV

## Added note

After completion of this work, authors have called our attention to recent work on large cross sections from brane theory; we include some references. See also  and , and the earliest related work  which we are aware of.

## Figures


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# Untitled Document

RI-3-02

A Note on Multi-trace Deformations and AdS/CFT

Amit Sever1 E-mail : asever@cc.huji.ac.il. and Assaf Shomer2 E-mail : shomer@cc.huji.ac.il.

Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel

We derive the general formula, at a finite cutoff, for the change in the boundary condition of a scalar field in AdS under a Multiple-trace deformation of the dual CFT. Our analysis suggests that fluctuations around the classical solution in $`AdS`$ should not be constrained by boundary conditions.

March 2002

1. Introduction.

The AdS/CFT correspondence \[1,,2,,3\] claims that string theory on $`AdS_{d+1}\times _{9d}`$ is dual to a $`CFT_d`$ that “lives” on the $`d`$dimensional boundary of $`AdS_{d+1}.`$ CFT operators that are dual to single particle states in string theory/gravity are usually referred to (in a language borrowed from 4-dimensional gauge theories) as “Single-trace” operators. Deformations of the $`CFT`$ Lagrangian by such Single-trace operators are known to be related to deforming the dual string worldsheet by the corresponding vertex-operator. In the low energy gravity approximation this amounts to changing the vacuum expectation value of the dual gravity field (see \[4,,5\] for review and references). Deforming the $`CFT`$ Lagrangian by “Multi-trace” operators, corresponding to multi-particle states in the dual string/gravity picture, was recently argued \[6,,7\] to give rise to a non-local generalization of the standard string theory worldsheet Lagrangian (NLST). In  the effect of a “Double-trace” deformation was analyzed in the gravity approximation and was shown to give rise to a change in the boundary condition to which the dual gravity field was subjected. An ansatz for the general case of “Multi-trace” deformations was given in  leading to the same conclusion. In this note we derive a general formula, at a finite cutoff, for the change in the boundary condition of a scalar field in AdS under a Multiple-trace deformation of the dual CFT. This is done using a formulation that is not the one usually used in the literature. Our result agrees with the one suggested in  when one removes the IR cutoff in AdS. The analysis we present raises the question whether or not one should impose boundary conditions in $`AdS/CFT`$. This point is discussed in section 4. Recent papers dealing with similar issues are \[10,,11,,12\].

2. A finite cutoff formulation of the $`AdS/CFT`$ correspondence.

In this section we summarize a finite cutoff formulation of the $`AdS_{d+1}/CFT_d`$ correspondence that was presented in  and which will be used in this note. This formulation is convenient for the discussion of Multi-trace deformations. We work in Euclidean $`AdS_{d+1}`$ in the Poincare patch with coordinates $`(z,\stackrel{}{x})`$ where the metric is given by (we set $`R_{AdS}=1`$)

$$ds^2=\frac{dz^2+dx_idx_j\delta ^{ij}}{z^2}.$$

The boundary of Euclidean $`AdS`$ in these coordinates is the surface $`(AdS)\{(z=0,\stackrel{}{x})\}\{(z=\mathrm{},|\stackrel{}{x}|=\mathrm{})\}`$. We introduce a finite IR cutoff in $`AdS`$ by considering the surface $`z=ϵ<<1`$. This introduces a problem near the special point in this parameterization $`(z=\mathrm{},|\stackrel{}{x}|=\mathrm{})`$ since as we approach $`|\stackrel{}{x}|\mathrm{}`$ the surface $`z=ϵ`$ approaches the boundary (see figure 1). This is an artifact of our choice of coordinates. To avoid this problem we restrict all sources away from $`\mathrm{}`$. Taking that into account we denote the boundary of $`AdS`$ space at finite cutoff by $`\{(z=ϵ,\stackrel{}{x})\}`$ and the bulk by $`\{(z>ϵ,\stackrel{}{x})\}`$.

Figure 1: AdS space in Poincare coordinates.

We focus on the case of a scalar field in $`AdS`$, with mass $`m^2\frac{d^2}{4}`$, obeying the Breitenlohner Freedman bound and dual to a scalar CFT operator of dimension $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ where $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\mathrm{\Delta }d)=m^2`$. We consider the following covariant gravity action which contains a boundary term that will prove important for the discussion of boundary conditions:

$$𝒮_0[\varphi ]=\frac{1}{2}_{}d^{d+1}x\sqrt{g}[g^{\mu \nu }_\mu \varphi _\nu \varphi +m^2\varphi ^2]+\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{2}_{}\sqrt{\widehat{g}}\varphi ^2,$$

where $`\widehat{g}`$ stands for the metric restricted to the boundary. In Poincare coordinates the expression is:

$$𝒮_0[\varphi ]=\frac{1}{2}_{}d^dx𝑑zz^{d+1}[(_z\varphi )^2+(_i\varphi )^2+\frac{m^2}{z^2}\varphi ^2]+\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }}{2}_{}ϵ^d\varphi ^2.$$

The linear variation of this action is:

$$\delta 𝒮_0[\varphi ]=_{}d^{d+1}x\sqrt{g}\delta \varphi [^2+m^2]\varphi _{}ϵ^d\delta \varphi (z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi .$$

In order to have classical solutions there are two choices. Either the field obeys a Dirichlet boundary condition $`\delta \varphi |_{}=0`$, or it has to satisfy:

$$(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi |_{}=0.$$

This relation can be treated either as a boundary condition or as a boundary equation of motion without a boundary condition3 In the classical approximation the two are the same.. We adopt (2.1) in what follows and since the above mentioned ambiguity will be important later we will refer to (2.1) as a “boundary relation”. In section 4 this issue will be discussed.

The solution to the bulk equation of motion $`(^2m^2)\varphi =0`$ is of the form :

$$\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)=d^dx^{}\alpha (\stackrel{}{x}^{})\frac{z^\mathrm{\Delta }}{(z^2+|\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}|^2)^\mathrm{\Delta }},$$

where $`\frac{z^\mathrm{\Delta }}{(z^2+|\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}|^2)^\mathrm{\Delta }}`$ is the “bulk-boundary” propagator. The meaning of (2.1) becomes clear when we consider the asymptotics of the classical solution near the boundary $`z0`$.

$$\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)=\left[\alpha (\stackrel{}{x})z^{d\mathrm{\Delta }}+\beta (\stackrel{}{x})z^\mathrm{\Delta }\right](1+𝒪(z^2)).$$

In order to get a finite result when $`z0`$ we look at:

$$z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)(d2\mathrm{\Delta })\alpha (\stackrel{}{x})+0\times \beta (\stackrel{}{x})z^{2\mathrm{\Delta }d}+\mathrm{}.$$

The leading term is proportional to the boundary function $`\alpha `$ and demanding $`z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)=0`$ amounts thus to the trivial solution $`\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)=0.`$ To have a non trivial solution in this formulation one needs to change the action and correspondingly change (2.1). The way to do that is to check what boundary relation is obeyed by a general solution of the form (2.1):

$$z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)=2\mathrm{\Delta }d^dx^{}\alpha (\stackrel{}{x}^{})\frac{z^{2\mathrm{\Delta }d+2}}{(z^2+|\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}|^2)^{\mathrm{\Delta }+1}}(𝐀\alpha )(\stackrel{}{x}),$$

where for brevity of our notation we denote this linear functional acting on $`\alpha (\stackrel{}{x}^{})`$ by $`𝐀\left[\alpha (\stackrel{}{x}^{})\right](\stackrel{}{x})`$. This cumbersome looking integral turns out to have very desirable properties as we will demonstrate shortly. In order to fix the boundary relation determined by some classical function $`\rho (\stackrel{}{x})`$ we thus write:

$$z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)|_{}=(𝐀\rho )(\stackrel{}{x}).$$

This fixes $`\alpha (\stackrel{}{x})=\rho (\stackrel{}{x})`$ and allows us to formulate conveniently the fact that the boundary relation sets the leading term in the expansion of the gravity field near the boundary of AdS \[2,,3\]4 The sub leading term, $`\beta `$ parameterizes the expectation value of the dual CFT field $`𝒪`$ in the presence of a source term $`\rho 𝒪`$. Regularity of the solution in Euclidean $`AdS`$ fixes this term as a function of the leading term $`\alpha `$..

Moreover, as pointed out in (2.1), it is clear that (2.1) does not restrict terms which scale with $`z`$ like the subleading term $`\beta (\stackrel{}{x})z^\mathrm{\Delta }`$. In the Lorentzian version of the correspondence terms of this type are identified with the fluctuating $`CFT`$ degrees of freedom and it is thus desirable that they should not be constrained.

Note that, as usual in field theory, (2.1) subjected to (2.1) will not have nontrivial classical solutions unless we add to it a boundary source term to ensure that its linear variation vanishes also when $`\rho 0`$. The action one gets in the presence of a source is thus:

$$𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]𝒮_0[\varphi ]+_{}d^dxd^dx^{}ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)𝐀(\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{x}^{})\rho (\stackrel{}{x}^{})𝒮_0[\varphi ]+ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi 𝐀\rho ,$$

since the vanishing of the linear variation:

$$\delta 𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]=_{}d^{d+1}x\sqrt{g}\delta \varphi [^2+m^2]\varphi _{}ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\delta \varphi [z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi 𝐀\rho ],$$

leads either to Dirichlet boundary condition or to the ones we use, namely (2.1)5 Using (2.1) in (2.1) one gets the action we used in . We will demonstrate below that the general analysis presented here reproduces the result in . Note that the two actions are not equivalent if we choose Dirichlet boundary conditions..

The formulation of the $`AdS/CFT`$ correspondence \[2,,3\] in terms of generating functionals in the classical gravity approximation is thus given by:

$$Z[\rho ]_{CFT}<e^{{\scriptscriptstyle \rho 𝒪}}>_{CFT}=Z[\rho ]_{string}D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]}e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi _\rho ;\rho ]},$$

where $`<\mathrm{}>_{CFT}`$ means the path integral in the CFT, the field $`\varphi `$ is the gravity field dual to the CFT operator $`𝒪`$, and $`\varphi _\rho `$ is the classical solution. Since we are interested only in the dynamics of one scalar field we slightly abused notations as if it is a field theory path integral over this scalar field. This is justified at low enough energies before quantum gravity and stringy effects set in, which is the regime we are interested in. Note that there are two ways to interpret this gravity path integral. Either the measure includes (2.1) as a boundary condition or that there is no boundary condition and (2.1) is imposed at the classical saddle point as a boundary equation of motion.

Let us first show that this reproduces the known results of $`AdS/CFT`$. Evaluating the action (2.1) on the classical solution (2.1) obeying (2.1), i.e. on

$$\varphi _\rho (\stackrel{}{x},z)=d^dx^{}\rho (\stackrel{}{x}^{})\frac{z^\mathrm{\Delta }}{(z^2+|\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}|^2)^\mathrm{\Delta }},$$

one gets at a finite cutoff $`ϵ`$

$$𝒮^ϵ[\varphi _\rho ;\rho ]=\frac{1}{2}_{}d^dx_1d^dx_2d^dx_3\frac{\rho (\stackrel{}{x}_1)𝐀(\stackrel{}{x_2},\stackrel{}{x}_3)\rho (\stackrel{}{x}_3)}{(ϵ^2+|\stackrel{}{x}_1\stackrel{}{x}_2|^2)^\mathrm{\Delta }}.$$

To remove the cutoff we use the formula (for $`\gamma >\frac{d}{2}`$):

$$\underset{z0}{lim}\frac{z^{2\gamma d}}{(z^2+|\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}|^2)^\gamma }=\pi ^{\frac{d}{2}}\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\gamma \frac{d}{2})}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\gamma )}\delta ^d(\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}).$$

This gives (see (2.1) for the definition of A):

$$\underset{z0}{lim}𝐀(\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{x}^{})=\left(2\pi ^{\frac{d}{2}}(\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{d}{2})\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{d}{2})}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\mathrm{\Delta })}\right)\delta ^d(\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}).$$

Thus after removing the cutoff the action becomes:

$$𝒮[\varphi _\rho ;\rho ]\underset{ϵ0}{lim}𝒮^ϵ[\varphi _\rho ;\rho ]=(\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{d}{2})\pi ^{\frac{d}{2}}\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{d}{2})}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\mathrm{\Delta })}d^dxd^dx^{}\frac{\rho (\stackrel{}{x})\rho (\stackrel{}{x}^{})}{|\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}|^{2\mathrm{\Delta }}}.$$

Here we see the desirable properties of this formulation. The specific form of $`𝐀`$ gave, upon the removal of the cutoff, exactly the correct coefficient $`(\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{d}{2})`$ that was found in  to be necessary in order to obey Ward identities. The minus sign is important for the positivity of the $`CFT`$ two-point function.

In the marginal case $`\mathrm{\Delta }=\frac{d}{2}`$ the asymptotic behavior is given instead of (2.1) by:

$$\varphi (\stackrel{}{x},z)=\left[\alpha (\stackrel{}{x})z^{\frac{d}{2}}log(\frac{z}{z_0})+\beta (\stackrel{}{x})z^{\frac{d}{2}}\right](1+𝒪(z^2)),$$

with $`z_0`$ a constant. An elegant property of this formulation is that due to the shift of the exponent in $`𝐀`$ with respect to (2.1) $`(\gamma =\mathrm{\Delta }+1)`$ the above procedure remains true also in this marginal case6 There is no divergence in (2.1) in the marginal case as can be seen by using the defining property of the Gamma function $`0\times \mathrm{\Gamma }(0)=\mathrm{\Gamma }(1)=1`$., with the result

$$\underset{z0}{lim}𝐀(\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{x}^{})=\frac{d\pi ^{\frac{d}{2}}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(\frac{d}{2}+1)}\delta ^d(\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{x}^{}).$$

The action one gets in this case is given in . Moreover, scalar fields in $`d`$dimensions obey a unitarity bound $`\mathrm{\Delta }\frac{d2}{2}`$. In this formalism we see this bound to arise naturally as a bound on the applicability of the derivation leading to (2.1). Indeed unless $`\mathrm{\Delta }>\frac{d2}{2}`$ the coefficient in front of (2.1) diverges. The fact that in $`𝐀`$ the exponent is $`\gamma =\mathrm{\Delta }+1`$ captures this property7 This bound is also necessary for the expansion (2.1) to give the leading terms when $`z0`$. Indeed the $`𝒪(z^2)`$ corrections are smaller when $`\mathrm{\Delta }<\frac{d}{2}`$ if $`d\mathrm{\Delta }<\mathrm{\Delta }+2`$.,8 The case $`\mathrm{\Delta }=\frac{d2}{2}`$ corresponds to a free CFT field. It is thus not surprising that we do not see this behavior in the gravity approximation.. This formalism is applicable also in the range $`\frac{d}{2}>\mathrm{\Delta }>\frac{d2}{2}`$, however in this range there are further subtelties \[14,,15\].

To summarize, this formalism reproduces correctly the usual $`AdS/CFT`$ results including some of its subtleties. It differs from the usual treatment of $`AdS/CFT`$ in that we use (2.1) instead of Dirichlet boundary condition. In this treatment the CFT source $`\rho `$ is also a source to the gravity field $`\varphi `$ albeit with coupling only on the boundary of $`AdS`$. In the next section we show how to generalize to the case of multiple trace deformations of the dual $`CFT`$.

3. AdS/CFT deformed by a Multiple-trace Operator.

In this section we derive the effect of deforming the dual CFT with a Multi-trace operator. Start with an $`AdS/CFT`$ dual pair and denote the action of the CFT by $`I_0[\phi _j]`$, where $`\phi _j`$ are the fundamental fields of the CFT. Now consider, following , a general deformation of the CFT action

$$I_0I_WI_0+W[\widehat{𝒪}(\phi _j)],$$

by adding some function of the Single-trace operator

$$\widehat{𝒪}Tr(\underset{j}{}\phi _j).$$

Expanding the notation of (2.1) we write the classical gravity approximation to the $`AdS/CFT`$ correspondence as:

$$Z[\rho ]_{CFT}<e^{{\scriptscriptstyle \rho \widehat{𝒪}}}>_{CFT}=D[\phi _j]e^{I_0[\phi _j]}e^{\rho O(\phi _i)}D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]}e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi _\rho ;\rho ]},$$

where as before $`\rho `$ is a classical source, $`<\mathrm{}>_{CFT}`$ stands for $`D[\phi _j]e^{I_0[\phi _j]}(\mathrm{})`$ and we use the notation $`\widehat{𝒪}`$ for the quantum operator acting in the CFT Hilbert space and $`O`$ for the usual (commutative) function which enters in the corresponding path integral. To find the gravity action dual to the deformed CFT we proceed as follows:

$$\begin{array}{cc}\hfill Z_{CFT}^W[\rho ]& <e^{{\scriptscriptstyle \rho \widehat{𝒪}}}>_{CFT}^W<e^{{\scriptscriptstyle \rho \widehat{𝒪}}W[\widehat{𝒪}]}>_{CFT}=\hfill \\ & =D[\phi _j]e^{I_0[\phi _i]W[O(\phi _i)]+\rho O(\phi _i)}=D[\phi _i]e^{I_0}e^{W[O]}e^{\rho O}=\hfill \\ & =D[\phi _i]e^{I_0}e^{W[\frac{\delta }{\delta \rho }]}e^{\rho O}=e^{W[\frac{\delta }{\delta \rho }]}D[\phi _i]e^{I_0}e^{\rho O}=\hfill \\ & =e^{W[\frac{\delta }{\delta \rho }]}<e^{{\scriptscriptstyle \rho \widehat{𝒪}}}>_{CFT}=e^{W[\frac{\delta }{\delta \rho }]}D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]}=\hfill \\ & =e^{W[\frac{\delta }{\delta \rho }]}D[\varphi ]e^{\left(𝒮_0[\varphi ]+ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi 𝐀\rho \right)}=D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_0[\varphi ]}e^{W[\frac{\delta }{\delta \rho }]}e^{ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi 𝐀\rho }=\hfill \\ & =D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_0[\varphi ]}e^{W[ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }𝐀\varphi ]}e^{ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi 𝐀\rho }=D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]}e^{W[ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }𝐀\varphi ]}\hfill \\ & D[\varphi ]e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ,W]}e^{𝒮_{gr}[\varphi _{cl};\rho ,W]}.\hfill \end{array}$$

A crucial assumption in this derivation is that (2.1) is not a boundary condition but a boundary equation of motion, i.e. the measure $`D[\varphi ]`$ does not depend on $`\rho `$.

To summarize the computation, we found that at a finite cutoff the gravity action dual to the CFT deformed as in (3.1) is:

$$𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ,W]𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ]+W[_{}d^dx^{}ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }𝐀(\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{x}^{})\varphi (\stackrel{}{x}^{},z)].$$

From here we proceed to find the boundary relation in the same way as for (2.1):

$$\begin{array}{cc}\hfill \delta 𝒮_{gr}[\varphi ;\rho ,W]& =_{}d^{d+1}x\sqrt{g}\delta \varphi [^2+m^2]\varphi \hfill \\ & _{}ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }\delta \varphi \left(z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi 𝐀\rho +𝐀\frac{\delta W[\psi ]}{\delta \psi }\right),\hfill \end{array}$$

where we denoted the argument of $`W`$ by $`\psi `$ which in the condensed notation introduced before is given by:

$$\psi _{}d^dx^{}ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }𝐀(\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{x}^{})\varphi (\stackrel{}{x}^{},z)ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }𝐀\varphi .$$

Since the path integral in (3.1) has no boundary condition, a classical solution must obey, apart from the bulk equation of motion, also the following boundary equation of motion:

$$z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi |_{}=𝐀\left(\rho \frac{\delta W[\psi ]}{\delta \psi }\right).$$

This is the main result of this work. It shows how the deformation of the dual CFT by a Multi-trace operator changes the action and the boundary equation of motion in gravity.

The generalization to a function of many variables $`W[\widehat{𝒪}_1,\mathrm{},\widehat{𝒪}_n]`$ is straightforward. The action becomes:

$$𝒮_{gr}[\varphi _1,\mathrm{},\varphi _n;\rho ,W]\underset{i=1}{\overset{n}{}}𝒮_{gr}[\varphi _i;\rho _i]+W[\psi _1,\mathrm{},\psi _n],$$

where $`\psi _iϵ^{\mathrm{\Delta }_i}𝐀_i\varphi _i`$ and with the following boundary equation of motion for each field:

$$z^{\mathrm{\Delta }_id}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta }_i)\varphi _i|_{}=𝐀_i\left(\rho _i\frac{\delta W[\psi _1,\mathrm{},\psi _n]}{\delta \psi _i}\right).$$

In the specific example discussed in :

$$W[\widehat{𝒪}]=\frac{\stackrel{~}{h}}{2}\widehat{𝒪}^2,$$

we get the following deformed boundary equation of motion:

$$z^{\mathrm{\Delta }d}(z_z\mathrm{\Delta })\varphi |_{}=𝐀\left(\rho +\stackrel{~}{h}ϵ^\mathrm{\Delta }𝐀\varphi \right),$$

reproducing the result of  which was obtained using an auxiliary field method.

In  Witten reasoned based on a matrix model analogy that the boundary relation in $`AdS`$ gravity corresponding to a Multi-trace deformation of the form (3.1) is

$$\alpha =\frac{\delta W[\beta ]}{\delta \beta },$$

with $`\alpha ,\beta `$ given by (2.1). This matches with the results presented above since when the cutoff is removed the LHS of (3.1) essentially picks out the $`\alpha `$ up to a coefficient (see (2.1)) while from (2.1) the RHS of (3.1) becomes9 This is so because when $`ϵ0`$ $`\psi ϵ^{d2\mathrm{\Delta }}\alpha (\stackrel{}{x})+\beta (\stackrel{}{x})`$ (up to coefficients) and thus $`\frac{\delta \psi (\stackrel{}{x})}{\delta \beta (\stackrel{}{y})}=\delta ^d(\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{y})`$. The extra $`\rho `$ in (3.1) is just a matter of difference in conventions with respect to  since we singled out the linear term in $`W`$. $`\frac{\delta W[\psi ]}{\delta \psi }=\frac{\delta W[\beta ]}{\delta \beta }`$.

4. Discussion and Summary

4.1. Marginality and General Covariance.

If $`W[\widehat{𝒪}_1,\mathrm{},\widehat{𝒪}_n]`$ is a marginal deformation in the CFT then it contains only monomial terms of dimension $`d`$. Correspondingly $`W[ϵ^{\mathrm{\Delta }_1}𝐀_1\varphi _1,\mathrm{},ϵ^{\mathrm{\Delta }_n}𝐀_n\varphi _n]`$ on the gravity side will have only terms of the form $`ϵ^d\varphi _j`$. In Poincare coordinates the boundary volume element is $`\sqrt{\widehat{g}}=ϵ^d`$. Thus the deformation of the gravity action can be written in a general covariant way. From (2.1) we see that this boundary volume element is needed in order to get a finite boundary integral in the limit $`ϵ0`$.

4.2. Renormalizability.

The way in which the deformation term $`W`$ enters both the CFT action (3.1) and the dual gravity action (3.1) suggests that any renormalization procedure applied on the CFT side by adding local counter-terms translates straightforwardly to the gravity side. Thus if the CFT action must be supplemented with a counter-term $`I+W[\widehat{𝒪}]I+(W[\widehat{𝒪}]+R[\widehat{𝒪}])`$ then following the same steps as in (3.1) we see that the gravity action acquires a corresponding boundary term $`𝒮gr+W[\psi ]𝒮gr+(W[\psi ]+R[\psi ])`$. This fact was demonstrated explicitly in  for the case (3.1).

4.3. Boundary condition vs boundary equation of motion.

An important theme discussed in this note is the issue of boundary condition versus boundary equation of motion in $`AdS/CFT`$. In the usual correspondence described in section 2 it seems that there is not much of a difference whether one chooses Dirichlet boundary condition or (2.1). Furthermore, in the classical limit it is more a matter of semantics whether one thinks of (2.1) as a boundary condition constraining the phase space of allowed quantum fluctuations or as a boundary equation of motion standing on an equal footing with the bulk equation of motion. It is therefore interesting that when one considers Multi-trace deformations the natural choice turns out to be (2.1). The derivation (3.1) clearly supports the interpretation of (2.1) as a boundary equation of motion and not as a boundary condition. The work done in  also supports this interpretation, since although $`AdS/CFT`$ was formulated there with a boundary condition, the result was that after a Double-trace deformation one got (3.1) without a boundary condition10 The boundary conditions where explicitly integrated over in .. It thus looks more natural if the “usual” case is formulated in the same way as the one with Multi-trace deformations. We conclude that our analysis seems to give non-trivial information about the quantum gravity side of $`AdS/CFT`$. Of course, the claim that $`AdS/CFT`$ “has no boundary condition” raises some questions regarding conservation of charges etc. Also, it is not entirely clear if the distinction is really so sharp. Indeed the only fluctuations around the classical solution which contribute to the path integral are the ones which behave near the boundary like $`\delta \varphi z^\kappa `$ with $`\kappa >\frac{d}{2}`$ or $`\kappa =\frac{d}{2}\sqrt{\frac{d^2}{4}+m^2}`$. At least when $`\mathrm{\Delta }>\frac{d}{2}`$ fluctuations of the first kind automatically satisfy (2.1) when $`ϵ=0`$, while those of the second kind are infinitely supressed in the path integral. It thus seems that the difference between the two options before the deformation vanishes in this case when one removes the cutoff11 When $`ϵ=0`$ the depth of the well around the boundary behavior of the classical solution becomes infinite.. A last remark is that the string theory description of spacetimes with boundaries is an interesting and subtle problem; see e.g. the discussion in .

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank R. Argurio, J.L.F. Barbon, D.S. Berman, M. Dine, S. Elitzur, G. Ferretti, A. Giveon, A. Hanany, Y. Oz, A. Petkou, E. Rabinovici for useful discussions. We owe special thanks to M. Berkooz and O. Aharony for advising us and for a critical reading of the manuscript. A.Sh thanks the theory devision in CERN and the string group in Chalmers university, Gothenburg, for hospitality during the final stages of this work. A.Sh is supported by a Clore fellowship. This work is supported in part by BSF – American-Israel Bi-National Science Foundation, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities – Centers of Excellence Program, the German-Israel Bi-National Science Foundation, the European RTN network HPRN-CT-2000-00122.

References

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text:
# References

Mystery of Vacuum Energy
or
Rise and Fall of Cosmological Constant

A.D. Dolgov

INFN, Via Paradiso, 12 - 44100 Ferrara Italy
and
ITEP, Bol. Cheremushkinskaya 25, Moscow 113259, Russia.

## Abstract

Two sides of cosmological constant problem are discussed: a mysterious compensation of all contributions to vacuum energy with the accuracy of 100-50 orders of magnitude and a surprising equality of a constant vacuum energy density to the present-day value of time dependent cosmological energy density.

Cosmological constant was born in 1918 in Einstein’s paper , where he noticed that the equations of General Relativity would possess a stationary cosmological solution if one added an extra term proportional to metric tensor $`g_{\mu \nu }`$ with a constant coefficient $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$:

$`R_{\mu \nu }{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}g_{\mu \nu }R=8\pi G_NT_{\mu \nu }+g_{\mu \nu }\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ (1)
For quite a long time the parameter $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ was considered as an extra degree of freedom in GR, permitted by general covariance. Now it is commonly understood that $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ should be identified with vacuum energy density:

$`\rho _{vac}=\mathrm{\Lambda }/8\pi G_N\mathrm{\Lambda }m_{Pl}^2/8\pi `$ (2)
Naively one might think that vacuum is something which is empty and thus its energy must be zero. That is why many physicists and especially astronomers were (and still are) very strongly against cosmological constant. Einstein himself considered $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ as the biggest blunder of his life. The point of view of one of the creators of the big bang cosmology, George Gamow, is expressed by his words : ”$`\lambda `$ again raises its nasty head” (he used a small letter, which somewhat reminded a snake, possibly to show his contempt). The attitude of astro-cosmo-physical society toward $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ was (and possibly is) strongly polarized. The majority did not accept the notion that vacuum might gravitate and insisted that $`\mathrm{\Lambda }0`$. On the other hand, some non-negligible by number and quality scientists believed that $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ exists and might be cosmologically important. Among them are such distinguished names as Lemaître, De Sitter, and Eddington. By Lemaître’s opinion, even if Einstein did not do anything except discovering $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term it would be enough to make his name famous.

A striking fine-tuning, however, justified a negative attitude to a cosmologically essential $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term. Vacuum energy must remain constant in the course of the universe expansion, while the energy density of usual matter decreases roughly as critical energy density $`\rho _cm_{Pl}^2/t^2`$. Thus, if now $`\rho _{vac}`$ is close to $`\rho _c`$, it looks as a very strange coincidence. This problem stimulated the notion of the so called time dependent cosmological ”constant”. This idea was first put forward in 1932 by M. Bronstein  However this assumption is not as innocent as it sounds, and Bronstein’s conjecture was justly criticized by Landau, as is admitted in Bronstein’s paper . Similar criticism is valid for all subsequent development of the idea; the list of publication on the subject is quite long and can be, at least partly, found in refs. -. In brief, the problem with $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=\mathrm{\Lambda }(t)`$ is the following. Taking covariant derivative of both sides of eq. (1), one finds:

$`_\mu \mathrm{\Lambda }+8\pi G_NT_{\mu ;\nu }^\nu =0`$ (3)
Usually the energy-momentum tensor of matter is obtained from the matter action by variation over metric:

$`T_{\mu \nu }={\displaystyle \frac{\delta }{\delta g^{\mu \nu }}}{\displaystyle d^4x\sqrt{g}}`$ (4)
and if general covariance is unbroken, $`T_{\mu \nu }`$ is conserved as a result of equations of motion, $`T_{\mu ;\nu }^\nu =0`$ and $`_\mu \mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$. Thus a high price is to be paid for an introduction a time-dependent $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term: either one has to reject the standard Lagrangian formalism or to invent a new dynamical field which is a highly non-trivial task.

There is one more and even much more striking side of the cosmological constant problem. Even if vacuum energy is cosmologically significant, i.e. $`\rho _{vac}\rho _c`$, it is unreasonably tiny in terms of particle physics scale:

$`\rho _{vac}\rho _c10^{47}\mathrm{GeV}^4`$ (5)
Moreover there are contributions into vacuum energy, which are 50-100 orders of magnitude(!) larger than this upper limit. The first review papers stressing the importance of the vacuum energy problem were published in 1989 . Since then several more reviews appeared  where one can find more up-to-date references.

There are vacuum fluctuations which naively have infinitely large energy density. Fortunately in the world with equal number of bosonic and fermionic species this infinity cancels out, as was noticed by Zeldovich  a few years before the pioneering papers on supersymmetry were published . Still since supersymmetry is not exact, only infinities are compensated but finite non-compensated remnants are of the order of the SUSY breaking scale, $`\rho _{vac}^{(susy)}m_{susy}^410^8\mathrm{GeV}^4`$. Possibly there were phase transitions in the early universe in the course of which vacuum energy changed by $`10^{60}\mathrm{GeV}^4`$, if they took place at GUT scale or by $`10^{10}\mathrm{GeV}^4`$ at electroweak scale. One could argue however that these phase transitions are manifestations of high energy physics and who knows, if they existed or not. Still there exist some other contributions which, though smaller than the grand unification and even the electroweak ones, are enormous in comparison with $`10^{47}\mathrm{GeV}^4`$. It is well known that vacuum state in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is not empty. It is filled by quark (or chiral)  and gluon  condensates. The existence of these condensates is practically an experimental fact. Successful QCD description of hadron properties is impossible without them. The vacuum energy density of the quark condensate, $`\overline{q}q`$, is about $`10^4\mathrm{GeV}^4`$ and that of gluon condensate, $`G_{\mu \nu }^2`$, is approximately an order of magnitude bigger. Comparing these numbers with the upper bound (5) we see that there must exist something which does not know anything about quarks and gluons (this ”something” is not related to quarks and gluons by the usual QCD interactions, otherwise it will be observed in experiment) but still this mysterious agent is able to compensate vacuum energies of quarks and gluons with the fantastic accuracy of $`10^{44}`$.

Several possibilities to solve this mystery were discussed in the literature, none was successful. One can imagine logically the following four ways (however, it is quite possible that a number 5 is realized):
1. Modification of gravity on macroscopic distances (possibly due to higher dimensions).
2. Anthropic principle.
3. A symmetry leading to $`\rho _{vac}=0`$.
4. Adjustment mechanism (either by a new massless or very light field or due to infrared instability of quantum fluctuations in De Sitter space-time).

To modify gravity at big distances, so that the vacuum part of energy-momentum tensor does not gravitate, is a formidable task, keeping in mind that general covariance, which implies, in particular, covariant conservation of energy momentum tensor and ensures vanishing of the graviton mass, must be respected. In the course of the universe evolution equation of state may change so that vacuum energy changes (it usually happens in phase transitions) and subtraction of vacuum energy seems incompatible with conservation of total $`T_{\mu \nu }`$.

Anthropic principle is possibly the last resort in the case that no other solution can be found. At the moment the situation with $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-term reminds the one that existed in Friedman cosmology before inflationary resolution of seemingly unsolvable cosmological problems has been proposed .

It would be very attractive to discover a symmetry principle forbidding vacuum energy. Such a symmetry should connect known fields with new unknown ones. Some of those fields should be very light to achieve the cancellation on the scale $`10^3`$ eV. Neither such fields are observed, nor such a symmetry is known. Moreover, if cosmological constant is not precisely zero, as strongly indicated by the recent data , one has to explain why a symmetry breaking produces a remnant very close to $`\rho _c`$ today.

For me the adjustment mechanism seems to be the most promising at the present time, though this point of view is possibly not shared by many physicists working on the problem. The idea of adjustment is similar to the solution of CP-conservation problem in quantum chromodynamics by the axion field -. Assume that there exists a new massless field $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$ coupled to gravity in such a way that this field is unstable in De Sitter background. Such a field would develop vacuum condensate whose energy could kill the source . At the moment no satisfactory adjustment mechanism, which gives a realistic cosmology, has been found. However, independently of concrete realization, adjustment models generically predict that vacuum energy is compensated only up to the terms of the order of $`\rho _c(t)`$ . The non-compensated remnants may possess a rather peculiar equation of state.

A natural idea that $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$ is a scalar field meets serious difficulties  but higher spin fields may be more perspective. In particular, a second rank symmetric tensor $`S_{\mu \nu }`$ with a very simple Lagrangian density:

$`=S_{\mu \nu ;\alpha }S^{\mu \nu ;\alpha }`$ (6)
could develop a condensate of isotropic components $`S_{tt}`$ and $`S_{ij}\delta _{ij}`$ which eliminate an original $`\rho _{vac}`$ down to terms of the order $`m_{Pl}^2/t^2`$ and successfully change De Sitter expansion into a power law one. Still the model does not lead to realistic cosmology. In particular, the concrete realization proposed in ref.  leads to a strong time variation of the gravitational constant . There are quite many different models of adjustment mechanism discussed in the literature. The references can be found in the above cited reviews ; recently there appeared a few more papers .

Another model of adjustment discussed in the literature  is based on the known phenomenon that quantum fluctuations of massless fields in De Sitter space-time are infrared unstable. The effects of such instability are significant but it is not yet clear if they could kill their creator, vacuum energy.

An interesting approach to self-tuning of the cosmological constant in multidimensional theories is actively developed during last years. The number of papers on the subject is already impressive and constantly rising. An incomplete list of references includes the papers  which may help to understand some ideas showing how this mechanism may operate. One should keep in mind however, that we live in four dimensional world (higher dimensions, if they exist, are either small or penetration there is protected by a potential wall) and all the mechanisms of nullification of vacuum energy in higher dimensions must be described in 4D language as well. If new higher dimensional physics starts to operate at TeV scale it is not clear how it may cancel out QCD vacuum condensates of quarks and gluons which are developed at 100 MeV scale.

One may try another less ambitious approach - to neglect the problem of extremely large vacuum energy introduced by particle physics and quantum field theory and to try simply to describe cosmology phenomenologically introducing an additional parameter, or better to say, a function $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(t)`$, keeping in mind, of course, that this can be done by introducing a new light or massless field to keep general covariance unbroken. Earlier papers on the subject include refs. . This approach attracted great attention after indications for accelerated cosmological expansion in 1998 . An unknown form of energy was mimicked by a scalar field with the equation of state $`p=w\rho `$ with a negative parameter $`w<1/3`$. The name “quintessence” was suggested for this field . This work stimulated a lot of activity in the field. Many references can be found in the reviews . My special pleasure is to cite in this connection the works by M. Novello and his collaborators .

A question of vital importance for all the models that are aimed to a resolution of vacuum energy problem is what is the magnitude of vacuum or vacuum-like energy (now the term “dark energy” is commonly used for the latter). If it is too large by absolute value, cosmology would be very much different and our type of life would be hardly possible  (anthropic principle?). If vacuum energy is too small it would not be observed. According to the present day data, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}0.7`$. Thus we are very lucky, it is large enough to be observed in cosmological phenomena and small enough not to spoil our life. Moreover, as we have already mentioned above, this adds another interesting mystery to the list of unexplained phenomena: why $`\rho _{vac}`$ which stays constant during cosmological evolution is so close to energy density of matter which evolves with cosmic time as $`\rho _m1/t^2`$. There is indeed weird cosmic conspiracy: all forms of matter have similar contributions to cosmological energy density: usual baryonic matter ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_b0.05`$), dark matter ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_{DM}0.20.3`$) - possibly dark matter consists of several components of comparable mass/energy density, and now there is another member of the club, vacuum energy with $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}0.7`$.

Though there are quite strong data now indicating that seemingly empty space indeed (anti)gravitates, still this conclusion is so revolutionary that it deserves more thorough checks. During practically all previous (XXth) century the overwhelming feeling was that cosmological constant is identically zero. There were only 2-3 short periods when a non-zero lambda was seriously considered. After the Einstein’s “blunder” of 1918 the most serious was one at the end of 60’s when astronomical data indicated an accumulation of quasars near the red-shift $`z=2`$ . Then again cosmological constant was strongly out of fashion till the end of the century when different pieces of data have accumulated, all implying that $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ is most probably non-vanishing. Prior to the observation of large z supernovae , there were indications to the age crisis. The universe age can be expressed through the present day value of the Hubble parameter $`H=100h`$ km/sec/Mpc and the cosmological energy density as:

$`t_u=9.78810^9h^1\mathrm{yr}{\displaystyle _0^1}{\displaystyle \frac{dx}{\sqrt{1\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}+\mathrm{\Omega }_mx^1+\mathrm{\Omega }_{rel}x^2+\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}x^2}}}`$ (7)
where $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{rel}`$, and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}`$ correspond respectively to the energy density of nonrelativistic matter, relativistic matter, and to the vacuum energy density (or, what is the same, to the cosmological constant); $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}=\mathrm{\Omega }_m+\mathrm{\Omega }_{rel}+\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}`$. If $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}=0`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}=1`$ (according to inflation), and $`h0.7`$ (see e.g. ref. ) then $`t_u`$ would be 9.3 Gyr, much smaller than the age of the universe estimated from nuclear chronology and the ages of old globular clusters, for a recent analysis see e.g. ref. . However if $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}>0`$ the age crisis disappears. In particular, for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}=1`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}=0.7`$ the universe age would be 13.5 Gyr in good agreement with the age determined by other methods.

Observations of high red-shift supernovae, if they are standard candles, allow to measure deceleration parameter, $`q=\mathrm{\Omega }_m2\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}`$. The two contributions enter with opposite sign because positive vacuum energy antigravitates. Indeed, according to the Einstein equations effective source of gravitational force is $`\rho +3p=2\rho `$, where $`\rho `$ and $`p`$ are respectively energy and pressure densities and for vacuum $`p=\rho `$. On the other hand, position of the first acoustic peak in the angular spectrum of cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) permits to conclude that $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{tot}=\mathrm{\Omega }_m+\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}=1`$. One can also determine $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m`$ directly measuring peculiar velocities, gravitational lensing, or evolution of cluster abundances. All these methods give $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m0.3`$. The determination of three different combinations of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}`$ mentioned above are analyzed e.g. in ref.  (there are many more works where a similar conclusion is reached but their list is too long for this brief paper). It is argued that all three data sets well agree converging to $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{vac}0.7`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m0.3`$. So it seems that now and at last astronomy presents a solid piece of evidence in favor of non-zero and significant cosmological term.

To summarize, the problem of vacuum energy remains possibly the most profound problem of contemporary physics. It is a unique example when theoretical expectation differ from observation by 100-50 orders of magnitude. The recent indications that the universe expands with acceleration and that cosmological constant (or an unknown form of dark energy) is non-vanishing significantly amplified gravity of the problem. If earlier one might think that vacuum does not gravitate at all, now it seems that empty space creates gravitational repulsion. This observation improved the status of adjustment mechanism which predicted that there must be some unusual form of energy due to a non-complete compensation of vacuum  energy. Still no satisfactory form of adjustment mechanism leading to realistic cosmology has been yet found. Hopefully when it is achieved the theory will indicate a unique and well defined form of dark energy but at the moment the problem is far from resolution. It presents a strong challenge for fundamental research to and a serious indication to new physics. Two famous small clouds on the fundamental physics sky a century ago brought to life revolutionary quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Quite possibly the mystery of vacuum energy will stimulate new ideas in physics of this century (or millennium?).