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# Kondo effect of non-magnetic impurities and the co-existing charge order in the cuprate superconductors

## Abstract

We present a theory of Kondo effect caused by an induced magnetic moment near non-magnetic impurities such as Zn and Li in the cuprate superconductors. Based on the co-existence of charge order and superconductivity, a natural description of the induced moment and the resulting Kondo effect is obtained in the framework of bond-operator theory of microscopic $`t`$-$`J`$-$`V`$ Hamiltonian. The local density of state near impurities is computed in a self-consistent Bogoliubov-de Gennes theory which shows a low-energy peak in the middle of superconducting gap. Our theory also suggests that the charge order can be enhanced near impuries.

Impurities in the cuprate superconductors have attracted much interest because of their role as an effective tool in probing the local electronic and magnetic properties of high $`T_c`$ superconductors. Especially remarkable have been recent experiments in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)  of surfaces of the cuprate superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (BSCCO) which showed a low-bias peak in the differential tunneling conductance in the vicinity of Zn impurities . Since the Zn++ ion has spin $`S=0`$, it seems natural to view each Zn site as just a potential scatterer, and therefore to interpret the peak as a quasibound state . However, there are some experimental features which cannot be naturally explained by this theory .

More importantly, a series of NMR experiments  have shown clear evidences that there is an induced magnetic moment with spin $`S=1/2`$ near Zn impurities. Therefore, it is imperative for a consistent theory to address the problem of impurity in the framework of Kondo effect. Though there have been several, previous works based on the Kondo physics , their approach was based on the ad hoc assumptions on the existence of induced spin moment near Zn impurities. Especially, the location of induced spin moment and the range of Kondo interaction were chosen in ad hoc manner. In this article, we would like to provide a self-consistent theory of Kondo effect based on the co-existence of charge order and superconductivity. We take this assumption to be natural because one of the important consequences of charge order is the induced $`S=1/2`$ moment near non-magnetic impurities , as schematically shown in Fig.1.

Much more direct evidences for the relevance of charge order in the high $`T_c`$ superconductors have been recently obtained in several remarkable STM experiments, one of which was performed by Hoffman et al.  where the charge order with a period of four lattice spacing was observed near vortex cores in BSCCO. As predicted in Ref., the superconductivity is locally suppressed near the cores of vortices, and the static charge order appears in such regions. Another STM measurement in optimally doped BSCCO was performed by Howald et al. , showing clear evidences for the static charge order even in zero magnetic field. In addition to the STM measurements, inelastic neutron scattering techniques have been also used to provide important evidences for the charge order in La2-xSrxCuO4 (LSCO) and YBa2Cu3O6+x (YBCO) .

Note our viewpoint that, though the charge order may not be static in all regions of superconducting phase, the time scale of charge order fluctuation is long enough to ensure the superconducting correlation and the Kondo spin physics. Therefore, in the rest of discussions, we will assume the static charge order with period of two lattice spacing (the spin-Peierls order), which, we believe, captures the essential physics in spite of its simplicity. Also, remember that the charge orders with different period are most likely to coexist because, as shown in Ref., the periodicity is rather sensitive to various parameters including the doping concentration.

Recently, a natural theoretical framework was developed to describe the co-existing phase of charge density wave (CDW) order and superconductivity, based on the bond-operator representation . It was shown that the saddle-point approximation of this bond-operator theory consistently interpolates the phase of Mott insulator at low dopings and that of superconductor with nodal fermions at moderate dopings. Therefore, it would be very interesting to explore the question whether the bond-operator theory gives rise to the low-energy peak of local density of state in the vicinity of non-magnetic impurities without ad hoc assumptions. It would be also interesting to study the effect of impurity on the charge order.

Now we begin our bond-operator theory by setting up the exact mapping between the bond operators and the usual electron creation operators . Let $`c_{1a}^{}`$ and $`c_{2a}^{}`$ $`(a=,)`$ be the electron creation operators on the two sites of a pair. When we project out all states with two electrons at the same site, the electronic Hilbert space for a pair of sites is composed of nine states which can be expressed in terms of the “bond particle” creation operators defined by:

$`s^{}|v`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}}\epsilon _{ab}c_{1a}^{}c_{2b}^{}|0,`$ (1)
$`t_\alpha ^{}|v`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}}\sigma _{bc}^\alpha \epsilon _{ca}c_{1a}^{}c_{2b}^{}|0,`$ (2)
$`h_{1a}^{}|v`$ $`=`$ $`c_{1a}^{}|0,`$ (3)
$`h_{2a}^{}|v`$ $`=`$ $`c_{2a}^{}|0,`$ (4)
$`d^{}|v`$ $`=`$ $`|0`$ (5)
where $`|0`$ is the electron vacuum and $`|v`$ is an imaginary vacuum void of any bond particles. Remember that $`\sigma _{ab}^\alpha `$ $`(\alpha =x,y,z)`$ are the Pauli matrices, and $`\epsilon _{ab}`$ is the second-rank antisymmetric tensor with $`\epsilon _{}=+1`$. The opertators $`s,d,t_\alpha `$ all obey the canonical boson commutation relations, while the $`h_{1a},h_{2a}`$ obey the canonical fermion relations. Since the total Hilbert space of these five bosons and four fermions is much larger than that of the physical nine states, we must impose the following constraint on the bond particle Hilbert space.

$$s^{}s+t_\alpha ^{}t_\alpha +h_{1a}^{}h_{1a}+h_{2a}^{}h_{2a}+d^{}d=1.$$
(6)
In the subspace contrained by Eq. (6) we can write the exact expressions for electron operators in terms of bond operators:

$`c_{1a}^{}`$ $`=`$ $`h_{1a}^{}d+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}}\epsilon _{ab}s^{}h_{2b}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}}\epsilon _{ac}\sigma _{cb}^\alpha t_\alpha ^{}h_{2b},`$ (7)
$`c_{2a}^{}`$ $`=`$ $`h_{2a}^{}d+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}}\epsilon _{ab}s^{}h_{1b}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}}\epsilon _{ac}\sigma _{cb}^\alpha t_\alpha ^{}h_{1b},`$ (8)
$`S_{1\alpha }`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}(s^{}t_\alpha +t_\alpha ^{}sϵ_{\alpha \beta \gamma }t_\beta ^{}t_\gamma )+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\sigma _{ab}^\alpha h_{1a}^{}h_{1b},`$ (9)
$`S_{2\alpha }`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}(s^{}t_\alpha +t_\alpha ^{}s+ϵ_{\alpha \beta \gamma }t_\beta ^{}t_\gamma )+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\sigma _{ab}^\alpha h_{2a}^{}h_{2b},`$ (10)
where $`ϵ_{\alpha \beta \gamma }`$ is the third-rank antisymmetric tensor with $`ϵ_{xyz}=+1`$, and, as usual, the electon spin operator is defined as $`S_\alpha =1/2c_a^{}\sigma _{ab}^\alpha c_b`$.

Equiped with the bond-operator representation of electron operators, we now apply the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) theory to solve the $`t`$-$`J`$-$`V`$ model in finite systems containing a single impurity with (infinitely) strong repulsion, $`U`$, which is defined by:

$`H`$ $`=`$ $`t{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}(c_{ia}^{}c_{ja}+c_{ja}^{}c_{ia})+J{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}S_{i\alpha }S_{j\alpha }`$ (11)
$`+`$ $`V{\displaystyle \underset{i,j}{}}c_{ia}^{}c_{ia}c_{jb}^{}c_{jb}\mu {\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}c_{ia}^{}c_{ia}+Uc_{i_0a}^{}c_{i_0a}`$ (12)
where $`i_0`$ denotes the position of impurity, and $`\mu `$ is the chemical potential. Also, it is implicitly assumed that all states with two electrons on any site have been projected out. Written in terms of bond operators, the Hamiltonian is physically meaningful only when the contraint condition in Eq.(6) is satisfied simultaneously. In this article, as usual in the mean field theory, only the average of this constraint will be satisfied via the Lagrange multiplier method. Note, however, that the average is taken over quantum fluctuations, not over space, so that the constraint will be satisfied individually at each site.

While general techniques of the bond-operator method can be found in Ref. in detail, several conceptial and technical points are worth mentioning, especially related to the impurity problem. (1) The nearst-neighbor Coulomb repulsion, $`V`$, is not only physically reasonable, but also gives rise to an important consequence. Without $`V`$, the pairing of holes primarily occurs through the condensation of $`d`$-bosons, which results in a very short-range $`s`$-wave-like pairing. It is only when the $`d`$-boson condensation is suppressed by a large $`V`$ that the superconducting state develops $`d`$-wave-like pairing, and nodal fermions emerge. Remember that we do not make any assumptions either on the emergence of superconducting state or the symmetry of pairing. They are obtained as a natural consequence of our saddle-point bond-operator theory of $`t`$-$`J`$-$`V`$ model at moderate dopings.

(2) The chemical potential, $`\mu `$, should be determined by fixing the average hole concentration, $`x`$, in the region far away from the impurity. In our finite system, we first obtain the value of $`\mu `$ without introducing the impurity, and then use it for the case of impurity by assuming that the system size is large enough so that a single impurity does not change the chemical potential.

(3) The impurity potential, $`U`$, is taken to be infinitely repulsive so that electrons are completely depleted from the Zn site. In the bond-operator formalism, one of the $`h`$-fermions, say $`h_{1a}(a=,)`$, is pinned at the unpaired site near the Zn impurity. (See Fig.1.) Of course, it is possible without charge order in the doped antiferromagnets that the electron escapes from the unpaired site all together, leaving the vacancy instead of lone spin moment. It is assumed, however, that the empty state is energetically unfavorable because of the similar reason why $`d`$-boson condensation is suppressed for large $`V`$.

(4) Finally, unlike the previous work in Ref., there are now two sets of BdG equations both for the bosons ($`t_\alpha `$) and the fermions ($`h_{1a}`$ and $`h_{2a}`$). Consequently, the number of self-consistency conditions for the normal and anomalous exchange energies is greatly increased, which limits the system size significantly. The number of self-consistence equations is $`11\times N^2/2`$ with $`N^2`$ being the number of sites. Also, note that the diagonalization of boson BdG matrix is not as straightforward as that of fermion BdG matrix. It is performed by using the method in Ref..

The saddle-point theory is not yet complete alone with the aforementioned self-consistent BdG equations, but it still needs to determine the condensation density of $`s`$-boson, $`s^2`$, by minimizing the ground state energy. Similar to the chemical potential, the Lagrange multiplier associated with the constraint is first computed as a function of $`s^2`$ for the situation when there is no impurity, by satisfying the constraint in the mean field level. Then, $`s^2`$ is fixed to be the value minimizing the ground state energy, at which point the Lagrange multiplier is also fixed. Fig.2 shows the ground state energy as a function of $`s`$-boson condensation density which also can serve as an order parameter for the spin-Peierls order. After the impurity is introduced, the position-dependent condensation density, $`s_i^2`$, is determined in turn by satisfying the constraint at each site with the Lagrange multiplier determined previously. In this way, it is guaranteed (at least in the mean field level) that the ground state energy is minimized and also the constraint is satisfied at the same time.

Now let us turn to the physical observables. As mentioned in the introduction, the local density of state (LDOS) can be obtained directly in the STM experiments through the measurement of differential tunneling conductance, which show a low-energy peak in LDOS near non-magnectic impurities while the superconducting coherence peak is greatly suppressed . Theoretically, the local density of state can be computed in terms of the spectral function given by:

$$\rho (𝐫,\omega )=\text{Im}G^{ret}(𝐫,\omega +i\delta ),$$
(13)
where the retarded electronic Green function, $`G^{ret}(𝐫,\omega +i\delta )`$, is obtained by using the usual analytic continuation from the time-ordered electronic Green function $`G(𝐫,\tau )=T_\tau c_a(𝐫,\tau )c_a^{}(𝐫,0)`$ $`(a=,)`$. In the bond-operator formalism, the spectral function of electron on the site 1 of dimer located at $`𝐫_i`$ is related to that of $`h_2`$-fermion via:

$$\rho _1(𝐫_i,\omega )\frac{1}{2}s_i^2\text{Im}G_{h_2}^{ret}(𝐫_i,\omega i\delta ),$$
(14)
where $`G_{h_2}(𝐫_i,\tau )=T_\tau h_{2a}(𝐫_i,\tau )h_{2a}^{}(𝐫_i,0)`$. The electronic spectral function at site 2 is related to that of $`h_1`$-fermion in similar way. In Eq.(14) the approximation is made when the contribution from magnons ($`t_\alpha `$) is ignored because they are high-energy modes.

To compare the theoretical LDOS with the differential tunneling conductance measured in STM experiments, we need to take into account some key properties of realistic surface structure of BSCCO. Between the superconducting CuO2 layer and the STM tip, there is always the BiO layer formed in such a way that each Bi atom is located directly above each Cu or Zn atom. So it is reasonable to assume that the Bi atom will block tunneling currents from reaching the Cu/Zn atom directly below the STM tip, and so the STM measures the LDOS contributed by the four nearest-neighboring sites instead of the single site directly below the tip. . Under this assumption, the LDOS measured in STM experiments, $`\rho (𝐫_i,\omega )`$, may be identified with an average of LDOS from the nearest-neighboring sites: $`\rho (𝐫_i,\omega )\rho (𝐫_i+\widehat{x},\omega )+\rho (𝐫_i\widehat{x},\omega )+\rho (𝐫_i+\widehat{y},\omega )+\rho (𝐫_i\widehat{y},\omega )`$. Fig.3 shows $`\rho (𝐫_i,E)`$ near and far away from the Zn impurity as a function of energy $`E/J`$, where the LDOS near impurity is defined as $`\rho (𝐫_i,\omega )`$ with $`𝐫_i`$ indicating the position of the Zn impurity. Compared to the LDOS far away from the impurity, the low-energy peak (denoted by the arrow in graph) develops near the Zn impurity, while the coherence peak is somewhat reduced indicating the suppression of superconductivity, which is in a reasonably good agreement with STM measurements.

Another physical observable in which we are interested is the order parameter of charge order, or the spin-Peierls order parameter, $`s_i^2`$. One of the main questions that we would like to answer in this article is how much the charge order is affected by the impurity. It is completely conceivable that the spin-Peierls order is locally reduced near impurity at the same time when the superconductivity is also suppressed. In the extreme case the spin-Peierls order can be completely destroyed while the $`S=1`$ excitons start to condense locally so that the magnetic order emerges near the impurity: in the bond-operator formalism, $`t_\alpha (𝐫_i)0`$ with $`𝐫_i`$ indicating the neighboring sites of impurity. If so, it may imply the emergence of the spin density wave (SDW) near impurities. However, the $`s_i^2`$ plotted as a function of the distance from impurity in Fig.4 shows the opposite behavior that overall the spin-Peierls order is not affected much by the presence of impurity after one lattice spacing. In fact, the spin-Peierls order is somewhat enhanced at the nearest-neighboring Cu site of the Zn impurity, which may suggest an interesting prediction that the static charge can be observed near the Zn impurities by using the STM techniques. Finally, note that the bottom panel of Fig.4 shows the equal-time spin-spin correlation within dimer, $`S_{1i}^\alpha S_{2i}^\alpha =\frac{3}{4}s_i^2+\frac{1}{4}t_i^{}t_i`$, which suggests basically the similar physics by showing that the effect of the spin $`S=1`$ excitons is small.

In conclusion, we have applied the bond-operator method to address the problem of non-magnetic impurity such as Zn/Li in the high-$`T_c`$ cuprate superconductors. It is shown that, without ad hoc assumptions, the low-energy peak of local density of state in the vicinity of impurity can be computed in the framework of bond-operator formalism. Also, it is predicted that the charge-density-wave order can be enhanced near Zn impurities.

The author is indebted to Subir Sachdev for very useful discussions and encouragement. This research was supported in part by US NSF Grant DMR 0098226.


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# Spectroscopic Properties of QSOs Selected from Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy Samples

## 1 Introduction

Two of the most important reasons for investigating the ultraluminous IRAS galaxies (ULIRGs) are to find the evolutionary connection between circumnuclear massive starbursts and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and to identify the evolution path from galaxy mergers to elliptical galaxies and QSOs (see Sanders & Mirabel 1996 for a review). In recent years, significant progress has been achieved with both space and ground-based telescopes (Surace et al. 1998; Surace, Sanders, & Evans 2000; Genzel et al. 1998; Farrah et al. 2001 and reference therein). It is now widely accepted that the vast majority ($`95\%`$) ULIRGs are strongly interacting and merging galaxies while some of them are post-merger galaxies. The AGN phenomenon probably appears at the final merging stage (e.g., Clements et al. 1996; Kim, Veilleux, & Sanders 1998; Zheng et al. 1999; Canalizo & Stockton 2001a; Cui et al. 2001). Spectral analyses for large samples of ULIRGs reveal that the fraction of objects with AGN spectral characteristics is about 25–30% while the fraction of QSOs/Seyfert 1s is less than 10% (Wu et al. 1998; Lawrence et al. 1999). However, the percentage of QSOs/Seyfert 1s increases with increasing infrared luminosity, reaching 30–50% for $`L_{\mathrm{IR}}>10^{12.3}L_{}`$ (Veilleux, Kim, & Sanders 1999). As the infrared luminosity of ULIRGs is equivalent to the bolometric luminosity of optically selected QSOs (Sanders 2001), we find it convenient to refer to QSOs/Seyfert 1s selected from ULIRGs as IR QSOs throughout this paper.

Previous spectroscopic studies of small and statistically incomplete IR QSO samples have uncovered some unusual properties compared with optically selected QSOs/Seyfert 1s. Many IR QSOs are extremely strong Fe II emitters (Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ $`>2.0`$), for example, PHL 1092, IRAS 07598+6508 and Mrk 231 (Lípari 1994; Lawrence et al. 1997). In fact, almost 100% of extremely strong Fe II emitters are luminous IR QSOs (Lípari et al. 2002). More than twenty years after their discovery, the origin of such extremely strong optical Fe II emissions in QSOs/Seyfert 1s is still being debated. It has become clear, however, that the strength of the Fe II emission cannot be explained in the framework of photoionization excitation. If strong outflows and shocks are present in strong/extremely strong Fe II emitters, non-radiative shock heating and overabundance of iron may help to explain the strong Fe II emission (Collin & Joly 2000). Studies of IR QSOs may therefore shed new light on the origin of the Fe II emission.

Furthermore, the fraction of low ionization broad absorption line QSOs (lo-BAL QSOs) is much higher in an IR QSO sample (27%) than that in an optically selected QSO sample (1.4%) (Boroson & Meyers 1992). The lo-BAL QSOs are defined as a subclass of broad absorption line QSOs with an obvious Mg II $`\lambda \lambda `$2795,2802 doublet and low-ionization line absorption troughs (Weymann et al. 1991). Some IR QSOs belong to yet another class of unusual AGNs, the luminous narrow line Seyfert 1s (hereafter NLS1s, Osterbrock & Pogge 1985). NLS1s are defined by their optical emission line properties. They have narrow hydrogen Balmer lines with typical full width at half maximum (FWHM) $``$ 500–2000 km s-1. The \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007/H$`\beta `$ line ratio is less than 3 and most of them have strong Fe II emissions. In the X-ray band, NLS1s show systematically steeper power-law slopes in the continuum than normal Seyfert 1s. Some NLS1s exhibit rapid X-ray variabilities as well (Boller, Brandt & Fink 1996). Moran, Halpern, & Helfand (1996) pointed out that many NLS1s are luminous in the infrared band. IR QSOs therefore offer a unique opportunity to investigate potential physical connections between IR QSOs, lo-BAL QSOs and luminous NLS1s (Brandt & Gallagher 2000; Canalizo & Stockton 2001b; Sanders & Mirabel 1996).

In this paper, we study the spectroscopic properties of IR QSOs based on a large sample of 25 objects. We compare their properties with those of the Boroson & Green (1992, hereafter BG92) sample, which includes 87 optically selected QSOs. The outline of the paper is as follows. In §2, we discuss how our IR QSO sample is compiled. The observations and data reduction are described in §3. We present the spectra and statistical properties of our sample IR QSOs in §4 and finally, in §5, we discuss and summarize our results. Throughout this paper we use a Hubble constant of $`H_0`$ = 50 km s-1 Mpc-1 and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ = 1 and no cosmological constant. As all our objects have redshift lower than 0.35, the adoption of a different density parameter and cosmological constant has little effects on our results.

## 2 Sample Selection

Our IR QSO sample is compiled mainly from three sources

* The QDOT redshift survey is a survey of the IRAS galaxies sparse-sampled at a rate of one in six. It includes 2387 IRAS galaxies complete down to a 60 $`\mu `$m flux density limit of 0.6 Jy. Lawrence et al. (1999) gave a table of 97 ULIRGs (for H0 = 50 km s-1 Mpc-1 and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ = 1) with the criterion that the 60 $`\mu `$m luminosity is greater than $`10^{12}`$ L. The optical spectral features and classifications are given in the ULIRG table. There are eight objects in the table identified as IR QSOs.
* Kim & Sanders (1998) selected 118 ULIRGs (infrared luminosities L(8–1000 $`\mu `$m) $`>`$ 1012 L for H0 = 75 km s-1 Mpc-1 and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ = 0) from the criterion of 60 $`\mu `$m flux density greater than 1 Jy in sky region of $`\delta >40\mathrm{°}`$ and $`\left|b\right|>\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}30}\mathrm{°}`$. Veilleux et al. (1999) gave the spectroscopic features and classification of 108 out of these 118 ULIRGs. There are 10 IR QSOs among these 108 ULIRGs.
* Moran et al. (1996) presented spectroscopic classifications for a catalogue of IRAS galaxies selected from the cross-correlation of the IRAS Point Source Catalogue with the ROSAT All Sky Survey by Boller et al. (1992). This catalogue consists of 241 objects and 80 of them are identified as QSOs/Seyfert 1s. 11 of these objects are IR QSOs.

Due to the constraint of the observatory site and instrumental capability, we selected our targets by requiring the IR QSOs to be in the northern sky ($`\delta >30\mathrm{°}`$) and z$`<`$0.35 with L(8–1000 $`\mu `$m) $`>`$ 1012 L for H0 = 50 km s-1 Mpc-1 and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ = 1. In addition, we included F09427+1929 (Zheng et al. 1999). Taking into account the overlapping sources, the sample consists of 25 IR QSOs. Table 1 lists the basic parameters. Note that all the infrared luminosities have been converted using H0 = 50 km s-1 Mpc-1 and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ = 1.

While the sample size is still moderate, it is interesting to put this number in the context of the total expected number of IR QSOs in the local universe. The PSCz catalogue provides a complete redshift survey of 15411 IRAS galaxies (Saunders et al. 2000). About 900 ULIRGs were found, which implies the percentage of ULIRGs in the IRAS galaxy catalogue is about 6%. The percentage of IR QSOs among ULIRGs is approximately 10%, as there are 8 IR QSOs among 97 ULIRGs in the QDOT catalogue and 10 IR QSOs among 108 ULIRGs in the 1 Jy sample. So the fraction of IR QSOs in the complete PSCz catalogue is of the order of 0.6%, i.e., the total IR QSOs in the PSCz catalog may be less than 100. Our sample therefore includes roughly one quarter of IR QSOs in the local universe. Statistical results based on this quite large IR QSO sample should be representative.

## 3 Observations and Data Reduction

Long-slit optical spectroscopic observations were carried out on the 2.16m telescope at the Xinglong station of the National Astronomical Observatories. The observations were mostly performed between October 1998 and November 1999 using an OMR spectrograph while some preliminary studies were conducted before 1998. For our 1998 and 1999 observations, a Tektronix 1024$`\times `$1024 CCD was used giving a wavelength coverage of 4000 Å to 9000 Å with a grating of 200 Å mm-1. The spectral resolution was 9.7 Å (2 pixels). The slit width varied from 1.5″ to 3.5″ to match the seeing at the Xinglong station. For the pre-1998 observations, the instrument setup was slightly different. For these observations, a grating of 195 Å mm-1 was used and the coverage is from 3500 Å to 8100 Å with a resolution of 9.3 Å. For F01572+0009, the spectrum coverage was in the range of 3800 $``$ 6300 Å with a resolution of 4.9 Å. The observation log is given in Table 2 listing observation epochs, exposure times, approximate seeings and adopted slit widths.

Data reduction was performed using IRAF software. CCD reductions included bias subtraction, flat field correction and cosmic-ray removal. Sky light subtractions were accomplished during the extraction procedure. Wavelength calibrations were carried out using a He-Ar lamp. The resulting wavelength accuracy is better than 1 Å. KPNO standard stars were observed for flux calibrations. The telluric O2 absorption bands near 6870 Å and 7620 Å were removed using the spectra of the standard stars.

The IRAF package ‘SPLOT’ is used to measure isolated emission lines. ‘SPECFIT’111SPECFIT is developed and kindly provided by Gerard A. Kriss., an interactive spectral analysis procedure linked to IRAF is used to measure blended lines (e.g., H$`\alpha `$ and \[N II\]$`\lambda \lambda `$6548,6583). It can match a wide variety of emission lines, absorption lines, and continuum models. We model the emission lines with Gaussian profiles and the local continuum as a power-law.

Since the intrinsic extinction of ULIRGs is significant, the Galactic extinction is ignored in our analysis. The extinction correction is calculated approximately according to Veilleux & Osterbrock (1987) and the intrinsic broad line H$`\alpha `$/H$`\beta `$ ratio is taken to be 3.1 (Baker 1997). The H$`\beta `$/H$`\gamma `$ ratio is used to estimate the extinction when H$`\alpha `$ is out of the spectral coverage (Osterbrock 1989). The measured fluxes of Balmer lines are the sum of the narrow and broad components. It is noted that the intrinsic broad Balmer line ratios may be larger than the adopted values (e.g. MacAlpine 1985) and the extinction corrections may have large uncertainties. Fortunately, the emission line ratios adopted in our analyses, e.g. Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007/H$`\beta `$, are almost independent of extinction, due to the adjacency of the involved lines. For the Fe II residual measurement, the uncertainty from the extinction correction will be discussed in section 4.3. In general, the uncertainty for the flux measurement introduced by the extinction correction is less than 20%.

As the Fe II emission is moderately or extremely strong for most of our sample galaxies, Fe II multiplets seriously blend with the H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\] $`\lambda \lambda `$4959,5007 lines and contaminate the continuum. We carefully remove the Fe II multiplets following BG92. Their method uses an Fe II template derived empirically from high quality data of I ZW 1, a typical NLS1 galaxy. We then measure the flux for all emission lines based on the Fe II-subtracted continuum. On the other hand, the emission lines for a quite large fraction of our sample IR QSOs show a remarkable asymmetric profile. In such cases, double-Gaussian profiles are needed to fit them. The asymmetry and blueshift can then be measured from the fitting. In the following subsections we describe in more detail the Fe II multiplets removal method and the measurement of the line asymmetry and blueshift.

### 3.1 Fe II Multiplets Removal

In order to estimate the Fe II strength and measure the line fluxes reliably, we adopt the BG92 method which relies on an Fe II template. The template and observed spectra are both transformed into the rest frame. The template is broadened by convolving with a Gaussian of various line widths and scaled by multiplying by a factor indicating the line strength. The best match is then searched for in the two-dimensional parameter space of the line width and line strength. A good Fe II subtraction is found when the parts of the continuum between the H$`\gamma `$ and H$`\beta `$ and between 5100–5400 Å(which covers the Fe II multiplets 48, 49) are flat. The best-fit Fe II template emission lines are then subtracted from the observed spectrum. The Fe II flux is then determined from the best fitting Fe II template between the rest wavelengths 4434 Å and 4685 Å. The procedure of Fe II subtraction is illustrated in Fig. 1. In each panel of Fig. 1, the top curve is the dereddened spectrum, the bottom curve is the Fe II template while the middle curve shows the Fe II-subtracted spectrum. Note that the Fe II-subtracted spectra have been shifted downwards for clarity.

In the BG92 method, it is assumed that the relative strengths of the Fe II lines (within each multiplet and among multiplets) are the same for different objects. For half of our spectra, the Fe II emission can be subtracted very well by the Fe II template. However, for F00275$``$2859, IRAS 07598+6508, F09427+1929, Mrk 231 and F20036$``$1547 , the Fe II multiplets 48, 49 (5100–5400 Å) are stronger than Fe II multiplets 37, 38 relative to the BG92 template. In contrast, for F02065+4705, F10026+4347, Z11598$``$0112, F20520$``$2329 and F22454$``$1744, the Fe II multiplets 37, 38 (4500–4680 Å) are stronger than Fe II multiplets 48, 49 relative to BG template. For these objects, significant Fe II residuals can be seen in their Fe II-subtracted spectra. The extreme case is Z11598$``$0112, for which nearly half of the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570 (i.e. Fe II multiplets 37, 38) is left after the multiplets 48, 49 are subtracted. Fig. 2 shows two examples of such remarkable Fe II emission residuals in the Fe II multiplets 48, 49 and 37, 38 in the top and bottom panels, respectively. Compared with the optical QSO sample of BG92, the IR QSO sample contains more objects showing large deviations from the Fe II template.

The spectra For F13218+0552 and F23411+0228 are too noisy to detect the Fe II lines reliably, so we take the Fe II strength for F13218+0552 from Remillard et al. (1993) and ignore F23411+0228 in our statistical analysis concerning the Fe II strength.

### 3.2 Emission Line Fitting and Measurement

As a first step, we use a single Gaussian profile to fit each emission line for all target galaxies. It works well for most emission lines. However, a single Gaussian profile cannot fit some lines, e.g., those with asymmetric profiles. In such cases, two Gaussian components are used to fit the emission lines, namely, one narrow component and one centroid-shifted broad component. The blueshift (or redshift) is defined as the shift of the broad component relative to the narrow component in units of km s-1. Fig. 3 illustrates the two Gaussian component fitting for the permitted line H$`\beta `$ (top panel) and forbidden line \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 (bottom panel). In Fig. 3, the observed and fitted profiles are shown by the solid and dashed lines, respectively, while the dot-dashed line is for the Gaussian components and the dotted line represents the fitting residual. As one can see, for F01572+0009, the blueshift of the permitted emission line H$`\beta `$ of F00275$``$2859 is 750 km s-1 while the blueshift of \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 is 510 km s-1.

Moreover, there is no correlation between the FWHM of the narrow Gaussian component of the permitted line H$`\beta `$ and that of the forbidden line \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007. It implies that the narrow Gaussian component of the permitted emission lines is different from the narrow lines (such as \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007) from the narrow line region. Efforts were also made to separate the narrow Gaussian component contributed by the narrow line region. However, the contribution from the narrow line region is usually less than 3% so we ignore this component in our discussions.

We also measure the asymmetry parameter defined by de Robertis (1985):

$$\mathrm{asy}=\frac{\lambda _\mathrm{c}(3/4)\lambda _\mathrm{c}(1/4)}{\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda (1/2)},$$
(1)
where $`\lambda _\mathrm{c}(1/4)`$ and $`\lambda _\mathrm{c}(3/4)`$ are the wavelength centers at $`1/4`$ and $`3/4`$ of the maximum, respectively, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda (1/2)`$ is the FWHM. The asymmetry parameter is positive (negative) if there is excess light in the blue (red) wing.

Based on the Fe II-subtracted spectra and Gaussian fitting of emission lines, we measured the flux, FWHM, and equivalent width (EW) for each strong emission line for all our objects. The fluxes of broad lines or asymmetric lines refer to the sum of double components. For most targets, the uncertainty of flux measurement of emission lines is about 10%, but for low S/N cases it could be up to 20%. The uncertainty of the blueshift measurement is within 150 km s-1. However, for three sources (F02054+2835, F13218 +0552 and F23411+0228), the fluxes of emission lines have large uncertainties due to the poor S/N and hence they are less reliable.

The dereddened and Fe II-subtracted spectrum for each sample IR QSO is shown in Fig. 1. Table 3 lists the FWHM, blueshifts and asymmetry parameters for H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007. The intrinsic FWHM values are obtained from the subtraction, in quadrature, of the observed FWHM and that of the instrumental profile, measured from the comparison lamp lines. Note that only the significant \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 blueshifts (the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 blueshift $`>`$ 500 km s-1) are listed. In Table 4, color excess E(B$``$V), the equivalent widths of the emission lines and various line ratios are listed.

## 4 Statistical Results

As discussed in the introduction, our sample is a unique one to investigate the physical connection among IR QSO, luminous NLS1s and lo-BAL QSOs. We therefore performed statistical studies similar to those in BG92 for their optical sample, which includes 87 QSOs from the Bright Quasar Survey Catalogue with redshift less than 0.5 (Schmidt & Green 1983). The results for these two samples will be compared in order to understand any possible evolutionary connection between IR QSOs and classical QSOs.

### 4.1 The Percentage of NLS1s and Strong Fe II Emitters

It is obvious from Table 3 that for all our IR QSOs except F16136+6550 and F18216+6419, the H$`\beta `$ FWHM is less than 4000 km s-1. This differentiates IR QSOs from classical QSOs as the main characteristic of classical QSOs is the presence of broad permitted emission lines with typical FWHM between 4000 and 10000 km s-1 (Rodríguez-Ardila et al. 2000). To make it clear, Fig. 4 shows the distribution of the H$`\beta `$ FWHM for our sample (top) and the BG92 sample (bottom). A Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test indicates a probability of $`9.5\times 10^5`$ for the two distributions being the same. From Table 3 and Fig. 4, the percentage of IR QSOs with H$`\beta `$ FWHM less than 2000 km s-1 in our sample is 60% (15/25). In comparison, only 23% of BG92 QSOs have FWHM H$`\beta `$ less than 2000 km s-1 and one third of BG92 QSOs are classical QSOs with H$`\beta `$ FWHM larger than 4000 km s-1.

As part of our IR QSOs are selected from the IRAS-ROSAT cross-correlation catalogue, our sample may be biased to include more NLS1s (Stephens 1989). To check this, we performed statistics for the sub-sample of 15 objects selected from two purely IR-selected samples (the QDOT redshift survey and 1 Jy ULIRG sample). Out of these 15 objects, 8 are identified as NLS1s (53%). Therefore, there is no clear difference in the fraction of NLS1s between the whole sample and the purely IR-selected sub-sample.

We also carefully investigated whether the H$`\beta `$ blueshift could influence the H$`\beta `$ FWHM and concluded that this possibility is unlikely. Therefore the percentage of NLS1s seems genuinely high in our IR QSO sample.

Fig. 5 shows the histograms of the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ ratio for the IR QSO and BG92 samples. We can see from Fig. 5 that the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ ratio distributions for the two samples are quite different. A K-S test reveals that the probability for these two distributions being the same is $`3.0\times 10^6`$. Table 4 shows that 25% (6 in 24) and 46% (11 in 24) of IR QSOs are respectively extremely strong (Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ $`>2.0`$) and moderately strong ($`1.0<`$ Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ $`<2.0`$) Fe II emitters (Joly 1991; Véron-Cetty, Véron-Cetty, & Conçalves 2001). In contrast, for the BG92 sample, only 15 out of 87 (17%) QSOs are moderately strong Fe II emitters and there are no extremely strong Fe II emitters present. The high percentage of strong Fe II emitters in our sample can also be seen by comparing with that of the overall AGN population. Véron-Cetty et al. (2001) found that moderately strong Fe II emission occurs in only about 5% of AGNs and only a few AGNs are extremely strong Fe II emitters. Furthermore, the two weakest Fe II emitters (with Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ $`<0.5`$) in our sample (F16136+6550 and F18216+6419) have broad permitted emission lines with FWHM larger than 4000 km s-1, and hence are classical QSOs.

### 4.2 The Correlations

In this subsection, we study the correlations between various emission lines and continua for our sample IR QSOs. For this purpose, we performed Spearman Rank-order (S-R) correlation analyses among various quantities and investigate the implications of these correlations. As mentioned above, most of our sample IR QSOs are moderately/or extremely strong Fe II emitters, and the origin of the Fe II emission is still not understood. Hence our analysis focuses on the correlations of the Fe II strength with other parameters. Throughout this paper, the correlations are characterized by the probability $`𝒫`$ that the null hypothesis of no correlation is true.

Fig. 6 shows the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ line ratio versus the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 peak, defined as the peak height of the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 line relative to that of H$`\beta `$ as in PG92. These two parameters are anti-correlated with a correlation coefficient of 0.71 at a very high significance level ($`𝒫=6.1\times 10^6`$). This result is consistent with BG92 although the correlation between these two parameters is stronger than the one reported by BG92 for optically selected QSOs. The Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ ratio is also well correlated with the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007/H$`\beta `$ ratio with $`𝒫=9.8\times 10^3`$. Note that 6 IR QSOs in our sample have very weak \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 emission (with EW of \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 less than 5 Å). Such a weak \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 emission is an important characteristic of lo-BAL QSOs (Boroson & Meyers 1992); we return to this point in §5.2.

Fig. 7 shows the striking correlation between the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ line ratio and the H$`\beta `$ blueshift. The S-R correlation coefficient is 0.75 which is highly significant with $`𝒫=2.7\times 10^5`$. In particular, it can be seen from Table 3 and Fig. 7 that about two thirds of our targets show H$`\beta `$ blueshifts with values as large as 2000 km s-1.

As there are striking correlations between both the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 peak and Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ and H$`\beta `$ blueshift, we also performed a correlation analysis between the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 peak and H$`\beta `$ blueshift. We found that these two parameters are well correlated with an S-R correlation coefficient of 0.72 corresponding to $`𝒫=1.4\times 10^4`$. These tight correlations between the H$`\beta `$ blueshift, Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ and the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 peak must reflect some physical connection between these lines.

Fig. 8 plots the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ line ratio versus the H$`\beta `$ FWHM for 24 of our objects (F23411+0228 is excluded due to its low S/N). If the two classical QSOs with H$`\beta `$ FWHM larger than 4000 km s-1are excluded, then the S-R correlation coefficient between these two parameters is 0.47 with $`𝒫=2.8\times 10^2`$. If we further exclude the 3 objects with H$`\beta `$ FWHM larger than 3000 km s-1(but smaller than 4000 km s-1), the correlation becomes somewhat stronger, with an S-R correlation coefficient of 0.58 corresponding to $`𝒫=9.9\times 10^3`$. We caution, however, that if we include the 2 objects with H$`\beta `$ FWHM larger than 4000 km s-1, the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ line ratio and the H$`\beta `$ FWHM are no longer well correlated.

Fig. 9 shows the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ line ratio versus the H$`\beta `$ asymmetry parameter defined by de Robertis (1985, see also eq. 1). The S-R correlation coefficient is 0.46 with $`𝒫=2.8\times 10^2`$. Our result is broadly consistent with BG92, although the H$`\beta `$ asymmetry parameters for our sample IR QSOs seems to be much larger than those for the BG92 sample. Quantitatively, just 13% of BG92 QSOs have the asymmetry parameter larger than 0.1, while in our sample 48% (26%) of IR QSOs have the H$`\beta `$ asymmetry value larger than 0.1 (0.2).

As described in §3.2, the H$`\beta `$ blueshift value is determined by the blueshift of the broad Gaussian component relative to the narrow Gaussian component in permitted emission lines. The blueshifted broad Gaussian component may be connected with the outflow of clouds in the broad line region (Leighly 2001). Outflows with a velocity of several hundred or even a few thousand km s-1 could produce shocks that can excite the emission lines. Such shocks may be an important ingredient for understanding the strong correlation seen between the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ ratio and the H$`\beta `$ blueshift.

### 4.3 The Soft X-ray Properties

We collected all the X-ray information from Moran et al. (1996) and Xia et al. (2001) based on ROSAT archive data. Table 1 lists the ratio of the soft X-ray luminosity to the infrared luminosity, LX/LFIR. This is an important quantity as nearly all the luminosity of an ULIRG is emitted in the far-infrared band (Surace et al. 2000). We can see from Table 1 that 17 of our IR QSOs were detected by either ROSAT All Sky Survey (13/17) or pointing observations (4/17). The ratio of the soft X-ray luminosity to the far-infrared luminosity spans about four orders of magnitude. Not surprisingly, the four objects (IRAS 07598+6508, Mrk 231, F00275$``$2859 and F21219$``$1757) detected only by ROSAT pointings have the lowest LX/LFIR$`<0.01`$ values compared with the other 14 objects detected by the ROSAT All Sky Survey. For the non-detections, we calculated their upper limits of the soft X-ray luminosity as follows. We assume a detection limit is 6 source photons (as in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey Faint Source Catalogue, Voges et al. 2000) and an average exposure time of 400 seconds for each source. The spectrum of each source is taken to be a power-law with a photon index of 2.3 (appropriate for AGNs) and Galactic neutral hydrogen column density is adopted. The estimated LX/LFIR upper limits are also given in Table 1. As might be expected, they all satisfy LX/LFIR$`<0.01`$.

Fig. 10 shows the H$`\beta `$ blueshift versus the ratio of soft X-ray luminosity to far-infrared luminosity for 14 objects detected by the ROSAT All Sky Survey and ROSAT pointings. In this statistic and also in the following statistics concerning LX/LFIR, we excluded F16136+6550, F18216+6419 because they have broad emission lines and are QSOs; F23411+0228 is also excluded due to its low S/N spectrum. It is clear from Fig. 10 that the objects with larger H$`\beta `$ blueshifts tend to be soft X-ray weak and vice versa (the S-R correlation coefficient –0.61 corresponding to $`𝒫=2.0\times 10^2`$). In Fig. 10, we also labelled the two potential low-BAL QSOs (F09427+1929 and F20036$``$1547, see section 5.2) using their soft X-ray luminosity upper limits. These two objects strengthen the trend described above.

During our data reduction, we noticed that the Fe II emission cannot be subtracted very well by the Fe II template of BG92 for one third of our targets, i.e., there are large residuals of Fe II multiplets 48, 49 (5100–5400 Å) or Fe II multiplets 37, 38 (4500 – 4680 Å) in the Fe II-subtracted spectra. We define the residual of Fe II multiplets 37, 38 (or Fe II 48, 49) as the excess of Fe II 37, 38 (or Fe II 48, 49) relative to its strength in the best-fit Fe II template. A positive residual means that there is an excess in the Fe II 37, 38 while a negative value signals an Fe II 48, 49 excess. The Fe II residual is somewhat uncertain due to the extinction correction. Since the blue light suffers more extinction than the red light, an over-correction in the extinction would lead to an over-estimate of the Fe II multiplets 37, 38 and hence increase the value of the Fe II residual in this multiplets. This overall trend also establishes that the excess of Fe II multiplets 48, 49 relative to multiplets 37, 38 cannot be an artifact. For example, for F00275$``$2859, we have adopted E(B$``$V) = 0.41, which results in a negative Fe II residual (i.e., there is an excess in the Fe II multiplets 48, 49). If no extinction is adopted, then the value of the Fe II residual in the multiplets 48, 49 would further increase by 30%. We note that while Boroson & Green (1992) have described such residuals, they are not as remarkable as in our IR QSO sample.

We list the measurements of significant Fe II residuals in Table 4. We have examined the correlation of the residuals with other parameters. A correlation was found between the residuals of Fe II multiplets and the soft X-ray luminosity. This is interesting because it ties in with the long-standing puzzle why some NLS1s with extremely strong Fe II emission are X-ray luminous, while others with similar optical spectra are X-ray weak. Fig. 11 shows the residuals of Fe II multiplets vs. the LX/LFIR ratio for 14 object with concrete X-ray detections. We can see from Fig. 11 that as the residual of Fe II multiplets increases from minus to positive, the soft X-ray luminosities of IR QSOs also increase (the S-R correlation coefficient is 0.44 with the correlation significant of $`𝒫=0.117`$). The most interesting result from Fig. 11 is that objects with larger Fe II multiplets 48, 49 residuals are all X-ray weak. To check the validity of this result, we measured or estimated the Fe II multiplets residual for another two low-redshift lo-BAL QSOs — PG 1700+518 and IRAS 14026+4341. The Fe II multiplets 48, 49 residuals are 0.19 and 0.1, respectively. These two objects are shown in Fig. 11 as well using their upper limits of the soft X-ray luminosity (the soft X-ray information of PG 1700+518 is from Wang, Brinkmann, & Bergeronet 1996). In the same figure, we also indicated the locations of two potential lo-BAL QSOs, F09427+1929 and IRAS 20036$``$1547, as they have significant Fe II multiplets 48, 49 residuals and extremely weak \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007. It is interesting that all four low-redshift lo-BAL QSO and the two potential low-BAL IR QSOs are located in the bottom left of Fig. 11. Furthermore, we also measured the Fe II multiplets residual for soft X-ray weak QSOs (Brandt, Laor & Wills 2000) with available spectral data. None of them have positive Fe II multiplets residuals. It appears that the Fe II multiplets residual may be a good criterion to select X-ray weak QSOs or lo-BAL QSOs.

### 4.4 Infrared Properties

The infrared color-color diagram has been used as an important tool to discriminate starbursts and AGN activities in the nuclear/circumnuclear regions of galaxies (de Grijp et al. 1985; Lípari 1994). 20 IR QSOs in our sample are securely detected in three far-infrared bands (25, 60 and 100$`\mu \mathrm{m}`$). Fig. 12 shows the location of these objects in the infrared color-color diagram, $`\alpha (60,25)`$ versus $`\alpha (100,60)`$. Here $`\alpha `$($`\lambda _1`$, $`\lambda _2`$) = $``$log(F($`\lambda _2`$)/F($`\lambda _1`$))/log($`\lambda _2/\lambda _1`$), where the wavelength is in units of $`\mu \mathrm{m}`$. In the same diagram, the power-law and blackbody lines are also indicated.

It is clear from Fig. 12 that almost all IR QSOs except F13218+0552 are located between the blackbody and power-law lines. Moreover, there are a group of IR QSOs clearly located close to the blackbody line. This group includes F01572+0009, IR06269$``$0543, F11119+3257, F13218+0552, F15462$``$0450, F23411+0228 and Mrk 231. We find that they have either significant \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 blueshifts (see Table 3), or significant \[O II\] $`\lambda `$3727 blueshifts (Mrk 231, see Lípari et al. 2002).

The objects close to the power-law line are F18216+6419, F16136+6550, F12265+0219 (3C 273), F10026+4347, F22454$``$1744 and three additional objects in the bottom left of the figure. The first 2 objects are the only classical QSOs in our sample while the remaining objects are all moderate/extremely strong Fe II emitters with bright soft X-ray emission (see Table 4).

## 5 Summary and Discussion

We studied an IR QSO sample with a total of 25 objects. The sample is compiled from the QDOT redshift survey, the 1 Jy ULIRGs survey and from a cross-correlation study of the IRAS Point Source Catalogue with the ROSAT All Sky Survey Catalogue. Using the observed optical spectra and archive data in the infrared and soft X-ray, we investigated the correlations of the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ ratio with the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 peak, H$`\beta `$ blueshift and the H$`\beta `$ FWHM. All these parameters are correlated. We found that soft X-ray weak QSOs, especially lo-BAL QSOs, tend to have significant Fe II multiplets 48, 49 (5100–5400 Å) residuals (cf. Fig. 11). The correlation between the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ residuals and the LX/LFIR ratio, shown in Fig. 11, although somewhat weak, may be a useful clue for understanding why some strong/extremely strong Fe II emitters are X-ray luminous while others are X-ray quiet.

### 5.1 The Outflows

One of the striking features of the emission lines for IR QSOs is the blueshift of permitted emission lines or the forbidden \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 line. As we have removed the Fe II multiplets carefully surrounding the H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\] $`\lambda \lambda `$4959,5007 , there should not be much Fe II multiplet contamination to the H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\] $`\lambda \lambda `$4959,5007 emission lines. Moreover, the blueshifts measured from H$`\beta `$ and H$`\alpha `$ are similar, as are the blueshifts measured from the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 and \[O III\]$`\lambda `$4959 lines (see Fig. 3). The asymmetries of the H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 lines cannot be attributed to contaminations from other emission lines. Outflows give a plausible explanation for the emission line blueshift (for alternative explanations, see Brandt et al. 2000). Such emission-line outflows have been found and discussed extensively for some NLS1s (Leighly 2000; Christopoulou et al. 1997), radio galaxies (Tadhunter et al. 2001) and for IR QSOs (Lípari 2002).

From the strong correlation between the Fe II FWHM and the H$`\beta `$ FWHM, Boroson & Green (1992) suggested that the Fe II line and permitted emission lines share a common emission region. If the H$`\beta `$ blueshifts are due to cloud outflows in the broad line region, shocks are likely to be produced in outflows. Such shocks may be responsible for the Fe II emission, as the pure photoionization model fails to explain the strong Fe II emission (Collin & Joly 2000). The tight correlation between the H$`\beta `$ blueshift and the Fe II $`\lambda `$4570/H$`\beta `$ ratio can then be understood as they are physically connected through shocks associated with outflows. Analogously, the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 blueshifts could probe the outflows in narrow line emission region. It is interesting to see that all objects with large \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 blueshifts are located close to the blackbody line in the infrared color-color diagram. Hence the locations of IR QSOs in the infrared color-color diagram may be related with outflows in the \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 emission line region. We caution, however, that there are other explanations concerning the strong Fe II emission, especially in NLS1 galaxies (see Sulentic, Marziani, & Dultzin-Hacyan 2000 for a review).

If the emission line blueshifts can indeed be attributed to outflows, then our sample indicates such outflows are common for IR QSOs. Our statistics do not however clarify which mechanism (central AGN radiative pressure, starbursts or both) drives these outflows. High resolution observations and investigations in the UV, soft X-ray and optical bands are needed to further explore this unique sample.

### 5.2 The Connection of IR QSOs with Luminous NLS1s and Low-ionization BAL QSOs

60% of our IR QSOs satisfy the strict criteria of NLS1s. For the remaining objects, most are moderate strong/extremely strong Fe II emitters. However, 71% (5/7) of the extremely strong Fe II emitters in IR QSO sample fail to meet the strict criterion of NLS1s. Similarly, a large fraction (44%) of extremely strong Fe II emitters in the sample of Véron-Cetty et al. (2001) also have H$`\beta `$ FWHM larger than 2000 km s-1. As Véron-Cetty et al. (2001) pointed out, there should be a continuous distribution of optical line widths for QSOs/Seyfert 1s and hence the separation between the broad line Seyfert 1s and NLS1s at 2000 km s-1 could be arbitrary (see also Sulentic et al. 2000). Our results seem to support the above statement and hint that the strength of optical Fe II emission line, rather than the H$`\beta `$ FWHM, may be the most important characteristic of non-classical QSOs.

Much attention has been paid to lo-BAL QSOs recently. Canalizo & Stockton (2001b) studied four lo-BAL QSOs currently known at $`z<0.4`$ and found that all four are ULIRGs which reside in dusty starbursts or post-starbursts. Two of these, Mrk 231 (i.e., F12540+5708) and IRAS 07598+6508, are in our IR QSO sample. The main characteristics of lo-BAL QSOs are strong Fe II emissions, very weak \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 emissions and low X-ray luminosity. They are intermediately located between the power-law and blackbody lines in the infrared color-color diagram (cf. Fig. 12). A recent Chandra survey for BAL QSOs also revealed that all these four lo-BAL QSOs have high column densities and are unusually faint in both soft and hard X-ray bands (Gallagher et al. 2002). These properties are shared by some other IR QSOs in our sample in addition to Mrk 231 and IRAS 07598+6508. For example, F00275$``$2859, F09427+1929 and F20036$``$1517 have all the properties of lo-BAL QSOs as described above. We identify them as potential or more evolved lo-BAL QSOs. If UV observations establish that they are real lo-BAL QSOs, the percentage of lo-BAL QSOs in our sample will be 20%, similar to the fraction found by Boroson & Meyers (1992) for a much smaller IR QSO sample.

Brandt & Gallagher (2000) argued that the potential physical connection between luminous NLS1s and lo-BAL QSOs is their high accretion rate relative to the Eddington accretion rate. IR QSOs tend to appear in the final merging phase with their central AGN activity recently triggered or rejuvenated by the merging activity (Sanders & Mirabel 1996; Zheng et al. 1999; Canalizo & Stockton 2001a and reference therein). Numerical simulations show that a large amount of gas flows toward the center during mergers (e.g., Barnes & Hernquist 1991), so it seems plausible that IR QSOs also have high accretion rates. Such systems may have a greater ability to drive radiative outflows. The correlations we presented in section 4.2 suggest that the outflow velocity and the physical condition in the outflow region (inferred from the H$`\beta `$ and \[O III\]$`\lambda `$5007 emission line blueshifts) influence the Fe II , infrared and soft X-ray emission properties. In short, IR QSOs, luminous NLS1s and lo-BAL QSOs may have some common physical conditions. The difference between them may be from different viewing angles or from different evolution phases. A careful study of IR QSOs may be important for understanding the evolution and formation of classical QSOs.

We are grateful to Drs. Th. Boller, T.Q. Wang, J.Y. Wei, L.C. Deng and Mr. Z.H. Shang for helpful discussions, and to the BATC members for advice on data deduction. Particular thanks are due to Drs T. Boroson & R. Green for kindly providing their Fe II template and their dataset of QSOs in PG92. We also thank the anonymous referee and Dr. Richard James for constructive comments that improved the paper. This project was supported by NSF of China and NKBRSF G19990754.


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# Neutron Star Properties Viewed by the ENU Model

## 1 INTRODUCTION

Neutron stars are objects with the mass from about 1.4 (the Chandrasekhar limit) to 3.5 solar masses, diameter $`r10^4`$ m, and density $`10^{17}`$ kg m-3. Spinning neutron stars emitting electromagnetic radiation from their poles are called pulsars. The radiation energy varies from radio waves to gamma rays. Until now investigated neutron stars are characterized \[1 - 3\] by the magnetic field ranging from $`10^7`$ T to $`10^9`$ T and the rotation period from miliseconds to seconds. Rotating magnetic field influences the electrons being present in the environment, giving thus rise the formation of synchrotron radiation. In addition to ”classical” radio pulsars, soft gamma repeaters - magnetars - with magnetic fields up to $`10^{11}`$ T are known, their radiation is not, however, of synchrotron nature caused by electrons. Magnetars are outside the scope of this article.

Radiation output of radio pulsars reaches usually $`10^{24}10^{28}`$ W, with $`10^{30}`$ W as a known maximum. The extremely strong gravitational field is able to attract and hold neutrons and electrons within the spheres above iron surface crust up about 1 cm or 10 m, respectively.

Owing to Vaidya metric application , the model of Expansive Nondecelerative Universe  enables to localize gravitational energy . Stemming from a general formula , the absolute value of gravitational energy density $`\epsilon _g`$ at a pulsar surface can be expressed as

$$\left|\epsilon _g\right|=\frac{Rc^4}{8\pi G}\frac{3m_Pc^2}{4\pi ar_P^2}4.6\times 10^{12}\text{ J/m}\text{3}$$
(1)
where $`R`$ is the scalar curvature ($`R0`$ in Vaidya metric ), $`m_P`$ is the pulsar mass, $`r_P`$ is its radius, and $`a`$ represents the gauge factor (in the above and following equations the mass $`2.8\times 10^{30}`$ kg, radius $`10^4`$ m, and gauge factor $`1.3\times 10^{26}`$ m were introduced).

It can hardly be a coincidence that the gravitational energy density is very close to (just about 1.4 times higher than) the electromagnetic energy density of hydrogen atom is.

Gravitational field may be described by a wave function

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_g=\mathrm{exp}(i\omega _gt)$$
(2)
where $`\omega _g`$ is the frequency of gravitational wave.

At the pulsar surface

$$\omega _g=\left(\frac{m_Pc^5}{\mathrm{}ar_P^2}\right)^{1/4}1.5\times 10^{18}\text{ Hz}$$
(3)
Based on the fact that the gravitational field of a pulsar is able to held electrons up to 10 m distance from the surface it follows that the magnetic moment vector of the electrons shall perform precessional motion with the frequency

$$\omega _e=\frac{B\mu _e}{\mathrm{}}=\frac{Be}{m_e}$$
(4)
where $`B`$ is the pulsar magnetic field intensity, $`\mu _e`$ is the electron magnetic moment, $`m_e`$ and $`e`$ are the electron mass and charge, respectively.

The pulsar stability is preserved only when

$$\omega _g\omega _e$$
(5)
In case of equality (5), stemming from (3) to (5) the lower limit of pulsar magnetic field intensity follows as

$$B_{P(\mathrm{min})}8.5\times 10^6\text{ T}$$
(6)
which is in excellent accord with the value obtained from experimental observations. The upper limit of pulsar magnetic field intensity can be estimated based on the Compton frequency of electron

$$\omega _C=\frac{m_ec^2}{\mathrm{}}10^{21}\text{ Hz}$$
(7)
where the limiting condition

$$\omega _e=\omega _C$$
(8)
$$B_{P(\mathrm{max})}4.4\times 10^9\text{ T}$$
(9)
Of course, the frequency $`\omega _e`$ can approach but never reach the value of $`\omega _C`$.

As to the structure and composition of neutron stars, various hypotheses have been formulated (from iron-like crust to quark-gluon plasmas). Further we show another mode to derive the value of $`B_{P(\mathrm{max})}`$. Suppose, whole pulsar consists of particle with the mass of electron. A number of electrons $`n(e)`$ corresponding to a pulsar of the mass $`m_P`$ is then given as

$$n(e)=\frac{m_P}{m_e}$$
(10)
In such a case it can be supposed that the maximum rotation energy of the pulsar is

$$E_{P(\mathrm{𝑟𝑜𝑡},\mathrm{max})}=\frac{m_P\mathrm{}\omega _{P(\mathrm{max})}}{m_e}=\frac{m_P\mathrm{}eB_{P(\mathrm{max})}}{m_e^2}$$
(11)
where $`\omega _{P(\mathrm{max})}`$ is a maximum procession motion of the electron magnetic moment vector at the maximum magnetic field intensity $`B_{P(\mathrm{max})}`$. The upper limit of rotational energy of the spherical bodies is expressed as

$$E_{(\mathrm{𝑟𝑜𝑡},\mathrm{max})}=\frac{mc^2}{5}$$
(12)
Putting (11) and (12) identical, it leads to

$$B_{P(\mathrm{max})}6.7\times 10^8\text{ T}$$
(13)
which is the value being in good agreement with expectations. It can be stated that there is no possibility to find a pulsar of a 1.4 solar masses having its magnetic field intensity higher than that given by (9) or (13).

The lower limit of pulsar rotational energy emerges when the electron mass in (11) is substituted for the neutron mass $`m_n`$ and the minimum value of the magnetic field intensity $`B_{P(\mathrm{min})}`$ given by (6) is introduced. In such a case,

$$\frac{m_P\mathrm{}eB_{P(\mathrm{min})}}{m_n^2}=\frac{m_Pr_P^2\omega _{(\mathrm{min})}^2}{5}$$
(14)
The maximum rotation period of a neutron star following from (14) is then

$$t_{(rot,\mathrm{max})}=\frac{2\pi }{\omega _{(\mathrm{min})}}3.9\text{ s}$$
(15)
Also this value is in excellent agreement with observation. At present, the maximum rotational period of 3.8 s is reported, it should be pointed out, however, that 1) the rotational period is mass and radius dependent, 2) it can change due to energy emission, 3) it can change due to mass transfer when existing in binaries. Longer rotational periods are usually ascribed to white dwarfs.

The ENU approach enable to evaluate the radiation output of pulsars $`P_{P(rad)}`$. In order to secure a pulsar stability, its radiation output cannot exceed its gravitational output $`P_{P(g)}`$, i.e.

$$P_{P(g)}P_{P(rad)}$$
(16)
In the ENU model, generally

$$\left|P_g\right|=\frac{d}{dt}\frac{Rc^4}{8\pi G}𝑑V=\frac{mc^3}{a}$$
(17)
Comparing eqs. (16) and (17) is follows that any pulsar formed from a star with the Chandrasekhar limit mass and radius $`r10^4`$ m cannot have radiation output higher than

$$P_{P(\mathrm{𝑟𝑎𝑑},\mathrm{max})}5.6\times 10^{29}\text{ W}$$
(18)
which corresponds to the observed values.

### 1.1 Conclusions

Up-to-now known values of pulsar magnetic field intensity, rotational period, and maximum radiation output stem from experimental observation and are of empirical nature. Applying the ENU model into the matter allows to offer a deeper theoretical explanation of the known values and to estimate the limits for the mentioned parameters.

### 1.2 References

 B. Link, R.I. Epstein, J.M. Lattimer, Phys. Rev. Lett., 83 (1999) 3362

 I. Bednarek, R. Manka, Int. J. Mod. Phys. D, 10 (2001) 607

 N.K. Glendenning, Compact Stars: Nuclear Physics, Particle Physics and General Relativity (2nded.), Springer, New York, 2000

 P.C. Vaidya, Proc. Indian Acad. Sci., A33 (1951) 264

 V. Skalský, M. Súkeník, Astrophys. Space Sci., 178 (1991) 169 & 181 (1991) 153

 J. Šima, M. Súkeník, Spacetime & Substance 3 (2001) 125


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# The Rees-Sciama effect and the primordial nucleosynthesis

## 1 Introduction

The Rees-Sciama effect (Rees & Sciama (1968); for a detailed survey see Mészáros & Molnár (1996), Zaldarriaga et al. (1998), Sakai et al. (1999) and the references therein) causes an additional non-Friedmann shift of the photons of cosmic microwave background radiation (hereafter CMBR) due to the changing gravitational field of transparent expanding structures being between the last scattering surface and us. These structures may be either overdensities (cf. superclusters) or underdensities (cf. voids), and also the additional shift may be both redshift or blueshift, respectively.

This effect may clearly be important in galaxy formation scenarios, where the initial perturbations during the recombination play a cardinal role, and these perturbations may be deduced from the observed anisotropies of CMBR. The importance follows from the fact that, due to the Rees-Sciama effect, the observed anisotropies of CMBR need not entirely be caused by the inhomogeneities of non-relativistic matter during the recombination, and the later transparent structures may also cause anisotropies in CMBR (see Mészáros (1994) for more discussion of this question).

In addition, surprisingly, this effect can have a connection to completely different cosmological topics. For example, Mészáros & Molnár (1996) show an interesting connection between this effect and the observations of Lauer & Postman (1994), where the peculiar velocity of the Earth and the maximum of the dipole anisotropy of CMBR were found to have different directions. Mészáros & Molnár (1996) show that - theoretically and surprisingly \- the dipole anisotropy of CMBR may also be caused by the Rees-Sciama effect. Nevertheless, further observational data exclude this possibility. The importance of that work was recognized even by the editors of Sky & Telescope Magazine (Sky & Telescope (1997)).

A similar surprising connection is the subject of this article. It discusses the connection between this effect and the primordial nucleosynthesis. Interestingly, this connection may have an essential impact on the character of dark matter of Universe (at least, in principle), because this dark matter can dominantly be baryonic. Because the character of dark matter is one of the most important open questions of present-day Cosmology, it is doubtlessly true that the subject of this article is highly topical.

The paper is organized as follows. Sect. 2 succinctly summarizes the known facts about the Rees-Sciama effect. In Sect. 3 the connection between this effect and the primordial nucleosynthesis is formulated. Sect. 4 shows that observations reject this connection. Finally, in Sect. 5, the results of paper are summarized.

## 2 Survey of the Rees-Sciama effect

In this Section, we summarize briefly the known facts concerning the Rees-Sciama effect.

The majority of the several papers (see Mészáros & Molnár (1996) and references therein) dealing with this effect discusses the case of a single spherically symmetric overdense region. There are only a few articles that discuss the case of a single void (Thompson & Vishniac (1987), Mészáros (1994), Mészáros & Molnár (1996)).

Summarizing the main results of the topic one may conclude: a. The effect is independent of wavelength, and therefore the black-body spectrum remains, and only the corresponding temperature is changed due to the crossing of photons across a transparent structure; b. The void causes an additional redshift (i.e. the temperature of CMBR is smaller than the Friedmann value); c. The overdense region causes both additional redshift and blueshift, and the profile of this change is calculable either analytically or numerically; d. Effects from several voids and superclusters along the path of the photons of CMBR should simply be summed; e. The order of the effect is $`|\delta T/T|(|\delta \rho |/\rho )(y/d_{hor})^\beta `$, where $`T`$ is the temparature of CMBR, $`\delta T`$ is its change, $`\beta (2.53.0)`$, $`\rho `$ is the Friedmann density, $`\delta \rho `$ is its departure from this value; $`y`$ is the size of the object causing the additional shift, and $`d_{hor}`$ is the size of horizon. It is essential to note that $`\delta T`$ and $`T`$ are the present-day observable values; the remaining quantities are understood for the time, when the object is crossed by the CMBR photons. It is also necessary to note that $`|\delta \rho |/\rho 1`$ may also occur; i.e. the structures can be highly non-linear. The effect is increasing roughly cubically by the size of object. To illustrate, consider a spherical empty void with diameter $`100h^1`$ Mpc at $`z1`$; i.e. in the cosmological sense very recent ($`z`$ is the redshift, and $`H=100h`$ km/(s Mpc) is the Hubble parameter). Then the effect is of order $`|\delta T/T|10^5`$ (Mészáros (1994)). It must also be noted that - at least theoretically \- this effect need not be so small. For example, Rees & Sciama (1968) in their original paper discuss a hypothetical case, when the effect is of order $`|\delta T/T|2\times 10^3`$. It is even possible that the effect can be of order unity; again in principle. For example, assume that a void with $`|\delta \rho |/\rho 1`$ having a present-day size $`300`$ Mpc existed already during the recombination epoch. Because during the recombination epoch its physical size is $`1000`$ times smaller, at that time $`d_{hor}`$ was at the same order. In this hypothetical case this void would give an effect of order unity.

## 3 A possible impact on the character of dark matter and on the primordial nucleosynthesis

Surprisingly, in principle, the Rees-Sciama effect may lead to a new argument supporting the baryonic character of dark matter based on the theory of primordial nucleosynthesis. As far as it is known, this connection was never mentioned yet.

The key idea of this connection is the following. About 90 % of matter in the Universe is dark, and recently is widely accepted that this dark matter is dominantly non-baryonic (Peebles (1993)). The key argument against the baryonic character of dark matter is based on the theory of nucleosynthesis. This argument follows from the coincidence between the prediction of this theory and the observed abundances of H, D, 3He, 4He and 7Li. A few years ago it was believed that this coincidence was fulfilled for the ratio $`\eta =n_b/n_\gamma =(1.6\pm 0.1)\times 10^{10}`$, where $`n_b`$ is the number density of baryonic matter, and $`n_\gamma `$ is the number density of photons of CMBR (Dar (1995)). Later it was suggested (Turner et al. (1996), Cardall & Fuller (1996), Steigman et al. (1999)) that this small and relatively precise value was not correct. For example, Steigman et al. (1999) obtain a much bigger value for this ratio from the primordial nucleosynthesis; the value $`\eta _{}^>6\times 10^{10}`$ is favored, and even the value $`\eta =13\times 10^{10}`$ is not excluded. On the other hand, a value as small as $`\eta 2\times 10^{10}`$ is not yet excluded either. Recently one has $`n_\gamma =410cm^3`$, and $`n_b=1.124\times 10^5\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2cm^3`$, where $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ is the ratio of baryonic density to the critical one (Peebles (1993); p.103). Hence, one has $`n_b/n_\gamma =2.74\times 10^8\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2`$. To be in accord with the earlier values of the theory of nucleosynthesis it must be that $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2=(5.8\pm 0.4)\times 10^3`$; while with the highest allowed value of Steigman et al. (1999) $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^24\times 10^2`$. The newest studies (see Coc et al. (2001) and the references therein) give $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2=(1.5\pm 0.3)\times 10^2`$, i.e. $`\eta =4\times 10^{10}`$. Different observations suggest that $`\mathrm{\Omega }_M(0.10.4)`$, where $`\mathrm{\Omega }_M`$ is the ratio of total density of non-relativistic matter to the critical density (Bahcall & Fan (1998)). (Note here that for the purpose of this paper it is completely irrelevant, if the cosmological constant is zero or non-zero (Riess (2000)).) This means that one must have $`\mathrm{\Omega }_M/\mathrm{\Omega }_b(2.580)h^2`$, i.e. for the allowed $`h(0.60.75)`$ (Freedman et al. (2001)) the ratio $`\mathrm{\Omega }_M/\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ must be $`(150)`$. The first value seems to be excluded; only in the case of the lowest allowed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_Mh^2`$ case with the highest allowed value of $`\eta `$ can this occur. Because about 90 % of matter is dark, the situation is straightforwardly solvable, if one assumes that this dark matter is dominantly non-baryonic.

For the sake of completeness it must be added here that - beyond the argument based on the primordial nucleosynthesis - there are two other different and independent arguments for the non-baryonic character of the dark matter. The first argument is based on the observed anisotropies of CMBR (see, cf., de Bernardis et al. (2001) and references therein). The obtained value $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2=(0.022\pm 0.004)`$ clearly needs a dominantly non-baryonic dark matter. In addition, if one assumes that the dark matter is dominated by baryonic dark matter then any galaxy formation theory is in doubt. (For example, Peebles (1993) in Chapt. 25 ”Baryonic Dark Matter” considers the adiabatic dark matter scenario as ”only of historical interest” and also the isocurvature dark matter scenario is taken as an ”unattractive” scenario.) The second argument follows from the observations of Lyman-$`\alpha `$ forest at high redshifts giving $`\mathrm{\Omega }_bh^2=(0.035\pm 0.015)`$ (see Hui et al. 2001 and references therein). However, the discussion of these arguments is not a subject of this article.

Consideration in primordial nucleosynthesis is based on the key assumption that $`\eta =n_b/n_\gamma =`$ constant during the whole expansion of Universe. In the Friedmann models both $`n_b`$ and $`n_\gamma `$ must not depend on spatial coordinates; they depend only on time $`t`$. Because the functional dependence on time should be the same for both densities - specifically one should have $`n_bn_\gamma a(t)^3`$ (”the comoving densities of CMBR photons and baryons, respectively, are constant”; $`a(t)`$ is the expansion function) - the ratio of two densities should be constant (for more details see, e.g., Weinberg (1972)). (Departures from $`a^3n_\gamma =`$ constant may exist but should be small. For example, departures of order $`10^5`$ should surely exist (Peebles (1971); p. 232). $`a^3n_b`$ should be even more constant.) Strictly, the theoretical prediction of $`n_b/n_\gamma `$ from the theory of primordial nucleosynthesis is a prediction for this ratio for the first a few minutes of Universe, when the temperature of CMBR is $`(110)`$ MeV (Dar 1995).

In addition, it is automatically assumed that the ratio $`n_b/n_\gamma `$ does not change in the later stages of Universe. Trivially, if $`n_b/n_\gamma =`$ constant was not true in early times, then this standard assumption would be essentially modified.

Some attempts have been made not to fulfil this assumption. One of that is the case when $`n_b`$ depends on spatial coordinates. These attempts do not lead to essentially new conclusions (Jedamczik & Fuller (1995)).

Contrary to these attempts, assume for the moment that $`n_b/n_\gamma `$ is changing drastically with time, but that spatial dependence is negligible. If this is the case, then the baryonic character of dark matter may easily be saved under some specific conditions. Simply, one has to assume that during the era of primordial nucleosynthesis $`n_b/n_\gamma 10^{10}`$, but recently this ratio is $`(2.580)h^2`$ times bigger. This skip may occur - at least in principle - in three ways: either by increasing the comoving number density of baryons, by decreasing the comoving number density of CMBR photons, or by the combination of both. From the physical point of view only the case when the comoving number of photons is decreasing seems to be allowable.

The key idea of this paper is to remark that such a decrease of the number of photons may occur. This decrease is in principle possible due to a global Rees-Sciama effect of order unity caused by voids having the sizes of horizon. This may be seen as follows.

If CMBR is a blackbody radiation (this is assumed everywhere in this article), then $`n_\gamma (t)a^3(t)`$. This relation is standardly assumed to be fulfilled with high accuracy during the whole epoch of expansion after the annihilation of electron-positron pairs (Peebles (1971), Weinberg (1972)). Assume for the moment that this relation is fulfilled only before recombination, but that does not hold during a short period after recombination. Everything else is identical to the case of the standard Friedmann model. In the standard picture recombination occurs at $`a_o/a(t)1000`$ (Peebles (1971)), where $`a_o`$ is the present value of expansion function. Assume here that recombination occured later: at $`a_o/a(t)=1000/q`$. The value $`q`$ should be chosen to have $`q(150^{1/3})(13.7)`$. Before recombination the value of $`\eta =n_b/n_\gamma `$ was in accordance with the prediction of primordial nucleosynthesis. Nevertheless, immediately after recombination there is a skip in the temperature of CMBR; this temperature is immediately decreasing $`q`$-times. As the simplest situation, it may be assumed that this skip occurs instantaneously; i.e. during this decrease of temperature the change of $`a(t)`$ is unimportant. Hence, if this skip of temperature occurs, it can easily be that $`\mathrm{\Omega }_M=\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ today.

All this gives the following idea. Assume that, shortly after recombination, the Universe is filled by sufficiently large voids. This means that immediately after recombination large non-linear structures exist. (It must be stated here that this situation is not precisely identical to the model of Jedamczik & Fuller (1995). They assume non-linear structures already during nucleosynthesis - i.e. during the first a few minutes of Universe. Here no non-linearities are needed before recombination. They are needed only shortly after recombination.) This situation may lead - shortly after recombination - to an additional global redshift; compared with the Friedmann value the temperature of CMBR should decrease $`q`$ times. Knowing the results of the studies concerning the Rees-Sciama effect, one may conclude that this decrease is possible - at least, in principle.

Of course, several questions emerge for this eventuality; both from the theoretical and the observational point of view. The discussion of these questions is the subject of the next Section.

## 4 Solution: No impact

From the purely theoretical point of view, the eventuality of the decrease of $`T`$ of CMBR $`q`$-times with respect to the Friedmann value seems to be allowed.

Theoretically, two conditions are required to occur for this phenomenon. First, to have this huge Rees-Sciama effect the existence of voids of sizes comparable with the horizon at $`z1000/q(3001000)`$, when the recombination occurs, is required. Remarkably, this can happen, because in the baryon dominated galaxy formation scenarios the non-linearities should exist even during recombination (Mészáros (1997) and references therein). Second, recombination should be ”delayed” and should occur at $`z(3001000)`$. The ”delayed” recombination is in principle again allowed. On the other hand, there are also strange artificial requirements: First, why exactly $`q`$ times does this additional decrease occur, and not - say - ten or hundred times more? Second, how did these huge voids arise already during recombination? Here one has to add that some objects may exist during recombination (Mészáros (1991), Mészáros (1997), Baccigalupi (1998), Sakai et al. (1999)), but not huge voids comparable with the size of horizon. Third, if these huge voids existed at $`z(3001000)`$, why are some objects not seen already at these redshifts? Hence, purely from the theoretical point of view, the huge global Rees-Sciama effect is allowed, but its occurence is strange enough.

Even worse is the situation from the observational point of view. There are at least three counter arguments here. First, voids of the sizes of the horizon at $`z(3001000)`$ should today have sizes of hundreds of Mpc. No such objects are observed; the observed voids have sizes of tens of Mpc. Second, the sizes of these voids - leading to the global additional redshift defined by $`q`$ \- are highly artificial, because they should have roughly the same sizes. Nothing like this is observed. Third, even if this were the case, it would be practically excluded that in any direction the same huge (of order unity) additional redshift occurs. The observed variance of this effect should be of order $`10^5`$ or smaller, because this is the order of the observed variance of $`|\delta T|/T`$ (Peebles (1993), Zaldarriaga et al. (1998), de Bernardis et al. (2001)). In fact, the question of the variance of the Rees-Sciama effect - caused by several objects - was already discussed and solved in detail (Thompson & Vishniac (1987), Sakai et al. (1999)). These articles arrive at the result that the variance and the size of the Rees-Sciama effect should have the same order. Therefore, voids with sizes comparable to the horizon at $`a_o/a(t)=1000/q`$ should give angular scales at $`q`$ degrees (this is the corresponding angular scale for the horizon at these redshifts (Peebles (1993))) a variance of order unity in the temperature of the CMBR. This is obviously not observed. This is the key argument against the huge global Rees-Sciama effect.

It seems that any further speculation about the voids having the sizes comparable with horizon scale is hopeless.

## 5 Conclusions

The purpose of this paper was to discuss the potential impact of the Rees-Sciama effect on the character of dark matter. The first result of this paper is the surprising fact that - in principle - once a global Rees-Sciama effect occurs after the recombination, then the dark matter may be dominantly baryonic. The second result is even more surprising: from the purely theoretical point of view, under highly artificial but physically allowed assumptions, the global Rees-Sciama effect can really occur. Nevertheless, the third result seems to be unambiguous: there is a clear contradiction with the observations, because the extreme observed isotropy of CMBR on the order $`10^5`$ excludes the occurence of a global huge Rees-Sciama effect.

One has still to add that - due to the fully negative conclusion - it might appear that the purposes of this paper were useless. The author argues that this is not the case for three reasons. First, any, in principle, allowed connections between two different topics should always be discussed. (In fact, the situation is similar to the case when the Rees-Sciama effect and the Lauer-Postman’s observations were discussed together. There negative results were also obtained, but the importance of that discussion was obvious.) Second, from the purely theoretical point of view, the global Rees-Sciama effect is allowed; under artificially strange conditions, but it is allowed. This conclusion alone is remarkable and fully new. Third, it is not excluded that in the future the situation will change due to new observational effects. For example, if reionization (Baltz et al. (1998), Weller (1999)) were confirmed at - say - $`z(520)`$, then the observed extreme isotropy of CMBR would reflect the situation after reionization, and not after recombination; then the key argument against the huge global Rees-Sciama effect would be overcame.

###### Acknowledgements.

The useful remarks of Dr. F. Vrba and of the anonymous referee are kindly acknowledged. This research was supported by Research Grant J13/98: 113200004.


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# Piezoresistive anisotropy of percolative granular metals

\[

## Abstract

The piezoresistive response of granular metals under uniaxial strain is strongly dependent on the concentration of the conducting phase. Here we show that the piezoresistive anisotropy is reduced as the system approaches its percolation thresold, following a power law behavior in the critical region. We propose a simple relation between the conductance and the piezoresistive anisotropy which could be used in relation to real materials and notably to the thick film resistors. PACS numbers: 72.20.Fr, 72.60.+g, 72.80.Ng

\]

Disordered systems constituted by random dispersions of metallic and insulating phases, also commonly referred to as granular metals, show transport properties strongly dependent of the concentration $`x`$ of the metallic phase in the composite. For $`x`$ larger than a critical concentration $`x_c`$, transport is metallic-like while for $`xx_c`$ the system undergoes a metal-to-insulator transition. In the critical region $`(xx_c)1`$, the conductance $`G`$ follows a power-law behavior $`G(xx_c)^t`$ where $`t`$ is the critical exponent. The minimal model of a theoretical descriptions of transport in granular metals is based on extensions of percolation theory to random-resistors network models. Numerical simulations of such percolative resistors show that as $`x`$ approaches $`x_c`$ from above, fluctuations of the microscopic (bond) currents get enhanced. It has been shown recently that this phenomenon can be spoiled to get more accurate experimental determinations of $`x_c`$ compared to common conductance measurements.

The enhancement of bond current fluctuations is basically also at the origin of the peculiar behavior of the piezoresistance effect as $`xx_c`$. Under an uniaxial imposed strain, in fact, the piezoresistive response is highly anisotropic when $`x1`$, being maximum for external electric fields applied along the direction of the imposed strain (longitudinal response) and minimum along the orthogonal directions (transverse response). This is due to the fact that for $`x1`$ the microscopic bond currents are basically all in the direction of the external electric field. Instead, lower values of $`x`$ force the bond currents to have components also along directions perpendicular to the external fields so that the anisotropy of the piezoresistive response is gradually reduced until at $`x=x_c`$ the longitudinal and transverse responses become equal. Hence, at the percolation thresold the piezoresistive effect is perfectly isotropic.

The transport properties of granular metals under uniaxial strain could in principle help to characterize the vicinity to the percolation thresold with an higher accuracy compared to that typical of common conductance measurements. The interest on the piezoresistive response of granular metals however concerns also more applicative problems. In fact, a particular class of granular metals made of RuO2, IrO2 or other metal-oxide granules embedded in a glassy matrix, also commonly known as thick-film resistors (TFRs), are characterized by a quite large piezoresistive response, which is used in fabricating highly sensitive pressure and force sensors. It is thought that intergrain tunneling processes are responsible for the TFRs high strain sensibility. A characteristic common to most of the TFRs is that their piezoresistive response is quasi-isotropic, indicating that the values and directions of the microscopic currents are highly fluctuating functions and that the TFRs are quite close to the percolation thresold. This is confirmed also by the observation of power-law dependence of $`G`$ upon RuO2 concentrations.

In this communication, we compute the piezoresistive response of different random resistor network models as a function of bond or site concentrations. We show that close to the percolation thresold, the piezoresistive anisotropy follows an universal behavior governed by an exponential law. Our prediction could be easily experimentally tested, and could bring important informations on the topology of the percolative network and the critical point of TFRs.

To model the piezoresistive behavior of TFRs, or more generally of percolative granular metals, we consider a three-dimensional cubic random-resistor network whose bond conductances either zero or proportional to a tunneling exponential factor $`\mathrm{exp}(2d_i/\xi )`$, where $`d_i`$ is the tunneling distance between two neighbouring sites along the $`i`$ direction and $`\xi `$ the localization length. In our model, the network bond directions are parallel to the orthogonal $`x`$, $`y`$, $`z`$ axes, and in the absence of applied strains the tunneling distances are all equal: $`d_i=d`$, $`i=x,y,z`$. In this situation, the network is isotropic and the total conductance $`G_i=G`$ depends only on the specific bond conductance distribution. To study the effect of an applied strain, let us assume that the resistor network is embedded in an homogeneous elastic medium and that the elastic coefficients of the network and the medium are equal. Hence, when a strain field $`\epsilon _{ii}`$ ($`i=x,y,z`$) is applied to the sample, the conductance changes to $`G_i=G+\delta G_i`$, where the variation $`\delta G_i`$ can be expressed in terms of the (intrinsic) conductivity variation $`\delta \sigma _i`$ and a geometric (extrinsic) factor:

$$\frac{\delta G_i}{G}=\frac{\delta \sigma _i}{\sigma }\epsilon _{ii}+\epsilon _{jj}+\epsilon _{kk},$$
(1)
where $`\sigma `$ is the unstrained conductivity and the indexes $`i`$, $`j`$, $`k`$ assume the values $`x`$, $`y`$, and $`z`$ with cyclic permutations. In the above equation, the variation $`\delta \sigma _i`$ is due to the tunneling distance change $`dd_i=d(1+\epsilon _{ii})`$ which leads to $`\mathrm{exp}(2d/\xi )\mathrm{exp}(2d/\xi )(1+2d\epsilon _{ii}/\xi )`$ for a conducting bond along the $`i`$ direction.

To express $`\delta \sigma _i/\sigma `$ as a function of a general $`\epsilon _{ii}`$, let us first imagine that an uniaxial strain along the $`x`$ direction ($`\epsilon _{xx}=\epsilon `$, $`\epsilon _{yy}=\epsilon _{zz}=0`$) is applied to the sample. In this situation, the conductivity along the $`x`$ axis will in general be different from those along the $`y`$ and the $`z`$ axes which, by symmetry, are instead equal. Therefore, up to linear terms in $`\epsilon `$, $`\sigma _x=\sigma \sigma \mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\epsilon `$ and $`\sigma _y=\sigma _z=\sigma \sigma \mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\epsilon `$ where

$`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\delta \sigma _x}{\epsilon \sigma }},`$ (2)
$`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\delta \sigma _y}{\epsilon \sigma }}={\displaystyle \frac{\delta \sigma _z}{\epsilon \sigma }},`$ (3)
are the longitudinal and transverse piezoresistive coefficients, respectively. The above reasoning can be repeated for uniaxial strains along the $`y`$ and the $`z`$ axis and, since the problem is linear, for a general strain field $`\epsilon _{ii}`$ the conductivity variations $`\delta \sigma _i`$ reduce to:

$$\frac{\delta \sigma _i}{\sigma }=\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\epsilon _{ii}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}(\epsilon _{jj}+\epsilon _{kk}).$$
(4)
The above equation permits to express all the piezoresistive coefficients $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{ij}=\delta \sigma _i/\epsilon _{jj}\sigma `$ or, by using Eq.(1), the corresponding piezoresistive gauge factors $`K_{ij}=\delta G_i/\epsilon _{jj}G`$ (that are the commonly measured quantities) in terms of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$. For example, in a typical experiment with a thick cantilever beam having the main axis directed along the $`x`$ direction, the strains are approximatively $`\epsilon _{xx}=\epsilon `$, $`\epsilon _{yy}=\nu \epsilon `$, and $`\epsilon _{zz}=\nu ^{}\epsilon `$, where $`\nu `$ and $`\nu ^{}`$ are the Poisson ratios of the cantilever and the resistive sample, respectively. By using Eqs.(1,4), the longitudinal ($`K_\mathrm{L}`$) and transverse (KT) piezoresistive gauge factors are:

$`K_\mathrm{L}K_{xx}`$ $`=`$ $`(1+\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})+(1\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})(\nu +\nu ^{}),`$ (5)
$`K_\mathrm{T}K_{yx}`$ $`=`$ $`(1+\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})\nu (1\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})(1\nu ^{}).`$ (6)
Hence from a measurement of $`K_{xx}`$ and $`K_{yx}`$ it is possible to extract the intrinsic piezoresistive coefficients $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$. As we are going to show below, the knowledge of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ permits to characterize the nature of transport of percolative piezoresistors.

As already pointed out in the introduction, the piezoresistive response depends in a non trivial way on the vicinity of the resistor network to its percolation critical point. Consider in fact Fig. 1a in which we report numerical Monte Carlo calculations of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ for bond percolating random resistor networks. In this model, a fraction $`p`$ of bonds distributed at random has conductance $`\mathrm{exp}(2d/\xi )`$, while the remaining fraction $`1p`$ has zero conductance. In the figure, filled symbols refer to a model in which the tunneling exponent $`2d/\xi `$ is set equal to $`4`$, while the open circles are obtained by treating $`\xi `$ as a random variable in such a way that $`22d/\xi 6`$. When there are no missing bonds ($`p=1`$) the piezoresistive response is anisotropic with the longitudinal coefficient much larger than the transverse one, reflecting the fact that the current flows mainly along paths parallel to the direction of the voltage drop. This is more evident for the $`2d/\xi =4`$ data (filled circles) for which $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}=2d/\xi =4`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}=0`$ at $`p=1`$. If fluctuations in the values of $`2d/\xi `$ are allowed (empty circles) even at $`p=1`$ the microscopic currents develop a component ortogonal to the voltage drop direction leading to $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}<2d/\xi `$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}>0`$. When bonds are removed ($`p<1`$), the longitudinal response gets reduced and at the same time the transverse piezoresistive coefficient is enhanced. This trend persists all the way down to the percolation thresold ($`p=p_c0.2488`$) where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ equals $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ and the system shows perfect piezoresistive isotropy. As shown in Fig.1b, the same qualitative behavior holds true also for site percolation models in which a concentration $`x`$ of sites is removed at random with remaining conducting bonds having $`2d/\xi =4`$ (filled squares) or $`22d/\xi 6`$ (open squares).

From the results of both bond percolation and site percolation models of Fig.1 we can infer that as a general rule $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ when the resistor network approaches its percolation thresold. This behavior is better analyzed in Fig. 2 where we plot the piezoresistive anisotropy factor $`(\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})/\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ obtained from the data of Fig.1 as a function of $`pp_c`$. For both bond and site percolation models with or without distribution of $`2d/\xi `$ values, the anisotropy factor monotonically goes to zero as $`pp_c`$ and in the critical region $`pp_c1`$ it follows a power law behavior:

$$\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}}(pp_c)^\lambda .$$
(7)
This specific power law dependence is made more clear in the inset of Fig. 2 where the data are plotted in a log-log scale. A fit of the numerical data to Eq.(7) leads to $`\lambda =0.7\pm 0.1`$ for bond percolation and $`\lambda =0.4\pm 0.2`$ for site percolation independently of $`2d/\xi `$ within the error bars. Although we obtain a critical exponent for bond correlation somewhat larger than that for site percolation, we do not take this difference too seriously since a precise determination of $`\lambda `$ requires much more extensive numerical calculations than those presented here. This is outside the scope of this communication, which instead hints to point out the existence of a critical exponent $`\lambda `$ for the piezoresistive anisotropy.

The power law behavior of Eq.(7) can also be inferred from the transport properties of anisotropic bond percolation models studied some time ago. In those works, percolating networks with random bond conductances were defined in such a way that the conducting bonds were equal along two directions, for example $`y`$ and $`z`$, but different from those along the third direction, that is $`x`$. Topological considerations, renormalization group analysis, and numerical calculations showed that the quantity $`\sigma _y/\sigma _x1=\alpha (p)`$ has a power law behavior $`\alpha (p)(pp_c)^\lambda ^{}`$ close to the percolation thresold. By neglecting the geometrical factors, it is easy to see from Eqs.(2,3) that in our piezoresistive model $`\sigma _y/\sigma _x1(\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})\epsilon `$, so that the two exponents $`\lambda `$ and $`\lambda ^{}`$ are equal.

In summary, we have shown numerically that in the critical regime of percolative resistor networks the piezoresistive anisotropy has a power law behavior. This result suggests a possible experimental route to characterize transport properties in TFRs or other piezoresistive granular compounds. In fact, as pointed out in the introduction, typical TFRs show a power law behavior of the conductance $`G`$ as a function of metallic concentration. Hence, we predict that if this behavior is due to the closeness to a percolative critical point, then the piezoresistive anisotropy factor should follow Eq.(7) or equivalently:

$$G\left(\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}}\right)^{\lambda /t},$$
(8)
where $`t`$ is the critical exponent of the unstrained conductance $`G(pp_c)^t`$. We are not aware of published data from which it is possible to infer $`G`$ and $`(\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}\mathrm{\Gamma }_{})/\mathrm{\Gamma }_{}`$ as a function of the metallic concentration in a controlled way, so Eq.(8) cannot yet be tested. However, there is evidence that the piezoresistive gauge factors anisotropy $`(K_\mathrm{L}K_\mathrm{T})/K_\mathrm{L}`$ in some commercial TFRs is lower for higher resistive samples, in qualitative accord therefore with Eq.(8). We encourage acquisition of additional experimental data in TFRs to verify our predictions.