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# Submitted to Workshop on Open Problems in Mathematical Systems and Control Theory, MTNS’02 Computational problems for vector-valued quadratic forms

## Submitted to Workshop on Open Problems in Mathematical Systems and Control Theory, MTNS’02
Computational problems for vector-valued quadratic forms

Francesco Bullo
Coordinated Science Laboratory

University of Illinois

Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801

United States

bullo@uiuc.edu

Jorge Cortés
Systems, Signals and Control

University of Twente

Enschede, 7500 AE

The Netherlands

j.cortesmonforte@utwente.nl

Andrew D. Lewis
Mathematics & Statistics

Queen’s University

Kingston, ON K7L 3N6

Canada

andrew@mast.queensu.ca

Sonia Martínez
Institute of Mathematics & Physics

High Council of Scientific Research

Madrid, 28006

Spain

s.martinez@imaff.cfmac.csic.es

### 1.1 Problem statement and historical remarks

For $``$-vector spaces $`U`$ and $`V`$ we consider a symmetric bilinear map $`B:U\times UV`$. This then defines a quadratic map $`Q_B:UV`$ by $`Q_B(u)=B(u,u)`$. Corresponding to each $`\lambda V^{}`$ is a $``$-valued quadratic form $`\lambda Q_B`$ on $`U`$ defined by $`\lambda Q_B(u)=\lambda Q_B(u)`$. $`B`$ is *definite* if there exists $`\lambda V^{}`$ so that $`\lambda Q_B`$ is positive-definite. $`B`$ is *indefinite* if for each $`\lambda V^{}`$, $`\lambda Q_B`$ is neither positive nor negative-semidefinite. The problem we consider is as follows.

* Given a symmetric bilinear map $`B:U\times UV`$:

1. are there necessary and sufficient conditions, checkable in polynomial-time, for determining when $`Q_B`$ is surjective?
    2. if $`Q_B`$ is surjective, given $`vV`$ is there a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a point $`uQ_B^1(v)`$?
    3. are there necessary and sufficient conditions, checkable in polynomial-time, for determining when $`B`$ is indefinite?

Before we comment on how our problem impinges on control theory, let us provide some historical context for it as a purely mathematical one. The classification of $``$-valued quadratic forms is well understood. However, for quadratic maps taking values in vector spaces of dimension two or higher, the classification problem becomes more difficult. The theory can be thought of as beginning with the work of Kronecker, who obtained a finite classification for pairs of symmetric matrices. For three or more symmetric matrices, that the classification problem has an uncountable number of equivalence classes for a given dimension of the domain follows from the work of Kac . For quadratic forms, in a series of papers Dines (see  and references cited therein) investigated conditions when a finite collection of $``$-valued quadratic maps were simultaneously positive-definite. The study of vector-valued quadratic maps is ongoing. A recent paper is , to which we refer for other references.

### 1.2 Control theoretic motivation

Interestingly and perhaps not obviously, vector-valued quadratic forms come up in a variety of places in control theory. We list a few of these here.

#### Optimal control:

Agračhev  explicitly realises second-order conditions for optimality in terms of vector-valued quadratic maps. The geometric approach leads naturally to the consideration of vector-valued quadratic maps, and here the necessary conditions involve definiteness of these maps. Agračhev and Gamkrelidze  look at the map $`\lambda \lambda Q_B`$ from $`V^{}`$ into the set of vector-valued quadratic maps. Since $`\lambda Q_B`$ is a $``$-valued quadratic form, one can talk about its *index* and *rank* (the number of $`1`$’s and nonzero terms, respectively, along the diagonal when the form is diagonalised). In  the topology of the surfaces of constant index of the map $`\lambda \lambda Q_B`$ is investigated.

#### Local controllability:

The use of vector-valued quadratic forms arises from the attempt to arrive at feedback-invariant conditions for controllability. Basto-Gonçalves  gives a second-order sufficient condition for local controllability, one of whose hypotheses is that a certain vector-valued quadratic map be indefinite (although the condition is not stated in this way). This condition is somewhat refined in , and a necessary condition for local controllability is also given. Included in the hypotheses of the latter is the condition that a certain vector-valued quadratic map be definite.

We note that Sontag  and Kawski  have shown that the problem of determining local controllability is NP-hard. Our problem of asking whether there is a polynomial-time algorithm for determining the indefiniteness of a quadratic map is not inconsistent with these results since, in terms of controllability, our problem concerns only second-order conditions. However, it would be interesting if even second-order conditions were shown to be difficult computationally.

#### Control design via power series methods and singular inversion:

Numerous control design problems can be tackled using power series and inversion methods. The early references  show how to solve the optimal regulator problem and the recent work in  proposes local steering algorithms. These strong results apply to linearly controllable systems, and no general methods are yet available under only second-order sufficient controllability conditions. While for linearly controllable systems the classic inverse function theorem suffices, the key requirement for second-order controllable systems is the ability to check surjectivity and compute an inverse function for certain vector-valued quadratic forms.

#### Dynamic feedback linearisation:

In  Sluis gives a necessary condition for the dynamic feedback linearisation of a system

$$\dot{x}=f(x,u),x^n,u^m.$$

The condition is that for each $`x^n`$, the set $`D_x=\{f(x,u)T_x^n|u^m\}`$ admits a *ruling*, that is, a foliation of $`D_x`$ by lines. Some manipulations with differential forms turns this necessary condition into one involving a symmetric bilinear map $`B`$. The condition, it turns out, is that $`Q_B^1(0)\{0\}`$. This is shown by Agračhev  to generically imply that $`Q_B`$ is surjective.

### 1.3 Known results

Let us state a few results along the lines of our problem statement that are known to the authors. The first is readily shown to be true (see  for the proof). If $`X`$ is a topological space with subsets $`ASX`$, we denote by $`\text{int}_S(A)`$ the interior of $`A`$ relative to the induced topology on $`S`$. If $`SV`$, $`\text{aff}(S)`$ and $`\text{conv}(S)`$ denote, respectively, the affine hull and the convex hull of $`S`$.

###### Proposition 1

Let $`B:U\times UV`$ be a symmetric bilinear map with $`U`$ and $`V`$ finite-dimensional. The following statements hold:

1. $`B`$ is indefinite if and only if $`0\text{int}_{\text{aff}(\text{image}(Q_B))}(\text{conv}(\text{image}(Q_B)))`$;
2. $`B`$ is definite if and only if there exists a hyperplane $`PV`$ so that $`\text{image}(Q_B)P=\{0\}`$ and so that $`\text{image}(Q_B)`$ lies on one side of $`P`$;
3. if $`Q_B`$ is surjective then $`B`$ is indefinite.

The converse of (iii) is false. The quadratic map from $`^3`$ to $`^3`$ defined by $`Q_B(x,y,z)=(xy,xz,yz)`$ may be shown to be indefinite but not surjective.

Agračhev and Sarychev  prove the following result. We denote by $`\text{ind}(Q)`$ the index of a quadratic map $`Q:U`$ on a vector space $`U`$.

###### Proposition 2

Let $`B:U\times UV`$ be a symmetric bilinear map with $`V`$ finite-dimensional. If $`\text{ind}(\lambda Q_B)dim(V)`$ for any $`\lambda V^{}\{0\}`$ then $`Q_B`$ is surjective.

This sufficient condition for surjectivity is not necessary. The quadratic map from $`^2`$ to $`^2`$ given by $`Q_B(x,y)=(x^2y^2,xy)`$ is surjective, but does not satisfy the hypotheses of Proposition 2.

### 1.4 Problem simplification

One of the difficulties with studying vector-valued quadratic maps is that they are somewhat difficult to get ones hands on. However, it turns out to be possible to simplify their study by a reduction to a rather concrete problem. Here we describe this process, only sketching the details of how to go from a given symmetric bilinear map $`B:U\times UV`$ to the reformulated end problem. We first simplify the problem by imposing an inner product on $`U`$ and choosing an orthonormal basis so that we may take $`U=^n`$.

We let $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ denote the set of symmetric $`n\times n`$ matrices with entries in $``$. On $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ we use the canonical inner product

$$𝑨,𝑩=\text{tr}(𝑨𝑩).$$

We consider the map $`\pi :^n\text{Sym}_n()`$ defined by $`\pi (𝒙)=𝒙𝒙^t`$, where t denotes transpose. Thus the image of $`\pi `$ is the set of symmetric matrices of rank at most one. If we identify $`\text{Sym}_n()^n^n`$, then $`\pi (𝒙)=𝒙𝒙`$. Let $`K_n`$ be the image of $`\pi `$ and note that it is a cone of dimension $`n`$ in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ having a singularity only at its vertex at the origin. Furthermore, $`K_n`$ may be shown to be a subset of the hypercone in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ defined by those matrices $`𝑨`$ in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ forming angle $`\mathrm{arccos}(\frac{1}{n})`$ with the identity matrix. Thus the ray from the origin in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ through the identity matrix is an axis for the cone $`K_N`$. In algebraic geometry, the image of $`K_n`$ under the projectivisation of $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ is known as the *Veronese surface* , and as such is well-studied, although perhaps not along lines that bear directly on the problems of interest in this article.

We now let $`B:^n\times ^nV`$ be a symmetric bilinear map with $`V`$ finite-dimensional. Using the universal mapping property of the tensor product, $`B`$ induces a *linear* map $`\stackrel{~}{B}:\text{Sym}_n()^n^nV`$ with the property that $`\stackrel{~}{B}\pi =B`$. The dual of this map gives an injective linear map $`\stackrel{~}{B}^{}:V^{}\text{Sym}_n()`$ (here we assume that the image of $`B`$ spans $`V`$). By an appropriate choice of inner product on $`V`$ one can render the embedding $`\stackrel{~}{B}^{}`$ an isometric embedding of $`V`$ in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$. Let us denote by $`L_B`$ the image of $`V`$ under this isometric embedding. One may then show that with these identifications, the image of $`Q_B`$ in $`V`$ is the orthogonal projection of $`K_n`$ onto the subspace $`L_B`$. Thus we reduce the problem to one of orthogonal projection of a canonical object, $`K_n`$, onto a subspace in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$! To simplify things further, we decompose $`L_B`$ into a component along the identity matrix in $`\text{Sym}_n()`$ and a component orthogonal to the identity matrix. However, the matrices orthogonal to the identity are readily seen to simply be the traceless $`n\times n`$ symmetric matrices. Using our picture of $`K_n`$ as a subset of a hypercone having as an axis the ray through the identity matrix, we see that questions of surjectivity, indefiniteness, and definiteness of $`B`$ impact only on the projection of $`K_n`$ onto that component of $`L_B`$ orthogonal to the identity matrix.

The following summarises the above discussion.

* The problem of studying the image of a vector-valued quadratic form can be reduced to studying the orthogonal projection of $`K_n\text{Sym}_n()`$, the unprojectivised Veronese surface, onto a subspace of the space of traceless symmetric matrices.

This is, we think, a beautiful interpretation of the study of vector-valued quadratic mappings, and will surely be a useful formulation of the problem. For example, with it one easily proves the following result.

###### Proposition 3

If $`dim(U)=dim(V)=2`$ with $`B:U\times UV`$ a symmetric bilinear map, then $`Q_B`$ is surjective if and only if $`B`$ is indefinite.

### References


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# Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description

## 1. Introduction

It is now easy to collect vast quantities of language documentation and description and store it in digital form. It is getting easier to transcribe the material and link it to linguistic descriptions. Yet how can we ensure that such material can be re-used by others, both now and into the future? While today’s linguists can access documentation that is over 100 years old, much digital language documentation and description is unusable within a decade of its creation.

The fragility of digital records is amply demonstrated. For example, the interactive video disks created by the BBC Domesday Project are inaccessible just 15 years after their creation.111http://www.observer.co.uk/uk\_news/story/0,6903,661093,00.html In the same way, linguists who are quick to embrace new technologies and create digital materials in the absence of archival formats and practices soon find themselves in technological quicksand.

The uncritical uptake of new tools and technologies is encouraged by sponsors who favor projects that promise to publish their data on the web with a search interface. However, these projects depend on technologies with life cycle of 3-5 years, and the resources they create usually do not outlive the project any longer than this.

This paper considers portability in the broadest sense: across different software and hardware platforms; across different scholarly communities (e.g. field linguistics, language technology); across different purposes (e.g. research, teaching, development); and across time. Portability is frequently treated as an issue for software, but here we will focus on data. In particular, we address portability for language documentation and description, and interpret these terms following Himmelmann:

> The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Linguistic practices and traditions are manifest in two ways: (1) the observable linguistic behavior, manifest in everyday interaction between members of the speech community, and (2) the native speakers’ metalinguistic knowledge, manifest in their ability to provide interpretations and systematizations for linguistic units and events. This definition of the aim of a language documentation differs fundamentally from the aim of language descriptions: a language description aims at the record of A LANGUAGE, with ”language” being understood as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules that constitute the invariant underlying structure of the utterances observable in a speech community. \[Himmelmann, 1998, 166\]

We adopt the cover term DATA to mean any information that documents or describes a language, such as a published monograph, a computer data file, or even a shoebox full of hand-written index cards. The information could range in content from unanalyzed sound recordings to fully transcribed and annotated texts to a complete descriptive grammar. Beyond data, we are be concerned with language resources more generally, including tools and advice. By TOOLS we mean computational resources that facilitate creating, viewing, querying, or otherwise using language data. Tools include software programs, along with the digital resources that they depend on such as fonts, stylesheets, and document type definitions. By ADVICE we mean any information about what data sources are reliable, what tools are appropriate in a given situation, and what practices to follow when creating new data \[Bird and Simons, 2001\].

This paper addresses seven dimensions of portability for digital language documentation and description, identifying problems, establishing core values, and proposing best practices. The paper begins with a survey of the tools and technologies (§2), leading to a discussion of the problems that arise with the resources created using these tools and technologies (§3). We identify seven kinds of portability problem, under the headings of content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation and rights. Next we give statements about core values in digital language documentation and description, leading to a series of “value statements”, or requirements for best practices (§4), and followed up with collection of best practice recommendations (§5). The structure of the paper is designed to build consensus. For instance, readers who take issue with a best practice recommendation in §5 are encouraged to review the corresponding statement of values in §4 and either suggest a different practice which better implements the values, or else take issue with the value statement (then back up to the corresponding problem statement in §3, and so forth).

## 2. Tools and Technologies for Language Documentation and Description

Language documentation projects are increasing in their reliance on new digital technologies and software tools. This section contains a comprehensive survey of the range of practice, covering general purpose software, specialized tools, and digital technologies. Reviewing the available tools gives us a snapshot of how digital language documentation and description is created and managed, and provides a backdrop for our analysis of data portability problems.

### 2.1. General purpose tools

The most widespread practice in language documentation involves the use of office software. This software is readily available, often pre-installed, and familiar. Word processors have often been used as the primary storage for large lexical database, including a Yoruba lexicon with 30,000 entries split across 20 files. Frequently cited benefits are the wysiwyg editing, the find/replace function, the possibility of cut-and-paste to create sublexicons, and the ease of publishing. Of course, a large fraction of the linguist’s time is spent on maintaining consistency across multiple copies of the same data. Word processors have also been used for interlinear text, with three main approaches: fixed width fonts with hard spacing, manual setting of tabstops, and tables.222http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/cumming/WordForLinguists/Interlinear.htm All methods require manual line-breaking, and significant labor if line width or point size are changed. Another kind of office software is the spreadsheet, which is often used for wordlists. Language documentation created using office software is normally stored in a secret proprietary format that is unsupported within 5-10 years. While other export formats are supported, they may loose some of the structure. For instance, part of speech may be distinguished in a lexical entry through the use of a particular font, and this information may be lost when the data is exported. Also, the portability of export formats may be compromised, by being laden with presentational markup.

A second class of general purpose software is the hypertext processors. Perhaps the first well-known application to language documentation was the original Macintosh hypercard stacks of Sounds of the World’s Languages \[Ladefoged and Maddieson, 1996\]. While it was easy to create a complex web of navigable pages, nothing could overcome the limitations of a vendor-specific hypertext language. More recently, the html standard and universal, free browsers have encouraged the creation of large amounts of hypertext for a variety of documentation types. For instance, we have interlinear text with html tables (e.g. Austin’s Jiwarli fieldwork333http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/jiwarli/gloss.html), interlinear text with html frames (e.g. Culley’s presentation of Apache texts444http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/apache/ChiMesc2.html), html markup for lexicons, with hyperlinks from glossed examples and a thesaurus (e.g. Austin and Nathan’s Gamilaraay lexicon555http://www3.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~austin/GAMIL.HTML), gifs for representing IPA transcriptions (e.g. Bird’s description of tone in Dschang666http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/fieldwork/), and Javascript for image annotations (e.g. Poser’s annotated photographs of gravestones engraved with Déné syllabics777http://www.cnc.bc.ca/yinkadene/dakinfo/dulktop.htm). In all these cases, html is used as the primary storage format, not simply as a view on an underlying database. The intertwining of content and format makes this kind of language documentation difficult to maintain and re-use.

The third category of general purpose software is database packages. In the simplest case, the creator shares the database with others by requiring them to purchase the same package, and by shipping them a full dump of the database (e.g. the StressTyp database, which requires users to buy a copy of “4th Dimension”888http://fonetiek-6.leidenuniv.nl/pil/stresstyp/stresstyp.html). A more popular approach is to put the database on a web-server, and create a forms-based web interface that allows remote users to search the database without installing any software (e.g. the Comparative Bantu Online Lexical Database999http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/CBOLD/ and the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy Dictionary.101010http://ultratext.hil.unb.ca/Texts/Maliseet/dictionary/index.html) Recently, some sites have started allowing database updates via the web (e.g. the Berkeley Interlinear Text Collector111111http://ingush.berkeley.edu:7012/BITC.html and the Rosetta Project’s site for uploading texts, wordlists and descriptions121212http://www.rosettaproject.org:8080/live/).

### 2.2. Specialized tools

Over the last two decades, several dozen tools have been developed having specialized support for language documentation and description. We list a representative sample here; more can be found on SIL’s page on Linguistic Computing Resources,131313http://www.sil.org/linguistics/computing.html on the Linguistic Exploration page,141414http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/exploration/ and on the Linguistic Annotation page.151515http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/annotation/

Tools for linguistic data management include Shoebox161616http://www.sil.org/computing/shoebox/ and the Fieldworks Data Notebook.171717http://fieldworks.sil.org/ Speech analysis tools include Praat181818http://fonsg3.hum.uva.nl/praat/ and SpeechAnalyzer.191919http://www.sil.org/computing/speechtools/speechanalyzier.htm Many specialized signal annotation tools have been developed, including CLAN,202020http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/ EMU,212121http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/emu/ TableTrans, InterTrans, TreeTrans.222222http://sf.net/projects/agtk/ There are many orthographic transcription tools, including Transcriber232323http://www.etca.fr/CTA/gip/Projets/Transcriber/ and MultiTrans.242424http://sf.net/projects/agtk/ There are morphological analysis tools, such as the Xerox finite state toolkit.252525http://www.xrce.xerox.com/research/mltt/fst/ There are a wealth of concordance tools. Finally, some integrated multi-function systems have been created, such as LinguaLinks Linguistics Workshop.262626http://www.sil.org/LinguaLinks/LingWksh.html

In order to do their specialized linguistic processing, each of these tools depends on some model of linguistic information. Time-aligned transcriptions, interlinear texts, syntax trees, lexicons, and so forth, all require suitable data structures and file formats. Given that most of these tools have been developed in isolation, they typically employ incompatible models and formats. For example, data created with an interlinear text tool cannot be subsequently annotated with syntactic information without losing the interlinear annotations. When interfaces and formats are open and documented, it is occasionally possible to cobble the tools together in support of a more complex need. However, the result is a series of increasingly baroque and decreasingly portable approximations to the desired solution. Computational support for language documentation and description is in disarray.

### 2.3. Digital technologies

A variety of digital technologies are now used in language documentation thanks to sharply declining hardware costs. These include technologies for digital signal capture (audio, video, physiological) and signal storage (hard disk, cd-r, dvd-r, minidisc). Software technologies are also playing an influential role as new standards are agreed. The most elementary and pervasive of these is the hyperlink, which makes it possible to connect linguistic descriptions to the underlying documentation (e.g. from an analytical transcription to a recording). Such links streamline the descriptive process; checking a transcription can be done with mouse clicks instead of digging out a tape or finding an informant. The ability to navigate from description to documentation also facilitates analysis and verification. Software technologies and standards have given rise to the internet which permits low-cost dissemination of language resources. Notably, it is portability problems with these tools and formats that prevents these basic digital technologies from having their full impact. The download instructions for the Sumerian lexicon272727http://www.sumerian.org/ typify the problems (hyperlinks are underlined):

> Download the Sumerian Lexicon as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. In order to minimize downloads of this large file, once you have it, please use your Acrobat Reader to save it and retrieve it to and from your own desktop.
>
> Download the Sumerian Lexicon as a Word for Windows 6.0 file in a self- extracting WinZip archive.
>
> Download the same contents in a non-executable zip file.
>
> Includes version 2 of the Sumerian True Type font for displaying transliterated Sumerian. Add the font to your installed Windows fonts at Start, Settings, Control Panel, Fonts. To add the Sumerian font to your installed Windows fonts, you select File and Add New Font. Afterwards, make sure that when you scroll down in the Fonts listbox, it lists the Sumerian font. When you open the SUMERIAN.DOC file, ensure that at File, Templates, or at Tools, Templates and Add-Ins, there is a valid path to the enclosed SUMERIAN.DOT template file. If you do not have Microsoft’s Word for Windows, you can download a free Word for Windows viewer at Microsoft’s Web Site.
>
> Download Macintosh utility UnZip2.0.1 to uncompress IBM ZIP files. To download and save this file, you should have Netscape set in Options, General Preferences, Helpers to handle hqx files as Save to Disk. Decode this compressed file using Stuffit Expander.  Download Macintosh utility TTconverter to convert the IBM format SUMERIAN.TTF TrueType font to a System 7 TrueType font. Decode this compressed file using Stuffit. Microsoft Word for the Macintosh can read a Word for Windows 6.0 document file. There is no free Word for Macintosh viewer, however.

### 2.4. Digital Archives

Recently several digital archives of language documentation and description have sprung up, such as the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America,282828http://www.ailla.org/ and the Rosetta Project’s Archive of 1000 Languages.292929http://www.rosettaproject.org/ These exist alongside older archives which are in various stages of digitizing their holdings: the Archive of the Alaska Native Language Center,303030http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/ the LACITO Linguistic Data Archive,313131http://195.83.92.32/index.html.en and the US National Anthropological Archives.323232http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/ These archives and many others are surveyed on the Language Archives page.333333http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/exploration/archives.html Under the aegis of olac, the Open Language Archives Community,343434http://www.language-archives.org/ the notion of language archive has been broadened to include archives of linguistic software, such as the Natural Language Software Registry353535http://registry.dfki.de/

These archives face many challenges, the most significant being the lack of funding. Other challenges may include: identifying, adapting and deploying digital archiving standards; setting up key operational functions such as offsite backup, migration to new digital formats and media over time, and the support of new access modes (e.g. search facilities) and delivery formats (e.g. streaming media); and obtaining the long-term support of a major institution to assure contributors and users that the materials will be available over the long term.

## 3. Seven Problems for Portability

With the rapid uptake of new digital technologies, many creators of language documentation and description are ignoring the question of portability, with the unfortunate consequence that the fruits of their labors are likely to be unusable within 5-10 years. In this section we discuss seven critical problems for the portability of this data.

### 3.1. Content

Many potential users of language data are interested in assimilating multiple descriptions of a single language to gain an understanding of the language which is as comprehensive as possible. Many users are interested in comparing the descriptions of different languages in order to apply insights from one analysis to another or to test a typological generalization. However, two descriptions may be difficult to compare or assimilate because they have used terminology differently, or because the documentation on which the descriptions are based is unavailable.

Language documentation and description of all types depends critically on technical vocabulary, and ambiguous terms compromise portability. For instance, the symbols used in phonetic transcription have variable interpretation depending on the descriptive tradition: “it is crucial to be aware of the background of the writer when interpreting an unexplained occurrence of \[y\]” \[Pullum and Ladusaw, 1986, 168\]. In morphosyntax, the term “absolutive” can refer to one of the cases in an ergative language, or to the unpossessed form of a noun (in the Uto-Aztecan tradition) \[Lewis et al., 2001, 151\], and a correct interpretation of the term depends on an understanding of the linguistic context.

This terminological variability leads to problems for retrieval. Suppose that a linguist wanted to search the full-text content of a large collection of digital language data, in order to discover which other languages have relevant phenomena. Since there are no standard ontologies, the user will discover irrelevant documents (low precision) and will fail to discover relevant documents (low recall). In order to carry out a comprehensive search, the user must know all the ways in which a particular phenomena is described. Even once a set of descriptions are retrieved, it will generally not be possible to draw reliable comparisons between the descriptions of different languages.

The content of two descriptions may also be difficult to reconcile because it is not possible to verify them with respect to the language documentation that they cite. For example, when two descriptions of the same language provide different phonetic transcriptions of the same word, is this the result of a typographical error, a difference in transcription practice, or a genuine difference between two speech varieties? When two descriptions of different languages report that the segmental inventories of both languages contain a \[k\], what safe conclusions can be drawn about how similar the two sounds are? Since the underlying documentation is not available, such questions cannot be resolved, making it difficult to re-use the resources.

While the large-scale creation of digital language resources is a recent phenomenon, the language documentation community has been active since the 19th century, and much earlier in some instances. At risk of oversimplifying, a widespread practice over this extended period has been to collect wordlists and texts and to write descriptive grammars. With the arrival of new digital technologies it is easy to transfer the whole endeavor from paper to computer, and from tape recorder to hard disk, and to carry on just as before. Thus, new technologies simply provide a better way to generate the old kinds of resources. Of course this is a wasted opportunity, since the new technologies can also be used to create digital multimedia recordings of rich linguistic events. Such rich recordings often capture items which turn out to be useful in later linguistic analysis, and have immense intrinsic value as a record of cultural heritage for future generations. However, managing digital technologies in less controlled situations leads to many technical and logistical issues, and there are no guidelines for integrating new technologies into new documentary practices.

### 3.2. Format

Language data frequently ends up in a secret proprietary format using a non-standard character encoding. To use such data one must often purchase commercial software then install it on the same hardware and under the same operating system used by the creator of the data.

Other formats, while readable outside the tool that created them, remain non-portable when they are not explicitly documented. For example, the interpretation of the field names in Shoebox format may not be documented, or the documentation may become separated from the data file, making it difficult to guess what the different fields signify.

The developers of linguistic tools must frequently parse presentational formats. For example, the occurrence of \\[n\]\ in a lexical entry might indicate that this is an entry for a noun. More difficult cases involve subtle context-dependencies. This presentational markup obscures the structure and interpretation of the linguistic content. Conversely, in the absence of suitable browsing and rendering tools, end-users must attempt to parse formats that were designed to be read only by machines.

### 3.3. Discovery

Digital language data is often presented as a physical or digital artefact with no external description. Like a book without a cover page or a binary file called dict.dat, one is forced to expend considerable effort to discover the subject matter and the nature of the content. Organized collections – such as the archive of a university linguistics department – may provide some metadescription, but it is likely to use a parochial format and idiosyncratic descriptors. If they are provided, key descriptors like subject language and linguistic type are usually given in free text rather than a controlled vocabulary, reducing precision and recall. As a consequence, discovering relevant language resources is extremely difficult, and depends primarily on word-of-mouth and queries posted to electronic mailing lists. Thus, new resource creation efforts may proceed in ignorance of prior and concurrent efforts, wasting scarce human resources.

In some cases, one may obtain a resource only to discover upon closer inspection that it is in an incompatible format. This is the flip-side of the discovery problem. Not only do we need to know that a resource exists, but also that it is relevant. When resources are inadequately described, it is difficult (and often impossible) to find a relevant resource, a huge impediment to portability.

### 3.4. Access

In the past, primary documentation was usually not disseminated. To listen to a field recording it was often necessary to visit the laboratory of the person who collected the materials, or to make special arrangements for the materials to be copied and posted. Digital publication on the web has alleviated this problem, although projects usually refrain from full dissemination by limiting access via a restrictive search interface. This means that only selected portions of the documentation can be downloaded, and that all access must use categories predefined by the provider. Moreover, these web forms only have a lifespan of 3-5 years, relying on ad hoc CGI scripts which may cease working when the interpreter or webserver are upgraded. Lack of full access means that materials are not portable. More generally, people have often conflated digital publication with web publication, and publish high-bandwidth materials on the web which would be more usable if published on cd or dvd.

Many language resources have applications beyond those envisaged by their creators. For instance, the Switchboard database \[Godfrey et al., 1992\], collected for the development of speaker-independent automatic speech recognition, has since been used for studies of intonation and disfluency. Often this redeployment is prevented through the choice of formats. For instance, publishing conversation transcripts in the Hub-4 sgml format does not facilitate their reuse in, say, conversational analysis. In other cases, redeployment is prevented by the choice of media. For instance, an endangered language dictionary published only on the web will not be accessible to speakers of that language who live in a village without electricity.

One further problem for access deserves mention here. It sometimes happens that an ostensibly available resource turns out not to be available after all. One may discover the resource because its creator cited it in a manuscript or an annual research report. Commonly, a linguist wants to derive recognition for the labor that went into creating primary language documentation, but does not want to make the materials available to others until deriving maximum personal benefit. Two tactics are to cite unresolved, non-specific intellectual property rights issues, and to repeatedly promise but to never finally deliver. Despite its many guises, this problem has two distinguishing features: someone draws attention to a resource in order to derive credit for it – “parading their riches” as Mark Liberman (pers. comm.) has aptly described it – and then applies undocumented or inconsistent restrictions to prevent access. The result may be frustration that a needed resource is withheld, leading to wasted effort or a frozen project, or to suspicion that the resource is defective and so must be protected by a smoke screen.

### 3.5. Citation

Research publications are normally required to provide full bibliographic citation of the materials used in conducting the research. Citation standards are high for conventional resources (such as other publications), but are much lower for language resources which are usually incorrectly cited, or not cited at all. This makes it difficult to find out what resource was used in conducting the research and, in the reverse direction, it is impossible to use a citation index to discover all the ways in which a given resource has been applied.

Often a language resource is available on the web, and it is convenient to have the uniform resource locater (url) since this may offer the most efficient way to obtain the resource. However, urls can fail as a persistent citation in two ways: they may simply break, or they may cease to reference the same item. urls break when the resource is moved or when some piece of the supporting infrastructure, such as a database server, ceases to work. Even if a url does not break, the item it references may be mutable, changing over time. Language resources published on the web are usually not versioned, and a third-party description of some item may cease to be valid if that item is changed. Publishing a digital artefact, such as a cd, with a unique identifier, such as an isbn, avoids this problem.

Citation goes beyond bibliographic citation of a complete item. We may want to cite some component of a resource, such as a specific narrative or lexical entry. However, the format may not support durable citations to internal components. For instance, if a lexical entry is cited by a url which incorporates its lemma, and if the spelling of the lemma is altered, then the url will not track the change. In sum, language documentation and description is not portable if the incoming and outgoing links to related materials are fragile.

### 3.6. Preservation

The digital technologies used in language documentation and description greatly enhance our ability to create data while simultaneously compromising our ability to preserve it. Relative to paper copy which can survive for hundreds of years, digitized materials are evanescent because they use some combination of binary formats with undocumented character encodings saved on non-archival media and physically stored with no ongoing administration for backups and migration to new media. Presentational markup with html and interactive content with Javascript and specialized browser plugins require future browsers to be backwards-compatible. Furthermore, primary documentation may be embodied in the interactive behavior of the resource (e.g. the gloss of the text under the mouse may show up in the browser status line, using the Javascript “mouseover” effect). Consequently, digital resources – especially dynamic or interactive ones – often have a short lifespan, and typically become unusable 3-5 years after they are actively maintained.

### 3.7. Rights

A variety of individuals and institutions may have intellectual property vested in a language resource, and there is a complex terrain of legal, ethical and policy issues \[Liberman, 2000\]. In spite of this, most digital language data is disseminated without identifying the copyright holder and without any license delimiting the range of acceptable uses of the material. Often people collect or redistribute materials, or create derived works without securing the necessary permissions. While this is often benign (e.g. when the resources are used for research purposes only), the researcher risks legal action, or having to restrict publication, or even having to destroy primary materials. To avoid any risk one must avoid using materials whose property rights are in doubt. In this way, the lack of documented rights restrict the portability of the language resource.

Sometimes resources are not made available on the web for fear that they will get into the wrong hands or be misused. However, this confuses medium with rights. The web supports secure data exchange between authenticated parties (through data encryption) and copyright statements together with licenses can be used to restrict uses. More sophisticated models for managing digital rights are emerging \[Iannella, 2001\]. The application of these techniques to language resources is unexplored, and we are left with an all-or-nothing situation, in which the existence of any restriction prevents access across the board.

### 3.8. Special challenges for little-studied languages

Many of the problems reported above also apply to little-studied languages, though some are greatly exacerbated in this context. The small amount of existing work on the language and the concomitant lack of established documentary practices and conventions may lead to especially diverse nomenclature. Inconsistencies within or between language descriptions may be harder to resolve because of the lack of significant documentation, the limited access to speakers of the language, and the limited understanding of dialect variation. Open questions in one area of description (e.g. the inventory of vowel phonemes) may multiply the indeterminacies in another (e.g. for transcribed texts). More fundamentally, existing documentation and description may be virtually impossible to discover and access, owing to its fragmentary nature.

The acuteness of these portability problems for little-studied languages can be highlighted by comparison with well-studied languages. In English, published dictionaries and grammars exist to suit all conceivable tastes, and it therefore matters little (relatively speaking) if none of these resources is especially portable. However, when there is only one dictionary for the language, it must be pressed into a great range of services, and significant benefits will come from maximizing portability.

This concludes our discussion of portability problems arising from the way new tools and technologies are being used in language documentation and description. The rest of this paper responds to these problems, by laying out the core values that lead to requirements for best practices (§4) and by providing best practice recommendations (§5).

## 4. Value Statements

Best practice recommendations amount to a decision about which of several possible options is best. The notion of best always involves a value judgment. Therefore, before making our recommendations, we articulate the values which motivate our choices. Our use of “we” is meant to include the reader and the wider language resources community who share these values.

### 4.1. Content

Terminology. We value the ability of users to identify the substantive similarities and differences between two resources. Thus the best practice is one that makes it easy to associate the comparable parts of unrelated resources.

Accountability. We value the ability of researchers to verify language descriptions. Thus the best practice is one that provides the documentation that lies behind the description.

Richness. We value the documentation of little-studied languages. Thus the best practice is one that establishes a record that is sufficiently broad in scope and rich in detail that future generations can experience and study the language, even when no speakers remain.

### 4.2. Format

Openness. We value the ability of any potential user to make use of a language resource without needing to obtain unique or proprietary software. Thus the best practice is one that puts data into a format that is not proprietary.

Documentation. We value the ability of potential users of a language resource to understand its internal structure and organization. Thus the best practice is one that puts data into a format that is documented.

Machine-Readable. We value the ability of users of a language resource to write programs to process the resource. Thus the best practice is one that puts the resource into a well-defined format which can be submitted to automatic validation.

Human-Readable. We value the ability of users of a language resource to browse the content of the resource. Thus the best practice is one that provides a human-digestible version of a resource.

### 4.3. Discovery

Existence. We value the ability of any potential user of a language resource to learn of its existence. Thus the best practice is one that makes it easy for anyone to discover that a resource exists.

Relevance. We value the ability of potential users of a language resource to judge its relevance without first having to obtain a copy. Thus the best practice is one that makes it easy for anyone to judge the relevance of a resource based on its metadescription.

### 4.4. Access

Complete. We value the ability of any potential user of a language resource to access the complete resource, not just a limited interface to the resource. Thus the best practice is one that makes it easy for anyone to obtain the entire resource.

Unimpeded. We value the ability of any potential user of a language resource to follow a well-defined procedure to obtain a copy of the resource. Thus the best practice is one in which all available resources have a clearly documented method by which they may be obtained.

Universal. We value the ability of potential users to access a language resource from whatever location they are in. Thus the best practice is one that makes it possible for users to access some version of the resource regardless of physical location and access to computational infrastructure.

### 4.5. Citation

Credit. We value the ability of researchers to be properly credited for the language resources they create. Thus the best practice is one that makes it easy for authors to correctly cite the resources they use.

Provenance. We value the ability of potential users of a language resource to know the provenance of the resources it is based on. Thus the best practice is one that permits resource users to navigate a path of citations back to the primary linguistic documentation.

Persistence. We value the ability of language resource creators to endow their work with a permanent digital identifier which resolves to an instance of the resource. Thus the best practice is one that associates resources with persistent digital identifiers.

Immutability. We value the ability of potential users to cite a language resource without that resource changing and invalidating the citation. Thus the best practice is one that makes it easy for authors to freeze and version their resources.

Components. We value the ability of potential users to cite the component parts of a language resource. Thus the best practice is one that ensures each sub-item of a resource has a durable identifier.

### 4.6. Preservation

Long-Term. We value access to language resources over the very long term. Thus the best practice is one which ensures that language resources will still be usable many generations into the future.

Complete. We value the ability of future users of a language resource to access the complete resource as experienced by contemporary users. Thus the best practice is one which preserves fragile aspects of a resource (such as dynamic and interactive content) in a durable form.

### 4.7. Rights

Documentation. We value the ability of potential users of a language resource to know the restrictions on permissible uses of the resource. Thus the best practice is one that ensures that potential users know exactly what they are able to do with any available resource.

Research. We value the ability of potential users of a language resource to use it in personal scholarship and academic publication. Thus the best practice is one that ensures that the terms of use on resources do not hinder individual study and academic research.

## 5. Best Practice Recommendations

This section recommends best practices in support of the values set out in §4. We believe that the task of identifying and adopting best practices rests with the community, and we believe that olac, the Open Language Archives Community, provides the necessary infrastructure for identifying community-agreed best practices. Here, however, we shall attempt to give some broad guidelines to be fleshed out in more detail later, by ourselves and also, we hope, by other members of the language resources community.

### 5.1. Content

Terminology. Map linguistic terminology and descriptive markup elements to a common ontology of linguistic terms. This applies to the obvious candidates such as morphosyntactic abbreviations and structural markup, but also to less obvious cases such as the phonological description of the symbols used in transcription. (NB vocabularies can be versioned and archived in an olac archive; archived descriptions cite their vocabularies using the Relation element.)

Accountability. Provide the full documentation on which language descriptions are based. For example, where a narrative is transcribed, provide the primary recording (without segmenting it into multiple sound clips). Create time-aligned transcriptions to facilitate verification.

Richness. Make rich records of rich interactions, especially in the case of endangered languages or genres. Document the “multimedia linguistic field methods” that were used. Provide theoretically neutral descriptions of a wide range of linguistic phenomena.

### 5.2. Format

Openness. Store all language documentation and description in an open format. Prefer formats supported by multiple third-party software tools. NB some proprietary formats are open, e.g. Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3).

Documentation. Provide all language documentation and description in a self-describing format (preferably xml). Provide detailed documentation of the structure and organization of the format. Encode the characters with Unicode. Try to avoid Private Use Area characters, but if they are used document them fully. Document any 8-bit character encodings. (olac will be providing detailed guidelines for documenting non-standard character encodings.)

Machine-Readable. Use open standards such as xml and Unicode, along with Document Type Definitions (dtds), xml Schemas and/or other definitions of well-formedness which can be verified automatically. Archive the format definition, giving each version its own unique identifier. When archiving data in a given format, reference the archived definition of that format. Avoid freeform editors for structured information (e.g. prefer Excel or Shoebox over Word for storing lexicons).

Human-Readable. Provide one or more human readable version of the material, using presentational markup (e.g. html) and/or other convenient formats. Proprietary formats are acceptable for delivery as long as the primary documentation is stored in a non-proprietary format.

N.B. Format is a critical area for the definition of best practices. We propose that recommendations in this area be organized by type (e.g. audio, image, text), possibly following the inventory of types identified in the Dublin Core metadata set.363636http://dublincore.org/

### 5.3. Discovery

Existence. List all language resources with an olac data provider. Any resource presented in html on the web should contain metadata with keywords and description for use by conventional search engines.

Relevance. Follow the olac recommendations on best practice for metadescription, especially concerning language identification and linguistic data type. This will ensure the highest possibility of discovery by interested users in the olac union catalog hosted by Linguist.373737http://www.linguistlist.org/

### 5.4. Access

Complete. Publish complete primary documentation. Publish the documentation itself, and not just an interface to it, such as a web search form.

Unimpeded. Document all access methods and restrictions along with other metadescription. Document charges and expected delivery time.

Universal. Make all resources accessible by any interested user. Publish digital resources using appropriate delivery media, e.g. web for small resources, and cd/dvd for large resources. Where appropriate, publish corresponding print versions, e.g. for the dictionary of a little-studied language.

### 5.5. Citation

Credit, Provenance. Furnish complete bibliographic data for all language resources created. Provide complete citations for all language resources used. Document the relationship between resources in the metadescription (NB in the olac context, use the Relation element).

Persistence. Ensure that resources have a persistent identifier, such as an isbn or a persistent url (e.g. a Digital Object Identifier383838http://www.doi.org/). Ensure that at least one persistent identifier resolves to an instance of the resource or to detailed information about how to obtain the resource.

Immutability. Provide fixed versions of a resource, either by publishing it on a read-only medium, and/or submitting it to an archive which ensures immutability. Distinguish multiple versions with a version number or date, and assign a distinct identifier to each version.

Components. Provide a formal means by which the components of a resource may be uniquely identified. Take special care to avoid the possibility of ambiguity, such as arises when lemmas are used to identify lexical entries, and where multiple entries can have the same lemma.

### 5.6. Preservation

Long-Term. Commit all documentation and description to a digital archive which can credibly promise long-term preservation and access. Ensure that the archive satisfies the key requirements of a well-founded digital archive (e.g. implements digital archiving standards, provides offsite backup, migrates materials to new formats and media/devices over time, is committed to supporting new access modes and delivery formats, has long-term institutional support, and has an agreement with a national archive to take materials if the archive folds). Archive physical versions of the language documentation and description (e.g. printed versions of documents; any tapes from which online materials were created). Archive electronic documents using type 1 (scalable) fonts in preference to bitmap fonts.

Complete. Ensure that all aspects of language documentation and description accessible today are accessible in future. Ensure that any documentary information conveyed via dynamic or interactive behaviors is preserved in a purely declarative form.

### 5.7. Rights

Documentation. Ensure that the intellectual property rights relating to the resource are fully documented.

Research. Ensure that the resource may be used for research purposes.

## 6. Conclusion

Today, the community of scholars engaged in language documentation and description exists in a cross-over period between the paper-based era and the digital era. We are still working out how to preserve knowledge that is stored in digital form. During this transition period, we observe unparalleled confusion in the management of digital language documentation and description. A substantial fraction of the resources being created can only be re-used on the same software/hardware platform, within the same scholarly community, for the same purpose, and then only for a period of a few years. However, by adopting a range of best practices, this specter of chaos can be replaced with the promise of easy access to highly portable resources.

Using tools as our starting point, we described a diverse range of practices and discussed their negative implications for data portability along seven dimensions, leading to a collection of advice for how to create portable resources. These three categories, tools, data, and advice, are three pillars of the infrastructure provided by olac, the Open Language Archives Community \[Bird and Simons, 2001\]. Our best practice recommendations are preliminary, and we hope they will be fleshed out by the community using the olac Process.393939http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html

We leave off where we began, namely with tools. It is our use of the new tools which have led to data portability problems. And it is only with new tools, supporting the kinds of best practices we recommend, which will address these problems. An archival format is useless unless there are tools for creating, managing and browsing the content stored in that format. Needless to say, no single organization has the resources to create the necessary tools, and no third party developing general-purpose office software will address the unique needs of the language documentation and description community. We need nothing short of an open source revolution, leading to new specialized tools based on shared data models for all of the basic linguistic types, and connected to portable data formats.

## Acknowledgements

This research is supported by NSF Grant No. 9983258 “Linguistic Exploration” and Grant No. 9910603 “International Standards in Language Engineering.”


text:
# Elliptic flow of colored glass in high energy heavy ion collisions

## I Introduction

The collective flow of excited nuclear matter has been an important tool in attempts to extract the nuclear equation of state ever since the early days of heavy ion collision experiments eos . Measurements of collective flow at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) may provide insight into the excited partonic matter, often called a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), produced in high energy heavy ion collisions QMproc . In particular, the azimuthal anisotropy in the transverse momentum distribution has been proposed as a sensitive probe of the hot and dense matter produced in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions Ollitraut . A measure of the azimuthal anisotropy is the second Fourier coefficient of the azimuthal distribution, the elliptic flow parameter $`v_2`$. Its definition is Voloshin

$`v_2=\mathrm{cos}(2\varphi )={\displaystyle \frac{_\pi ^\pi 𝑑\varphi \mathrm{cos}(2\varphi )d^2p_\text{T}\frac{d^3N}{dyd^2p_\text{T}d\varphi }}{_\pi ^\pi 𝑑\varphi d^2p_\text{T}\frac{d^3N}{dyd^2p_\text{T}d\varphi }}}.`$ (1)
The elliptic flow for non-central collisions is believed to be sensitive to the early evolution of the system Sorge .

The first measurements of elliptic flow from RHIC, at center of mass energy $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130`$ GeV, have been reported recently STARv2 . Hydrodynamic model calculations provide good agreement, for large centralities, and for particular initial conditions and equations of state, with the measured centrality dependence of the data KHTS . The agreement at smaller centralities is less good, perhaps reflecting the breakdown of a hydrodynamic description in smaller systems Hirano:2001eu . Hydrodynamic models also agree well with the $`p_\text{T}`$ dependence of the unintegrated (see Eq. (1)) elliptic flow parameter $`v_2(p_\text{T})`$ up to 1.5 GeV/c at mid-rapidity KHTS . However, above $`1.5`$ GeV, the experimental distribution appears to saturate, while the hydrodynamic model distributions continue to rise KHTS . Jet quenching scenarios to explain this saturated behavior of $`v_2(p_\text{T})`$ at large $`p_\text{T}`$ v2jet  appear to disagree quantitatively with the data. Partonic transport models including only elastic gluon-gluon scattering require large cross sections or large initial gluon number to obtain significant elliptic flow Molnar:2001ux .

In this letter, we compute the contribution to $`v_2`$ at central rapidities from the strong color fields generated in the initial instants after the heavy ion collision. These are generated as follows. At high energies, or equivalently, at small Broken $`x`$, the parton density in a nucleus grows very rapidly and saturates eventually GLRMQ  forming a Color Glass Condensate MV  (CGC). The CGC is characterized by the color charge squared per unit area $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_s^2`$ which grows with energy, centrality and the size of the nuclei. Estimates for RHIC give $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_s12`$ GeV comment0 . For a recent review of the CGC model and additional references, see Ref. McLerran:Review . Since the occupation number of gluons in the CGC is large, $`f1/\alpha _S(\mathrm{\Lambda }_s^2)>1`$, classical methods can be applied to study gluon production in heavy ion collisions at high energies KMW ; KN  . The energy and number AR99 ; AR01  of gluons produced were computed numerically for an SU(2) Yang–Mills gauge theory and recently extended to the SU(3) case AYR01 . We have confirmed that strong electric and magnetic fields of order $`1/\alpha _S`$ are generated in a time $`\tau 1/\mathrm{\Lambda }_s`$ after the collision.

The classical Yang–Mills approach may be applied to compute elliptic flow in a nuclear collision comment1 . For peripheral nuclear collisions, the interaction region is a two-dimensional almond shaped region, with the $`x`$ axis lying along the impact parameter axis and the $`y`$ direction perpendicular to it and to the beam direction. We will show that even though large electric and magnetic fields (and the corresponding transverse components of the pressure in the x and y directions) are generated over very short time scales $`\tau 1/\mathrm{\Lambda }_s`$, the significant differences in the pressures, responsible for elliptic flow, are only built up over much longer time scales $`\tau R`$. Moreover, the elliptic flow is generated by soft modes $`p_\text{T}\mathrm{\Lambda }_s/4`$. Our result has important consequences for the theoretical interpretation of the RHIC data-these will be discussed later in the text.

## II Numerical Method

We now discuss our numerical computation of elliptic flow. As in our earlier work, we assume strict boost invariance. The dynamics is then that of a Yang-Mills gauge field coupled to an adjoint scalar field in 2+1-dimensions. For a numerical solution we use lattice discretization. The discretized theory is described by a Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian AR99 .

In previous work, we studied gluon production in central collisions of very large nuclei and therefore assumed a uniform color charge distribution ($`\mathrm{\Lambda }_s=constant`$) in the transverse plane. To study effects of anisotropy and spatial inhomogeneity, we shall consider a finite nucleus. We shall impose suitable neutrality conditions on the distribution of color sources Lam:1999  to prevent gluon production at large distances outside the nucleus.

To this end, we model a nucleus as a sphere of radius $`R`$, filled with randomly distributed nucleons of radius $`l1`$fm. For a gold nucleus, $`R6.5`$fm. The color charge distribution within a nucleon is generated as follows. First, we generate (throughout the transverse plane of a nucleon) a random uncorrelated Gaussian distribution $`\rho ^a(\stackrel{}{r})`$ ($`a`$ being the adjoint color index and $`\stackrel{}{r}`$ the transverse-plane position vector), obeying the relation

$$\rho ^a(\stackrel{}{r})\rho ^b(\stackrel{}{r}^{})=\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{n}^2\delta ^{ab}\delta (\stackrel{}{r}\stackrel{}{r}^{})$$

where the $``$ average is over the ensemble of nucleons. Next, we remove the monopole and dipole components of the distribution by superimposing the distribution with the appropriate homogeneous contribution; first of the color charge, then of the color dipole moment. For a sufficiently fine lattice discretization, this procedure does not result in a significant change in the average magnitude of the random charge distribution. Since the color charges of different nucleons are uncorrelated, the resulting nuclear color charge squared per unit area has a position-dependent magnitude,

$$\mathrm{\Lambda }_s^2(r)=\frac{2}{l}\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{n}^2\sqrt{R^2r^2}$$

, where $`r`$ is the transverse radial coordinate relative to the beam axis through the center of the nucleus and $`l`$ is the nucleon diameter. We can adjust $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{n}`$ to ensure the central nuclear color charge squared per unit area $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}^2\mathrm{\Lambda }_s^2(0)`$ has a desired value.

Once the color charge distributions of the incoming nuclei are determined, the corresponding classical gauge fields can be computed. The initial conditions for the gauge fields in the overlap region between the nuclei are obtained as discussed previously AR99 . For each configuration of color charges sampled, Hamilton’s equations are solved on the lattice for the gauge fields and their canonical momenta as a function of the proper time $`\tau `$.

## III Results

We first compute the momentum anisotropy parameter $`\alpha `$ (defined in Fig. 1) as a function of the proper time $`\tau `$ comment3 . The results for values of the external parameter $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R=18.5`$ and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R=74`$ (spanning the RHIC-LHC range of energies) are shown in Fig. 1. We observe that $`\alpha `$ rises gradually saturating at $`\alpha 1`$% at a proper time on the order of the size of the system. The time required to develop an anisotropy is clearly much larger than the characteristic time $`1/\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}`$ associated with non-linearities in the system.

The calculation of elliptic flow, defined by Eq. (1), involves determining the gluon number, a quantity whose meaning is ambiguous outside a free theory. Closely following our earlier work AR01 ; AYR01 , we resolve this ambiguity by computing the number in two different ways; directly in Coulomb Gauge (CG) and by solving a system of relaxation (cooling) equations for the fields. Both definitions give the usual particle number in the case of a free theory. We expect the two to be in good agreement for a weakly coupled theory. Wherever the two disagree strongly, we should not trust either.

It is easy to show that $`v_2N`$, $`N`$ being the total gluon number, can be reconstructed from the cooling time history of $`T_{xx}T_{yy}`$, just as $`N`$ can be reconstructed from that of the energy functional AR01 :

$$v_2N=\sqrt{\frac{2}{\pi }}_0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{dt}{\sqrt{t}}(T^{xx}(t)T^{yy}(t)).$$
(2)
This expression for $`v_2N`$ is manifestly gauge invariant.

In contradistinction to the gluon number, an estimate of $`v_2`$ involves both the fields and their conjugate momenta. Indeed, consider the expression for $`T_{xx}T_{yy}`$ in our system:

$$T_{xx}T_{yy}=\mathrm{d}^2x_{}\left[E_y^2E_x^2+(D_x\mathrm{\Phi })^2(D_y\mathrm{\Phi })^2\right],$$

where $`𝑬`$ is the chromo-electric field, $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$ the adjoint scalar field, and $`D_i`$ the covariant derivative, In the weak-coupling limit $`D_i`$ reduces to $`_i`$, the usual derivative. In that limit, the first two terms in $`T_{xx}T_{yy}`$ only involve the conjugate momenta of gluons polarized in the transverse plane, while the last two terms only depend on the fields of gluons whose polarization is perpendicular to that plane. Since it is not a priori obvious that the two polarizations contribute equally to $`v_2`$, both the fields and the conjugate momenta should be computed. For the cooling method, relaxation equations for conjugate momenta require that the usual relation between the momenta and proper time derivatives of the fields hold at all cooling times AK97 .

In Figure 2, we compare, for a fixed impact parameter ($`b/2R=0.5`$), the values of $`v_2`$ obtained by the different methods. In the cooling approach, $`v_2`$ can be computed first by considering only the potential part of $`T_{xx}T_{yy}`$ in Eq. 2 and then assuming an equal contribution from the kinetic part. As seen in Figure 2, such an equality does not hold until very late times. There is a significant difference at early times between the CG and cooling estimates of $`v_2`$.

At asymptotically large cooling times we expect $`N`$ and $`v_2N`$ of the cooled configuration to vanish. If the CG values of these do not vanish, then they are artifacts of the CG. We subtract the residual values from the corresponding values before cooling. The result is referred to as the corrected CG values. The cooling and the CG computations are expected to agree at late times, as the system becomes increasingly weakly coupled. The two methods agree for $`N`$ at fairly early times. For $`v_2`$, this convergence occurs at much later times, since, as we shall see in the following, $`v_2`$ is dominated by very soft modes with momenta $`p_\mathrm{T}<\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}`$.

In Figure 3 we plot $`v_2`$ reconstructed from the cooling time history of only the potential terms in $`T_{xx}T_{yy}`$, along with the CG values (also including potential terms only) as a function of $`n_{\text{ch}}/n_{\text{tot}}`$ for different values of $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R`$ as discussed in the figure. The systematic errors represented by the band (for $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}=18.5`$ comment4 ) are primarily due to limited resources available to study the slow convergence of the cooling and CG computations. We have studied the late time behavior of $`v_2`$ for one impact parameter-the results are shown in the figure.

The asymptotic values of $`v_2`$, as predicted by the model, undershoot the data. This disagreement notwithstanding, our results show that a significant $`v_2`$ can be generated by the classical fields. For very peripheral collisions, where the gluon density may be too low to justify the classical approximation, the predictions of the model are not reliable. Interestingly, the dependence of $`v_2`$ on $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R`$ is rather weak. For a fixed impact parameter, the model predicts that, as $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R\mathrm{}`$, the classical contribution to the elliptic flow goes to zero. This is because increasing $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R`$ is equivalent to increasing $`R`$ for fixed $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}`$ and therefore reducing the initial anisotropy.

In Fig 4, $`v_2(p_\text{T})`$ is plotted for $`b/2R=0.75`$ for $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}R=74`$. Our calculations show that the elliptic flow rises rapidly and is peaked for $`p_\text{T}\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}/4`$ before falling rapidly. The theoretical prediction TV  is that for $`p_\text{T}\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}`$, $`v_2(p_\text{T})\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}^2/p_\text{T}^2`$. The lattice numerical data appear to confirm this result-better statistics are required to determine the large momentum behavior accurately. A couple of comments about our result are in order. Firstly, even though $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_{s0}^2`$ is large, it may differ considerably from the color charge squared in the region where the nuclei overlap. This may explain in part why the momenta are peaked at smaller values of $`p_\text{T}`$. Secondly, the dominant contribution of very soft modes to $`v_2`$ helps explain why the cooling and CG computations differ until very late times. The soft gluon modes have large magnitudes and therefore continue to interact strongly until very late proper times. Concomitantly, the occupation number of these modes is not small and the classical approach may be adequate to describe these modes even at the late times considered.

## IV Discussion

We now turn to the theoretical interpretation of the RHIC $`v_2`$ data in the CGC approach. It is clear from Fig. 3 that our result for $`v_2`$ contributes only about 50$`\%`$ of the measured $`v_2`$ for various centralities. Our $`p_\text{T}`$ distributions also clearly disagree with experiment STARv2 ; Voloshin:2002ii . Naively, one could argue that the classical Yang-Mills approach is only applicable at early times so additional contributions to $`v_2`$ will arise from later stages of the collision. While there is merit in this statement, it is also problematic as we will discuss below.

The reason the situation is complex is as follows. We observed that it takes a long time $`\tau R`$ to obtain a significant elliptic flow. At these late times, one would expect that the classical approach would be inapplicable due to the rapid expansion of the system. On the other hand, we have seen that $`v_2`$ in the classical approach is dominated by soft modes which are strongly interacting and don’t linearize even at time scales $`\tau R`$. Clearly, the soft modes cannot be treated as on-shell partons even at times $`\tau R`$! This is the message one obtains from Fig 2.

The correct way to treat the theoretical problem may be as follows. Hard modes with $`k_t\mathrm{\Lambda }_s`$ linearize on very short time scales $`\tau 1/Q_s`$. Their subsequent evolution is treated incorrectly in the classical approach, which has them free streaming in the transverse plane. In actuality, they are scattering off each other via elastic $`gggg`$ and inelastic $`ggggg`$ collisions which drive them towards an isotropic distribution BMSS . This dynamics would indeed provide an additional pre-equilibrium contribution to $`v_2`$ and is calculable. An effect to consider here would be the possible screening of infrared divergences in the hard scattering by the time dependent classical field. More complicated is the effect of these hard modes on the classical dynamics of the soft modes and on their possible modification of the contribution of the latter to $`v_2`$. One has here a little explored dynamical analog to the interplay of hard particle and soft classical modes in the kinetic theory of Hard Thermal Loops JPED .

Were the system to thermalize, both these effects would complement the hydrodynamic component of elliptic flow KHTS . A quantitative study of the anisotropy generated in this intermediate regime would therefore be very useful in our theoretical understanding of the data.

Finally, we note that $`v_2`$ is extracted only indirectly from a variety of techniques-in particular, two and four particle cumulant analyses Nicola . Recently, it has been proposed that non-flow two particle correlations explain the $`v_2`$ data KT . It is unclear whether this model can explain other features of the measured azimuthal anisotropy. In our approach, a procedure very similar to the experimental approach can be followed and two and four particle correlations can be determined. This work will be reported in the near future.

We thank K. Filiminov, U. Heinz, D. Kharzeev, R. Lacey, Z. Lin, L. McLerran, A. Mueller, J.-Y. Ollitrault, K. Rajagopal, J. Rak, S. Voloshin, Nu Xu, E. Shuryak and D. Teaney for useful comments. We also thank Sourendu Gupta for contributing to the early stages of this work. R. V.’s research is supported by DOE Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886. A.K. and R.V. acknowledge support from the Portuguese FCT, under grants CERN/P/FIS/40108/2000 and CERN/FIS/43717/2001. R.V. and Y.N. acknowledge RIKEN-BNL for support. A.K. thanks the BNL NTG for hospitality. We also acknowledge support in part of NSF Grant No. PHY99-07949.


text:
# MATCHING WEAK COUPLING AND QUASICLASSICAL EXPANSIONS FOR DUAL QES PROBLEMS

## 1 Introduction

The discovery of quasi-exactly solvable (QES) spectral problems \[1-4\] provided new opportunities for exploring such interesting issues as the convergence of perturbative series at high orders or the relationship between weak coupling and quasiclassical (WKB) expansions. Of special importance for the second issue is the energy reflection (ER) symmetry of certain QES potentials . It was noted that in certain potentials the QES part of the spectrum is symmetric under $`EE`$. The transformation rule of the corresponding wave functions is also known.

In this work we will limit ourselves to a particular example of the so-called dual potentials . One-dimensional QES problems are based on sl(2). This is represented as follows,

$$H\underset{a,b}{}C_{ab}T^aT^b+\underset{a}{}C_aT^a,$$
(1)
where $`C`$’s are constants and $`T`$’s are sl(2) generators,

$`T^+=+2j\xi \xi ^2{\displaystyle \frac{d}{d\xi }},`$
$`T^0=j+\xi {\displaystyle \frac{d}{d\xi }},`$ (2)
$`T^{}=+{\displaystyle \frac{d}{d\xi }}.`$
The generators act on polynomials of $`\xi `$ of degree $`2j`$ provided $`j`$ is a semi-integer number. The dual potentials  are such that the two sister potential are related by the mapping,

$$EE.$$
(3)
Quasi-exact solutions in quantum-mechanics problems depend on the cohomology parameter $`(j)`$. This parameter determines how much of system’s spectral levels are included in the algebraic sector, or, in other words, how large the $`2j\times 2j`$ matrix will be .

An interesting limit may be taken, $`j\mathrm{}`$. If $`V(x)`$ is a potential well, it may become deeper as $`j`$ is increased. If $`j\mathrm{}`$ the lowest energy level can be calculated perturbatively since the anharmonicity becomes small. This is done by performing an expansion about the minimum point, approximating the potential at the minimum as a slightly perturbed harmonic oscillator.

This expansion leads to an expression for the ground state energy. In the dual potential the energy levels are symmetric with respect to zero. So, the energy reflection relationship can lead to an expression for the highest QES energy level of its sister. This expression may be checked by more traditional means. In particular, a WKB approximation can be applied for highly excited states. Each term is calculated using higher order WKB approximations. The WKB expansion can be confronted with the weak coupling expansion for the ground state of the sister potential. They should match. In Ref  a self dual potential was studied in this context. Here I analyze a pair of dual potentials with the aim of establishing the matching.

## 2 Lowest Energy Calculation

Let us investigate a particular example.

$$V_1(x)=\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{sin}^2x+\left(2j+\frac{1}{2}\right)\mathrm{cos}x,$$
(4)
$$V_2(x)=\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{sinh}^2x\left(2j+\frac{1}{2}\right)\mathrm{cosh}x.$$
(5)
The potentials are plotted in Figures 1 and 2. We start from the weak coupling expansion for $`V_1(x)`$. The first step is to calculate an expression for $`E_0`$. Because the potential is periodic the expression corresponds to the lower edge of the lowest energy band.

Let us parenthetically note that at large $`j`$ the width of the band can be readily evaluated quasiclassically by calculating the tunneling amplitude from $`x=\pi `$ to $`x=3\pi `$,

$$S_{\mathrm{tunnel}}=8\sqrt{2j+\frac{3}{2}},$$
(6)
and the band width

$$\delta Ee^{S_{\mathrm{tunnel}}}.$$
(7)
We neglect the effects that arise due to tunneling because they affect only terms exponentially small in $`j`$ while we address here the power expansion in $`\frac{1}{\sqrt{j}}`$.

As previously suggested, we consider the limit $`j1`$. The eigenvalue problem takes the form

$$\left[\frac{1}{2}\frac{d^2}{dx^2}+[\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{sin}^2x+\gamma \mathrm{cos}x]\right]\psi (x)=E\psi (x),$$
(8)
where,

$$\gamma =2j+\frac{1}{2},\text{(}j\text{ is semi-interger)}.$$
(9)
Taking the limit $`\gamma \mathrm{}`$ causes the potential well to become deeper. The minimum can be calculated to lie at,

$$x_{\text{min}}=\pi .$$
(10)
Expanding about $`\pi `$ and using the following notation,

$$\kappa =(\gamma +1)$$
(11)
gives the following expression for $`V_1(x)`$:

$$V_1(x)=(\kappa 1)+\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\kappa }(x\pi )^2\frac{1}{24}(\kappa +3)(x\pi )^4+\frac{1}{720}(\kappa +15)(x\pi )^6+\mathrm{},$$
(12)
where the dots denote higher order terms.

The terms of the $`\frac{1}{\sqrt{\kappa }}`$ expansion can be determined by treating the potential at the minimum as a slightly perturbed harmonic oscillator. The leading term is the classical term,

$$E_0=(\kappa 1).$$
(13)
The linear in $`(x\pi )`$ term in $`V_1`$ vanishes as do all the odd-power terms. The next term in $`E_0`$ comes from the zero-point oscillation energy for the a harmonic oscillator,

$$\delta E_0=\frac{\omega }{2}=\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\kappa }.$$
(14)
Next we consider the anharmonic terms. The first order perturbation in $`(x\pi )^4`$ produces the correction $`\kappa ^0`$,

$$\mathrm{\Delta }_1E_0=\frac{1}{32}.$$
(15)
The following term is given by adding the second order perturbation of the quartic term,

$$\mathrm{\Delta }_2E_0=\frac{7}{64}\frac{1}{\sqrt{\kappa }},$$
(16)
with the first order perturbation of the sextic term ,

$$\stackrel{~}{\mathrm{\Delta }_2E_0}=\frac{1}{384}\frac{1}{\sqrt{\kappa }}.$$
(17)
Taken together these terms give the following $`E_0`$ expansion:

$$E_0=\kappa +\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\kappa }+\frac{31}{32}\frac{41}{384}\frac{1}{\sqrt{\kappa }}\mathrm{}.$$
(18)
## 3 WKB Calculation

If the energy levels of the sister potentials are symmetric with respect to zero, then multiplying by $`(1)`$ the lowest energy expansion should provide an expression for the highest energy level in the algebraic sector of the sister potential. So, the energy reflection property takes the form

$$E_0=E_{},$$
(19)
where $`E_{}`$ is the highest energy level in the sister potential which is linked to the original potential by mapping $`V(x)V(xi)`$. Taking this as the highest even QES energy level in the potential depicted in Fig.2, we determine the number of this (P-even) state in terms of $`\gamma `$,

$$n=2(\gamma \frac{1}{2}).$$
(20)
Thus, from our calculation of the lowest energy in $`V_1`$ we have determined an expression for the highest energy in the sister system $`V_2`$. We now use WKB approximations to confirm this expression. Our second potential is

$$V_2(x)=\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{sinh}^2x\gamma \mathrm{cosh}x.$$
(21)
We scale the energy in the Schrödinger equation such that $`\alpha `$ is the scaled energy, $`E\gamma \alpha `$. We use the convenient change of variable $`x=2t`$. Thus,

$$[EV_2(t)]=(\gamma \alpha \mathrm{sinh}^2t)\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\mathrm{cosh}^2t.$$
(22)
After scaling the independent variables we obtain the Schrödinger equation,

$$ϵ\psi ^{^{\prime \prime }}(t)=[(1\frac{1}{\gamma }\mathrm{sinh}^2t)\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\mathrm{cosh}^2t(1\alpha )]\psi (t),$$
(23)
where the small parameter is defined as $`ϵ=\frac{1}{2\sqrt{2\gamma }}`$. Adopting the convention $`\beta =(1\alpha )`$, the scaled energy expansion becomes

$$\beta =\underset{n=0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}a_nϵ^n.$$
(24)
We will now use WKB approximation carried out to higher order to determine the coefficients of the energy expansion ($`a_n`$). The WKB quantization condition  to $`ϵ^5`$ is

$$2(\gamma \frac{1}{2})\pi =\frac{1}{2ϵ}𝑑t\sqrt{Q}\frac{ϵ}{96}𝑑t\frac{Q^{^{\prime \prime }}}{Q^{3/2}}\frac{ϵ^3}{3072}𝑑t\frac{2Q^{^{\prime \prime \prime \prime }}Q7(Q^{^{\prime \prime }})^2}{Q^{7/2}}+\mathrm{},$$
(25)
in which $`Q(t)=2[(\gamma \mathrm{sinh}^2t)\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\mathrm{cosh}^2t]`$ and the contours encircle the two turning points with the branch cut joining them. Once again the dots refer to higher order terms.

Next we expand Eq. (25) in powers of $`ϵ`$ and evaluate the contour integrals. In the calculation of each integral we use a second change of variables $`y=\mathrm{sinh}t`$. The first integral can be done along the real axis. The following integrals need to be evaluated along a contour but can be done in closed form. Each of the integral can be evaluated as a multiple of $`\pi `$. The factor of $`\pi `$ is then canceled with the factor of $`\pi `$ in the quantization condition, leaving a purely algebraic series.

Using the results from Eq. (25) we can calculate the scaled energy coefficients ($`a_n`$) in Eq. (24). This results in the following energy expansion

$$E_{}=\gamma \frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\gamma +1}+\frac{1}{32}+\frac{41}{384}\frac{1}{\sqrt{\gamma +1}}\mathrm{}.$$
(26)
Using again the notation $`\kappa =\gamma +1`$ yields

$$E_{}=\kappa \frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\kappa }\frac{31}{32}+\frac{41}{384}\frac{1}{\sqrt{\kappa }}\mathrm{},$$
(27)
in full agreement with the prediction given by the energy reflection relation.

## 4 Conclusion

The $`\frac{1}{\sqrt{\kappa }}`$ WKB expansion for $`V_2`$ is the same as the weak coupling expansion for $`V_1`$, predicted by the energy reflection relation. Thus we have validated the relation and established the relationship between the energy levels of the two dual potentials. We have shown not only that the relationship between the energy levels exist, but that it persits to higher orders algebraically. This is remarkable because the pertubation calculation and the WKB approximation are independent of one another. Thus, a deeper principle must underlie the symmetry that exists between the energy levels of the two potentials.

## 5 Acknowledgements

M.K. thanks Professor Mikhail Shifman for his careful guidance and generous support, and he thanks Xin Rui Hou, Justin Hietala, and Steven Giron for their shared knowledge and patient assistance.

## References