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# Evaluating the Effectiveness of Ensembles of Decision Trees in Disambiguating Senseval Lexical Samples

## 1 Introduction

There were eight Duluth systems that participated in the English and Spanish lexical sample tasks of Senseval-2. These systems were all based on the combination of lexical features with standard machine learning algorithms. The most accurate of these systems proved to be Duluth3 for English and Duluth8 for Spanish. These only differ with respect to minor language specific issues, so we refer to them generically as Duluth38, except when the language distinction is important.

Duluth38 is an ensemble approach that assigns a sense to an instance of an ambiguous word by taking a vote among three bagged decision trees. Each tree is learned from a different view of the training examples associated with the target word. Each view of the training examples is based on one of the following three types of lexical features: single words, two word sequences that occur anywhere within the context of the word being disambiguated, and two word sequences made up of this target word and another word within one or two positions. These features are referred to as unigrams, bigrams, and co–occurrences.

The focus of this paper is on determining if the member classifiers in the Duluth38 ensemble are complementary or redundant with each other and with other participating systems. Two classifiers are complementary if they disagree on a substantial number of disambiguation decisions and yet attain comparable levels of overall accuracy. Classifiers are redundant if they arrive at the same disambiguation decisions for most instances of the ambiguous word. There is little advantage in creating an ensemble of redundant classifiers, since they will make the same disambiguation decisions collectively as they would individually. An ensemble can only improve upon the accuracy of its member classifiers if they are complementary to each other, and the errors of one classifier are offset by the correct judgments of others.

This paper continues with a description of the lexical features that make up the Duluth38 system, and then profiles the Senseval-1 and Senseval-2 lexical sample data that is used in this evaluation. There are two types of analysis presented. First, the accuracy of the member classifiers in the Duluth38 ensemble are evaluated individually and in pairwise combinations. Second, the agreement between Duluth38 and the top two participating systems in Senseval-1 and Senseval-2 is compared. This paper concludes with a review of the origins of our approach. Since the focus here is on analysis, implementation level details are not extensively discussed. Such descriptions can be found in \[Pedersen, 2001b\] or \[Pedersen, 2002\].

## 2 Lexical Features

Unigram features represent words that occur five or more times in the training examples associated with a given target word. A stop–list is used to eliminate high frequency function words as features.

For example, if the target word is water and the training example is I water the flowering flowers, the unigrams water, flowering and flowers are evaluated as possible unigram features. No stemming or other morphological processing is performed, so flowering and flowers are considered as distinct unigrams. I and the are not considered as possible features since they are included in the stop–list.

Bigram features represent two word sequences that occur two or more times in the training examples associated with a target word, and have a log–likelihood value greater than or equal to 6.635. This corresponds to a p–value of 0.01, which indicates that according to the log–likelihood ratio there is a 99% probability that the words that make up this bigram are not independent.

If we are disambiguating channel and have the training example Go to the channel quickly, then the three bigrams Go to, the channel, and channel quickly will be considered as possible features. to the is not included since both words are in the stop–list.

Co–occurrence features are defined to be a pair of words that include the target word and another word within one or two positions. To be selected as a feature, a co–occurrence must occur two or more times in the lexical sample training data, and have a log–likelihood value of 2.706, which corresponds to a p–value of 0.10. A slightly higher p–value is used for the co–occurrence features, since the volume of data is much smaller than is available for the bigram features.

If we are disambiguating art and have the training example He and I like art of a certain period, we evaluate I art, like art, art of, and art a as possible co–occurrence features.

All of these features are binary, and indicate if the designated unigram, bigram, or co–occurrence appears in the context with the ambiguous word. Once the features are identified from the training examples using the methods described above, the decision tree learner selects from among those features to determine which are most indicative of the sense of the ambiguous word. Decision tree learning is carried out with the Weka J48 algorithm \[Witten and Frank, 2000\], which is a Java implementation of the classic C4.5 decision tree learner \[Quinlan, 1986\].

## 3 Experimental Data

The English lexical sample for Senseval-1 is made up of 35 words, six of which are used in multiple parts of speech. The training examples have been manually annotated based on the HECTOR sense inventory. There are 12,465 training examples, and 7,448 test instances. This corresponds to what is known as the trainable lexical sample in the Senseval-1 official results.

The English lexical sample for Senseval-2 consists of 73 word types, each of which is associated with a single part of speech. There are 8,611 sense–tagged examples provided for training, where each instance has been manually assigned a WordNet sense. The evaluation data for the English lexical sample consists of 4,328 held out test instances.

The Spanish lexical sample for Senseval-2 consists of 39 word types. There are 4,480 training examples that have been manually tagged with senses from Euro-WordNet. The evaluation data consists of 2,225 test instances.

## 4 System Results

This section (and Table 1) summarizes the performance of the top two participating systems in Senseval-1 and Senseval-2, as well as the Duluth3 and Duluth8 systems. Also included are baseline results for a decision stump and a majority classifier. A decision stump is simply a one node decision tree based on a co–occurrence feature, while the majority classifier assigns the most frequent sense in the training data to every occurrence of that word in the test data.

Results are expressed using accuracy, which is computed by dividing the total number of correctly disambiguated test instances by the total number of test instances. Official results from Senseval are reported using precision and recall, so these are converted to accuracy to provide a consistent point of comparison. We utilize fine grained scoring, where a word is considered correctly disambiguated only if it is assigned exactly the sense indicated in the manually created gold standard.

In the English lexical sample task of Senseval-1 the two most accurate systems overall were hopkins-revised (77.1%) and ets-pu-revised (75.6%). The Duluth systems did not participate in this exercise, but have been evaluated using the same data after the fact. The Duluth3 system reaches accuracy of 70.3%. The simple majority classifier attains accuracy of 56.4%.

In the English lexical sample task of Senseval-2 the two most accurate systems were JHU(R) (64.2%) and SMUls (63.8%). Duluth3 attains an accuracy of 57.3%, while a simple majority classifier attains accuracy of 47.4%.

In the Spanish lexical sample task of Senseval-2 the two most accurate systems were JHU(R) (68.1%) and stanford-cs224n (66.9%). Duluth8 has accuracy of 61.2%, while a simple majority classifier attains accuracy of 47.4%.

The top two systems from the first and second Senseval exercises represent a wide range of strategies that we can only hint at here. The SMUls English lexical sample system is perhaps the most distinctive in that it incorporates information from WordNet, the source of the sense distinctions in Senseval-2. The hopkins-revised, JHU(R), and stanford-cs224n systems use supervised algorithms that learn classifiers from a rich combination of syntactic and lexical features. The ets-pu-revised system may be the closest in spirit to our own, since it creates an ensemble of two Naive Bayesian classifiers, where one is based on topical context and the other on local context.

More detailed description of the Senseval-1 and Senseval-2 systems and lexical samples can be found in \[Kilgarriff and Palmer, 2000\] and \[Edmonds and Cotton, 2001\], respectively.

## 5 Decomposition of Ensembles

The three bagged decision trees that make up Duluth38 are evaluated both individually and as pairwise ensembles. In Table 1 and subsequent discussion, we refer to the individual bagged decision trees based on unigrams, bigrams and co–occurrences as U, B, and C, respectively. We designate ensembles that consist of two or three bagged decision trees by using the relevant combinations of letters. For example, UBC refers to a three member ensemble consisting of unigram (U), bigram (B), and co–occurrence (C) decision trees, while BC refers to a two member ensemble of bigram (B) and co-occurrence (C) decision trees. Note of course that UBC is synonymous with Duluth38.

Table 1 shows that Duluth38 (UBC) achieves accuracy significantly better than the lower bounds represented by the majority classifier and the decision stump, and comes within seven percentage points of the most accurate systems in each of the three lexical sample tasks. However, UBC does not significantly improve upon all of its member classifiers, suggesting that the ensemble is made up of redundant rather than complementary classifiers.

In general the accuracies of the bigram (B) and co–occurrence (C) decision trees are never significantly different than the accuracy attained by the ensembles of which they are members (UB, BC, UC, and UBC), nor are they significantly different from each other. This is an intriguing result, since the co–occurrences represent a much smaller feature set than bigrams, which are in turn much smaller than the unigram feature set. Thus, the smallest of our feature sets is the most effective. This may be due to the fact that small feature sets are least likely to suffer from fragmentation during decision tree learning.

Of the three individual bagged decision trees U, B, and C, the unigram tree (U) is significantly less accurate for all three lexical samples. It is only slightly more accurate than the decision stump for both English lexical samples, and is less accurate than the decision stump in the Spanish task.

The relatively poor performance of unigrams can be accounted for by the large number of possible features. Unigram features consist of all words not in the stop–list that occur five or more times in the training examples for a word. The decision tree learner must search through a very large feature space, and under such circumstances may fall victim to fragmentation.

Despite these results, we are not prepared to dismiss the use of ensembles or unigram decision trees. An ensemble of unigram and co–occurrence decision trees (UC) results in greater accuracy than any other lexical decision tree for the English Senseval-1 lexical sample, and is essentially tied with the most accurate of these approaches (UBC) in the English Senseval-2 lexical sample. In principle unigrams and co–occurrence features are complementary, since unigrams represent topical context, and co–occurrences represent local context. This follows the line of reasoning developed by \[Leacock et al., 1998\] in formulating their ensemble of Naive Bayesian classifiers for word sense disambiguation.

Adding the bigram decision tree (B) to the ensemble of the unigram and co–occurrence decision trees (UC) to create UBC does not result in significant improvements in accuracy for the any of the lexical samples. This reflects the fact that the bigram and co–occurrence feature sets can be redundant. Bigrams are two word sequences that occur anywhere within the context of the ambiguous word, while co–occurrences are bigrams that include the target word and a word one or two positions away. Thus, any consecutive two word sequence that includes the word to be disambiguated and has a log–likelihood ratio greater than the specified threshold will be considered both a bigram and a co–occurrence.

Despite the partial overlap between bigrams and co–occurrences, we believe that retaining them as separate feature sets is a reasonable idea. We have observed that an ensemble of multiple decision trees where each is learned from a representation of the training examples that has a small number of features is more accurate than a single decision tree that is learned from one large representation of the training examples. For example, we mixed the bigram and co–occurrence features into a single feature set, and then learned a single bagged decision tree from this representation of the training examples. We observed drops in accuracy in both the Spanish and English Senseval-2 lexical sample tasks. For Spanish it falls from 59.4% to 58.2%, and for English it drops from 57.2% to 54.9%. Interestingly enough, this mixed feature set of bigrams and co–occurrences results in a slight increase over an ensemble of the two in the Senseval-1 data, rising from 71.3% to 71.5%.

## 6 Agreement Among Systems

The results in Table 1 show that UBC and its member classifiers perform at levels of accuracy significantly higher than the majority classifier and decision stumps, and approach the level of some of the more accurate systems. This poses an intriguing possibility. If UBC is making complementary errors to those other systems, then it might be possible to combine these systems to achieve an even higher level of accuracy. The alternative is that the decision trees based on lexical features are largely redundant with these other systems, and that there is a hard core of test instances that are resistant to disambiguation by any of these systems.

We performed a series of pairwise comparisons to establish the degree to which these systems agree. We included the two most accurate participating systems from each of the three lexical sample tasks, along with UBC, a decision stump, and a majority classifier.

In Table 2 the column labeled “both” shows the percentage and count of test instances where both systems are correct, the column labeled “one” shows the percentage and count where only one of the two systems is correct, and the column labeled “none” shows how many test instances were not correctly disambiguated by either system. We note that in the pairwise comparisons there is a high level of agreement for the instances that both systems were able to disambiguate, regardless of the systems involved. For example, in the Senseval-1 results the three pairwise comparisons among UBC, hopkins-revised, and ets-pu-revised all show that approximately 65% of the test instances are correctly disambiguated by both systems. The same is true for the English and Spanish lexical sample tasks in Senseval-2, where each pairwise comparison results in agreement in approximately half the test instances.

Next we extend this study of agreement to a three–way comparison between UBC, hopkins-revised, and ets-pu-revised for the Senseval-1 lexical sample. There are 4,507 test instances where all three systems agree (60.5%), and 973 test instances (13.1%) that none of the three is able to get correct. These are remarkably similar values to the pair–wise comparisons, suggesting that there is a fairly consistent number of test instances that all three systems handle in the same way. When making a five–way comparison that includes these three systems and the decision stump and the majority classifier, the number of test instances that no system can disambiguate correctly drops to 888, or 11.93%. This is interesting in that it shows there are nearly 100 test instances that are only disambiguated correctly by the decision stump or the majority classifier, and not by any of the other three systems. This suggests that very simple classifiers are able to resolve some test instances that more complex techniques miss.

The agreement when making a three way comparison between UBC, JHU(R), and SMUls in the English Senseval-2 lexical sample drops somewhat from the pair–wise levels. There are 1,791 test instances that all three systems disambiguate correctly (41.4%) and 828 instances that none of these systems get correct (19.1%). When making a five way comparison between these three systems, the decision stump and the majority classifier, there are 755 test instances (17.4%) that no system can resolve. This shows that these three systems are performing somewhat differently, and do not agree as much as the Senseval-1 systems.

The agreement when making a three way comparison between UBC, JHU(R), and cs224n in the Spanish lexical sample task of Senseval-2 remains fairly consistent with the pairwise comparisons. There are 960 test instances that all three systems get correct (43.2%), and 308 test instances where all three systems failed (13.8%). When making a five way comparison between these three systems and the decision stump and the majority classifier, there were 237 test instances (10.7%) where no systems was able to resolve the sense. Here again we see three systems that are handling quite a few test instances in the same way.

Finally, the number of cases where neither the decision stump nor the majority classifier is correct varies from 33% to 43% across the three lexical samples. This suggests that the optimal combination of a majority classifier and decision stump could attain overall accuracy between 57% and 66%, which is comparable with some of the better results for these lexical samples. Of course, how to achieve such an optimal combination is an open question. This is still an interesting point, since it suggests that there is a relatively large number of test instances that require fairly minimal information to disambiguate successfully.

## 7 Duluth38 Background

The origins of Duluth38 can be found in an ensemble approach based on multiple Naive Bayesian classifiers that perform disambiguation via a majority vote \[Pedersen, 2000\]. Each member of the ensemble is based on unigram features that occur in varying sized windows of context to the left and right of the ambiguous word. The sizes of these windows are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 25, and 50 words to the left and to the right, essentially forming bags of words to the left and right. The accuracy of this ensemble disambiguating the nouns interest (89%) and line (88%) is as high as any previously published results. However, each ensemble consists of 81 Naive Bayesian classifiers, making it difficult to determine which features and classifiers were contributing most significantly to disambiguation.

The frustration with models that lack an intuitive interpretation led to the development of decision trees based on bigram features \[Pedersen, 2001a\]. This is quite similar to the bagged decision trees of bigrams (B) presented here, except that the earlier work learns a single decision tree where training examples are represented by the top 100 ranked bigrams, according to the log–likelihood ratio. This earlier approach was evaluated on the Senseval-1 data and achieved an overall accuracy of 64%, whereas the bagged decision tree presented here achieves an accuracy of 68% on that data.

Our interest in co–occurrence features is inspired by \[Choueka and Lusignan, 1985\], who showed that humans determine the meaning of ambiguous words largely based on words that occur within one or two positions to the left and right. Co–occurrence features, generically defined as bigrams where one of the words is the target word and the other occurs within a few positions, have been widely used in computational approaches to word sense disambiguation. When the impact of mixed feature sets on disambiguation is analyzed, co–occurrences usually prove to contribute significantly to overall accuracy. This is certainly our experience, where the co–occurrence decision tree (C) is the most accurate of the individual lexical decision trees. Likewise, \[Ng and Lee, 1996\] report overall accuracy for the noun interest of 87%, and find that that when their feature set only consists of co–occurrence features the accuracy only drops to 80%.

Our interest in bigrams was indirectly motivated by \[Leacock et al., 1998\], who describe an ensemble approach made up of local context and topical context. They suggest that topical context can be represented by words that occur anywhere in a window of context, while local contextual features are words that occur within close proximity to the target word. They show that in disambiguating the adjective hard and the verb serve that the local context is most important, while for the noun line the topical context is most important. We believe that statistically significant bigrams that occur anywhere in the window of context can serve the same role, in that such a two word sequence is likely to carry heavy semantic (topical) or syntactic (local) weight.

## 8 Conclusion

This paper analyzes the performance of the Duluth3 and Duluth8 systems that participated in the English and Spanish lexical sample tasks in Senseval-2. We find that an ensemble offers very limited improvement over individual decision trees based on lexical features. Co–occurrence decision trees are more accurate than bigram or unigram decision trees, and are nearly as accurate as the full ensemble. This is an encouraging result, since the number of co–occurrence features is relatively small and easy to learn from compared to the number of bigram or unigram features.

## 9 Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by a National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Development award (#0092784).

The Duluth38 system (and all other Duluth systems that participated in Senseval-2) can be downloaded from the author’s web site: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse/code.html.


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# Discovery of a Possible Anomalous X-ray Pulsar in the Small Magellanic Cloud

## 1 INTRODUCTION

Anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs) have a number of properties that distinguish them as a class from other pulsars. (See Mereghetti 2001 for a review.) They have periods in the range 6-12s, X-ray luminosities in the range $`10^{34}10^{36}`$ ergs/s, very soft X-ray spectra, little or no variability on time scales from hours to years, and they undergo relatively steady spin-down with no evidence for binary motion. The limited number of members of this class ($``$ 6) has inhibited development of a theoretical understanding of their properties. Models to account for their X-ray emission generally fall into two categories depending on the energy source, either loss of magnetic field energy (magnetar models) (Thompson & Duncan 1996; Heyl & Hernquist 1997) or accretion. Accretion models may be further subdivided according to the source of infalling material; binary companion models e.g. Mereghetti & Stella (1995), or accretion from a disk leftover from a supernova explosion (Marsden et al. 2001, Francischelli & Wijers 2002).

In this paper we present evidence for a possible addition to this class. In an examination of archival X-ray data from a number of X-ray satellites (ROSAT, Chandra, RXTE) we have discovered evidence for a previously unreported pulsar in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The properties of this pulsar are consistent with those of the AXPs. By virtue of the known distance to the SMC, 57 kpc (Feast & Walker 1987), the luminosity can be rather accurately established and it falls in the range of AXP luminosities. If this is a correct identification, then it will be the fastest yet discovered (P = 5.44 s) and the first extragalactic AXP if we discount the soft gamma repeater, 0526-66, in the LMC. This latter source exhibits all the characteristics of an AXP when it is not bursting (Marsden et al. 2001).

## 2 OBSERVATIONS

The discovery data were obtained from a 100ks ACIS-I observation which began 2001 May 15, obsid 1881. The position of the source is: 01h 00m 43.14s, -72 11 33.8′′ (J2000), approximately 10 arc minutes from the ACIS-I aim point. The density of the stellar field, and its location well out of the Galactic plane, mitigate against ready boresight correction of the Chandra data. Apart from applying the prescribed aspect offset for this data set (See the Chandra X-ray Center “Aspect caveat” page at http://asc.harvard.edu/cal/ASPECT/aspect\_caveats.html), we have not further refined the provided aspect solution. Given the negligible uncertainty in the source centroid ($``$0.05 arcsec), we expect an absolute astrometric accuracy in line with the overall Chandra performance to date, which has provided a 90%-confidence radial uncertainty of 0.6 arcsec; see http://asc.harvard.edu/cal/ASPECT/celmon/index.html.

In accordance with the CHANDRA source naming convention, the source is designated CXOU J0110043.1-721134. A selection circle of 24 pixels (11.8”) was chosen to encompass $`>90\%`$ of the source photons. 6099 photons were retrieved from the observation with a background estimated to be 111 photons. The times of arrival of the source photons at the space craft were adjusted to the barycenter of the solar system and a fast Fourier transform (fft) was performed.

Inasmuch as the ACIS-I CCD read-out time is a fixed 3.241 seconds, the Nyquist limiting frequency for the fft is 1/6.482s = 0.154 Hz. In order to show clearly this limitation, the fft was performed with a bin size of 0.1 seconds, and a portion of the resulting power spectrum (normalized to unity power) is shown in figure 1. There are three peaks present, two of which are aliases of each other at 0.124706(1) and 0.183828(1) Hz, on opposite sides of the Nyquist frequency. These peaks have highly significant power values of 38.4. The chance probability of such a power is $`3\times 10^{17}`$. The peak at 0.308 Hz is due to the digitization limit (3.241 s) of the ACIS-I and has a power value approximately equal to the number of photons.

The spectrum of the source is very soft. An acceptable spectral fit to the data is given by a black-body model with an absorption column density 1.4$`\pm 0.2\times 10^{21}`$ H-atoms/cm2 and a value of kT = 0.41$`\pm `$0.01 keV. The fit to the data is shown in Figure 2.

A search of imaging X-ray satellite archives for data for this source has produced many observations dating from 1979. These observations are listed in Table 1. The most extensive source coverage is from the ROSAT satellite. For ROSAT we have restricted the observations shown in the Table by excluding all observations which contain fewer than $``$ 50 source photons. This means that for the ROSAT HRI exposures less than 7.5 ks are excluded. For the PSPC exposures less than 1.5 ks are excluded as are observations in which the source is more than 30 arc minutes from the center of the field of view. This latter restriction is designed to avoid large vignetting corrections to the counting rate.

The luminosity values given in the table are derived under the assumption that the source is associated with the SMC (distance 57kpc, Feast & Walker 1987) and that the source spectrum has the same black-body model form as determined by the fit to the CHANDRA data. The luminosity is calculated for the CHANDRA spectral range 0.2 to 10 keV.

From the Table we notice a near constancy of flux values for a given instrument. The two Einstein observations are consistent. The HRI fluxes are consistent with a constant flux (chi-squared probability 6%). There is a single high PSPC observation (rp600455n00) which is nearly 5 $`\sigma `$ above the mean. Without that observation the remaining PSPC count rates are consistent with a constant flux (chi-squared probability 26%)

The luminosity values from different detectors are also nearly consistent with one another, averaging to a value of 1.5$`\times 10^{35}`$ ergs/s. ROSAT observations which are not included in the table (e.g. PSPC observations with the source further than 30 arc minutes from the center of the field) show the source as well. Thus the the variability of this source on a time scale of months to years is relatively small. In addition, within the 100ks CHANDRA observation there is no significant variation of the source count rate.

We may use the CHANDRA data as a guide to calculate what fft power values are to be expected from the other observations. The limited time resolution of the ACIS-I data and the fact that the pulsed signal is near the Nyquist limiting frequency of 0.154 Hz prohibit any detection of harmonic content higher than the fundamental. We therefore make the assumption that the pulsations are purely sinusoid, in which case the power expected is 0.25 $`N_{pulsed}^2/N_{tot}`$, where $`N_{pulsed}`$ is the number of pulsed photons and $`N_{tot}`$ is the total number of photons. By setting the power to be the observed value of 38 and taking into account the 2% background, we find that the pulsed fraction is 16$`\pm `$3%.

As a further attempt to detect pulsations from CXOU J0110043.1-721134 we analyzed data from the observation (rp600195a00) which has the highest sensitivity to a pulsed signal. It has the second longest exposure (16 ks) of any of the PSPC observations and has by far the shortest duration (85 ks). Other comparable exposure PSPC and HRI observations have durations more than 15 times longer and their sensitivity to a periodic signal is diluted by the search range needed to cover potential frequency variation over this length of time. The duration of rp600195a00 is such that no phase slippage is expected for $`\dot{P}`$s in the range of the AXPs.

The source for this observation is within 12.7’ of the center of the PSPC field of view where the angular resolution is excellent, thus a selection circle of 80 pixels (40”) could be used. With this selection 392 photons were retrieved, of which an estimated 37.6$`\pm 1`$ are background. A comparison of the pulse height spectrum for the source and the background, showed that sensitivity to a pulsed signal could be enhanced by eliminating photons with energies less than 0.4 keV. With this restriction 358 photons remained. The times of arrival of these photons were adjusted to the barycenter of the solar system and an fft was performed.

We restricted our search region to be near one of the two possible frequencies seen in the CHANDRA observation, either 0.1247 or 0.1838 (Hz). To account for a frequency change over the 9.6 years between the two observations we assume that the object has characteristics of the known AXPs. This implies that the pulsar is spinning down, and that the time scale for this, $`P/\dot{P}`$, is greater than 6.8 ky (see the table in Mereghetti 2001). In the search we have allowed for a possible time scale as short as 1 ky.

With these assumptions the range of frequencies to be searched is 1.20 mHz at the lower frequency and 1.76 mHz at the upper frequency. The ffts near these frequencies for both the CHANDRA observation (a) and (b) and the PSPC observation are shown in Figure 3. In the lower frequency search region there is no significant power peak, however in the upper region there is a peak power of 15.4 which may be significant.

To assess its significance we use a formula first derived by Fisher (1929). This formula gives the probability that a given Fourier power, P, taken from a range of n independent values of power, will be exceeded by chance. Equation (4) of Fisher gives that probability as a series, whose leading term, $`n(1g)^{n1}`$ is the only term which is significant for our values of P and n. The parameter “$`g`$” is the fraction of the power contained in the term in question. We have used normalized values of power, thus $`g=P/n`$. However, since we have used a frequency digitization finer than the independent frequency spacing, 1/T, we must multiply Fisher’s expression by an oversampling factor. For the fft’s we have used a frequency spacing of $``$ 1/5T for which an appropriate value of the oversampling factor is 3 (Lewis, 1994).

Putting in the numbers we find a chance probability of $`1.0\times 10^4`$ of finding such a power of 15.4 or greater within either search range. We judge this to be sufficiently small to be a detection. Using the PSPC observation which occurred 3705 days prior to the CHANDRA observation, we derive a frequency derivative of $`5.08\pm 0.07\times 10^{13}`$ Hz/s. This corresponds to a time scale, $`P/\dot{P}`$, of 11 ky.

In addition to the peak at 0.183982(2) Hz there are two other peaks in its vicinity with powers greater than 8. They are separated from the main peak by 0.000173 Hz and 0.000519 Hz. These peaks are due to the on-time profile (window function) of the PSPC data. The 0.000173 Hz frequency is a beat frequency with the orbital period of the satellite (96 minutes); the 0.00519 Hz frequency is its third harmonic. In a simulation of the dataset we have reproduced this behavior.

The pulse profile of the PSPC observation is shown in Figure 4. There is no evidence in the fft for harmonics higher than the fundamental. The pulsed fraction is 36$`\pm `$5%. This disagrees with the 16% value derived from the CHANDRA detection. This discrepancy can be accounted for by the different spectral response of the two detectors and a difference between the unpulsed and pulsed spectrum. Relative to the ACIS-I detector the PSPC weights lower energy photons significantly more than higher energy photons. For example, the ratio of effective area for the PSPC at 0.8 keV to its effective area at 2.0 keV is $``$ 3. The same ratio for the ACIS-I detector is $``$0.8. Further we find that the pulsed source spectrum is somewhat softer than its unpulsed emission. Therefore because of the PSPC’s energy response it will detect the pulsed part of source emission more efficiently than the unpulsed part. This qualitatively accounts for the higher pulsed fraction as determined by the PSPC.

We have calculated the sensitivity of the remaining non-CHANDRA observations using this value of the pulsed fraction. We find that none of the other non-CHANDRA observations listed in Table 1 would be sensitive to this pulsation.

We have searched for a possible radio/optical counterpart to CXOU J0110043.1-721134 and find no radio counterpart. There is an 18th magnitude star (S01020208968 in the Guide Star Catalogue-II available on-line through http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/cat?I/271#sRM99.3) which is located 1.2 arc seconds from the source. The position of CXOU J0110043.1-721134 has an uncertainly of 0.6 arc seconds, therefore it is unlikely to be associated with this star. Nevertheless it remains a possibility pending refinement of the X-ray source position. From the density of stars in the Guide Star Catalogue within 30 arc seconds of this position, there is a 4% probability of a chance association within 1.2 arc second. Multi-band optical photometry has been performed on this star by Nazé et al (2002). The authors believe this star may be an early B star. If this star is a binary companion of CXOU J0110043.1-721134 then it would be the first seen for an AXP and would raise the possibility of accretion as the source of its luminosity.

## 3 DISCUSSION

The properties exhibited by CXOU J0110042.8-721132 are fully consistent with the AXP class of X-ray pulsar (Mereghetti 2001 and references therein). Its spectrum is very soft - consistent with other AXPs. Its luminosity, $`1.5\times 10^{35}`$ ergs/s/cm2, is in the range of AXP luminosities ($`10^{34}10^{36}`$ ergs/s/cm2). There is little variation in its long-term and and short-term intensity, and it is spinning down with a characteristic age, $`P/\dot{P}`$, of 11 ky, typical of 3 of the 6 AXPs.

One of the central issues for AXPs is their energy source. If accretion then there may be a companion from which the accretion occurs and which will cause a modulation in the pulsation unless the orbit is observed face on. (Some models of accretion powered AXPs derive their accretion from a remnant disk leftover from a supernova explosion (Marsden et al. 2001, Francischelli & Wijers 2002).) The 100ks continuous CHANDRA observation provides an opportunity for a search for binary induced modulation.

We have subdivided the observation into four 25 ks segments, and separately performed an fft on each. The power peak in the 0.184 Hz region shows no significant frequency variation. In addition, we have explored what would happen to the time series of photons from the source if a hypothetical binary modulation were superimposed. For binary orbits with periods less than one day we find that a projected semi-major axis of more than 0.5 light seconds will reduce the power of the signal by more than one standard deviation in the power. We take this to be an effective limit on the size of any orbit. For orbital periods longer than the 1.2 day observation this size limit is weakened.

This absence of any apparent binary modulation on a time scale $``$ 1 day is consistent with evidence for other of the AXPs (Mereghetti 2001) for the lack of a binary companion.

Three of the AXPs appear to be associated with relatively young ($`<`$ 20 ky) supernova remnants. In each of these cases: (1E 2259+586: Rho & Petre 1997, Parmar et al. 1998); 1E 1841-045, Helfand et al. 1994; and J1844-0288, Vasisht et al. 2000) there is evidence for extended X-ray emission. We have examined the CHANDRA data for evidence of emission beyond that which is consistent with a point source. We find none. However, a better limit on any possible extension to the source may be derived from ROSAT HRI observations (the first two in the Table) in which the source was approximately 6 arc minutes from the center of the field where the angular resolution of the HRI is better than in CHANDRA data 10 arc minutes off-axis. One-dimensional profiles though the image in the right ascension and declination directions of the combined HRI dataset are consistent with a point source with a width ($`\sigma `$) of 2.0 arc seconds. There is no evidence for emission at a level $`>`$ 5% the counting rate at the peak of the profiles at a distance of 10 to 20 arc seconds from the source. Any extension to the source must be a distance from the source less than the width of the point spread function of the HRI, 10 arc seconds. This corresponds to a limit to the size of any extended X-ray emission of 2.8 pc at the distance of the SMC.

This limit is comparable to the X-ray extension observed for the two SNR/AXP associations with known distances (Kes 73/1E 1841-045 and CT109/1E 2259.1+586). A deep CHANDRA exposure with the source centered in the field of the HRC is needed to constrain strongly the possibility of a supernova remnant association for this pulsar.

This work made use of software and data provided by the High-Energy Astrophysics Archival Research Center (HEASARC) located at Goddard Space Flight Center.


text:
# Electronic structure of single-crystalline MgxAl1-xB2

\[

## Abstract

Polarization-dependent x-ray absorption spectroscopy at the B 1$`s`$ edge of single-crystalline MgxAl1-xB2 reveals a strongly anisotropic electronic structure near the Fermi energy. Comparing spectra for superconducting compounds ($`x`$=0.9, 1.0) with those for the non-superconductor $`x`$=0.0 gives direct evidence on the importance of an in-plane spectral feature crossing $`E_F`$ for the superconducting properties of the diborides. Good agreement is found with the projected B 2$`p`$ density of states from LDA band structure calculations.

\]

MgB2 is a compound known for decades which only recently, to everyone’s surprise, was shown to be a superconductor  with $`T_c39`$ K, one of the highest transition temperatures observed for any non-cuprate material. Compared to the high-$`T_c`$ cuprates its crystal structure is simple: boron and magnesium form separate layers (“in-plane” lattice constant $`a3.09`$ Å) which, for B, are graphite-like with a hexagonal atomic arrangement. The B and Mg sheets are stacked alternatingly along the $`c`$ axis (“out-of-plane” lattice constant $`c3.52`$ Å). This layered structure, and especially the covalent $`sp^2`$ and 2D character of the B-B $`\sigma `$ bonds , already suggests a strong anisotropy between in-plane and out-of-plane properties . It was established quickly  by experiment and theory that superconductivity in this compound is fairly conventional, being $`s`$-wave, BCS-type, and phonon-induced. Recently, however, also deviations were suggested, like the presence of two energy gap scales . Substitution of Mg by Al is, at high temperatures, possible for all concentrations, preserving the crystal structure while decreasing lattice constants (slightly in the case of $`a`$, considerably in the case of $`c`$ ); electron doping, combined with increased orbital overlap due to unit volume contraction, is expected during this substitution, and superconductivity is very quickly suppressed at only modest substitution levels .

The electronic structure near the Fermi level, $`E_F`$, has been studied by photoemisssion, x-ray absorption, and optical experiments, first on polycrystalline samples , and now augmented by de Haas–van Alphen investigations . Single crystals which recently became available  allow studies in even greater depth, like determining occupied band dispersions in angle-resolved photoemission . More immediate access to the orbital character is provided by polarization-dependent near-edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) experiments; we present the first such study on single-crystalline MgxAl1-xB2, which, performed at the boron 1$`s`$ edge, yields the unoccupied electronic structure with B 2$`p`$ character (as a function of Al substitution) and is able to discriminate between $`\sigma `$ and $`\pi `$ states. Spectral results are directly compared with the appropriately projected B 2$`p`$ density of electronic states (DOS) from LDA band structure calculations, enabling us to sensitively test and possibly cross-corroborate the theoretical and experimental electronic structure near $`E_F`$.

Single crystals of AlB2 and the solid solution Mg0.9Al0.1B2 were grown from Al or Al/Mg flux by the slow-cooling method; the resulting crystal sizes were about 2$`\times `$2 mm2 for $`x`$=0 and 0.4$`\times `$0.5 mm2 for $`x`$=0.9. Hexagonal single-crystalline MgB2 platelets with a diameter of up to 200 $`\mu `$m could be obtained by isothermally annealing 11B powder  in a Mg flux enclosed in an evacuated Mo cylinder. The MgB2 crystals ($`x`$=1) show a sharp superconducting transition at $`T_c`$=38.8 K, with a resistive 10%-90% width $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$$`T`$$``$1.8 K. The substitution level, $`x`$=0.9, of the partially Al substituted crystals was determined by x-ray diffraction; the transition was already suppressed to around 20 K and considerably broadened. To increase useful surface area for $`x`$=0.9 and 1.0, several crystals were mounted right next to each other on the sample holder .

Near-edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) measurements with linearly polarized light were performed at two facilities: the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), Brookhaven, USA, where the Montana State University/NSLS beamline U4B was utilized for measuring the $`x`$=0 sample; and at the Synchrotron Radiation Research Center (SRRC), Hsinchu, Taiwan, where the undulator beamline U5 was used for measuring the $`x`$=0.9 and $`x`$=1.0 samples. Resolution was set to 180 and 100 meV at the NSLS and the SRRC, resp.; all data were taken in the normal state. Cleaving the samples was obviated by employing bulk-sensitive fluorescence-yield (FY) \[

\]

detection with a typical probing depth of $``$500 Å, using either a channeltron (SRRC) or Si(Li) detectors (NSLS). The necessary self-absorption correction was performed  using tabulated cross sections . While the energy-dispersive Si(Li) detectors allowed direct suppression of the mainly Mg/Al 2$`p`$-derived and energy-dependent background, this background had to be numerically removed (using the same tables) for the channeltron spectra. Some residual distortion remains, and spectral weights for the latter, i. e., for MgB2 and Mg0.9Al0.1B2, cannot quantitatively be compared to those for AlB2. Spectra were taken at normal incidence (polarization parallel to the crystal base plane, i. e., E$``$$`c`$) and at 60 grazing incidence; the E$``$$`c`$ spectra were extrapolated. Energy calibration is approximated by extrapolation from the O 1$`s`$ edge of a reference system and yields a MgB2 onset position near 186 eV.

LDA band structure calculations up to 20 eV above the Fermi level $`E_F`$ were performed in the mixed-basis pseudopotential framework , with 18/18/18 Monkhorst-Pack $`k`$ sampling in the Brillouin zone (BZ) and using the tetraeder method for determining the electronic density of states (DOS); further details can be found in Ref. . The occupied states (which are not observable in x-ray absorption) were separated off, and convolution with a Gaussian of width 0.2 eV roughly simulates experimental broadening effects, including core-hole lifetime, multiphonon processes, and monochromator resolution. In the absence of strong correlation and/or excitonic effects the resulting B 2$`p`$ DOS should closely resemble the experimental spectra.

Figure 1 presents the main results of this work. It is divided into four panels (a)–(d): the left column \[(a), (c)\] contains the theoretical results and the right column \[(b), (d)\] the experimental ones; the upper row \[(a), (b)\] plots the in-plane spectra, the lower row \[(c), (d)\] the out-of-plane spectra. Data for $`x`$=1.0 (MgB2) are depicted as black circles in all panels, those for $`x`$=0.9 as grey circles, and those for $`x`$=0 (AlB2) as open circles. To facilitate further discussion the main features in the spectra are labeled A$`\mathrm{}`$H, with subscripts “1” and “0” denoting features corresponding to samples with or without Mg. A number of observations immediately catches the eye and is discussed in the following:

(i) Most obvious is the strong asymmetry between in-plane and out-of-plane spectra, illustrating the different character of B $`2p`$ $`\sigma `$ and B $`2p`$ $`\pi `$ states, resp., and also underlining the need for such a polarization- and thus symmetry-resolved study.

(ii) In NEXAFS (but not in LDA), a sharp spike is observed around 6-7 eV above onset for both orientations (and for $`x`$=1.0 and 0.9 extending above the intensity region shown). It is attributed to one of the resonances identified in Ref.  (and is thus labeled “r” in our Figure 1) . This feature does not affect the electronic structure near onset and can thus be disregarded in the following.

(iii) The general agreement between theory and experiment is, on all accounts, excellent: all major spectral features are reproduced nicely, not only in their energy positions (Table I provides a listing) but often also in their relative spectral weight. For the in-plane spectra of MgB2 the LDA results (Fig. 1 (a)) show right above $`E_F`$ a prominent peak A1 derived from a region of low dispersion along the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ line in the BZ (the uppermost part of the almost fully occupied, bonding $`\sigma `$ band derived from B $`2p_{xy}`$ states). This is followed by a region of very low (but non-zero) DOS until a steep rise up to a shoulder B1 occurs about 7 eV above $`E_F`$; between 14 and 20 eV a large maximum D1 is preceded by a shoulder C1 and followed by a steep decrease to low DOS. NEXAFS data (Fig. 1 (b)) display the same feature A1 right at onset, very prominently and sharp. In fact, the width of this feature, 0.7 eV, is exactly the theoretical value. Although the spectral intensity right above A1 is, in agreement with theory, substantially reduced the suppression is not quite as complete since the NEXAFS experiment does not exactly image the DOS but starts developing an absorption jump. B1 is partially masked by the oxide-related peak “ox”, but peak D1 (with shoulder C1 before and steep decrease afterwards) reproduces again nicely the averaged LDA structure in this energy range. The in-plane spectra of AlB2 exhibit for both LDA and NEXAFS a very low DOS for about 2 eV above $`E_F`$ and onset, resp. – there is no peak A0 visible, suggesting that this feature (which would correspond to A1) is already occupied and situated below $`E_F`$. Only after several eV the spectra rise to a shoulder with small protrusion B0 at about 4 eV above $`E_F`$. D0, again with preceding shoulder C0 and subsequent fall-off, is somewhat less pronounced compared to the similar feature for MgB2.

While NEXAFS for Mg0.9Al0.1B2 in general resembles that for MgB2 quite closely it is conspicuous that even at this small substitution level peak A1 has already lost much of its spectral weight, about 65% compared to MgB2. Close inspection also indicates an A1 width reduced by about 0.1 eV (less than all experimental broadening; the intrinsic width reduction will thus be greater). With this, and assuming that the Al content injects 0.1 electrons per formula unit, one can crudely estimate the B $`2p_x`$ DOS at EF to be $``$0.37 states/(eV$``$atom); LDA estimates 0.10 states/(eV$``$atom). Obviously small additional substitution will push A1 below $`E_F`$ altogether, consistent with the quick suppression of superconductivity reported for Al doping.

(iv) For the out-of-plane orientation LDA (Fig. 1 (c)) predicts, in contrast to the in-plane spectra, an almost constant DOS for about 5 eV above $`E_F`$ for both MgB2 and AlB2. Although the corresponding $`\pi `$ bonds give less rise to dramatic DOS variations than the $`\sigma `$ bonds discussed in (iii) some more features can be identified and exhibit, again, good correspondence between theory and experiment. Differences worth noting are very few: peak H0 is almost undetectable in experiment while H1 is stronger in weight than in LDA; both are, on the other hand, located 15 eV and more above $`E_F`$ where precise correspondence between x-ray absorption and band structure is less to be expected. Right at $`E_F`$, however, peak E1 for MgB2 appears considerably stronger in NEXAFS than in LDA; imperfections in mounting the small crystallites may have introduced some angular uncertainty which could cause some contribution from in-plane A1 intensity.

The inset in Fig. 1 (b) further illustrates the good agreement between LDA and NEXAFS: the peak positions (full symbols) lie, up to 12 eV and more, very close to the straight line denoting exact, 1:1 correspondence; the tendency visible at higher energies towards reduced NEXAFS energies does not suggest a significant amount of correlation. The open symbols depict the corresponden-

ces between the peak pairs for AlB2 and MgB2, like B0/B1, many of which are to some degree consistent with a “semi-rigid shift” of the band structure  due to the extra electron per formula unit introduced by Al replacing Mg. The symbols cluster around a value of 2 eV for such a shift.

In conclusion, the orbital-resolved electronic structure of the novel superconductor MgB2 was studied with polarization-dependent B 1$`s`$ NEXAFS on single crystals and was compared to NEXAFS on single-crystalline Mg0.9Al0.1B2 and non-superconducting AlB2 as well as to the unoccupied B 2$`p`$ DOS obtained from LDA band structure for both MgB2 and AlB2. The similarity between LDA and NEXAFS is excellent for a large number of major spectral features – in particular, a B 2$`p_{xy}`$ $`\sigma `$ derived state at $`E_F`$ that is identified by theory to carry superconductivity shows up very prominently in MgB2 NEXAFS, is already considerably reduced for Mg0.9Al0.1B2, and is completely absent (i. e., occupied) for AlB2. Less drastic changes are observed for the B $`2p_z`$ $`\pi `$ states. Systematics in peak positions are consistent with a semi-rigid shift of the bands expected from the extra electrons provided by Al. The close correspondence between experiment and theory lends additional and valuable support to further theoretical implications, including the absence of strong correlation effects, the dominant effect of holes in the B $`2p`$ $`\sigma `$ bands (as compared to the $`\pi `$ bands) for superconductivity, as well as its BCS-type mechanism and electron-phonon origin, in this family of layered, covalent compounds.

We thank C. T. Chen, S.-C. Chung, S. L. Hulbert, H.-J. Lin, G. Nintzel, S. Tokumitsu, and H. Winter for generous support and fruitful discussions. This work was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the National Science Council, Taiwan (NSC). Research was carried out in part at the NSLS, Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Division of Material Sciences and Division of Chemical Sciences, under contract number DE-AC02-98CH10886.


text:
# Entangled photon apparatus for the undergraduate laboratory

## I Introduction

Entanglement of particles is ubiquitous in quantum mechanical systems and is arguably the aspect of quantum theory most at odds with classical intuitions . Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen first drew attention to the possibility of non-local effects involving entangled particles.Einstein1935  In the mid-Sixties it was realized that the nonlocality of nature was a testable hypothesis and subsequent experiments confirmed the quantum predictions. More recently, much effort has gone into exploiting the odd nature of entangled particles.Bell1964  Applications include secure cryptography , transmission of two bits of information with a single photon and “teleportation” of a quantum state (by erasing the state of a system and then re-creating the state in a distant system).Ekert1991 ; Naik2000 ; Jennewein2000 ; Bennett1992 ; Bennett1993  Perhaps the most exciting possible application is in computing. A “quantum computer” which used entangled particles as data registers would be capable of performing calculations faster than any classical computer. Feynman1982 ; Deutsch1992 ; Shor1997 ; Nielsen2000

Here we describe how to produce and detect entangled photons using equipment and techniques suitable for an undergraduate laboratory. This is possible due to recent advances in diode laser technology and new techniques for generation of photon pairs .Kwiat1995 ; Kwiat1999  The total cost for the apparatus is approximately 15,000 USD.

## II Overview

In the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPD) a single pump photon spontaneously splits into “signal” and “idler” photons inside a nonlinear crystal.Hong1985 ; Hariharan1996  Because the two downconverted photons come from a single parent photon they have definite combined properties: their total energy and momentum (inside the crystal) must agree with the parent energy and momentum. They are also produced at very nearly the same time. The individual photons’ properties are free to vary, however, and SPD produces a spectrum of both signal and idler wavelengths centered around twice the parent photon wavelength. To satisfy phase matching requirements, which reflect the dispersion and birefringence of the crystal, these different wavelengths emerge in different directions and create a conical rainbow of emission as illustrated in Figure 1 .

By appropriate angular placement of the detectors, we select “degenerate” daughter photons, those which have the same wavelength $`\lambda _\mathrm{S}=\lambda _\mathrm{I}=2\lambda _{\mathrm{pump}}`$. Our crystals are cut for Type I downconversion, in which the signal and idler photons have the same polarization, which is opposite to that of the pump photon. Boyd1992  A given crystal can only support Type I downconversion of one pump polarization, the other polarization simply passes through the transparent crystal. Our source uses two identical crystals, with one rotated 90 from the other about the beam propagation direction, as shown in Figure 2. In this arrangement each crystal can support downconversion of one pump polariazation. A 45 polarized pump photon can downconvert in either crystal, producing a polarization-entangled pair of photons. Kwiat1999

Figure 3 shows a schematic of the experimental setup. A 5 mW, 405 nm, InGaN laser diode (Nichia Model NLHV500C) is the source of pump photons. The diode is driven at its specified operating current with a precision constant current source capable of supplying the 5V operating voltage of the InGaN laser. The beam is focused with an aspheric lens mounted in a collimating tube, which is held in a vee-mount glued to a mirror mount. The beam focus is adjusted to produce a beam diameter of about 1 mm at 1 m from the laser.

The laser beam passes a BG12 colored glass filter, a beam aperture consisting of a sheet of aluminum with small hole drilled in it, a glass linear polarizer on a rotating mount, a 0.5 mm thick quartz plate mounted to rotate about the vertical (the crystal’s fast axis) and a second beam aperture before reaching the nonlinear crystals. The apertures and filter act to remove unwanted light and the polarizer and quartz plate set the laser polarization.

The nonlinear crystals are two beta barium borate (BBO) crystals, 5 mm $`\times `$ 5 mm $`\times `$ 0.1 mm thick, cut with their crystal axes at 29 from normal to the large face. The crystals are mounted face-to-face with one crystal rotated by 90 about the normal to the large face. The crystal holder is held in a mirror mount and aligned to retroreflect the laser beam. A beam stop blocks the laser beam after it passes alongside the detectors.

The downconverted photons produced in the BBO crystals travel about 1 meter before passing an adjustable 1 inch diameter iris diaphragm, a plastic film near-infrared polarizer on a rotatable mount, a 1 inch diameter RG780 colored glass filter, and are focused by a 75mm focal length lens onto the detector surface. The RG780 is a long-pass filter with a 50% transmission at 780 nm. For a coincidence detection event to occur, both signal and idler photons, which are roughly equally spaced in wavelength about 810 nm, must pass RG780 filters. Thus a wavelength band (in the signal photon) of about 780–840 nm can lead to coincidence detection.

The detectors (Perkin-Elmer Optoelectronics model SPCM-AQR-13) are silicon avalanche photodiodes run in Geiger mode, called single-photon counting modules (SPCMs). PerkinElmer ; Ghioni1996

To aid in focusing, each detector was mounted on standard optical mounting posts and a 30 mm “cage” assembly was attached to hold the lens and RG780 filter. These are described in section III. The lens is held in an X-Y translator for fine adjustment of the lens position.

Along each detection path, the detector, lens, filter, polarizer and iris are mounted on an aluminum rail which pivots about an optical post directly below the crystal. This arrangement allows adjustment of the angular position of the detectors without losing focus. Although we performed our experiments on an optical table, we note that this is probably unncecessary. Interferometric stability is not required and the rails maintain the necessary alignment. We expect the experiment could be performed on an optical breadboard or other flat surface.

## III mechanics

The first version of the detection setup used independent table-mounted components to hold the filters and position the focusing lenses. This early setup was quick to assemble from common components such as translation stages and lens holders, but was difficult to align and required near-complete darkness. For greater ease of use we developed the mechanical system described below.

The SPCMs, as furnished by the manufacturer, do not directly interface to standard optical hardware. We built two simple adapter plates, shown in Figures 4 and 5. The base adapater allows the detector to be mounted on standard optical posts, while the front adapter allows a cage assembly to be attached to the detector, as shown in Figure 6. The cage assembly consists of four rods, each 4 inches long, held at the detector end by a 30 mm cage plate and at the other end by a 30 mm X-Y translator which holds the focusing lens and filter. The cage plate attaches to the front adapter by a threaded tube and a retaining ring. This same tube presses against a gasket of black closed-cell foam to make a light-tight seal. Other threaded tubes link the X-Y translator to the cage plate. This arrangement has two principal advantages. First, the path from filter to detector is entirely enclosed, greatly reducing sensitivity to stray light and protecting the detector from mechanical damage. Second, precise positioning of the focusing lens is easily accomplished by sliding the X-Y translator along the rails and adjusting the X-Y translation knobs. Because the lens sits about 1m away from the crystals, the image of the crystals on the detector moves by about 75 $`\mu `$m for every 1 mm displacement of the lens. This is handy as the detector area is only 180 $`\mu `$m in diameter.

Each detector and cage assembly, as well as the associated iris and polarizer, sit upon a detector rail as shown in Figure 3. We constructed our rails from half-inch thick aluminum bars, as shown in Figure 7. Four post holders are mounted directly to the rail to hold the detector, iris, and linear polarizer. A half-inch diameter hole at the opposite end from the detector fits over a standard (0.499 inch diameter) optical post which serves as a pivot for the rail. The second rail pivots about the same post, sitting upon the first rail. A half-inch high spacer beneath the second rail on the detector end allows the rail to sit flat on the table.

## IV electronics

Detection of a photon by an SPCM produces a short (about 25 ns) TTL pulse. To identify photons from SPD within the background of fluorescence photons, we record coincident detections. Our first coincidence detector used a NIM standard time-to-amplitude converter and a multi-channel analyzer (MCA). This setup required converting the TTL pulses to NIM pulses and also required a computer to record data from the MCA. A simpler and far less expensive alternative is to build a coincidence circuit from fast logic chips. A schematic for such a circuit is shown in Figure 8.

The circuit is built from two 74ACT74 dual D-type positive edge-triggered flip-flops, or four D-type flip-flops in all. Starting at the lower left of the diagram and working clockwise, the first flip-flop delays the B pulse by the time required to clock and reset, 6.5 ns to 19.5 ns by the manufacturer’s specifications. The next flip-flop produces a stretched pulse at A OUT. The next performs the coincidence detection: If A IN is already high when the delayed B pulse arrives, a stretched pulse is produced at COINC OUT. The coincidence window is the duration of the A IN pulse. The final flip-flop stretches the B pulse. The inputs are 50 $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ terminated. The outputs pusles are all TTL compatible and about 250 ns long. Longer pulses can be produced by increasing the values of the capacitors. The output pulses are fed to the counter-timer inputs of a PC-based data acquisition board.

The coincidence circuit is simple to build, but as with any fast electronics, proper construction technique is necessary for good performance. It is helpful to have a fast oscilloscope when debugging this circuit.

## V alignment

The apparatus is not difficult to align if done in the correct order. All optical elements should be set to the same height above the table. With the crystals, polarizers and RG780 filters removed from the setup, the remaining rail-mounted components (detectors, lenses, and irises) can be aligned as follows. The detector is viewed from the position the crystals will occupy, through the open iris and lens. The detector’s active area is a circular black spot at the center of a gold square. By aligning and focusing the lens, the detector’s active area can be made to fill the field of view. The iris should be centered on this image.

Once this rough alignment is performed, the crystals, polarizers and RG780 filters can be put in place. The laser is aligned to pass through the crystals’ center. The rails should be positioned on opposite sides of the laser beam, each about three degrees away from the beam. With the room darkened, fine adjustments in lens position can be made to maximize the singles count rate at each detector. Finally, the angles of the rails should be adjusted to maximize the coincidence detection rate. Following this procedure we find coincidence rates greater than 300 cps, as shown in Figure 9.

To show that the photons are polarization-entangled, we measured coincidence rates as a funciton of the two polarizer orientations. The polarization correlations were strong enough to demonstrate a violation of a Bell inequality. We used the the Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt version of the Bell inequality $`|S|2,`$ where $`S`$ is a measure of the polarization correlation involving sixteen coincidence measurements. As described in the accompanying paper, we found $`S=2.307\pm 0.035,`$ a clear violation.Dehlinger2002B  The total acquisition time in this experiment was 240 seconds and a fit to the coincidence data indicates more than 100 polarization-entangled photons per second. These data were taken with the irises fully opened. Closing down the irises will reduce the count rate, but may improve the purity of the detected entangled state.

## VI miscellaneous

A darkened room is necessary for the experiment but complete darkness is neither necessary nor desirable. In our setup, black velvet curtains surrounding the work area block out sunlight and room lights. We find a dimmed but visible computer monitor adjacent to the optical table gives negligible background coincidence counts. We use green LEDs behind BG-18 colored glass filters to illuminate the table; the green light is blocked by the RG780 filters.

## VII acknowledgements

We thank Paul Kwiat for inspiration and helpful discussions. This work was supported by Reed College and grant number DUE-0088605 from the National Science Foundation.

## Appendix A Suppliers and equipment notes

Below we list components of the apparatus which are unique or difficult to find, as well as suppliers for these components. These are also the most costly parts of the apparatus. Remaining components not described below include standard optical hardware such as mirror mounts, electronics to build the coincidence detector, and a means to record the detection rates.

Edmund Industrial Optics
101 East Gloucester Pike
Barrington, NJ 08007-1380
(800) 363-1992
http://www.edmundoptics.com
25.4 mm diameter unmounted linear glass polarizing filters. 1”$`\times `$1” Polaroid near-IR linear polarizing film $`\times `$2. 1” diameter RG-780 colored glass longpass filter $`\times `$2. 1” diameter BG-12 blue-violet colored glass bandpass filter. 1” diameter BG-18 blue-green colored glass bandpass filter. Total cost: $255.

ILX Lightwave
P.O. Box 6310
Bozeman, MT
(800) 459-9459
http://www.ilxlightwave.com
LDX-3412 Precision Current Source. Cost: $846.

This model was chosen both for its precision and its compliance voltage. Most diode laser drivers can’t supply the 5V operating voltage of the gallium nitride laser.

MTI Corporation
5327 Jacuzzi St. Bldg. 3H
Richmond, CA 94804
(510) 525-3070
http://www.mticrystal.com
SO\*10 x-cut 5mm$`\times `$5mm$`\times `$0.5mm quartz substrate, optically polished on both sides. Cost: $12.

We glued this piece of quartz to a metal support to mount in an optic holder.

Nichia Corporation
Tokyo technical center
13F Tamachi Center Building, 34-7, Shiba 5-Chome
Minato-Ku, Tokyo 108-0014
Japan
http://www.nichia.co.jp
NLHV500C: 5mW nominal wavelength 405 nm InGaN laser diode, 1000 hour version. Cost: $1000.

We tested two diodes, one with a wavelength of 400 nm, the other 406 nm, with very similar results. As InGaN laser diodes are a very young technology, it is reasonable to expect improvements in cost and lifetime in the near future.

Perkin-Elmer Optoelectronics
22001 Dumberry Road
Vaudreuil Quebec J7V 8P7
CANADA
(450)-424-3300
http://opto.perkinelmer.com
SPCM-AQR-13 Silicon APD Based Single Photon Counting Modules $`\times `$2. Total cost: $7200.

The -13 suffix describes the dark count rate. This has very little effect upon the coincidence count rate in the experiment, and any suffix model can be used. Note that the lead time for these detectors can be several months. Detectors require a +5 Volt power supply, not included.

Thorlabs, Inc.
435 Route 206
P.O. Box 366
Newton, NJ 07860
(973) 579-7227
http://www.thorlabs.com
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text:
# Microscopic Study of Slablike and Rodlike Nuclei: Quantum Molecular Dynamics Approach

## Abstract

Structure of cold dense matter at subnuclear densities is investigated by quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations. We succeeded in showing that the phases with slab-like and rod-like nuclei etc. can be formed dynamically from hot uniform nuclear matter without any assumptions on nuclear shape. We also observe intermediate phases, which has complicated nuclear shapes. Geometrical structures of matter are analyzed with Minkowski functionals, and it is found out that intermediate phases can be characterized as ones with negative Euler characteristic. Our result suggests the existence of these kinds of phases in addition to the simple “pasta” phases in neutron star crusts.

Collapse-driven supernovae (SNe) and the following formation of neutron stars (NSs) are the most dramatic processes during the stellar evolution. These objects provide not only astrophysically significant phenomena but also interesting material phases inside them; both are strongly connected with each other. Investigating the properties of nuclear matter under extreme condition is one of the essential subjects to clarify the mechanism of collapse-driven SNe bethe  and the structure of NS crusts review . This subject is also interesting in terms of the fundamental problem of the complex fluids of nucleons.

At subnuclear densities, where nuclei are about to melt into uniform matter, it is expected that the energetically favorable configuration possesses interesting spatial structures such as rod-like and slab-like nuclei and rod-like and spherical bubbles etc., which are called nuclear “pasta”. This picture was first proposed by Ravenhall et al. rpw  and Hashimoto et al. hashimoto . These works, which are based on free energy calculations with liquid drop models assuming some specific nuclear shapes, clarify that the most energetically stable nuclear shape is determined by a subtle balance between nuclear surface and Coulomb energies. Although detailed aspects of phase diagrams vary with nuclear models lorenz , the realization of the “pasta” phases as energy minimum states can be seen in a wide range of nuclear models and basic feature of phase diagrams is universal gentaro1 ; gentaro2 , i.e. with increasing density, the shape of the nuclear matter region changes like sphere $``$ cylinder $``$ slab $``$ cylindrical hole $``$ spherical hole $``$ uniform. This feature is also reproduced by Thomas-Fermi calculations williams ; lassaut ; oyamatsu .

The phases with these exotic nuclear structures, if they are realized in NS crusts or SN cores, bring about many astrophysical consequences. As for those to NS phenomena, it is interesting to note the relevance of nonspherical nuclei in neutron star matter (NSM) to pulsar glitches pp  and cooling of NSs lorenz . For supernova matter (SNM), “pasta” phases are expected to affect the neutrino transport rpw ; gentaro2  and hydrodynamics in SN cores lassaut .

Though the properties of “pasta” phases in equilibrium state have been investigated actively, the formation and the melting processes of them have not been discussed except for some limited cases based on perturbative approaches review ; iida . It is important to adopt a microscopic and dynamical approach which allows arbitrary nuclear structures to understand these processes of nonspherical nuclei. At finite temperatures, it is considered that not only nuclear surface becomes obscure but also nuclei of various shapes may coexist. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate density fluctuations without any assumptions on nuclear shape to investigate the properties of “pasta” phases at finite temperatures. Although some previous works williams ; lassaut  do not assume nuclear structure, they can not incorporate fluctuations of nucleon distributions satisfactorily because they are based on the Thomas-Fermi calculation which is one-body approximation. In addition, only one structure is contained in the simulation box in these works, there are thus possibilities that nuclear shape is strongly affected by boundary effect and some structures are prohibited implicitly.

We have started studying dense matter at subnuclear densities by quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) aichelin  which is one of the molecular dynamics (MD) approaches for nucleon many body systems (see, e.g., Ref. feldmeier  for review). MD for nucleons including QMD, which is a microscopic and dynamical method without any assumptions on nuclear structure, is suitable for incorporating fluctuations of particle distributions. The final aim of our study is to understand the above mentioned formation and melting processes of nonspherical nuclei and to investigate the properties of matter consists of nonspherical nuclei at finite temperatures. For the first step, the question posed in this paper is as follows: Can the phases with nonspherical nuclei be formed dynamically?

There is a pioneering work by Maruyama et al. maruyama  which attempts to investigate the structure of matter at subnuclear densities by QMD. Unfortunately, they did not treat the Coulomb interaction consistently and could not anneal the system successfully. As a result, they could not reproduce the phases with nonspherical nuclei of simple structures. In the present work, we improve the above shortcomings and obtain phase diagrams for cold dense matter of the proton fraction $`x=0.3`$ and 0.5 at subnuclear densities. We also discuss nuclear shape changes with morphological measures.

While there are a lot of versions of MD for fermions, we choose QMD among them based on trade-off between calculational amounts and accuracies. The typical length scale $`l`$ of inter-structure is $`l10`$ fm and the density region of interest is just below the normal nuclear density $`\rho _0=0.165\mathrm{fm}^3`$. The required nucleon number $`N`$ in order to reproduce $`n`$ structures in the simulation box is about $`N\rho _0(nl)^3`$ (for slabs), it is thus desirable that we prepare nucleons of order 10000 if we try to reduce boundary effects. While it is very hard task to treat such a large system by, for example, FMD and AMD (see, e.g., Ref. feldmeier  and references therein) whose calculational amounts scale as $`N^4`$, it is feasible to do it by QMD whose calculational amounts scale as $`N^2`$. It is also noted that we mainly focus on macroscopic structures; the exchange effect would not be so important for them. Therefore, QMD, which is less elaborate in treating the exchange effect, has the advantage of other models.

We have performed QMD simulations of infinite (n,p,e) system with fixed proton fraction $`x=`$ 0.3 and 0.5 for various nucleon densities $`\rho `$ ( the density region is 0.05 - 1.0 $`\rho _0`$). We set a cubic box which is imposed periodic boundary conditions in which 2048 nucleons (1372 nucleons in some cases) are contained. The relativistic degenerate electrons which ensure the charge neutrality are treated as a uniform background and the Coulomb interaction is calculated by the Ewald method (see, e.g., Ref. allen ) which enables us to sum contributions of long-range interactions in a system with periodic boundary conditions. For nuclear interaction, we use an effective Hamiltonian developed by Maruyama et al. (medium EOS model) maruyama  which reproduce the bulk properties of nuclear matter and the properties of stable nuclei, especially heavier ones, i.e. binding energy and root-mean-square radius.

We first prepare an uniform hot nucleon gas at $`k_BT20`$ MeV as an initial condition which is equilibrated for $`5002000`$ fm/c in advance. In order to realize the ground state of matter, we then cool it down slowly for $`O(10^310^4)`$ fm/c keeping the nucleon density constant by frictional relaxation method etc. until the temperature gets $`0.1`$ MeV or less. Note that any artificial fluctuations are not given during the simulation.

The QMD equations of motion with friction terms are solved using the fourth-order Gear predictor-corrector method in conjunction with multiple time step algorithm allen . Integration time steps $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ are set to be adaptive in the range of $`\mathrm{\Delta }t<0.10.2`$ fm/c depending on the degree of convergence. At each step, the correcting operation is iterated until the error of position $`\mathrm{\Delta }r`$ and the relative error of momentum $`\mathrm{\Delta }p/p`$ get smaller than $`10^6`$, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }r`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }p/p`$ are estimated as the maximum values of correction among all particles. Computer systems which we use are equipped with MD-GRAPE II.

Shown in Figs. 1 and 2 are the resultant nucleon distributions of cold matter at $`x=`$ 0.5 and 0.3, respectively. We can see from these figures that the phases with rod-like and slab-like nuclei, cylindrical and spherical bubbles, in addition to the one with spherical nuclei are reproduced in the both cases. We here would like to mention some reasons of discrepancies between the present result and the result obtained by Maruyama et al. which says “the nuclear shape may not have these simple symmetries” maruyama . The most crucial reason seems to be the difference in treatment of the Coulomb interaction. In the present simulation, we calculate the long range Coulomb interaction in a consistent way using the Ewald method. For the system of interest where the Thomas-Fermi screening length is comparable to or larger than the size of nuclei, this treatment is more adequate than that with introducing an artificial cutoff distance as in Ref. maruyama . The second reason would be the difference in the relaxation time scales $`\tau `$. In our simulation, we can reproduce the bubble-phases (see d and e of Figs. 1 and 2) with $`\tau 10^3`$ fm/c and the nucleus-phases (see b and c of Figs. 1 and 2) with $`\tau O(10^4)`$ fm/c. However, the matter in the density region corresponding to a nucleus-phase is quenched in an amorphous state when $`\tau 10^3`$ fm/c. In the present work, we take $`\tau `$ much larger than typical time scale $`\tau _{th}O(100)`$ fm/c for nucleons to thermally diffuse the distance of $`l10`$ fm at $`\rho \rho _0`$ and $`k_BT1`$ MeV. This temperature is below the typical value of the liquid-gas phase transition temperature in the density region of interest, it is thus considered that our results are thermally relaxed in a satisfying level.

Phase diagrams of matter in the ground state are shown in Figs. 3 (a) and (b) for $`x=`$ 0.5 and 0.3, respectively. As can be seen from these figures, the obtained phase diagrams basically reproduce the sequence of the energetically favored nuclear shapes predicted by simple discussions hashimoto  which only take account of the Coulomb and surface effects; this prediction is that the nuclear shape changes like sphere $``$ cylinder $``$ slab $``$ cylindrical hole $``$ spherical hole $``$ uniform, with increasing density. Comparing Figs. 3 (a) and (b), we can see that the phase diagram shifts towards the lower density side with decreasing $`x`$, which is due to the tendency that as the nuclear matter at larger neutron excess, the saturation density is lowered. It is remarkable that the density dependence of the nuclear shape, except for cylindrical bubbles (just in the case of $`x=0.3`$) and spherical nuclei and bubbles, is quite sensitive and phases with intermediate nuclear shapes which are not simple as shown in Figs. 1 and 2 are observed in two density regions: one is between the cylinder phase and the slab phase, the other is between the slab phase and the cylindrical hole phase. We note that these phases are different from coexistence phases with nuclei of simple shapes and we will referred to them as “intermediate phases”.

To extract the morphological characteristics of the nuclear shape changes and the intermediate phases, we introduce the Minkowski functionals (see, e.g., Ref. minkowski  and references therein) as geometrical and topological measures of the nuclear surface. Let us consider a homogeneous body $`K`$ in the $`d`$-dimensional Eucledian space, where $``$ is the class of such bodies. Morphological measures are defined as functionals $`\phi :𝐑`$ which satisfy the following three properties: (1) Motion invariance, i.e. $`\phi (K)=\phi (gK)`$, where $`g`$ denotes any translations and rotations. (2) Additivity, i.e. $`\phi (K_1K_2)=\phi (K_1)+\phi (K_2)\phi (K_1K_2)`$, where $`K_1,K_2`$. (3) Continuity, i.e. $`lim_n\mathrm{}\phi (K_n)=\phi (K)`$ if $`lim_n\mathrm{}K_n=K`$, where $`K`$ is a convex body and $`\{K_n\}`$ is a sequence of convex bodies. Hadwiger’s theorem states that there are just $`d+1`$ independent functionals which satisfy the above properties; they are known as Minkowski functionals. In three dimensional space, four Minkowski functionals are related to the volume, the surface area, the integral mean curvature and the Euler characteristic.

Here, we particularly focus on the integral mean curvature and the Euler characteristic; the results of other quantities will be discussed elsewhere. Both are described by surface integrals of the following local quantities, the mean curvature $`H=(\kappa _1+\kappa _2)/2`$ and the Gaussian curvature $`G=\kappa _1\kappa _2`$, i.e. $`_KH𝑑A`$ and $`\chi \frac{1}{2\pi }_KG𝑑A`$, where $`\kappa _1`$ and $`\kappa _2`$ are the principal curvatures and $`dA`$ is the area element of the surface of the body $`K`$. The Euler characteristic $`\chi `$ is a purely topological quantity and

$`\chi `$ $`=`$ $`\text{(number of isolated regions)}\text{(number of tunnels)}`$ (1)
$`+\text{(number of cavities)}.`$
Thus $`\chi >0`$ for the sphere and the spherical hole phases and the coexistence phase of spheres and cylinders, and $`\chi =0`$ for the other ideal “pasta” phases, i.e. the cylinder, the slab and the cylindrical hole phases. We introduce the area-averaged mean curvature, $`H\frac{1}{A}H𝑑A`$, and the Euler characteristic density, $`\chi /V`$, as normalized quantities, where $`V`$ is the volume of the whole space.

We calculate these quantities by the following procedure. We first construct proton and nucleon density distributions $`\rho _\mathrm{p}(𝐫)=\left|\mathrm{\Phi }_\mathrm{p}(𝐫)\right|^2`$ and $`\rho (𝐫)=\left|\mathrm{\Phi }(𝐫)\right|^2`$ from data of the centers of position of the nucleons, where $`\mathrm{\Phi }_\mathrm{p}(𝐫)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Phi }(𝐫)`$ are the QMD trial wave functions of protons and nucleons (see Ref. maruyama ). We set a threshold proton density $`\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}`$ and then calculate $`f(\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}})V(\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}})/A(\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}})`$, where $`V(\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}})`$ and $`A(\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}})`$ are the volume and the surface area of the regions in which $`\rho _\mathrm{p}(𝐫)\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}`$. We find out the value $`\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}=\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}^{}`$ where $`\frac{d^2}{d\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}^2}f(\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}^{})=0`$ and define the regions in which $`\rho _\mathrm{p}(𝐫)\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}^{}`$ as nuclear regions. For spherical nuclei, for example, $`\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}^{}`$ corresponds to a point of inflection of a radial density distribution. In the almost whole phase-separating region, the values of $`\rho _{\mathrm{th}}^{}`$ distribute in the range of about $`0.70.9\rho _0`$ in the both cases of $`x=0.5`$ and 0.3, where $`\rho _{\mathrm{th}}^{}`$ is the threshold nucleon density corresponds to $`\rho _{\mathrm{p},\mathrm{th}}^{}`$. We then calculate $`A`$, $`H𝑑A`$ and $`\chi `$ for the determined nuclear surface. We evaluate $`A`$ by the triangle decomposition method, $`H𝑑A`$ by the algorithm shown in Ref. minkowski  in conjunction with a calibration by correction of surface area, and $`\chi `$ by the algorithm of Ref. minkowski  and by that of counting deficit angles genus  which are confirmed that both of them give the same results.

We have plotted the obtained $`\rho `$ dependence of $`H`$ and of $`\chi /V`$ for the surface of $`\rho _{th}=\rho _{th}^{}`$ in Fig. 4. In addition to the values of $`H`$ for the surface of $`\rho _{th}=\rho _{th}^{}`$, we have also investigated those for the surface of $`\rho _{th}=\rho _{th}^{}\pm 0.05\rho _0`$ to examine the extent of the uncertainties of this quantity which stem from the arbitrariness in the definition of the nuclear surface, but we could not observe remarkable differences from the values for $`\rho _{th}=\rho _{th}^{}`$ (they were smaller than 0.015/fm). We could not see these kinds of uncertainties in $`\chi /V`$ except for the densities near below the density at which matter turns into uniform.

The behavior of $`H`$ shows that it decreases almost monotonously from positive to negative with increasing $`\rho `$ until the matter turns into uniform. The densities correspond to $`H0`$ are about 0.4 and 0.35$`\rho _0`$ for $`x=0.5`$ and 0.3, respectively; these values are consistent with the density regions of the phase with slab-like nuclei (see Fig. 3). As mentioned previously, $`\chi /V`$ is actually positive in the density regions corresponding to the phases with spherical nuclei, coexistence of spherical and cylindrical nuclei, and spherical holes because of the existence of isolated regions. As for those corresponding to the phases with cylindrical nuclei, planar nuclei and cylindrical holes, $`\chi /V0`$. The fact that the values of $`\chi /V`$ are not exactly zero for nucleon distributions shown as slab phases in Figs. 1 and 2 reflects the imperfection of these “slabs”, which is due to the small nuclear parts which connect the neighboring slabs. However, we can say that the behavior of $`\chi /V`$ depicted in Figs. 4(c) and 4(d) shows that $`\chi /V`$ is negative in the density regions of the intermediate phases, even if we take account of the imperfection of the obtained nuclear shapes and the uncertainties of the definition of the nuclear surface. This means that the intermediate phases consist of nuclear surfaces which are saddle-like at each point on average and they consist of each highly connected nuclear and gas regions due to a lot of tunnels (see Eq. (1)).

Let us now refer to discrepancies from the results of previous works which do not assume nuclear structure williams ; lassaut ; the intermediate phases can not be seen in these works. We can give following two reasons for the discrepancies: (1) These previous calculations are based on the Thomas-Fermi approximation which can not sufficiently incorporate fluctuations of nucleon distributions. This shortcoming may result in favoring nuclei of smoothed simple shapes than in the real situation. (2) There is a large possibility that some highly connected structures which have two or more substructures in a period are neglected in these works because only one structure is contained in a simulation box.

If the phases with highly connected nuclear and bubble regions are realized as the most energetically stable state, we can say that it is not unnatural thing magierski . It is considered that, for example, a phase with perforated slab-like nuclei, which has negative $`\chi /V`$, could be more energetically stable than that with extremely thin slab-like nuclei. The thin planar nucleus costs surface-surface energy which stems from the fact that nucleons in it feel surfaces of both sides. We have to examine the existence of the intermediate phases by more extensive simulations with larger nucleon numbers and with longer relaxation time scales in the future.

Here we would like to discuss astrophysical consequences of our results. Pethick and Potekhin have pointed out that “pasta” phases with rod-like and slab-like nuclei are analogous to the liquid crystals according to the similarity of the geometrical structures pp . It can also be said that the intermediate phases observed in the present work are “sponge”-like phases because they have both highly connected nuclear and bubble regions shown as $`\chi /V<0`$. The elastic properties of the sponge-like intermediate phases are qualitatively different from those of the liquid crystal-like “pasta” phases because the former ones do not have any directions in which restoring force does not act, on the other hand the latter ones have. Our results suggest that the intermediate phases occupy a significant fraction of the density region in which nonspherical nuclei can be seen (see Fig. 3). If this is also true for more neutron-rich case as $`x0.1`$, it leads to increasing of the maximum elastic energy that can be stored in the NS crust than that in the case of the all nonspherical nuclei have simple structures. Besides, the cylinder and the slab phases which are liquid crystal-like lie between the sponge-like intermediate phases or the crystalline solid-like phase, and the releasing of the strain energy would, in consequence, concentrate in the domain of these liquid crystal-like phases. The above mentioned effects of the intermediate phases should be taken into account in considering the crust dynamics of starquakes etc. if these phases exist in NSM. In the context of pulsar glitch phenomena, the effects of the sponge-like nuclei on pinning rate of superfluid neutron vortices also have yet to be investigated.

For neutrino cooling of NSs, some version of the direct URCA process which is suggested by Lorenz et al. lorenz  that this might be allowed in the “pasta” phases would be suppressed in the intermediate phases. This is due to the fact that the proton spectrum is no longer continuous in the sponge-like nuclei. The last point which we would like to mention is about the effects of the intermediate phases on neutrino trapping in SN cores. The nuclear parts connect over a wide region which is much larger than that characterized by the typical neutrino wave length $`20`$ fm. Thus the neutrino scattering processes are no longer coherent in contrast to the case of the spherical nuclei, and this may, in consequence, reduce the diffusion time scale of neutrinos as in the case of “pasta” phases with simple structures. This reduction softens the SNM and would thus act to enhance the amount of the released gravitational energy.

Our calculations demonstrate that the “pasta” phases can be formed dynamically from hot uniform matter in the proton-rich cases of $`x=0.5`$ and 0.3 without any assumptions on nuclear shape. This suggests that the existence of these phases in NS crusts because they cool down keeping the local thermal equilibrium after proto-NSs are formed and their cooling time scale is much larger than the relaxation time scale of our simulations. This conclusion has to be confirmed in more neutron-rich cases of $`x0.1`$ in the future. Our results also suggest that the existence of the highly connected intermediate phases which are characterized as $`\chi /V<0`$. This provides a vivid picture that NS inner crusts which consist of dense matter at subnuclear densities may be rich in properties due to the possibilities of a variety of material phases.

###### Acknowledgements.

G. W. are grateful to T. Maruyama, K. Iida, K. Niita, A. Tohsaki, K. Oyamatsu, S. Chikazumi, C. Hikage and K. Kotake for helpful discussions and comments. This work was supported in part by the Junior Research Associate Program in RIKEN through Research Grant No. J130026 and by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research provided by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology through Research Grant No. 14102004 and No. 14-7939.