format: text

text:
# Star Formation from Galaxies to Globules

## 1 Introduction

Observations of blue and uv surface brightnesses from young stars, IR radiation from dust, and H$`\alpha `$ from HII regions tell us the rates at which stars form in other galaxies (Kennicutt 1998a). Observations of young stellar clusters reveal some of the processes involved (Efremov 1995; Clarke, Bonnell, & Hillenbrand 2000; Elmegreen et al. 2000), and observations of HI, CO, and other gases, along with the associated dust structures, show how these processes work (Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 2000; Williams, Blitz, & McKee 2000).

These galactic-scale observations have led to two empirical laws for star formation: a column density relation,

$$\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Area}\mathrm{\Sigma }^{1.4}$$
(1)
(Schmidt 1959; Buat, Deharveng, & Donas 1989; Kennicutt 1989, 1998b; Tenjes & Haud 1991), and a column density threshold, for both a fixed threshold,

$$\mathrm{\Sigma }>\mathrm{\Sigma }_{min}6\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{pc}^2$$
(2)
with gas column density $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ (Gallagher & Hunter 1984; Skillman 1987; Guiderdoni 1987; Chiappini, Matteucci, & Gratton et al. 1997) and a variable threshold based on the Toomre (1964) criterion:

$$\mathrm{\Sigma }>\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}\frac{0.7c\kappa }{3.36G},$$
(3)
corresponding to $`Qc\kappa /\left(3.36G\mathrm{\Sigma }\right)<1.4`$ for velocity dispersion $`c`$ and epicyclic frequency $`\kappa `$ (Quirk 1972; Zasov & Simakov 1988; Kennicutt 1989). Other similar empirical laws have been suggested as well (e.g., Dopita & Ryder 1994; Prantzos & Boissier 2000; Chiappini, Matteucci, & Romano 2001).

The column density relation holds for the main disks and inner parts of galaxies as well as starburst regions in a continuous power law (Kennicutt 1998b). It also works in the Antennae galaxy for both general star formation and cluster formation (Zhang, Fall, & Whitmore 2001). The Toomre threshold applies to normal spiral galaxies (Kennicutt 1989; Caldwell et al. 1992; Martin & Kennicutt 2001), elliptical galaxies (Vader & Vigroux 1991), low surface brightness galaxies (van der Hulst et al. 1993; Pickering et al. 1999), and starbursts (Shlosman & Begelman 1989; Elmegreen 1994a). The fixed column density threshold is most evident in irregular galaxies (Taylor et al. 1994; Meurer et al. 1996; Hunter et al. 1998; van Zee et al. 1998; Hunter, Elmegreen, & van Woerden 2001).

There are a few interesting exceptions to these relations. O’Neil, Bothun, & Schombert (2000) and O’Neil, Verheijen, & McGaugh (2000) report low surface brightness galaxies with $`\mathrm{\Sigma }>\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ but not much star formation. Conversely, the inner parts of M33 and NGC 2403 have $`\mathrm{\Sigma }<\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ and normal star formation (Martin & Kennicutt 2000), as does the nuclear region of the S0/E7 galaxy NGC 4550 (Wiklind & Henkel 2001). Dwarf galaxies commonly form stars at column densities that are a factor of 2 below what would be the threshold for spiral galaxies (Hunter et al. 1998; van Zee et al. 1998). There is also some concern that dynamical processes like spiral arm generation should maintain $`\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ independent of star formation (Fuchs & von Linden 1998; Bertin & Lodato 2001; Combes 2001). Moreover, the threshold for instabilities should not be $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ but $`0.4\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ if the combined stellar and gaseous fluids are considered (Orlova, Korchagin, & Theis 2002). Lower thresholds are also possible for sub-populations of clouds with lower than average velocity dispersions (Ortega, Volkov, & Monte-Lima 2001), and for magnetic disks with a Parker instability (Chou et al. 2000; Kim, Ryu, & Jones 2001; Franco et al. 2001). Thresholds for $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ based on the rate of shear rather than the epicyclic rate were preferred by Pandey & van de Bruck (1999).

Clearly the connection between star formation and disk stability is more complex than originally envisioned in the standard feedback scenario (Goldreich & Lynden-Bell 1965). Nevertheless, there are several general implications of these empirical relations that are not strongly dependent on the details of star formation. The next section uses the column density thresholds to show that gaseous self-gravity and a cool thermal state are important precursors to star formation. No particular mechanism follows from these relations, however, because many cloud formation processes have the same relations. Observations on intermediate scales are discussed next. These data highlight the importance of compressible turbulence as a scale-free cloud formation process, but again fall short of pin-pointing the final trigger for new stars. The most telling observations come from the morphologies of star-forming environments. On small scales, the common appearance of dense clusters inside comet-shaped clouds adjacent to high-pressure HII regions or near the tips of isolated filaments suggests that the final step in the star formation process is a compression of pre-existing clouds by nearby young stars and supernovae.

Considering this, the problem of star formation becomes one of understanding how large and intermediate scale processes conspire with local triggering events to give the empirical relations discussed above. A possible solution is discussed in Sect. 5 (see also Elmegreen 2002a). A related problem is whether such triggering is important for all regions of star formation, including starbursts, low surface-brightness disks, and the early Universe. All of these considerations should lead to a theory of star formation where the rate can be predicted from first principles in all environments. We are far from such a theory at the present time, but a few suggestions for how it might go are made in Sect. 6.

## 2 Implications of the Empirical Laws for Star Formation on a Large Scale

### 2.1 The Dynamically-Based Surface Density Threshold

The existence of a critical column density related to $`c\kappa /\left(3.36G\right)`$ implies that ambient self-gravity in galaxy disks is important for star formation. This column density threshold first arose in the context of spontaneous disk instabilities, but it actually has a much broader applicability.

The instability model predicts that when $`\mathrm{\Sigma }>c\kappa /3.36G`$ in a one-component stellar disk, spiral arms form easily (Toomre 1964, 1981; Goldreich & Lynden-Bell 1965; Julian & Toomre 1966; Athanassoula 1984). The gaseous parts of these arms collapse into giant cloud complexes with a Jeans mass of

$$M_{Jeans}=\mathrm{\Sigma }\left(\lambda /2\right)^2=\frac{c^4}{G^2\mathrm{\Sigma }}10^610^7\mathrm{M}_{}$$
(4)
(Balbus 1988; Elmegreen 1994b; Kim & Ostriker 2001) for wavelength $`\lambda =2c^2/\left(G\mathrm{\Sigma }\right)`$. Galaxies with numerous, short and patchy arms show these collapse sites directly, one for each big patch; they form randomly on the scale of the Jeans length ($`2`$ kpc) and then get sheared into spiral arms at the same time as they make stars. Galaxies with a few long and symmetric arms (Kuno et al. 1995) or tidal arms (Rodrigues et al. 1999; Duc et al. 2000; Braine et al. 2001) have comparable collapse sites, but they are located inside the arms, strung out like beads with the same Jeans-length spacing. Models of the first type are in Toomre & Kalnajs (1991), Gerritsen & Icke (1997), Wada & Norman (1999, 2001), Huber & Pfenniger (2001) and elsewhere. Models of the second type are in Elmegreen & Thomasson (1993) for spiral wave modes in normal galaxies, and Barnes & Hernquist (1992) and Elmegreen, Kaufman, & Thomasson (1993) for tidal arms. Similar beads of star formation line up around nuclear starburst rings (e.g., Sersic & Pastoriza 1965, 1967; Maoz et al. 1996; D. Elmegreen et al. 1999; Buta, Crocker & Byrd 1999) and around the giant rings of collisional ring galaxies (Bransford et al. 1998). Presumably, these beads form by the same types of gravitational instabilities.

In most nearby galaxies, the Jeans mass clouds at the top of this collapse chain are seen as the largest coherent gas features (Elmegreen & Elmegreen 1983; Rand 1993; Kuno et al. 1995). They are also present in the inner (Elmegreen & Elmegreen 1987) and outer (Grabelsky et al. 1987) Milky Way, enclosing hierarchical clusters of molecular clouds and OB associations (Efremov 1995).

The extrapolation from this $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$-threshold behavior involving gaseous self-gravity to the process of star formation in molecular cloud cores is not obvious. The most straightforward scenario is where gravitational instabilities sensitive to $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ make giant cloud complexes, as discussed above, and then these complexes form molecules in their shielded cores, making giant molecular clouds that dissipate turbulent energy, cool and contract with increasing gravitational force until they form stars. Such monotonic contraction probably happens some of the time, but the complete picture seems to be more complex.

Part of the problem is that $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ also appears for other processes of star formation, such as triggered collapse in expanding shells (Elmegreen, Palouš, & Ehlerová 2002). When $`\mathrm{\Sigma }<\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$, long-range triggered star formation becomes inefficient as the expansion of shells is resisted by Coriolis forces. This makes it difficult for a shell to build up enough material to become gravitationally unstable. The probability that a shell triggers star formation, considering a wide range of possible local conditions and rotation curves, decreases from 0.6 to 0.1 as $`\mathrm{\Sigma }/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ decreases from 1.6 to 0.16. Thus $`\mathrm{\Sigma }>\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ implies not only that spiral arms can form and make clouds, but also that existing stars can trigger other stars in shells with dimensions comparable to the scale height.

$`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ should have a similar role for star formation that is triggered on large scales by turbulence compression. This role is most evident if we rewrite the Toomre $`Q=c\kappa /\left(\pi G\mathrm{\Sigma }\right)`$ parameter (for a gas $`\pi `$ replaces 3.36) in terms of the ratio of the epicyclic radius at the local rms speed, $`R_{ep}=c/\kappa `$, to the scale height of an isothermal layer, $`H=c^2/\left(\pi G\mathrm{\Sigma }\right)`$. Then $`QH/R_{ep}`$. Large $`Q`$ or small $`\mathrm{\Sigma }/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ correspond to turbulent eddies that circle around in tight curls, narrower than a scale height, because of the relatively large Coriolis force. Such eddies cannot compress enough gas in their converging parts to make a Jeans mass, considering that the ambient Jeans length is about equal to the disk thickness.

The balance between self-gravitational and Coriolis forces reflected in the ratio $`\mathrm{\Sigma }/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ affects any process of cloud formation that involves moving and compressing a gravitationally significant amount gas. Not every star formation model should be sensitive to $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$, however. One where random cloud collisions trigger stars should have no $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ dependence. The fact that $`\mathrm{\Sigma }>\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ in regions of star formation tells us only that disk gravity is important for the first step in the star formation process, which is cloud formation. These clouds may then form stars by a variety of methods. Some will cool and condense by themselves, others will collide, and still others will get compressed by nearby stars. To investigate the mechanisms of star formation in more detail, we have to look at individual regions. This is the topic of Sect. 4. Before this, the implications of the other column density threshold, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{min}`$, are considered.

### 2.2 The Constant Surface Density Threshold

The dynamically-based column density threshold, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$, does not apply well to dwarf and irregular galaxies (Hunter & Plummer 1996; van Zee et al. 1997; Hunter, Elmegreen & Baker 1998; Hunter, Elmegreen, & van Woerden 2001). This may be because there is no spiral-enhanced compression of gas in these galaxies, and too little shear to pump turbulent energy into the gas after spiral instabilities. There may be end-of-bar compressions in dwarf galaxies (Roye & Hunter 2000), but this would not involve $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ either. Thus several of the primary functions of gaseous self-gravity in the star formation process for spiral galaxies does not work well for dwarf galaxies. Nevertheless, there is still some suggestion of an absolute minimum column density for star formation in dwarfs, and this minimum seems to apply to spirals as well.

The primary implication of a minimum column density for star formation appears to be that the gas pressure must be high enough to support a cool phase of HI clouds. The metallicity should also be moderately high (Wolfire et al. 1995). The concept of multiple interstellar thermal phases was introduced by Field (1965) and Field, Goldsmith & Habing (1969). Today, the two-phase model is not considered to be the main driver of cloud formation because most interstellar motions are supersonic and the thermal instability always works at subsonic speeds, as measured in the warm component. This means that gravitational instabilities, expanding shells, and turbulence all make large clouds faster than thermal instabilities (Vázquez-Semadeni, Gazol, & Scalo 2000; Gazol et al. 2001). Nevertheless, the existence of a cool phase in the atomic medium is a prerequisite for most star formation, and the criterion for this phase is related to the pressure, and therefore the gas column density, giving the observed threshold effect.

The average pressure in an isolated galaxy disk is determined by the weight of the gas layer in the gravitational potential of the total disk mass that lies within the gas layer. If the gas column density is $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$, and the total column density inside the gas layer including gas, stars, and dark matter is $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{total}`$, then the midplane pressure is $`P=(\pi /2)G\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{total}`$. This relation comes from the following expressions: $`P=\rho c^2`$ for midplane gas density $`\rho `$ and velocity dispersion $`c`$, $`H=c^2/\left(\pi G\mathrm{\Sigma }_{total}\right)`$ for gas scale height $`H`$, and $`\mathrm{\Sigma }=2\rho H`$. An approximation for $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{total}`$ in a stars+gas disk is the expression $`\mathrm{\Sigma }+\left(c_{gas}/c_{stars}\right)\mathrm{\Sigma }_{stars}`$, where the last term accounts for the fraction of stars that are in the gas layer (Elmegreen 1989a). The gas pressure increases only indirectly as the energy sources from supernova and stellar winds increase: these sources affect $`c`$ most directly; $`c`$ affects $`H`$ through the vertical equilibrium, and $`H`$ affects the fraction of the total stellar mass that is in the gas layer, which enters into $`P`$. The gas pressure can also increase in large regions if the galaxy experiences a ram pressure from its flow through a hot intergalactic gas. Such an increase might have affected the thermal balance at the leading edge of the LMC (Dickey et al. 1994).

The total pressure is important for the thermal state of the ISM. When the pressure is high, a cool atomic phase of gas exists in equilibrium where collisional cooling balances stellar heating (Wolfire et al. 1995). If the pressure is very high, then only this cool atomic phase exists, in addition to cold and possibly warm molecular phases and a warm or hot ionized phase. The warm diffuse molecular phase is not important for CO in the Solar neighborhood but it is moderately important in the inner Milky Way and very important in starbursts and other active regions with high pressures (Aalto et al. 1995; Wilson, Howe, & Balogh 1999; Smith, et al. 2000; Hüttemeister et al. 2000; Mao et al. 2000; Curran et al. 2001; Israel & Baas 2001; Rodríguez-Fernández et al. 2001). For intermediate pressures, as in the Solar neighborhood, both the warm and cool phases of atomic gas co-exist and there is warm $`H_2`$ gas in diffuse clouds without much CO emission. Where the pressure is low (and usually the metallicity is low at the same place), only the warm phase can exist for atomic gas, and then there are few cool diffuse atomic clouds and few molecular clouds. The molecules also tend to be confined to the far inner regions of self-gravitating clouds when the ambient pressure and metallicity are low (Lequeux et al. 1994), and there is a greater abundance of very cold ($`T1040`$ K) atomic clouds in the place of normal molecular clouds (Dickey et al. 2000). The minimum pressure for the existence of cool diffuse atomic clouds corresponds to a minimum gas column density threshold of about $`\mathrm{\Sigma }>6`$ M pc-2, depending slightly on the metallicity and radiation field (Elmegreen & Parravano 1994). This presumably gives the observed $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{min}`$ threshold for star formation.

Nearby spiral galaxies clearly reveal this column density threshold. Braun (1997) noted how the outer parts of all the spiral galaxies he considered make a transition to a smooth warm phase just beyond the optical radius, $`R_{25}`$. For NGC 2403, the fractional mass in the form of cool HI drops from 90% to 20% as the radius increases from $`0.8`$R25 to $`1.6`$ R25; beyond $`2`$R25, this fraction is less than 10%. Similarly, the Sagittarius dwarf irregular galaxy has two components of HI that may be separated by their linewidths; star formation occurs only near the cool component (Young & Lo 1997b). The same is true in other dwarf galaxies (Young & Lo 1996, 1997a) and in NGC 2366 (Hunter, Elmegreen, & van Woerden 2001). In the main disk of the LMC, the proportion of HI in cool diffuse clouds is the same as it is in the Solar neighborhood, but there is an increase in this proportion, and a possible decrease in cloud temperature, toward the 30 Dor region (Dickey et al. 1994; Mebold et al. 1997) and LMC4 (Marx-Zimmer et al. 2000), where the pressures are high. There is also cool HI in the LMC tidal bridge, suggesting moderately high pressures there too (Kobulnicky, & Dickey 1999). The SMC differs though, having a lower fraction of HI in a cool diffuse form, and lower temperatures in that form, presumably because of its lower pressure and metallicity (Dickey et al. 2000). The cool HI fractions in the main disks of M31 and M33 are similar to that in the Milky Way (Dickey & Brinks 1993).

The outer parts of both spiral and dwarf irregular galaxies are so warm that their total HI linewidths are comparable to the thermal speed. No source of turbulence is needed for the outer parts of galaxies in this case. There is usually enough stellar light from the inner disk to keep the atomic gas warm (Elmegreen & Parravano 1994), so the velocity dispersion stays moderately high even as the column density drops. This means that any tendency for stellar energy feedback and gravitational instabilities to regulate $`\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ through star formation and spiral arm formation should turn off when $`\mathrm{\Sigma }<\mathrm{\Sigma }_{min}`$.

A cool phase of atomic gas is necessary for star formation because cool diffuse clouds are the first step in the transition from the average ISM to the dense molecular clouds where stars form. The average ISM usually has a gas density comparable to the critical tidal density, which is $`=3\mathrm{\Omega }R/\left(2\pi G\right)d\mathrm{\Omega }/dR1`$ cm-3 locally, for galaxy angular rotation rate $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ and galactocentric radius $`R`$. This density is always too low to form stars directly. The density has to be high enough that the dust column out to the nearest bright star is opaque to the star’s uv light. Then the gas can cool and build up molecules that lower the temperature even more with their low-excitation rotational transitions. Eventually the temperature gets so low ($`10`$ K), and the density so high in a near-pressure equilibrium, that the self-gravitational energy density in turbulence-compressed regions overcomes the thermal energy density. Collapse to stars follows if the local shear and turbulent energy densities are also low. Note that it is not enough for gravity to dominate thermal pressure ($`M>M_{Jeans}`$) in a turbulent region: star formation also requires that the clump last for a collapse time before the external turbulent flows destroy it. Excessive turbulence could conceivable prevent star formation if the motions continuously force the gas to break up into pieces that are smaller than a thermal Jeans mass (Padoan 1995).

Without the first step of diffuse cloud formation, ambient self-gravity, spiral wave shocks, supernovae, turbulence, and other large-scale disturbances cannot make the gas dense enough to become opaque and form cold molecular clouds. Only if the ambient ISM already has diffuse clouds, as in the main disks of spiral galaxies, or if a pressure disturbance in a marginally warm ISM is strong enough to induce the transition to a cool diffuse state, can star formation proceed. Dense clouds also form their molecules faster if the diffuse clouds that make them are mostly molecular $`H_2`$ too (Pringle, Allen & Lubow 2001). The outer disks of galaxies are generally warm and without much star formation, but sometimes a spiral arm can act as a pressure source and make enough cool gas to start the process off (e.g., see Ferguson et al. 1998; LeLièvre & Roy 2000). This illustrates the old model by Shu et al. (1972), generalized recently by Koyama & Inutsuka (2000). Better observations of the most distant star-forming regions in our Galaxy may elucidate the possible pressure sources (Kobayashi & Tokunaga 2000).

### 2.3 The Schmidt Law

The other empirical law of star formation, the power-law dependence of the star formation rate on the total column density, indicates that cloud and star formation usually occur at the local dynamical rate averaged over a large area. If we write this law as

$$\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Area}ϵ\mathrm{\Sigma }\omega $$
(5)
for efficiency $`ϵ`$few percent and rate $`\omega \left(G\rho \right)^{1/2}\mathrm{\Sigma }^{1/2}`$ for constant $`H`$, then the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }^{1.4}`$ law follows approximately (Madore 1978). Most of the exponent in this relation is from the available gas, which contributes $`ϵ\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ to the star formation rate; $`\omega `$ is the conversion rate of this gas into a dense form. The use of a dynamical rate for $`\omega `$ does not imply that gravitational forces are directly involved. The dynamical rate is also about equal to the turbulence crossing rate over a scale height ($`c/H=\left[2\pi G\rho \right]^{1/2}`$) and it is the inverse of the collapse time for large expanding shells with modest overpressures (i.e., for low Mach numbers – see Elmegreen, Palouš, & Ehlerová 2002).

Models of galactic evolution using an equation like equation 5 give a reasonable agreement with the observed radial dependence of star formation (Wang & Silk 1994). The expression is sometimes multiplied by another term proportional to the galactic orbital rate, as if a spiral shock were involved too (Wyse & Silk 1989; Prantzos & Boissier 2000). This is done to better reproduce the metallicity gradient, which is not steep enough from equation 5 alone. However the additional factor is not observed directly in star formation studies, and the steep gradients could result from other things, such as global gas accretion (e.g., Ferguson & Clarke 2001 and references therein).

The Schmidt law is not very model-dependent because the detailed physics of the star formation process is confined to a relatively weak dependence on the density or column density, i.e., in the $`\omega `$ term. This means that nearly any model with a dynamical time scale ($`\left[G\rho \right]^{1/2}`$) can give it, as can other models, such as propagating star formation (Sleath & Alexander 1995) and cloud collisions (Tan 2000).

The Schmidt law is inconsistent with the recent suggestion that the efficiency of star formation, as given by the rate per unit gas mass and equal to the inverse of the gas consumption time, is about constant in a variety of environments, including normal galaxies (Rownd & Young 1999; Boselli, Lequeux, & Gavazzi 2002), the central regions of early-type galaxies (Inoue, Hirashita, & Kamaya 2000), and the starbursting antennae galaxy (Gao et al. 2001). This would imply that SFR/Area $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ only, without the $`\omega `$ factor. The discrepancy between these two observations has not been explained. We return to the Schmidt law in Section 6.

## 3 Star Formation on Intermediate Scales

Ambient interstellar gravity and a cool phase of atomic gas are important for star formation, but they do not work alone. Clouds formed by ambient gravitational instabilities should have a characteristic size and mass at first, and possibly a regular structure too. There are two characteristic sizes, the Jeans length, $`c^2/\left(\pi G\mathrm{\Sigma }\right)`$, and the Toomre (1964) length, $`2\pi G\mathrm{\Sigma }/\kappa ^2`$. The first arises from the balance between pressure and self-gravity and appears in the separation between clouds along spiral arms (Kuno et al. 1995). The second results from the balance between Coriolis forces and self-gravity and appears in the separation between stellar arms. This regularity differs from the morphology of clouds and star formation on intermediate and small scales, where scale-free and fractal structures are seen.

The earliest indication that the ISM is scale free came from the mass spectra of clouds and clusters (e.g. Field & Saslaw 1965). The cloud mass spectrum is a power law below the ambient Jeans mass (e.g., Heyer, Carpenter, & Snell 2001), and the cluster mass spectrum is a power law for the same physical scales (Battinelli et al. 1994; Comeron & Torra 1996; Elmegreen & Efremov 1997; Feinstein 1997; McKee & Williams 1997; Oey & Clarke 1998; Zhang & Fall 1999).

These two power laws are usually seen only in a piecewise fashion for the gas, covering 2 orders of magnitude in cloud mass at most. When large and small pieces are fit together in any one region, using different angular resolutions, the mass range can be extended (Heithausen et al. 1998). Single maps show only a factor of $`100`$ in mass because the mass scales as the square of the size (Larson 1981), and cloud-finding routines recognize only factor of $`10`$ in size as a result of selection effects (Elmegreen & Falgarone 1996). The minimum cloud size is always several times the telescope beam width (Verschuur 1993), and the maximum cloud size is just big enough to contain recognizable substructure, at which point a decision is usually made to divide the bigger cloud into its parts and call them separate clouds. The largest gas concentrations in big maps are usually not included in the derived mass spectra as single clouds but only as collections of smaller clouds.

A better way to see a wide range of scale-free structure is with Fourier transform power spectra, which, for wide fields in the Milky Way (Crovisier & Dickey 1983; Green 1993; Stützki et al. 1998; Dickey et al. 2001), whole galaxies (Stanimirovic, et al. 1999; Elmegreen, Kim, & Staveley-Smith 2001), and galactic nuclei (Elmegreen, Elmegreen, & Eberwein 2002) show no characteristic scale between the size of the beam and the size of the map, except possibly for the line-of-sight galaxy thickness if that is resolved (Elmegreen et al. 2001; Padoan, et al. 2001a). The Delta variance technique (Stützki et al. 1998; Zielinsky & Stützki 1999; Bensch, Stützke, & Ossenkopf 2001) and spectral correlation function (Rosolowsky et al. 1999) are other ways to see scale-free structure that have some advantages over Fourier transform power spectra if there are sharp map boundaries and spectral line information, respectively. Scale-free variations for smooth intensity distributions are called multifractal because the fractal dimension varies between the peaks and the valleys (e.g., Vavrek 2001). IRAS intensity distributions of the local dust emission were shown to be multifractal by Chappell & Scalo (2001a). The edges of clouds (Dickman, Horvath, & Margulis 1990; Falgarone, Phillips, & Walker 1991) and galaxies (Westpfahl et al 1999) are fractal, which means their irregularities are scale-free (Mandelbrot 1983).

Stars form in this scale-free gas by making scale-free clusters and aggregates. This means that star fields are hierarchical if their ages are less than a crossing time (Feitzinger & Galinski 1987; Gomez et al. 1993; Efremov 1995; Elmegreen & Efremov 1996; Battinelli, Efremov & Magnier 1996; Harris & Zaritsky 1999; Testi et al. 2000; Elmegreen 2000; Heydari-Malayeri et al. 2001; Pietrzynski et al. 2001; Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2001; Zhang, Fall, & Whitmore 2001). Older regions may have power law structures too, but for different reasons (Larson 1995; Simon 1997; Bate, Clarke & McCaughrean 1998; Nakajima et al. 1998; Gladwin et al. 1999).

There is no characteristic length, like an ISM Jeans length, in the distribution of young stars. Even when the maximum size of a star complex looks like a Jeans length (Elmegreen et al. 1996), it may really be the maximum likely length from sampling statistics (Selman & Melnick 2000). This is because gas concentrations that begin at the Jeans length cascade both downward and upward in scale from the combination of turbulence, self-gravity, and shear, leaving little signature of their initial structure. An exception occurs where spiral instabilities do not operate, as in the centers of density-wave spiral arms; there the shear is low or negative and the Jeans mass condensations live only a short time before they flow into the interarm region.

The scale-free nature of interstellar gas is the imprint of turbulence (e.g., Falgarone & Phillips 1990; Scalo 1990; Lazarian 1995; Goldman 2000), or turbulence combined with non-linear self-gravitational instabilities (Fuchs & von Linden 1998; Semelin & Combes 2000; Crosthwaite, Turner, & Ho 2000; Bertin & Lodato 2001; Wada & Norman 2001; Huber & Pfenniger 2001; Vollmer & Beckert 2002; Chavanis 2002). Chaotic structures can also come from the thermal instability (Elphick, Regev, & Spiegel 1991).

An important point about turbulence is that smaller scales have smaller internal velocity dispersions. This means that the Jeans length decreases along with the physical scale, making the ratio of gravitational to turbulent energy densities somewhat constant (Larson 1981). For clouds that are defined out to a fixed opacity threshold, as in CO surveys, the pressure boundary condition breaks this constancy and makes the ratio of cloud mass to Jeans mass systematically decrease with scale.

The luminosity-based CO mass is $`M_{CO}TcR^2`$ for velocity dispersion $`c`$, radius $`R`$, and excitation temperature, T, and the Jeans mass is $`M_Jc^2R`$, so $`M_{CO}/M_JTR/c`$, which is the crossing time for constant $`T`$. For gravitating clouds, the column density scales with external pressure, $`P0.1GM^2/R^4`$, giving $`cR^{1/2}`$ with the virial theorem. For non-self-gravitating clouds, $`c`$ and $`R`$ have the same relation from turbulence. As a result, $`M_{CO}/M_JTR^{1/2}`$, so small CO clouds are systematically less self-gravitating than large CO clouds at the same $`T`$. The threshold is at about $`10^4`$ M for the FCRAO outer galaxy CO survey (Heyer, Carpenter & Snell 2001). It is larger ($`10^6`$ M) for collections of CO clouds inside giant molecular associations or HI superclouds (Inoue & Kamaya 2000) and smaller ($`10^3`$ M) for the cores of CO clouds (Bertoldi & McKee 1992; Falgarone, Puget, & Pérault 1992) and outer galaxy CO clouds (Brand 2001). These differences in mass at the virial threshold $`M_{CO}=M_J`$ imply that the coefficient $`\alpha `$ in the size-linewidth relation, $`c=\alpha R^{1/2}`$, varies among the different surveys, not as a function of scale but as a function of molecule type, pressure, or perhaps survey sensitivity. Numerical simulations of turbulence that consider these relations in more detail are in Vazquez-Semadeni, Ballesteros-Paredes & Rodriguez (1997).

This is only one example of the many selection effects that can result from cloudy-model interpretations of turbulent structures and motions. Scalo (1990) recognized some of these issues at an early stage. Other problems for the gas are the appearance of false clouds from velocity crowding on the line of sight (Ballesteros-Paredes, Vázquez-Semadeni, & Scalo 1999; Lazarian & Pogosyan 2000; Pichardo et al. 2000; Ostriker, Stone, & Gammie 2001; Lazarian et al. 2001), and the false separation of “cloud” types (molecular, atomic, self-gravitating, diffuse) when the physical distribution of the gas is more of a continuum.

Analogous selection effects result for stellar distributions after conceptually forcing a discrete “cluster” model onto what is really a more complicated pattern. Terms like clusters, OB associations, stellar aggregates, and star complexes are different scales inside a hierarchy of self-similar structures. Dense clusters probably form by processes that are very similar to those involved with giant star complexes, even though dense clusters look very different in their relaxed state. These differences in morphology as a function of scale result from three effects that are unrelated to the star formation process itself: (1) Massive regions sample further into the high mass tail of the initial stellar mass function, forming O-type stars readily. (2) Large regions form stars long enough to make supernovae within a dynamical time scale, causing severe cloud dispersal and an inability to form stars with a high efficiency; the result is an unbound collection of stars after the gas leaves. (3) Galactic tidal forces shear away the remains of large-scale star formation because the average density is low.

The turbulence scaling laws cause these three effects. As the size of a region increases, the time scale for star formation increases approximately as the square root of size and the average densities of the gas and clusters decrease approximately inversely with size. Most of the morphological differences between bound open clusters and loose star complexes seem to result from these initial scale-dependent differences in the gas. Power-law mass functions for galactic clusters, which sample only the densest cores of the multifractal gas (Elmegreen 2002b) and for star complexes, which sample the largest scales (D. Elmegreen & Salzer 1999) follow from the fractal distribution of the gas.

The apparent similarity in star formation processes over a wide range of scales becomes more obvious at very high pressures, where the giant unbound star complexes that form in normal galaxies change to become morphologically indistinct from bound galactic clusters, i.e., they form super star clusters or young globular clusters with the mass of a complex but the density of a galactic cluster. This change occurs because ambient pressures exceeding $`10^7`$ kB lead to turbulent crossing times that are less than the supernova time of an O-type star in a region containing $`10^6`$ M or more (Elmegreen & Efremov 1997; Ashman & Zepf 2001). Another change may occur if the cluster environment is so dense that coalescence and protostar interactions affect the IMF (Bonnell et al. 2001).

Self-similarity in star formation is also apparent when viewing extremely young embedded clusters or clusters of pre-stellar objects. There the source distribution is still hierarchical, not relaxed or isothermal like the old notion of a cluster (Motte, Andre, & Neri 1998; Testi et al. 2000). The relaxation occurs after individual stars form and begin to interact with gas and other stars.

Hierarchical structure in young clusters implies that star formation is faster than an orbit time; otherwise the stars would mix and scatter (Ballesteros-Paredes, Hartmann & Vázquez-Semadeni 1999; Elmegreen 2000; Carpenter 2000; Yamaguchi et al. 2001a). What defines a cluster before one dynamical time is the high density of cores, protostars, and stars that form in high density gas. Viewed from a perspective that includes a wide range of scales, this clustering property is not special or limited to small sizes. In an embedded cluster, the mean separation between stars is proportional to the inverse cube root of the average density, by mass conservation. There is usually no evidence for a characteristic length from discrete physical processes until the binary star separation is reached (Larson 1995). When the gas is mostly used up the cluster begins to disperse (Kroupa, Aarseth & Hurley 2001). Perhaps 90% of all stars younger than a few tenths of a million years occur in dense embedded clusters (Carpenter 2000), but only $`50`$% of them remain after $`10`$ My because of this systematic dispersal (Battinelli & Capuzzo-Dolcetta 1991; Yamaguchi et al. 2001a).

Hierarchical structure breaks down if there are regular filaments or sheets in the gas that are controlled by external forces. Such structures condense into regularly-spaced globules as a result of gravitational instabilities (Miyama, Narita, & Hayashi 1987; Bastien et al. 1991). Regular structure is evident in the Orion core, for example (Vannier et al. 2001). The power law slope of autocorrelated structures also changes on small scales when self-gravity becomes strong because then the dense cores that form are not transient turbulent structures (Ossenkopf, Klessen, & Heitsch 2001).

The correlation between size and crossing time that is well-known for turbulent gas is visible also in the stars as a correlation between the size of a region and the duration of the star formation event there. This stellar correlation ranges between $`1`$ pc and $`1000`$ pc, with larger regions taking longer to evolve but each region forming stars completely in several local dynamical time scales (Elmegreen & Efremov 1996; Efremov & Elmegreen 1998; Battinelli & Efremov 1999; Elmegreen 2000; Heydari-Malayeri et al. 2001). This means that OB associations and their GMCs appear to have a characteristic size and mass, but only because the selection of a region by the presence of O-type stars defines the age and therefore the scale. Selection by the presence of Cepheid variables and red supergiants defines a much larger characteristic scale because the relevant timescale is longer (Efremov 1995).

Selection effects also bias our inference of a maximum scale for star formation. There is a maximum scale for OB associations in the Milky Way at which there is a sudden drop in the luminosity function (McKee & Williams 1997). There is no physical limit to star formation at this scale, however; the clustering of young stars continues up to star complexes and flocculent spiral arms (Elmegreen & Efremov 1996). These larger regions form stars for longer times and therefore contain several separate OB associations as subregions (e.g., Comeron 2001). They would not be called single OB associations. Thus the count of OB associations in a whole galaxy, like the count of clouds in the previous discussion, has a size limitation above which the physical structures that are present tend to be resolved out, subdivided, and then ignored as distinct entities. Autocorrelation studies for young star fields find no characteristic feature on the scale of an OB association, only a systematic weakening of the correlated power up to the point where a statistically small number of distinct units remains (D. Elmegreen & Salzer 1999; Selman & Melnick 2000; Zhang, Fall, & Whitmore 2001; Elmegreen & Elmegreen 2001).

In summary, the morphology of star formation on intermediate scales points to the strong influence of turbulence in compressing the gas and defining its dynamical time. These intermediate scales range from the Jeans and Toomre lengths (as well as the disk thickness) at the upper end, down to the scale of significant cloud erosion and distortion inside HII regions. This morphology suggests that in spite of the empirical correlations mentioned in Section I, which point most directly to gravitational instabilities as the cause of star formation, the actual dynamics involved is more closely related to transient compression in a turbulent fluid (Elmegreen 1993; Myers & Lazarian 1998; Klessen, Heitsch, & Mac Low 2000; Williams & Myers 2000; Heisch, Mac Low, & Klessen 2001; Klessen 2001; Padoan et al. 2001b). The processes that make the empirical laws serve mostly to regulate this turbulence. Self-gravity is necessary to pump turbulent energy into the gas on large scales through spiral instabilities, and it is also necessary to make self-gravitating clouds in the compressed regions that result from other processes. This link between turbulence and self-gravity on the large scale, defined by the condition $`\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$, also ensures a basic equality between gravitational and turbulent energy density on small scales, where dense cores eventually form clusters. That is, the compressed regions in a turbulent fluid become self-gravitating and last for a collapse time if the larger scale gas around them is also self-gravitating (Elmegreen 1993). The turbulence-gravity link also shows up in the conversion rate from ambient gas to star-forming gas, which occurs on both the dynamical time and the turbulence crossing time ($`\omega `$ in equation 5) when $`\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$.

## 4 Star Formation in Dense Clusters

The previous sections cited observations on large and intermediate scales which suggest that self-gravity in the interstellar gas forms $`M_{Jeans}=10^7`$ M cloud complexes and drives turbulence in and around these complexes as a result of swing-amplified spiral instabilities if there are no stellar arms, and beading instabilities inside stellar arms if there is a global density wave. The observations also suggest that this turbulence expands to larger scales by the swing amplifier and cascades to smaller scales by non-linear hydrodynamics. Pressure fluctuations from supernovae and other stellar processes add to this turbulence on intermediate to small scales. As a result, the gas is compressed into a fractal network with marginally opaque clouds if there is a cool atomic or molecular phase available. The structure has a wide range of scales, and star formation follows inside the cold molecular cores of the most strongly self-gravitating parts.

Understanding the last part of this scenario, how star formation actually begins, requires observations of young clusters and not just interstellar gas structures. The biggest clue is that most embedded clusters in the solar neighborhood are adjacent to HII regions excited by slightly older clusters. This is true for Orion (Lada et al. 1991; Dutrey et al. 1991; Reipurth, Rodriguez, & Chini 1999; Coppin et al. 2000), the Rosette nebula (Phelps & Lada 1997), Perseus OB2 (Sancisi et al. 1974; Sargent 1979), Ophiuchus (de Geus 1992), Sco-Cen (Preibisch & Zinnecker 1999), the Trifid Nebula (Lefloch & Cernicharo 2000), W3/4/5 (Thronson, Lada, Hewagama 1985; Kerton & Martin 2000), M17 (Thronson & Lada 1983) and dozens of other regions, as reviewed in Elmegreen (1998) and Elmegreen et al. (2000). The whole Perseus arm from $`l=106^{}`$ to $`140^{}`$ has most of its IRAS sources in clusters that are at the tips of cometary clouds and partial shells around HII regions (Carpenter, Heyer & Snell 2000; Bachiller, Fuente, & Kumar 2002).

In all of these cases, the embedded clusters are young enough to have been triggered by the pressures of the adjacent HII regions. They are not just highly obscured parts of the same clusters that excite the HII regions. For this reason, most clusters (and therefore most young stars) look triggered in pre-existing clouds by the sudden application of a high external pressure. Yamaguchi et al. (1999) estimate that several tens of percent of all star formation in the inner Galaxy is triggered by adjacent HII regions. The same morphology is found in other galaxies, including the LMC where giant shells (Goudis & Meaburn 1978; Kim, et al. 1999; Yamaguchi et al. 2001b), the 30 Dor region (Walborn et al. 1999) and other regions (Heydari-Malayeri et al. 2001) have high-pressure triggering. Yamaguchi et al (2001c) estimate again that a substantial fraction of star formation in the LMC is triggered in this way. Galaxies that are much further away do not yet have high resolution infrared observations to show embedded young clusters, but still the juxtaposition of high pressure and star formation is evident in the form of giant star-forming shells (e.g., Brinks, Braun, & Unger 1990; Puche et al. 1992; Stewart & Walter 2000; Stewart et al. 2000). Evidence for triggering in a dwarf starburst galaxy was given by MacKenty et al. (2000).

Smaller regions of star formation, such as Taurus and Serpens, do not sample the IMF far enough into the high mass tail to make the massive stars that excite HII regions. As a result, star formation looks spontaneous there, although the clouds themselves could have formed in large-scale turbulent flows (Ballesteros-Paredes, Hartmann & Vázquez-Semadeni 1999). However, the time scale for energy dissipation and spontaneous star formation in these regions is longer than the time between stray supernovae, so the final compression into dense cores could have been triggered after all. The Taurus clouds, for example, have a wind-swept appearance (Fig. 2 in Hartmann, Ballesteros-Paredes & Bergin 2001), suggesting that explosions or high speed flows from the east compressed and triggered the main star-forming core. Core D in TMC1 (Hirahara et al. 1992), with its peculiar molecular abundances suggesting extreme youth (Hartquist, Williams, & Viti 2001), is in a ridge near the head of this wind-swept structure, as if it were just compressed. Similarly, IC 5146 is a long filamentary cloud with a molecular core and young cluster at the tip (Lada, Alves, & Lada 1999). Filaments like this have a high cross section for stray supernovae and could be triggered easily at one end or the other without much residual evidence.

Sequential triggering is pervasive for three reasons: the hierarchical structure of the gas implies that most clusters have neighboring clouds to compress; the inefficiency of star formation ensures there is always residual gas that can be triggered further; and the spontaneous processes inside a non-star-forming cloud usually take longer than the pressure fluctuations outside the cloud. This latter inequality, mentioned also in the previous paragraph, warrants more discussion.

The internal dynamical processes in a turbulent medium are usually quicker than the external dynamical processes because the turbulent crossing time decreases with scale. However, turbulence dissipates significantly on only one crossing time (Stone, Ostriker, & Gammie 1998; MacLow et al. 1998), so the ISM must be stirred more frequently than the crossing rate if it is to remain turbulent. If turbulent energy input is pervasive, as in the reaction-advection model by Chappell & Scalo (2001b), then for nearly any scale in the midst of these stirring motions, the pressure fluctuations coming from outside a region should dominate the spontaneous pressure fluctuations happening inside the region. On scales that are much smaller or larger than the typical scales at which turbulent energy is deposited, spontaneous evolution should dominate triggered evolution as dense self-gravitating regions contract toward denser states. Inside a cluster-forming core, for example, which is somewhat shielded from common ISM disturbances, the self-gravitating clumps and protostellar condensations should be able to evolve independently toward stars. Also on galactic scales that are too large for common stellar energy sources to perturb in a coherent fashion, gaseous structures like spiral arms grow spontaneously from swing-amplified noise. But over the range of scales between these limits, including the scales for resolved atomic and molecular clouds in galactic surveys, the environment outside a cloud boundary is hostile and often more influential than the environment inside it before star formation begins. For this reason, most diffuse and molecular clouds should be triggered into forming their first generation of stars by random supernova and other specific events. Subsequent generations in the same cloud should be triggered sequentially because the pressure from the first generation will most likely dominate the environmental pressure later.

This balance between internal and external triggers could shift in young starburst regions, which are usually places where the epicyclic frequency and average dynamical rate are very high. If the dynamical time is much less than the lifetime of an O-type star, which is 3 My, requiring ambient ISM densities exceeding $`100`$ cm-3, then spontaneous star formation can proceed for quite a while (in a relative sense) before supernova begin. There should be proportionally less triggering because of this. Also in these regions, high pressures give self-gravitating clouds high velocity dispersions. When this dispersion exceeds $`10`$ km s-1, HII regions are born in near-pressure equilibrium so they do not expand, compress gas, and trigger more star formation.

Similarly, if the star formation rate is extremely low, as in the outer parts of galaxies or during quiescent periods in irregular galaxies, then supernova and other stellar pressures can be rare and pre-existing clouds will not be triggered. Slow spontaneous instabilities then dominate the star formation process, forming giant cloud complexes with dense cool cores if the internal pressure is high enough.

## 5 A Star-Formation Conspiracy

The similarities between the empirical laws of galactic star formation and the threshold and dynamical properties of gravitational instabilities in galaxy disks do not uniquely identify these instabilities as the cause of star formation. Direct compression of pre-existing clouds seems to cause most of the local star formation, while the time and spatial correlations for both gas and young stars suggests that turbulence is involved too. How do these three unique processes work together in such a seamless fashion?

The primary role of the dynamical threshold for column density, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$, is to determine where Jeans-mass clouds form as self-gravity overcomes Coriolis and pressure forces. The localized collapses appear as small spiral arms in the gas and stars, or as beads of clouds in the large stellar arms. The instabilities themselves do not necessarily lead to star formation, although they can, but the motions they induce drive turbulence that compresses the gas further. This secondary compression covers a wide range of scales below the Jeans length and stretches to even greater lengths because of shear. The cascade downward quickly produces very small structure in the cool component of the ISM. The minimum column density threshold ensures that there is such a cool phase available. All of this happens continuously in the main disks of galaxies. The turbulent cascade is relatively fast compared to other processes so we rarely see a perfectly smooth ISM on the scale of the Jeans length. In the outer parts of galaxies, or wherever the column density is less than the minimum for a cool phase, the ISM can be smooth.

Gas motions and cloud formation that are driven on large and intermediate scales by ISM gravity and turbulence could initiate star formation if given the chance, but in the main disks of galaxies there is usually so much activity that external pressure fluctuations tend to initiate star formation first. This is true whether the cloud was made by random turbulent motions in the next larger level of the hierarchy or by pressure-driven accumulations around an existing star formation site. A cloud is also more likely to be externally triggered than to form stars on its own whether it lies in an OB association and has a short internal dynamical time (because of the high environmental pressure), or lies in the intercloud medium and has a long dynamical time scale.

The implication of these considerations is that a fractal ISM, set up by one sequence of processes, is continuously rattled and pounded by pressure fluctuations from another sequence of processes. That is, star formation is often triggered by stellar pressures in clouds that turbulence, self-gravity, and other stellar pressures make. This interpretation explains the empirical laws mentioned in the introduction, it explains the scale-free structure of gas and young star fields, the origin of most turbulence and its connection with gravity, and the common appearance of young clusters in comet-shaped clouds and at the edges of high pressure HII regions. It also explains why the star formation rate in dwarf irregular galaxies, which provide a good test for local processes because they do not have spiral waves, scales better with the blue surface brightness than with either the gas column density or the threshold $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ (Hunter, Elmegreen, & Baker 1998; Brosch, Heller, & Almoznino 1998). The blue surface brightness traces the existing stars, and the pressures from these stars initiate star formation in the turbulent clouds that happen to be nearby.

The size-duration correlation in young star fields remains to be explained. This correlation resembles the size-crossing time correlation for turbulence, making it look like turbulent motions hold clouds in place externally while they form stars internally on the dissipation time, which is the internal turbulent crossing time. Such a process may actually apply to individual stars in the interiors of clouds (e.g. Williams & Myers 2000), but the morphology of such compression contrasts with the cometary and shell-like morphology of star-forming regions on larger scales, which are often adjacent to HII regions or ambient pressure excursions as discussed above.

There is another aspect of triggered star formation that seems to have some bearing on the size-duration correlation. The time scale for triggering by high pressure events is usually comparable to the dynamical time scale in the external, low-pressure medium. For example, the collapse time in compressed layers and shells, while depending only on the internal layer density (Vishniac 1983; McCray & Kafatos 1987), turns out in practice to depend mostly on the external (pre-shock) density at the relatively late time when embedded clusters form.

This external density dependence has been demonstrated in several ways. First, gravitational instabilities on the time scale of the internal density are relatively fast and they accompany the kinematic instabilities that result from shock curvature (Doroshkevich 1980; Welter & Schmid-Burgk 1981; Vishniac 1983, 1994; Nishi 1992; Yoshida & Habe 1992; Kimura & Tosa 1991, 1993; Lubow & Pringle 1993; Strickland & Blondin 1995; Garcia-Segura & Franco 1996). These kinematic instabilities drive strong internal motions (Mac Low & Norman 1993) and probably promote turbulence in the swept-up gas. If they form stars or dense knots, then these ballistic objects will emerge out the front of the layer as it decelerates. They will not be bound to the layer by gravitational forces because the deceleration is large and the layer gravity is small at this stage (see Elmegreen 1989b; Nishi 1992; Nishi & Kamaya 2000). This means that clusters and stars embedded in swept-up shells or layers form by a slower mode of instability.

Most triggered star formation in swept-up gas seems to occur after the layer or shell has become significantly self-gravitating as a whole, which means that the layer thickness is comparable to the internal Jeans length, the Mach number is low, and the internal density is only a factor of order 10 above the external density. For example, strong supernova shocks rarely have young stars in their compressed gas. They are too young for this and various instabilities have fractured the gas into pieces smaller than the Jeans mass (Chevalier & Theys 1975; Vishniac 1983). Only the oldest, largest, and slowest-moving shells have peripheral star formation (e.g., Deul & den Hartog 1990). This observation of late collapse times is confirmed theoretically by direct simulations of decelerating layers (Nishi & Kamaya 2000), and by a series of simulations with various environmental conditions that show instability times in expanding shells always comparable to about 0.2 times the external dynamical time, $`\left(G\rho \right)^{1/2}`$ (Elmegreen, Palouš, & Ehlerová 2002). When the collapse finally does begin, it tends to go very quickly (Elmegreen & Lada 1977; Nishi & Kamaya 2000).

This timing result seems to provide an important link between stellar compression as a trigger for star formation and the duration-size relation. After large-scale gravitational instabilities combined with supernova and other stellar pressures generate turbulence and a corresponding hierarchical density structure, the random stellar pressures continue to pound on the gas and trigger stars. The time scale for this triggering is comparable to the average dynamical time in the region. High-density regions, which tend to be small in a fractal gas, have new stars triggered faster than low density regions, which tend to be large. Thus, star formation moves around in a kpc-size star complex for a long time, with one generation slowly triggering others as a result of expanding HII regions, runaway O-type stars and O stars that evaporated off of clusters, stray supernova, and large-scale expansions into shells. At the same time, star formation propagates around inside each smaller region faster, forming OB subgroups inside of OB associations with the same combination of HII region and supernova pressures, but now on a shorter time scale because of the higher average GMC density. More star formation may be triggered on even shorter times inside the GMC cores. Because each region has a density-size relation originally established by turbulent motions, any process of star formation that operates on the local dynamical time, which includes both spontaneous and triggered star formation, contributes to a size-duration correlation for young stars that mimics the size-crossing time relation in the gas.

An important difference arises in spiral density wave shocks, where pre-existing clouds and gas crowd together to make a high density of young stars (Nikola et al. 2001). Here, there is little deceleration so gravitational collapse occurs on the short time scale of the compressed density rather than the long time scale of the external density. The shock moves at a steady, high-Mach speed through the galaxy, with greater Mach numbers and greater compressions at smaller radii inside corotation. As a result, ballistic condensations that form in the compressed gas stay close to the shock front. Their separation from the front at large radii, where the perpendicular component of the shock speed is small (near corotation) and the compression is also small, is comparable to their separation from the front at small radii, where the perpendicular component of the speed is high and the compression is high. For this reason, HII regions and young stars stay close to the spiral dust lane regardless of the distance from corotation.

There are several numerical models now that include enough about interstellar gas dynamics and star formation to reproduce most of the observations, but no models yet reproduce all of the features discussed here. Nomura & Kamaya (2001) modelled triggered star formation in a turbulent medium and got the size-duration correlation on scales larger than $`50`$ pc as a result of cluster drift at the initial cloud speed. This is the characteristic scale above which the turbulent speed exceeds the random walk speed for their propagating star formation model. Chappell & Scalo (2001b) simulated star formation in collapsing and colliding shells that were driven by other star formation. They also got spatially correlated star fields and a size-duration relation (Scalo & Chappell 1999), but lacked the resolution to see small-scale triggering at the edges of HII regions (see also the review of models like this in Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 2000). Neither of these models discussed the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ threshold nor did they include spiral wave generation as a source of structure and turbulence on larger scales. Wada & Norman (1999, 2001), Wada (2001), and Wada, Spaans, & Kim (2000) modelled a large fraction of a galaxy and reproduced the generation of spiral arms and turbulent structures from gravitational instabilities at the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ threshold. They had triggered star formation in turbulence-generated clouds, with much of the triggering done by random or collective supernovae, as discussed above. They did not include stellar spiral waves, nor did they check to see if there was a size-duration correlation or a Schmidt law. Instead, they studied other statistical properties of their results like the probability density function for gas density (which was a log-normal) and variations in the star formation rate over time.

## 6 Towards a comprehensive theory of star formation

There is no theory yet that can derive the star formation rate from first principles. If an expression like equation (5) is appropriate, then such a theory would determine $`ϵ`$ and $`\omega `$ as functions of scale and other parameters. Most likely, simplifications like this are not possible for a variable mixture of all star formation processes (e.g., Chappell & Scalo 2001b). Still, it is illustrative to consider the Schmidt law again, this time from two other points of view.

First consider the star formation rate in an individual cloud core, where an equation like (5) would be

$$\left(\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Volume}\right)|_{core}ϵ_c\rho _c\omega _c.$$
(6)
Here, $`ϵ_c`$ is the efficiency of star formation inside each dense protostellar core, $`\rho _c`$ is the average core density, and $`\omega _c`$ is the dynamical rate inside the core, which we take to be $`\omega _c=\left(G\rho _c\right)^{1/2}`$. The efficiency inside each core is high enough (perhaps $`50\%`$ – Matzner & McKee 2000) that it does not have much influence on the overall star formation rate; it is essentially constant. The dynamical rate $`\omega _c`$ does not have much influence either if we consider most star formation becomes inevitable when the core density reaches a certain value, like $`\rho _c=10^5m(H_2)`$ cm-3 in the solar neighborhood. At this density, big grains stop gyrating around the magnetic field (Kamaya & Nishi 2000), molecules begin to freeze onto grains (Bergin et al. 2001), and the ionization fraction begins to drop (Caselli et al. 2002). Also, the physical scale is so small that most turbulent motions become subsonic, reducing any tendency for turbulence to fragment the gas further (Goodman et al. 1998). Thus the onset of star formation on a small scale can by marked approximately by a certain density, $`\rho _c`$ (which may vary with galactic environment), and this makes $`\omega _c`$ well-defined, like $`ϵ_c`$. In this sense, the star formation rate, measured as a mass per unit volume per unit time, is about constant in cores that form stars (assuming a threshold density). The accretion rate onto a star is not constant because it is the mass per unit time, without the volume, and so depends on the core velocity dispersion which varies with scale ($`M\omega c^3/G`$).

To extrapolate this core-theory to a galactic-scale theory, we need to include all of the gas is that not forming stars. To do this, we write

$$\left(\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Volume}\right)|_{galaxy}=\left(\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Mass}\right)|_{core}\left(M_{core}/M_{galaxy}\right)\rho =ϵ_c\omega _cf_c\rho $$
(7)
where $`ϵ_c`$, and $`\omega _c`$ have the same meaning as in equation (6), but now $`f_c=M_{core}/M_{galaxy}`$ accounts for the fraction of the gas on the large scale that is in the form of dense, star-forming cores; $`\rho `$ is the average density on this large scale, as in equation (5). If this scale is larger than a scale height, then $`\rho `$ should be replaced by $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ to get the star formation rate per unit area; there should not be much change in $`ϵ_c`$ and $`\omega _c`$ with this substitution. Now we have $`ϵ_c\omega _cf_c`$ as a replacement for $`ϵ\omega `$ in equation (5); $`ϵ_c\omega _cf_c`$ is the product of the star formation rate per unit mass inside unstable cores ($`ϵ_c\omega _c`$) and the mass fraction that these cores represent ($`f_c`$).

One of the interesting aspects of writing the Schmidt law in this way is that it emphasizes the geometry of the gas through the fraction $`f_c`$. If this geometry a more universal property of the ISM than the mixture of all the discrete physical processes that enter into $`\omega `$ in the original theory, given by equation (5), then perhaps we have made some progress toward finding a comprehensive theory.

There does appear to be a universal aspect to gas geometry. Self-similar gas structures seem universal on scales between star-forming cores and the galactic scale height, so we can cover a wide range of galactic volume in our extrapolation from the average density $`\rho `$ down to the star-forming density $`\rho _c`$. What enters mathematically into this extrapolation is the probability distribution function for density, $`p(\rho )`$. More specifically, it is the probability distribution function for the density of gas that is in the form of self-gravitating objects. The pdf of density alone, which is equal to the probability that a certain volume has a density $`\rho `$, has been discussed extensively for turbulent and self-gravitating fluids (Vázquez-Semadeni 1994; Nordlund & Padoan 1999; Klessen 2000; Wada & Norman 2001). It is remarkably invariant in the Wada & Norman (2001) simulation, having a log-normal form even when the density structure comes from a mixture of gravitational instabilities, star-formation pressures, and turbulence.

For a log-normal, the fraction of all the mass with a density larger than some threshold $`\rho _c`$ is given by the normalized integral over $`p(\rho )`$,

$$f_c=\frac{_{\rho _c}^{\mathrm{}}\rho p(\rho )𝑑\rho }{_0^{\mathrm{}}\rho p(\rho )𝑑\rho }$$
(8)
where the normalized pdf is

$$p(\rho )=\frac{1}{\left(2\pi \right)^{1/2}\mathrm{\Delta }}\mathrm{exp}\left(0.5\left[\mathrm{ln}\left(\rho /\rho _p\right)\right]^2/\mathrm{\Delta }^2\right)d\mathrm{ln}\rho /d\rho .$$
(9)
Here, $`\rho _p`$ is the density at the peak of the log-normal, $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ is the Gaussian dispersion in the natural log of the density, and $`d\mathrm{ln}\rho /d\rho =1/\rho `$ converts the $`\mathrm{ln}\rho `$ interval in the definition of the log-normal into a linear interval for the integration.

The fraction of this dense gas that is self-gravitating may not be so easily determined, so the hard problem of generalizing the Schmidt law remains. Nevertheless, equation (8) for $`f_c`$ has several interesting properties.

First, $`f_c`$ approximately agrees with the observed value from the Schmidt law in Kennicutt (1998b) if $`\rho _c/<\rho >10^5`$ for average ISM density $`<\rho >=\rho _p\mathrm{exp}\left(\mathrm{\Delta }^2/2\right)`$ using $`\mathrm{\Delta }=2.3`$ from the simulations in Wada & Norman (2001). (Wada & Norman’s value of 1.41 for the dispersion uses an expression for $`p`$ that does not have the 0.5 factor in the exponent, and which also has a 10-based log in the exponent instead of a natural log.) For example, with $`\rho _c/<\rho >=10^3`$, $`10^4`$, $`10^5`$, and $`10^6`$ mH cm-3, the integral in equation (8)gives $`f_c=10^{1.5}`$, $`10^{2.7}`$, $`10^{4.2}`$, and $`10^{6.2}`$, respectively.

The observed value of $`f_c`$ may be obtained from Kennicutt’s (1998b) expression

$`\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Area}2.5\times 10^4\left({\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Sigma }}{\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{pc}^2}}\right)^{1.4}\mathrm{M}_{}\mathrm{kpc}^2\mathrm{yr}^10.033\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Omega }`$ (10)
for average star formation rate $`SFR`$ out to the edge of the disk, average gas surface density $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ inside the edge, and rotation rate in the outer disk $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$. The coefficient 0.033 comes from an observed conversion rate of 21% ($`=2\pi \times 0.033`$) of the total gas mass per orbit in the outer disk. If this galaxy-average rate results from a local Schmidt law of the same general form, $`\mathrm{SFR}(r)/\mathrm{Area}=ϵ_l\mathrm{\Sigma }(r)\mathrm{\Omega }(r)`$ for local efficiency $`ϵ_l`$, exponential disk $`\mathrm{\Sigma }(r)=\mathrm{\Sigma }_c\mathrm{exp}\left(r/r_D\right)`$, and flat rotation curve, $`\mathrm{\Omega }(r)=\mathrm{\Omega }_Dr_D/r`$ then $`ϵ_l`$ and the factor 0.033 are related by an integral over SFR(r),

$$\frac{_0^{r_{edge}}SFR(r)2\pi r𝑑r}{\pi r_{edge}^2}=0.033\frac{_0^{r_{edge}}\mathrm{\Sigma }(r)2\pi r𝑑r}{\pi r_{edge}^2}\mathrm{\Omega }\left(r_{edge}\right)$$
(11)
giving $`ϵ_l0.033r_D/r_{edge}`$ for typical $`r_D/r_{edge}0.25`$.

To convert this local expression with an angular rotation rate into a local expression with a gas density, we use the fact that most ISM densities are comparable to the tidal density, which gives $`\mathrm{\Omega }\left(2\pi G\rho /3\right)^{1/2}`$. This finally gives the local Schmidt law, now written per unit volume with average density $`\rho `$ instead of $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$,

$$\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Volume}0.033\times 0.25\times \left(2\pi /3\right)^{1/2}\rho \left(G\rho \right)^{1/2}=0.012\rho \left(G\rho \right)^{1/2}.$$
(12)
Considering the definition of $`f_c`$ as the fraction of the interstellar mass denser than $`\rho _c`$, we require $`0.012\left(G\rho \right)^{1/2}=ϵ_cf_c\left(G\rho _c\right)^{1/2}`$, from which we derive

$$f_c=0.012ϵ_c^1\left(\rho /\rho _c\right)^{1/2}.$$
(13)
Setting $`ϵ_c=0.5`$ and $`\rho _c/\rho =10^3`$, $`10^4`$, $`10^5`$, and $`10^6`$ as above, we get $`f_c=10^{3.1}`$, $`10^{3.6}`$, $`10^{4.1}`$, and $`10^{4.6}`$, respectively. Equations (8) and (13) give the same $`f_c10^4`$ at $`\rho _c/<\rho >10^5`$. This implies that the Schmidt law may result from star formation in unstable cores with a density that is always about the same factor times the average ISM density, namely, $`10^5`$.

If instead of the Schmidt law, with its areal rate dependence on the $`1.4`$ power of column density, the total galactic star formation rate is really proportional to the first power of the total gas mass, as suggested by studies that find a constant efficiency (cf. Sect. 2.3), then we should use an observed rate given by

$$\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Volume}\rho /\tau $$
(14)
for constant gas consumption time $`\tau 10^{9.6}`$ years (Boselli, Lequeux, & Gavazzi 2002). In this case, $`ϵ_cf_c\left(G\rho _c\right)^{1/2}1/\tau `$, giving

$$f_c\left[ϵ_c\tau \left(G\rho _c\right)^{1/2}\right]^1,$$
(15)
which has values of $`f_c=10^{3.0}`$, $`10^{3.5}`$, $`10^{4.0}`$, and $`10^{4.5}`$ for $`ϵ_c=0.5`$ and $`\rho _c=10^3`$, $`10^4`$, $`10^5`$, and $`10^6`$ m(H2) cm-3, respectively. Again the theoretical and observational values of $`f_c`$ agree for a fraction $`10^4`$ of the total gas mass in dense cores, but now the threshold core density $`\rho _c`$ has a constant value of $`10^5`$ m(H2) cm-3 instead of a relative value of $`\rho _c/<\rho >10^5`$.

A second implication of equation (8) is that most of the gas does not evolve monotonically toward collapse and the formation of stars. If all of the relevant processes have dynamical timescales, then the rate at which parcels of gas move around in the pdf is $`\rho ^{1/2}p(\rho )`$. This function (or a similar one made with a time scale proportional to another power of density) is also a log-normal in density (write $`\rho ^{1/2}`$ as $`\mathrm{exp}\left(0.5\mathrm{ln}\rho \right)`$ and then complete the square in the exponent), with no density-independent part except near the peak. This means that each parcel of gas has to have some probability of moving both up and down in density. If all of the mass with a density $`\rho _1`$ evolves at the dynamical rate toward a higher density $`\rho _2`$, and then continues to evolve at the dynamical rate to an even higher density $`\rho _3`$, then $`\rho _1^{1/2}p(\rho _1)`$ would have to equal $`\rho _2^{1/2}p(\rho _2)`$ in order to conserve mass. However, $`\rho ^{1/2}p(\rho )`$ decreases as a log-normal for higher densities. Thus there can be no monotonic progression at the dynamical rate toward higher densities. The fact that $`\rho ^{1/2}p(\rho )`$ is higher at lower densities (to the right of the peak) means that the probability for both compression and rarefaction has to be higher at lower densities too. Most clumps in a medium with this pdf will therefore get either compressed or dispersed after a dynamical time. The progression toward higher densities is a random walk along the abscissa of the $`\rho ^{1/2}p(\rho )`$ curve. Once a sufficiently high $`\rho `$ is reached that the collapse becomes monotonic, the pdf should change to a power law like $`p(\rho )\rho ^{0.5}`$.

When star formation is viewed in this way, we can see more clearly the importance of random events. The probability that a clump is destroyed by an external flow goes down with increasing density, in proportion to $`\rho ^{1/2}p(\rho )`$, but it never goes to zero until this pdf is violated, which presumably happens when local gravity becomes so strong that collapse begins. Thus a small clump in one region might survive the random bursts of pressures from external flows around it while an identical clump in another region might not. Observation of the clump alone, without any attention to the distorting flows in the environment, will not give the whole picture of its future evolution.

This probabilistic nature of star formation is the reason why Schmidt-type laws are deceptively simple. They suggest that certain processes are deterministic, when in fact they are not – given our limited knowledge of all the flows and forces in the region. Stochasticity is an unavoidable implication of the presence of interstellar turbulence in star-forming gas. The initial stellar mass function may be stochastic in this sense: we cannot write an equation for the mass of a star that forms in gas with certain bulk properties, but can only give the probability distribution function for all possible stellar masses (e.g., Elmegreen 1999).

Stochasticity in star formation may have another interesting effect. It may lead to time variations that have a fractal quality, with both large- and small-scale, and short- and long-time excursions. Time-average rates are not well-defined when temporal variations are fractal. The financial stock market is an example of a stochastic system with a fractal time behavior (Mandelbrot 1997). Time variations in the star formation rates in galaxies are well known (Rocha-Pinto et al. 2000), with the largest variations appearing in the smallest systems (Hunter 1997), as expected for a stochastic process. This does not identify any particular mechanism for star formation, such as stochastic self-propagating star formation (Gerola, Seiden, & Schulman 1980), but it may implicate the general role of turbulence in establishing the geometric properties of the gas, including the density pdf and the intermittent nature of the flows. The time variations are not likely to be large in the sense that a quiescent galaxy turns into a starburst because of intermittency in turbulence (starbursting dwarfs may be interacting with external matter anyway – Pustilnik et al. 2001), but they can be mild and continuous, as are the variations in real dwarf galaxies (van Zee 2001), having as a signature only the lack of specific and identifiable causes for each variation.

The previous discussion expresses the small-scale view of star formation, first emphasizing what we know about dense clumps and then extrapolating to the average ISM using universal geometric properties. Such an approach may be useful as an illustration of star formation efficiency and turbulent stochastic effects, but it is probably not useful as a means of deriving the global star formation rate from first principles. The bottleneck in the conversion of ambient gas into stars is at the largest scale, which dominates the overall dynamical time because of its low density. Nearly any physical process can form stars on a small scale, considering the very short times involved, without greatly affecting the overall star formation rate on the large scale.

The opposite point of view may be more productive. Considering the sensitivity of the star formation rate to $`\mathrm{\Sigma }/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$, the long-term and large-scale average rate should equal the rate at which the column density increases above the threshold value. This increase comes from vertical infall and in-plane accretion driven by viscous and spiral arm torques. Gravitational instabilities sensitive to $`\mathrm{\Sigma }/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ generate spiral arms and turbulence, and these arms generate torques which lead to accretion. The accretion increases $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$ but does not change $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ much, so in a steady state, all of the excess column density above $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ should form stars, regardless of the mechanisms involved. The link between the star formation rate and the accretion rate can also lead to exponential disk structure (Lin & Pringle 1987).

The problem with this approach is that there is yet no comprehensive theory of interstellar torques and accretion rates that can be used to get $`d\mathrm{\Sigma }/dt`$. The advantage of it, if there were such an accretion theory, is that it can readily account for the large influence that external perturbing galaxies have on the star formation rate through transient enhancements in spiral arm torques. Indeed, the major episodes of star formation in the Milky Way disk correspond to those in the LMC, and both may have occurred at the times of our closest approaches (Rocha-Pinto et al. 2000). It seems futile to try to formulate such variations in terms of $`f_c`$ and a generalized Schmidt law, but not at all unreasonable in terms of a simple rule like $`\mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{Area}d\left(\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}\right)/dt`$.

## 7 Conclusions

The empirical laws of star formation on a large scale suggest that clouds form by gravitational instabilities and compression from turbulence and stellar pressures when an equilibrium cool phase of interstellar matter is available. Gravitational instabilities make spiral arms and beads of star formation along the arms, and they pump energy into turbulence. The instabilities also lead directly to star formation by monotonic collapse in some cases, particularly when the ambient density is high or the environment is quiet. Turbulence structures the gas over a wide range of scales, making a pervasive multifractal network. Turbulence compression can lead directly to star formation too, in the converging parts of the flow. This may be an important formation mechanism for individual stars in the dense cores of molecular clouds. The onset of star formation in the whole cores, however, appears to be related more strongly to the presence of external pressures from other stars. These pressures are inferred from the cometary or flattened morphologies of gas structures enclosing embedded young clusters. The empirical laws and correlations apparently work on large and intermediate scales, even when star formation is triggered on small scales, because the triggering time is usually comparable to the local dynamical time.

This interpretation explains the origin of the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{min}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ thresholds for galaxy-wide star formation, the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }^{1.4}`$ power-law dependence for the average star formation rate, the self-similar structure of interstellar gas and young stars and the associated size-duration correlation for young star fields, and the common appearance of young clusters at the tips of filamentary clouds or at the edges of HII regions and other pressure sources. The emphasis on spiral instabilities as a significant source of turbulence also helps explain why $`\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Sigma }_{crit}`$ in most galaxy disks: spiral instabilities are more directly related to the ratio of these quantities than is the star formation rate.

The Schmidt law suggests that star formation can be viewed in either of two ways: (1) as a process on the scale of individual star-forming cores with a high efficiency and a high rate per unit mass, giving an overall galactic rate equal to this high rate multiplied by the core mass fraction, or (2) as a process on the scale of the galactic disk with an inefficient conversion of gas into stars at the large-scale dynamical rate for the ISM. Both viewpoints give the same result when the density distribution function is a log-normal like that found by Wada & Norman (2001). When the Schmidt law is satisfied, star formation is saturated to its maximum possible value given the low fraction of the gas ($`10^4`$) that is allowed to be dense in a turbulent medium. Detailed triggering mechanisms for individual clusters do not seem to matter for the overall star formation rate. Whatever mixture of physical processes is involved, the fastest rate that stars can form is given by the total gas mass in a dense state divided by the collapse time at that state.

Considerations of star formation with a threshold galactic column density suggest that the rate should have a long-time average that is equal to the accretion rate above this threshold. Models of accretion rates are currently not detailed enough to make this point of view useful.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by NSF grant AST-9870112.


text:
# Is there a “native” band gap in ion conducting glasses?

## Abstract

It is suggested that the spectrum of ion site energies in glasses exhibits a band gap, establishing an analogy between ion conducting glasses and intrinsic semiconductors. This implies that ion conduction in glasses takes place via vacancies and interstitial ions (as in crystals).

Ion conduction in glasses has been studied for many years but there is still no universally accepted theory ste57 ; owe63 ; hav65 ; isa69 ; moy81 ; ang90 ; fun90 ; bun98 . Some theories assume a more or less collective conduction mechanism, others assume that conduction proceeds via defects like vacancies or interstitials. We shall argue that most likely the latter is always the case. The approach taken below is to consider the very basic questions which may be asked.

The obvious first question relates to ion statics:

* What is the nature of the states of the ionic system?

It is quite clear that any glass has a discrete number of possible ion sites and that each ion site has room for just one ion (ions have a substantial volume, moreover there are Coulomb repulsions between ions); as pointed out by Kirchheim and Stolz long time ago kir85  an important consequence is that mobile ions behave like Fermions from the statistical mechanical point of view bar99 ; maa99 . It is also clear that ionic motion takes place via transitions between different distributions of the mobile ions among the available sites.

The next question is:

* What is the nature of the individual ion sites?

Following the commonplace assumption in most previous works we shall assume that the ions do not significantly perturb the network (the dynamic structure model of Bunde, Maass, and Ingram bun94 , of course, challenges this assumption). Given a rigid network there are two possibilities, depending on the strength of the interactions between mobile ions relative to ion-lattice interactions. If interactions among mobile ions are relatively weak, each ion site has a well-defined energy $`ϵ`$ which does not depend on whether or not neighboring sites are occupied. In this case the energy of the ionic system is simply the sum of all mobile ion energies. We shall initially assume that \[mobile\] ion-ion interactions are indeed relatively weak, but later on remove this limitation.

The density of ion site energies is denoted by $`p(ϵ)`$. The spread of energies deriving from the disorder of the glassy matrix is expected to be much larger than $`k_BT`$. Consequently, to a good approximation the following picture applies: States up to an energy $`ϵ_F`$ are filled while states above $`ϵ_F`$ are empty. $`ϵ_F`$ is the so-called Fermi energy. As is well-known from the theory of electronic conduction in solids kit96  there are two possibilities: $`p(ϵ_F)>0`$ corresponds to the Fermi energy lying within an energy band (“metal”), while $`p(ϵ_F)=0`$ corresponds to having the Fermi energy placed between two bands, i.e., the existence of a band gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }>0`$ (“semiconductor”). The “metal” case was first treated by Kirchheim kir83  and more recently by Baranovskii and Cordes bar99 . We argue below that it is more realistic to assume the existence of a band gap.

To be specific, consider the case of an ordinary alkali-oxide glass. The glassy network is created when the melt solidifies at the glass transition. The number of ions is equal to the number of negatively charged non-bridging oxygen (NBO) atoms. Because of Coulomb attraction it is favorable for each NBO atom to have at least one ion site associated with it. The crucial question is whether there are more low- energy ion sites than the number of NBO atoms. Any empty low energy site is basically a hole in the network structure. If there were a substantial fraction of holes, the density of the glass would be considerably lower than the density of crystals of similar composition. This is never the case. We conclude that there is only one low energy site per mobile ion, one per NBO atom. This implies the existence of a band gap.

An alternative argument for the existence of a band gap considers the annealing state of the glass. If the glass is well annealed, all atoms including the ions have been gradually and delicately brought into low-energy states defined by surrounding atoms. It is then highly unlikely that there are more low-energy ion sites than the actual number of ions. Surely, the glass would have to spend energy to produce empty sites carefully optimized for housing an ion, energy spent without reaping any benefits. This is like spending a lot of effort preparing for a guest that in the end prefers to stay elsewhere!

We have arrived at the following picture:

* An ion conducting glass has “native” ion sites, the number of which is equal to the number of ions. There are also “non-native” ion sites in the glass, but these all have energies at least the band gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ higher than that of any native site.

This picture is implicit already in the 1985 paper by Kirchheim and Stolz on tracer diffusion and mobility of interstitials in disordered materials kir85  (cf. Fig. 10).

Proceeding to consider the conduction mechanism, we shall refer by analogy to the theory of electronic conduction in semiconductors kit96 . A semiconductor has two sorts of charge carriers, electrons excited into the conduction band and holes of opposite charge (these are simply electrons missing from the valence band). In an intrinsic semiconductor – the analogue of the ionic glass – the number of mobile electrons is equal to the number of holes. For the ionic glass the analogue of a hole is a vacancy and the analogue of an excited electron is an interstitial ion, i.e., an ion placed in one of the high energy sites unoccupied in the “ground state” of the ionic system. At any given time the number of vacancies is equal to the number of interstitial ions.

If $`\mathrm{\Delta }k_BT`$, as is assumed from here on, the number of both vacancies and interstitial ions is much lower than the number of mobile ions and interstitial sites. In this situation charge transport proceeds via motion of well-defined vacancies and interstitial ions. These are “quasi-particles” with only finite lifetime, but at the low quasi-particle concentrations guarantied by $`k_BT\mathrm{\Delta }`$ their lifetimes are long compared to typical jump times: Just as in semiconductors quasi-particles are created in pairs, move away from each other, and end their life by annihilating. The annihilation is a recombination where an interstitial ion jumps into a vacancy. In most cases the ion and vacancy annihilating are not the same as those originally created in a pair (note that, if they are the same, the entire process has not resulted in any charge transport).

The final question is:

* How do vacancies and interstitial ions move?

Consider a vacancy. To move it should be filled by an ion. This ion either comes directly from another native site or from another native site (after one or more stops at interstitial sites). If $`v`$ is a vacancy and $`i`$ is an interstitial ion, the “direct” mechanism is symbolized

$$vv,$$

while the second mechanism, because the first ion jump creates a $`vi`$ pair, is

$$vvvi\mathrm{}vviv.$$

At low ion concentrations only the indirect mechanism is realistic.

Because of the complete symmetry between vacancies and interstitial ions we can immediately write up the two possible mechanisms for interstitial ion movement: The “direct” mechanism is

$$ii,$$

the “indirect” is

$$iiiv\mathrm{}iivi.$$

So far we have assumed that interactions between mobile ions are weak, corresponding to low mobile ion concentration. It is likely, however, that the above picture applies in general: Because the glass is prepared from the liquid by gradual cooling, the entire ion+glass system has low energy, even for large ion concentrations. In contrast to the dilute case each native ion site energy now has substantial Coulomb contributions from neighboring mobile ions. Nevertheless, it is still to be expected that it takes considerable energy to move an ion out of its native site, simply because the entire system minimized its energy during the glass transition. Note the consistency of the picture: If there is a band gap, the vast majority of mobile ions are to be found at their native site, so the contribution to the native site energy from neighboring mobile ions is there basically all time.

What are the consequences of the proposed picture? Annealing a glass lowers its energy. One thus expects that the native ion sites lower their energy, while the energy of interstitial sites is expected to increase because the structure becomes more tight. Annealing thus increases the band gap. This implies a lowering of the conductivity, as always seen in experiment. Another consequence relates to our understanding of conductivity which is basically charge carrier density times mobility. The analogy to intrinsic semiconductors tells us that there are two types of charge carriers with same density, but not necessarily same mobility. The mobility is measured, e.g., by Hall effect experiments. If the vacancy mobility exceeds that of the interstitials one would see a sign change in the Hall effect. If vacancies and interstitials have same mobility there should be no Hall effect. – Finally, we note that it is possible via correlation factor measurements to distinguish between vacancy and interstitial mechanism weg82 ; hei93 , in other words: determine which of the two has the largest mobility. For the glass of the composition $`\mathrm{Na}_2\mathrm{Si}_2\mathrm{O}_5`$ it is concluded that ion conduction proceeds via interstitials, not vacancies.

To summarize, referring to the fact that glass is produced from liquid we arrive at a picture of glass ion conduction as proceeding via vacancies and interstitial ions. This idea is not new, of course hav65 ; moy81 ; fri72 , but has here been discussed as a direct consequence of the existence of a band gap. Recent computer simulations by Cormack and coworkers and by Heuer and coworkers cor02 ; heu02  are consistent with this picture.

Conclusion: Ionic crystals trivially have a “native” band gap. We suggest that this is also the case for ionic glasses.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work was supported by the Danish Natural Science Research Council.