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# Phase control of La2CuO4 in thin-film synthesis

## I INTRODUCTION

The rare earth copper oxides of the general chemical formula RE2CuO4 take two different crystal structures: K2NiF4 (abbreviated as “ T ”) and Nd2CuO4 (“ T’ ”). The structural difference between T and T’ can be viewed simply as the difference in the RE-O arrangements: rock-salt-like versus fluorite-like. With regard to the Cu-O coordination, however, there is a significant difference: T has octahedral CuO6, whereas T’ has two-dimensional square-planar CuO4. Empirically, the former accepts only hole doping, the latter only electron doping. The T structure is formed with large La3+ ions, while the T’ structure is formed with smaller RE3+ ions, such as RE = Pr, Nd, Sm, Eu, and GdNd2CuO4 . The T-T’ boundary lies between La3+ and Pr3+. Namely, La2CuO4 is at the borderline of the T-phase stability.

The crystal chemistry of the rare earth copper oxides has been explained in terms of the crystallographic tolerance factor ($`t`$)RE2CuO4 ; (LaLn)2CuO4 , which is defined as

$$t=\frac{r_i(\mathrm{RE}^{3+})+r_i(\mathrm{O}^2)}{\sqrt{2}\times \{r_i(\mathrm{Cu}^{2+})+r_i(\mathrm{O}^2)\}}$$
(1)
where ri(RE3+), ri(Cu2+), and ri(O2-) are the ionic radii for RE3+, Cu2+, and O2- ions. The $`t`$ values for La2CuO4 and Pr2CuO4 are evaluated as 0.8685 and 0.8562 using the room-temperature ionic radii by Shannon and PrewittIonic . From the extensive data collected for a variety of RE2CuO4-type cuprates, the critical (room-temperature) value for the T $``$ T’ transition is presumed to be $`t_\mathrm{c}`$ = 0.865, below which T is unstableRE2CuO4 ; (LaLn)2CuO4 .

The different thermal expansion (“thermal-expansion mismatch”) between the RE-O and Cu-O bond lengths plays an important role in the T-versus-T’ stability as pointed out initially by Manthiram and GoodenoughThermal . The “ionic” RE-O bond has a larger thermal expansion than the “covalent” Cu-O bond, which leads to the increase in $`t`$ with increasing temperature. Hence the T phase is stable at high temperatures whereas the T’ phase is stable at low temperatures. In the case of La2CuO4, the transition from T to T’ is predicted to occur at around 700 K (427C), where $`t`$(700 K) $``$ 0.88. There have been a few attempts to stabilize the T’ phase of La2CuO4 in the past. However, a conventional solid-state reaction method requires firing temperature of at least 500C even with coprecpitated fine powders, so it could not produce single-phase T’-La2CuO4. Bulk synthesis of T’-La2CuO4 has been achieved only by a very special recipe as given by Chou et al.T'  Their recipe consists of the following two steps. The first step is to reduce T-La2CuO4 with hydrogen around 300C and obtain the Sr2CuO3-like phase. The second step is to convert the Sr2CuO3-like phase to T’-La2CuO4 by reoxygenation below 400C. The resultant product was the single-phase T’, although x-ray peaks were broadened due to the considerable lattice disorder and defects.

In thin-film synthesis, the reaction temperature can be lowered significantly, since reactants are much smaller in size and also more reactive than in bulk synthesis. The reactants in thin-film synthesis are atoms or molecules or ions or clusters, depending on the technique employed. The limiting case is achieved by reactive coevaporation from metal sources, in which the reactants are atoms and the oxidation reaction is initiated on a substrate. Using this reactive coevaporation technique, we have learned from our ten-year experience that cuprate films crystallize at temperatures as low as 400C. This enabled us to synthesize single-phase T’-La2CuO4. In this article we describe the phase control of “K2NiF4”-type La2CuO4 versus “Nd2CuO4”-type La2CuO4 by varying the synthesis temperature and using different substrates.

## II EXPERIMENT

We grew La2CuO4 thin films in a customer-designed MBE chamber from metal sources using multiple electron-gun evaporators with accurate stoichiometry control of the atomic beam fluxes. During growth, RF activated atomic oxygen was used for oxidation. The chamber pressure during growth was $`6\times 10^6`$ Torr. The substrate temperature was varied from 425C to 725C. The growth rate was $``$ 1.5 Å/s, and the film thickness was typically 450 Å. After the evaporation, most of the films were cooled to temperatures lower than 200C at a rate lower than 20C/min in $`1\times 10^5`$ Torr molecular oxygen to avoid phase decomposition. Some of the films were cooled in vacuum or in ozone to investigate the change of the transport properties by excess oxygen.

In order to examine the substrate influence on the selective phase stabilization(LaNdSr)2CuO4 , we used various substrates as listed in Table 1. The in-plane lattice constant ($`a_\mathrm{s}`$) covers from 3.6 Å to 4.2 Å , which should be compared to $`a_0`$ = 3.803 Å for T-La2CuO4 and $`a_0`$ = 4.000 - 4.010 Å for T’-La2CuO4 (T-La2CuO4 has orthorhombic structure with $`a^{}=5.3574`$ Å and $`b^{}=5.4005`$ Å, and $`a_0`$ is calculated as $`\sqrt{(a^{}\times b^{})/2}`$). The crystal structures include perovskite, K2NiF4, NaCl, and CaF2 (fluorite). We deposited films simultaneously on all the substrates listed in Table 1, which were pasted to one substrate holder by Ag paint. This avoids run-to-run variations.

The lattice parameters and crystal structures of the films were determined using a standard x-ray diffractometer. Resistivity was measured by the standard four-probe method using electrodes formed by Ag evaporation.

## III RESULTS and DISCUSSION

### III.1 Effect of synthesis temperature on the selective phase stabilization

Figure 1 shows the x-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns of La2CuO4 films grown on NdCaAlO4 (NCAO) substrates with different synthesis temperatures ($`T_\mathrm{s}`$). Since the $`c`$-axis lattice constant ($`c_0`$) is distinct between T and T’ ($`c_0`$(T) = 13.15 Å versus $`c_0`$(T’) = 12.55 Å), the phase identification is rather straightforward. The calculated patterns for T and T’ are also included in Fig. 1. The films grown at $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ $`>`$ 625C are single-phase T, while the films grown at $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ = 500 - 550C are single-phase T’. The films grown at $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ = 575 - 600C are a two-phase mixture of T and T’ with T’ more dominant for lower $`T_\mathrm{s}`$. The films grown below $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ = 475C show unidentified peaks at 2$`\theta `$ $``$ 31.4 and 65.5. From this result, we can see the following trend for synthesis temperature on the selective phase stabilization. High $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ stabilizes T and low $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ stabilizes T’.

### III.2 Effect of substrates on the selective phase stabilization

Figure 2 shows the XRD patterns of La2CuO4 films grown at $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ = 525C on different substrates. Of these films in this figure, the films on KTaO3 (KTO), NCAO, and ZrO2(Y) (YSZ) are single-phase T’YSZ , while the films on LaSrGaO4 (LSGO), LaAlO3 (LAO), LaSrAlO4 (LSAO), PrSrAlO4 (PSAO), and NdSrAlO4 (NSAO) are single-phase T. On YAlO3, the film is dominantly T’ with a trace amount of T. On SrTiO3 (STO) and NdGaO3 (NGO), the films are clearly a mixture of T and T’. The film on STO contains some amount of the T-like (!) phaseT\* . On MgO (MGO), no clear peak is observed. The $`c_0`$ values of these films together with films on other substrates are summarized in Fig. 3. Because of epitaxial strainstrain , $`c_0`$ of the T structure is noticeably substrate-dependent: the longest ($`c_0`$ = 13.25 Å) for LSAO and the shortest ($`c_0`$ = 13.05 Å) for LSGO. From these results, we can see the following trend for a substrate lattice parameter on the selective phase stabilization. Substrates with $`a_0`$ of 3.70 - 3.85 Å stabilize T, and substrates with $`a_0`$ of $`>`$ 3.90 Å or $`<`$ 3.70 Å stabilize T’ (or destabilize T).

Next we mention the effect of substrate crystal structure on the selective phase stabilization. If, in Fig. 2, one compares the films grown on perovskite and K2NiF4-type substrates with almost the same $`a_0`$, for example, NGO ($`a_0`$ = 3.838 Å) vs LSGO ($`a_0`$ = 3.843 Å) or YAO ($`a_0`$ = 3.715 Å) vs NSAO ($`a_0`$ = 3.712 Å), one can notice the trend that K2NiF4-type substrates have a tendency to stabilize the T structure rather than the T’ structure.

### III.3 Phase diagram in the $`T_\mathrm{s}`$-$`a_\mathrm{s}`$ plane

Our survey was performed at $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ from 425C to 725C on all substrates in Table 1. Figure 4 summarizes the results, which show the phase diagram on the selective stabilization of T versus T’ in the $`T_\mathrm{s}`$-$`a_\mathrm{s}`$ plane.
High $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ (625 $``$ 725C)
The films on most of the substrates are single-phase T. There are three exceptional substrates: KTO, YAO, and YSZ. The films on KTO and YSZ do not show any definite x-ray peak. The film on YAO is a mixture of T and T’ even at the highest temperature investigated. This can be explained by interdiffusion of Y from YAO substrates into La2CuO4 since Y substitution for La is known to stabilize the T’ structure.
Low $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ (450 $``$ 600C)
The films on the T-lattice matched substrates (LSGO, LAO, LSAO, PSAO, and NSAO) are single-phase T. The films on T’-lattice matched KTO and on fluorite YSZ are single-phase T’. The films on other substrates (STO, NGO, YAO, and NCAO) are a two-phase mixture of T and T’ with T’ more dominant for lower $`T_\mathrm{s}`$.

### III.4 Comparison of T-La2CuO4 and T’-La2CuO4

Next, we make a brief comparison of the physical properties of T-La2CuO4 and T’-La2CuO4, which have the same chemical formula but different crystal structures. Figure 5 shows the temperature dependences of resistivity for both the phases. The solid lines represent the $`\rho `$ \- $`T`$ curves for the films cooled in vacuum to ambient temperature, which do not have excess oxygen but might have slight oxygen deficiencies (La2CuO4+δ with $`\delta 0`$). The broken lines represent those for the films cooled in ozone, which have interstitial excess oxygen ($`\delta >0`$)ozone . The excess oxygen occupies the tetrahedral site in T, and the apical site in T’. The vacuum-cooled T film has much higher resistivity (by several orders of magnitudes at low temperatures) than the vacuum-cooled T’ film. In fact, T’-La2CuO4 is metallic down to 180 KmetallicT' . The ozone cooling causes a totally opposite effect on T and T’. The resistivity of the T film gets lowered by five orders of magnitudes at room temperature from $`50\mathrm{\Omega }\mathrm{cm}`$ to $`5\times 10^4\mathrm{\Omega }\mathrm{cm}`$, indicating that holes doped by excess oxygen are itinerant. Furthermore the film becomes superconducting. In contrast, the resistivity of the T’ film increases, indicating that holes doped by excess oxygen are localizedmetallicT' .

## IV SUMMARY

In summary, we have demonstrated that La2CuO4 can crystallize in the Nd2CuO4 structure using low-temperature thin-film synthesis. Furthermore the phase control of “K2NiF4”-type La2CuO4 versus “Nd2CuO4”-type La2CuO4 can be achieved by varying the synthesis temperature and also the substrate. The general trends are as follows: (i) high $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ stabilizes T and low $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ stabilizes T’, (ii) substrates with $`a_\mathrm{s}`$ $``$ 3.70 - 3.85 Å stabilize T and substrates with $`a_\mathrm{s}`$ $`>`$ 3.90 Å or $`a_\mathrm{s}`$ $`<`$ 3.70 Å stabilize T’ (or destabilize T), and (iii) K2NiF4-type substrates stabilize T.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors thank Dr. H. Sato, Dr. H. Yamamoto, Dr. S. Karimoto, and Dr. T. Yamada for helpful discussions, and, Dr. H. Takayanagi and Dr. S. Ishihara for their support and encouragement throughout the course of this study.


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# Correlating galaxy morphologies and spectra in the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey

## 1 Introduction

The classification of galaxies according to their observed morphologies has proved to be a very useful way of characterising different galaxy populations (see e.g. Hubble 1936). However, the high-resolution imaging data required to make such accurate morphological classifications, over a wide range of redshifts, is often unavailable in large galaxy redshift surveys. In this paper, a selection of different statistical methods are investigated, with the aim of establishing a quantifiable link between a galaxy’s morphology and its observed optical spectrum; thousands of which are now available through the advent of large galaxy redshift surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (York et al. 2000) and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS, Colless et al. 2001). In particular, a set of 4000 galaxies which have already been observed in the 2dFGRS, for which the morphology and spectrum have been determined, is used as a training set. It has long been established that a substantial link exists between the overall structure of a galaxy and the chemical properties reflected in its spectrum - which quantifies its stellar and gas composition (e.g. Morgan & Mayall 1957). However, efforts to quantify this relationship have been somewhat hampered due to the lack of large, representative, data-sets. For example, Folkes, Lahav & Maddox (1996) used a sample of only 26 unique galaxy spectra and morphologies in a similar analysis to that presented here. This is fortunately no longer an issue with the advent of fibre-based galaxy redshift surveys, which are able to acquire several hundred galaxy spectra per hour.

These surveys are producing extremely large data-sets for which the spectrum of a galaxy is known but its detailed structural parameters generally are not, or are very difficult to determine accurately from the photometry of the input catalogue over a representative redshift range. Fortunately, the spectrum of a galaxy is generally a more robust quantity to measure over a variety of redshifts and as such if a substantive link between optical spectra and these parameters can be determined this will greatly enhance our ability to probe the properties of our local galaxy population.

Another more specific advantage of being able to determine a galaxy’s morphology from its spectrum is that it allows the identification of targets for peculiar velocity follow-ups (using either $`D_n\sigma `$ for elliptical galaxies or the Tully-Fisher relation for spirals).

In this paper two statistical techniques are investigated, to determine how accurately morphology can be estimated from a galaxy’s optical spectrum. Both methods are ‘supervised’ - meaning that they require a training set of galaxies with both visually determined morphologies and observed spectra. The first method to be implemented is Fisher’s linear discriminant (Section 4), which attempts to determine an optimal linear combination of inputs (the spectrum) to distinguish between several outputs (the morphologies). The second method is an Artificial Neural Network (ANN, Section 5) which creates non-linear combinations of the input, and outputs a selection of class probabilities. The possible biases introduced into this work by systematic effects are described in Section 6 and then the success rates of each method are compared to those achieved using the default 2dFGRS spectral classification parameter, $`\eta `$, in Section 7.

## 2 Galaxy Morphologies in the 2dFGRS

A number of galaxies in the 2dFGRS have already had their morphologies determined manually by direct examination of the APM Galaxy Survey images (Maddox et al. 1990a,b see Fig. 1). The accuracy and completeness of this sample varies a great deal depending on the source of the classification and the range of galaxy magnitudes considered. In what follows I primarily make use of those galaxies which were ascribed morphologies in the APM Bright Galaxy Catalogue (Loveday 1996). This catalogue provides a complete sample of classified galaxies down to a magnitude limit of $`b_\mathrm{J}=16.44`$. The exact value of this magnitude limit now varies across the sky due to recent re-calibrations of the APM magnitudes (see e.g. Colless et al. 2001 for details of the most recent calibrations of those galaxies included in the 2dFGRS), however this will not have any substantial impact upon the representativeness of our classified sample. A significant number of galaxies at fainter magnitudes also have morphologies determined from other sources, but these will be substantially less reliable and so are not used in this analysis.

Of those $`b_\mathrm{J}<16.5`$ galaxies which have been successfully observed so far in the 2dFGRS, 3899 have a morphological classification (Fig. 2). The galaxy morphologies are given in four broad bins: Elliptical, S0, Spiral and Irregular. However, in the analysis presented here they are rebinned into only two classes; Early (Elliptical,S0) and Late (Spiral,Irregular) types. The reasons for doing so are two-fold: Firstly, the number of classified galaxies which have been identified as S0 or Irregular are significantly smaller than the number of Spirals. Therefore the identification of these types will be greatly hindered by the presence of Spiral outliers - which effectively swamp out any identifying signal which may arise from these types. Secondly, the distinction between Early and Late type galaxies is of fundamental importance to observational cosmology since each can be used in its own redshift-independent distance estimator, i.e. $`D_n\sigma `$ for Early types (Dressler et al. 1987) and the Tully-Fisher relation for Late types (Tully & Fisher 1977).

Note that this sample of galaxies consists entirely of relatively bright, nearby galaxies and so may not be representative of the entire 2dFGRS galaxy population. Another important point to bear in mind is that as these galaxies are relatively extended on the sky, the spectra observed of them (through the fixed fibre aperture of the 2dF instrument) may not be representative of the entire galaxy. This so called ‘aperture effect’ is a difficult issue to address and has led to much discussion in the literature (see e.g. Kochanek, Pahre & Falco, 2000; Madgwick et al. 2002). The possible impact of aperture effects on our results is discussed further in Section 6.

## 3 Galaxy spectra in the 2dFGRS

The purpose of this analysis is to relate the spectrum of a galaxy to its morphology. In the case of the 2dFGRS each spectrum consists of 1024 channels spanning the wavelength range of approximately 3700-8000Å, thereby including all the major optical diagnostics between O\[ii\] and H$`\alpha `$ (see Folkes et al. 1999, for further details). As an illustration, the average 2dFGRS spectrum for a representative volume-limited sample is shown in Fig. 3.

Rather than dealing with all 1024 spectral channels in the subsequent analysis (to represent a given spectrum), it is possible to take advantage of the fact that the vast majority of these channels are redundant by means of some form of data compression. In the analysis presented here use is made of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA, see e.g. Murtagh & Heck 1987) since this compression algorithm has met with considerable success in dealing with galaxy spectra (e.g. Connolly et al. 1995; Galaz & de Lapparent 1998; Folkes et al. 1999; Madgwick et al. 2002).

### 3.1 Review of PCA

PCA is a well established statistical technique which has proved very useful in dealing with high dimensional data sets. In the particular case of galaxy spectra we are typically presented with approximately 1000 spectral channels per galaxy, however when used in applications this is usually compressed down to just a few numbers, either by integrating over small line features - yielding equivalent widths - or over wide colour filters. The key advantage of using PCA in our data compression is that it allows us to make use of all the information contained in the spectrum of a galaxy in a statistically unbiased way, i.e. without the use of such ad hoc filters.

In order to perform the PCA on our galaxy spectra we first construct a representative volume limited sample of the galaxies. When we apply the PCA to this sample it constructs an orthogonal set of components (eigenspectra, herein denoted $`\mathrm{𝐏𝐂}_1`$,$`\mathrm{𝐏𝐂}_2`$,etc) which span the wavelength space occupied by the galaxy spectra. These components have been specifically chosen by the PCA in such a way that as much information (variance) is contained in the first eigenspectrum as possible, and that the amount of the remaining information in all the subsequent eigenspectra is likewise maximised. Therefore, if the information contained in the first $`n`$ eigenspectra is found to be significantly greater than that in the remaining eigenspectra we can significantly compress the data set by swapping each galaxy spectrum (described by 1000 channels) with just those first $`n`$ projections (denoted $`pc_1`$,$`pc_2`$ etc). The variances corresponding to the first 10 principal components derived in this manner are shown in Table 1.

Note that the PCA is merely a statistical tool, we do not imply (yet) that any of these components are physically significant, but rather we are merely using them as a method of data compression.

During the PCA analysis it was found that the eigenspectra became dominated by unphysical broad features from the fifth eigenspectrum ($`\mathrm{𝐏𝐂}_5`$) onwards. This was due to artifacts from sky emission features which we were unable to completely remove during the spectral reduction. Rather than restrict our future analysis to only the first four principal components, we have instead repeated the analysis with the wavelength range 5850-6200Å masked out. This has no noticeable effect on the original first four eigenspectra, all of which are essentially identical between the two PCA implementations. However, it does allow us to probe deeper into the PCA space than we would otherwise have been able to (up to $`\mathrm{𝐏𝐂}_9`$) .

It is worth noting that most galaxy spectra can be accurately reconstructed using only the first 4-5 principal components. In our subsequent analysis we make use of the first nine (this choice is justified in detail by Folkes, Lahav & Maddox 1996).

In order to gain some initial understanding of the link between galaxy spectra and morphologies, histograms are shown in Fig. 4 of the distributions of principal component projections for both Early and Late type galaxies. Also plotted are the eigenspectra for each of these projections, which illustrate what spectral features are encoded in the respective projections (Fig. 5). Included in each of these plots are the corresponding results for the $`\eta =0.5pc_1pc_2`$ projection which is used to spectrally classify the 2dFGRS galaxies (see next Section). It can be seen that most of the first nine principal components encode some degree of information about the morphology of a galaxy, although none are capable of separating Early from Late type galaxies accurately (with the exception of the $`\eta `$ spectral classification). The aim of the analysis presented in this paper is essentially to determine if it is possible to improve the separation between Early and Late types by taking either linear (Fisher Analysis, Section 4) or non-linear (Artificial Neural Networks, Section 5) combinations of these projections.

### 3.2 Spectral classification in the 2dFGRS

The 2dF instrument (Lewis et al. 2002) was designed to measure large numbers of redshifts in as short an observing time as possible. However, in order to optimise the number of redshifts that can be measured in a given period of time, compromises have had to be made with respect to the spectral quality of the observations. Therefore if one wishes to characterise the observed galaxy population in terms of their spectral properties care must be taken in order to ensure that these properties are robust to the instrumental uncertainties.

The quality and representativeness of the observed spectra can be compromised in several ways and a full list is presented in previous work (see e.g. Madgwick et al. 2002). The net effect is that the uncertainties introduced into the fibre-spectra predominantly affect the calibration of the continuum slope and have relatively little impact on smaller-scale features such as the emission/absorption line strengths. For this reason any given galaxy spectrum which is projected into the plane defined by ($`pc_1`$,$`pc_2`$) will not be uniquely defined in the direction of varying continuum but will be robust in the orthogonal direction (which measures the average line strength, see Fig. 6).

The projection onto this robust axis is denoted by $`\eta `$ (ETA\_TYPE in the 2dFGRS catalogue111http://www.mso.anu.edu/2dFGRS/),

$$\eta =apc_1pc_2.$$
(1)
Where $`a`$ is a constant which we find empirically to be $`a=0.5\pm 0.1`$. This (continuous) variable $`\eta `$, being the single most important component of the galaxy spectra which was robust to instrumental uncertainties, was chosen as the measure of spectral type in 2dFGRS.

Note that although $`\eta `$ is a continuous measure of type, it is often useful to divide a galaxy sample into different bins to simplify subsequent analyses. One of the most common divisions to make is to separate those galaxies with $`\eta <1.4`$ from those with $`\eta 1.4`$, referred to as relatively quiescent and star-forming galaxies respectively.

## 4 Fisher’s Linear Discriminant

It is clear from the trends in Fig. 4 that morphology is indeed related to the spectra of galaxies although, with the exception of the $`\eta `$ spectral classification, the correspondence is not particularly pronounced. However, as shown by $`\eta `$, it may be possible to improve this situation by taking various linear combinations of the projections in order to isolate those particular parts of a galaxy’s spectrum which contain the most information regarding its morphology.

In this section a method first proposed by Fisher (see e.g. Bishop 1995 and references therein) is considered, for linearly reducing data dimensionality (in this case we hope to go from our 9 principal components to 1 morphology) in a way which will optimally distinguish between different classes of objects. Strictly speaking this method will not create a discriminant between the two classes but rather, once we have reduced the dimensionality, it should become clear how to divide the sample.

As mentioned before, this method is a linear approach to this problem. In the next section this will be generalised to consider the possibility of a non-linear relationship between morphology and spectra through the use of Artificial Neural Networks.

### 4.1 Mathematical formulation

The mathematical formulation of Fisher’s linear discriminant is straight-forward. We consider a set of input vectors $`𝐱`$; we wish to determine the weights $`𝐰`$, such that the projection $`𝐲`$ is the most discriminatory between our two classes,

$$𝐲=𝐰^T𝐱$$
(2)
The mean vectors $`𝐦_1`$ and $`𝐦_2`$ of each class are given by,

$$𝐦_k=\frac{1}{N_k}\underset{nC_k}{}𝐱^n.$$
(3)
Here $`nC_k`$ are the elements of class $`C_k`$ (in this case $`k=\{1,2\}`$ for Early and Late types respectively). After projection, the scalar separation between the means will be,

$$m_2m_1=𝐰^T(𝐦_2𝐦_1),$$
(4)
and the within-class covariance is,

$$s^2=\underset{nC_k}{}(y^nm_k)^2$$
(5)
Fisher’s assertion was that the optimal mapping to be used in reducing our dimensionality should be such as to maximise,

$$J(𝐰)=\frac{(m_2m_1)^2}{s_1^2+s_2^2}.$$
(6)
This is easy to interpret physically: We wish to find a set of weights $`𝐰`$ such as to maximise the mean separation between the two classes $`(m_2m_1)`$ after we have performed our projection. The variance in the denominator takes into account the fact that our initial vectors $`𝐱`$ may have different spreads and hence differing degrees of overlap in different directions. Clearly we wish to find a projection which minimises this overlapping between our two classes.

To determine the optimal weights we simply need to re-introduce the explicit weight dependence into Eqn. 6 and differentiate. It is shown in Bishop (1995) that the solution is then,

$$𝐰𝐒_{𝐰}^{}{}_{}{}^{1}(𝐦_2𝐦_1).$$
(7)
Where,

$$𝐒_𝐰=\underset{C}{}\underset{nC}{}(𝐱^n𝐦_c)(𝐱^n𝐦_c)^T$$
(8)
is the total within-class covariance matrix. Equation 7 only yields the direction of the weight vector, not its magnitude. Conventionally the magnitude of $`𝐰`$ is taken to be such that $`_iw_i^2=1`$.

### 4.2 Classification using the Fisher analysis

After performing the Fisher analysis on the complete set of morphologically classified 2dFGRS galaxies, the resulting weighting vector is found to be,

$$𝐰=(1.2,1.3,3.5,0.18,0.34,0.96,0.68,6.5,6.4)/10.$$
(9)
Figure 7 shows the resulting Fisher projections using these weights for both the known Early and Late type galaxies in the 2dFGRS. It is clear from this figure that the method has been relatively successful in that the distinction between Early and Late type galaxies is now much more pronounced than for any of the individual principal components (Fig. 4).

Having derived this projection it is now necessary to determine ‘by-hand’ a cut that we will use to distinguish Early from Late type galaxies in the future. The actual cut adopted will, of course, depend on the specific application for which one requires the galaxies to be classified. For example, if one requires a complete sample of Early type galaxies a relatively high cut should be adopted compared to if one requires a relatively ‘pure’ sample. We note that in the context of deriving a pure sample, the results appear to be somewhat disappointing in that the Fisher analysis does not appear to be as discriminatory between Early and Late type galaxies as would otherwise have been hoped.

From Fig. 7 we conclude that a good general distinction between Early and Late type galaxies can be achieved by cutting the distribution at $`0.55`$. Using this cut gives the total number of galaxies classed Early and Late as (814,454) and (475,2156) respectively, where ($`x1`$,$`x2`$) represents $`x1`$ galaxies that are genuinely Early type and $`x2`$ that are genuinely Late type. Note that the contamination between types will vary substantially depending on the selection criteria of the redshift survey, and so we are primarily interested in the success rates of the classification i.e. 63% of Early types and 82% of Late types successfully classified, as opposed to the degree of contamination.

The distribution shown if Fig. 7 is very similar to that shown in Fig. 4 for $`\eta `$. Indeed, Fig. 8 shows the $`(pc_1,pc_2)`$ projections for our sample of galaxies separately, depending on whether they satisfied the Fisher $`0.55`$ criterion for being Early or Late type. Over-plotted on this figure is the cut imposed to classify the 2dFGRS into Type 1 (Quiescent) galaxies using $`\eta `$ (see Section 3.2). The correspondence is remarkable. Clearly much of the physical information carried in the PCA eigenspectra is contained in the first two principal components. It is also interesting that repeating the Fisher analysis using only these first two principal components yields a classification parameter very similar to $`\eta `$ (with very similar success of classification). These two forms of classification (Fisher and $`\eta `$) are contrasted further in Section 7.

It is worth noting that most spectral classifications are in fact indirectly anchored to morphological types by use of a training set (e.g. the Kennicutt Atlas, Kennicutt 1992) of galaxy spectra for which the morphology is known (see e.g. Connolly et al. 1995; Folkes et al. 1999). However, in the case of the 2dFGRS, $`\eta `$ was chosen purely on the grounds of robustness with respect to instrumental uncertainties in determining the spectral continuum. This point is discussed further in Section 7.

### 4.3 Spectral features

If we combine the PCA eigenspectra (Fig. 5) using our derived weighting vector $`𝐰`$ we can determine which spectral features are being used by the Fisher criterion to measure galaxy morphology. This spectrum is shown in Fig. 9.

It must be borne in mind, when attempting to interpret this spectrum, that the PCA is mean-subtracted, i.e. the average 2dFGRS spectrum has been subtracted from each individual spectrum before calculating it’s projection (see Fig. 3). Therefore negative values in this eigenspectrum represent either absorption or below average emission, whereas positive values correspond to above average emission.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the spectrum shown in Fig. 9 is its overall lack of nebular emission features, despite the fact that these dominate most of the PCA eigenspectra (see Fig. 5). It is interesting that this spectrum, which is so clearly different to that used to calculate $`\eta `$ (see top panel of Fig. 5), should give such a similar classification. Clearly there is a very pronounced correlation between the nebular emission features used to calculate $`\eta `$, and the strength of the 4000Å break and (to a lesser degree) the H$`\alpha `$ emission line, as measured by this combined eigenspectrum. The apparent broad feature at 5200Å (corresponding to the Mgb absorption line) is an artifact introduced due to our truncating the series of eigenspectra just as this feature was becoming prominent in them (it can be clearly seen in $`\mathrm{𝐏𝐂}_8`$ and $`\mathrm{𝐏𝐂}_9`$ in Fig. 5), and as such this is not contributing to the success of the classification itself.

In fact it is possible to determine more accurately exactly what parts of this spectrum are being used by the Fisher criterion to determine morphology by ‘masking-out’ certain segments of the combined eigenspectrum of Fig. 9, and then seeing how accurately one can recover the same classification (after re-projecting the galaxy spectra onto it). By doing this it can be shown that the entire classification is based on the part of the eigenspectrum below 4800Å, and hence that the morphology of a galaxy can be most accurately determined from the size of the 4000Å break, without the use of any further spectral information (although using the entire spectrum does not degrade the result, and hence will continue to be used throughout this work).

## 5 Artificial Neural Networks

This section further refines the analysis of the previous section by considering the possibility of a nonlinear relationship between a galaxy’s spectrum and its morphology. This is done by making use of an Artificial Neural Network, which is trained to identify galaxy morphology after being inputted with the galaxy spectra (from the first nine PCA eigenspectra).

### 5.1 Brief description

An artificial Neural Network (ANN) is a mathematical construct originally designed to simulate the functioning of the brain (see e.g. Ripley 1996). The network itself is designed around a set of layers, consisting of input nodes, hidden nodes and output nodes. The connections between these nodes can be quite complex and in most instances all the nodes in a previous layer are connected to all the nodes in the next layer. Because of this complexity the ANN can train itself to recognise highly nonlinear relationships between the inputs and the outputs we desire.

Each connection between two nodes has an associated weight, $`u_{ij}`$. The total input to any given node is the sum of all the individual inputs weighted by $`u_{ij}`$. Each node takes this total input and applies a transfer function to it, before passing it on to the next node. The transfer function is generally taken to be a sigmoid function,

$$f(z)=\frac{1}{1+\mathrm{exp}(z)},$$
(10)
since this keeps the output in the range , hence limiting the variation in the possible weighting schemes.

In order to train the network we need to establish a cost function. This is usually taken to be the Euclidean separation between the desired outputs, $`T_i`$, we hope to receive (at each of our output nodes), and the actual outputs, $`F(𝐮,x_i)`$,

$$E=\frac{1}{2}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}[T_iF(𝐮,x_i)]^2$$
(11)
All the weights in our network are initially set to random values. The network is then trained on our training data-set by inputing the first four principal components and comparing the output to the desired morphology of each object. The weights are adjusted by means of back-propagation until a global minimum in the cost function is found. The network is then fully trained and can be run on the testing set to establish its success.

Another aspect of neural networks is that of weight decay, whereby one can specify an additional factor in the cost function in order to restrain the magnitude of the weights. We do not make use of this refinement for the following reason: If one specifies multiple outputs for the neural network (in our case two outputs, corresponding to Early and Late) these can in fact be interpreted as the probabilities that a galaxy belongs to either class - so long as the weight decay is set to 0.

Further details about the mathematical formulation and interpretation of ANNs is given in e.g. Lahav et al. (1996) and Bishop (1995).

### 5.2 Results from the ANN

The ANN was run using three different configurations, all of which had 9 inputs and 2 outputs, and as such were only distinguished by the structure and size of their hidden layers. The first network used had a single hidden layer of 5 nodes (configuration 9:5:2), the second increased this to 9 nodes (configuration 9:9:2), and the final ANN had two hidden layers with 5 nodes each (configuration 9:5:5:2).

In each case the network required both a ‘training’ and a ‘testing’ data set. Because there were so many more Late than Early type galaxies in our sample (2631 versus 1268 respectively), 800 of each type were randomly selected for the purposes of training. The reason that equal numbers of each type were used for training the ANN was because ANNs are essentially complicated Bayesian classifiers, as such the detection of each type will be biased by by the prior distributional information of that type, which is determined by the selection criteria of the redshift survey. By using equal numbers of each type of galaxy in our training set we ensure that the results presented here are general and not only applicable to $`b_\mathrm{J}`$-selected galaxy samples, which are biased towards recently star-forming galaxies.

The remaining 2299 galaxies were used as a testing and validating set. The purpose of validation is to ensure that the ANN does not ‘over-train’ on the training set by over-fitting the data which it is supplied. For this reason the minimum in the error function (Eqn. 11) is calculated from the testing data set, rather than the training set. Note that for our purposes a galaxy was classified as Early type if the output probability from the ANN from the Early type node was greater than 0.5, and likewise for Late types.

In general it was found that the results were relatively insensitive to the choice of network architecture (changing by only a few percentage points of successfully detected galaxies of each type). This is consistent with the results from the previous section where it was found that the PCA eigenspectra generally carry the same physical information as each other - despite being ‘statistically’ independent.

The results from each ANN are summarised in Table. 2, and once again the ($`pc_1`$,$`pc_2`$) components are shown for the galaxies which have been classified by the ANN (in this case the 9:9:2 configuration) in Fig. 10. Again it can be seen that the classification can be quite accurately expressed using only these first two projections. The correspondence with the 2dFGRS $`\eta `$ classification is also shown.

One problem that arose when attempting to separate the Early type galaxies in our sample was that we obtained a significant contamination from Late type galaxies ($`50`$%). It was found that this fractional contamination could be reduced somewhat by increasing the complexity of the ANN, however this resulted in a lower percentage of the actual Early type galaxies being correctly classified. The actual degree of this contamination will vary according to the galaxy population under consideration. In the case of the 2dFGRS we are presented with a $`b_\mathrm{J}`$-selected sample of galaxies and as such there is a significantly higher proportion of Late type (star-forming) galaxies than Early types. On the other hand, in the case of a 2MASS (Jarrett et al. 2000) near-infrared selected galaxy sample, the proportion of types is reversed (Madgwick & Lahav 2001) and so a more pure sample of Early types can be determined.

## 6 Aperture effects

Because our sample of morphologically classified galaxies is drawn from only the most nearby (and hence the most extended on the sky) galaxies, we must consider the possibility that the observed spectra are not representative of the galaxies as a whole. For example, the 2dF fibre (diameter 2-2.16′′) may only sample the light from the bulge of a nearby spiral galaxy - the spectrum from which tends to be more similar to that of an Early type galaxy.

In order to test the importance of redshift upon the success of our morphological classifier we return to our ANN (configuration 9:9:2), trained previously. If aperture effects are important then we would expect to see that the ANN will recover the galaxy morphology of relatively distant galaxies more accurately than for nearby galaxies, particularly in the case of Late type galaxies. For this reason the results from the previous section were re-determined after dividing the testing sample into two redshift bins, $`z<0.05`$ (1533 galaxies) and $`z>0.05`$ (761 galaxies).

The results are summarised in Table. 3. Contrary to our expectations the success of the classification is relatively immune to the redshift being sampled. Clearly the situation must be more complex than a simple analysis such as this can resolve.

One important aspect of the spectra being used in this analysis which may explain this situation is the substantial seeing present at the Anglo-Australian Telescope site. This seeing acts to ‘smooth out’ any spectral gradients which may be present in a given galaxy. In general the seeing is of the order of 1.8-2.5′′ and so can effectively double the area being sampled by the 2dF fibre aperture.

Another major consideration in an analysis such as this is the stability of the morphological classification with redshift - as more distant galaxies will tend to be fainter and less extended on the sky. In general the robustness of a morphological classification is difficult to assess because of its subjectivity. It has been found in previous work (Naim et al. 1995) that this subjective element results in an uncertainty of the order of 2 T-Types. However, this figure does not incorporate the uncertainties introduced to the classification through inclination, obscuration and other systematic uncertainties. All of these uncertainties add to the importance of being able to estimate morphologies in a more robust manner such as by correlating with galaxy spectra, or indeed for neglecting morphology altogether and simply using a spectral-based classification (see e.g. Madgwick & Lahav 2001).

Because the galaxy sample considered here has been restricted to apparent magnitudes greater than $`b_\mathrm{J}=16.5`$, misclassification is not considered to be as significant an issue in this analysis as it might otherwise be. However when repeating the above analysis using galaxies fainter than this magnitude limit a very substantial systematic misclassification of spirals was observed. This was to be expected since the spiral arms of such galaxies will become more difficult to resolve at higher redshift (where most of the faintest galaxies will reside), particularly for galaxies inclined to the line-of-sight.

## 7 Discussion

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this work on recovering galaxy morphologies from their spectra, is how closely related the results from advanced statistical methods appear to be to the original 2dFGRS spectral classification, $`\eta `$. In some regards this was to be expected, since one is always inclined to relate one’s classification to galaxy morphology during its derivation. For example Folkes et al. (1999) used a training set of 26 galaxies drawn from the Kennicutt Atlas (Kennicutt 1992) as a training set to derive the original 2dFGRS spectral classification. These 26 galaxies were ‘projected’ onto the ($`pc_1`$,$`pc_2`$) plane defined by the 2dFGRS spectra and lines were drawn by-hand to roughly separate the galaxies according to their assumed morphologies. However, in the case of $`\eta `$ this method was not used, rather the galaxies were classified solely on the basis of finding the most statistically significant projection in the PCA which was robust to the known instrumental uncertainties in the 2dF instrument (see Madgwick et al. 2002 for more details).

The overall success of correlating galaxy morphologies and spectra, using the methods considered in this paper, is summarised in Fig. 11, where the percentages of galaxies classified correctly is shown for each method. In the case of the $`\eta `$ spectral classification and the Fisher discriminant it is possible to change the relative success rates between types simply by adopting different ‘cuts’ in these continuous parameters. This is demonstrated in Fig. 11 where the success rates are shown for both an $`\eta <1.4`$ cut (2dFGRS default) and an $`\eta <2`$ cut.

In general, the most successful method of correlating galaxy morphology with spectra appears to be the Artificial Neural Network, which can achieve consistently high success rates for both types of galaxies. However, in deciding whether to implement such an algorithm the relative pay-off must be weighed against the additional complexity of this algorithm. This is particularly true for this data-set since all three methods of classification make roughly similar distinctions between morphological types. However, with the advent of higher resolution (and signal-to-noise) spectra, it is possible that such advanced methods will become much more successful.

Note that in practical situations the interpretation of Fig. 11 is not as straight-forward as it might at first seem. One must also bear in mind the relative fractions of different galaxy types in the sample under consideration. In the case of the 2dFGRS, there are over 2 times as many Late type galaxies as Early types (2610 and 1289 galaxies respectively), so a decrease in the success rate of classifying Late types by 5% implies there will be an additional 250 galaxies classified as Early type, which is at least a 10% contamination of the Early type sample. This is particularly important if one wants to create a relatively ‘pure’ sample of a particular type of galaxy (e.g. for efficient use of telescope time during observational follow-ups).

## 8 Conclusions

Establishing a firm link between a galaxy’s morphology and its spectrum is advantageous for several reasons. For instance, galaxy spectra can be accurately determined to much greater redshifts and for fainter objects than morphologies. Also, most large redshift surveys currently taking place will contain many thousands of galaxy spectra but little information relating to the optical morphologies of those galaxies. In particular the separation of different morphological types of galaxies in these redshift surveys will be very useful as a means of separating objects for follow-up observations to determine independent distance measurements using either $`D_n\sigma `$ or the Tully-Fisher relation.

In this paper I have tried to quantify the link between galaxy spectra and morphology using several advanced statistical methods; namely, Fisher’s linear discriminant and Artificial Neural Networks. The best results produced suggest that it is possible to use optical galaxy spectra to create galaxy samples containing 70% of the Early type galaxies present and 80% of the Late types respectively. The contamination between these samples depends on the morphological mix of the survey under consideration. In the case of the $`b_\mathrm{J}`$-selected 2dFGRS the most significant contamination will be of mis-classified Late types in the Early type sample ($`40\%`$ contamination), in the case of a near-infrared selected sample this situation will be reversed.

Essentially the results obtained using more advanced statistical techniques (Sections 4 and 5) are comparable to those that could be obtained simply using the default 2dFGRS spectral classification $`\eta `$ (Madgwick et al. 2002) which can be accessed from the 2dFGRS database222 Spectral extension parameter ETA\_TYPE. This is an interesting result and certainly adds significantly to the physical interpretation of this parameter.

Another interesting aspect of this analysis is that the Fisher discriminant (Section 4) identified the 4000Å break to be the most essential element of a galaxy’s spectrum for the purposes of estimating its morphology. This result is somewhat expected since the general correlation between galaxy morphology and colour is already well established. However, it is intriguing to see this result derived in a quantitative manner from the observed spectra themselves.

The results presented in this paper are essentially limited by the coarseness of the morphological classification adopted, which for practical reasons can only be divided into two separate types (rather than a more realistic sequence of types). As larger samples of more accurately morphologically classified galaxies become available it will be interesting to repeat the analysis presented here, in order to determine whether even more information can be recovered to link a galaxy’s morphology and spectrum.

## Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Ofer Lahav for suggesting this project and providing plenty of invaluable advice and suggestions. Raven Kaldare and Andrew Firth were very helpful in explaining the intricacies of Artificial Neural Networks to me. I would also like to thank the anonymous referee for their helpful comments on the draft of this paper. The efforts of the 2dFGRS collaboration, in preparing and compiling the data used in this analysis, are greatly appreciated. This work was supported by an Isaac Newton studentship from the Institute of Astronomy and Trinity College, Cambridge.


text:
# Two-Body Cabibbo-Suppressed Charmed Meson Decays

## I INTRODUCTION

The decays of charmed particles can provide useful information about strong interactions. The magnitudes and phases of weak couplings governing these decays are well-specified in the standard electroweak theory, so that decay amplitudes serve mainly to illuminate the relative importance of various flavor topologies and their relative strong phases. This has been shown both for Cabibbo-favored decays JR99  and more recently for doubly-Cabibbo-suppressed processes CR02 . In the present article we extend these analyses to singly-Cabibbo-suppressed processes.

The analysis of charmed particle decays has shown that flavor SU(3) symmetry is qualitatively obeyed, but important symmetry-breaking effects can be identified hist . As one example, an argument using the U-spin subgroup of SU(3) predicts the rates for $`D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ and $`D^0K^+K^{}`$ to be equal, but they differ by a factor of about three. This effect can be understood on the basis of SU(3)-breaking in decay constants and form factors GR01 .

Some interesting opportunities and questions have arisen recently in the context of singly-Cabibbo-suppressed charm decays. Through the excellent photon and charged particle identification capabilities of the CLEO detector, it has become feasible to study many decays involving $`\eta `$ and $`\eta ^{}`$ EVT . The FOCUS Collaboration has recently amassed a large sample of charmed particles produced by high-energy photons at the Fermilab Tevatron FOCUS . Close and Lipkin CL02  have recently identified some puzzles in this sector, including claims for rates for $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$ Frab95  and $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$ Alb92  of the same order as some Cabibbo-favored two-body modes. We shall show that it is difficult to understand the first of these. While we do not have enough information to analyze charmed particle decays to VV, we use U-spin to relate these last two rates to those for $`D_s^+\rho ^+K^0`$ and $`D_s^+\rho ^+K^0`$, respectively, which should also have large rates if the claims are correct and approximate flavor symmetry is valid.

We recall notation in Section II, and update results of Ref. JR99  for Cabibbo-favored decays in Sec. III. We then tabulate results for Cabibbo-suppressed decays, and discuss specific relations among these decays (and between them and some Cabibbo-favored processes) in Sec. IV. We remark briefly on a relation for $`VV`$ decays in Sec. V. Open questions are noted in Sec. VI, which concludes.

## II NOTATION

We use the following quark content and phase conventions:

* Charmed mesons: $`D^0=c\overline{u}`$, $`D^+=c\overline{d}`$, $`D_s^+=c\overline{s}`$;
* Pseudoscalar mesons: $`\pi ^+=u\overline{d}`$, $`\pi ^0=(d\overline{d}u\overline{u})/\sqrt{2}`$, $`\pi ^{}=d\overline{u}`$, $`K^+=u\overline{s}`$, $`K^0=d\overline{s}`$, $`\overline{K}^0=s\overline{d}`$, $`K^{}=s\overline{u}`$, $`\eta =(s\overline{s}u\overline{u}d\overline{d})/\sqrt{3}`$, $`\eta ^{}=(u\overline{u}+d\overline{d}+2s\overline{s})/\sqrt{6}`$;
* Vector mesons: $`\rho ^+=u\overline{d}`$, $`\rho ^0=(d\overline{d}u\overline{u})/\sqrt{2}`$, $`\rho ^{}=d\overline{u}`$, $`\omega =(u\overline{u}+d\overline{d})/\sqrt{2}`$, $`K^+=u\overline{s}`$, $`K^0=d\overline{s}`$, $`\overline{K}^0=s\overline{d}`$, $`K^{}=s\overline{u}`$, $`\varphi =s\overline{s}`$.

We denote the tree, color-suppressed, exchange, and annihilation amplitudes by $`T`$, $`C`$, $`E`$, and $`A`$, respectively. The exchange and annihilation diagrams that involve singlet contributions are labeled by $`SE`$ and $`SA`$. Penguin diagrams should be negligible since $`V_{cd}^{}V_{ud}V_{cs}^{}V_{us}`$. For the $`PV`$ modes, we use the subscripts $`P`$ and $`V`$ to refer to those diagrams with the spectator quark going into a pseudoscalar meson and a vector meson in the final state, respectively. To distinguish between Cabibbo-favored and Cabibbo-suppressed decay modes, the amplitudes associated with the former are all unprimed, while those with the latter are primed.

The partial width $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ for a specific two-body decay to $`PP`$ is expressed in terms of an invariant amplitude $`𝒜`$ as

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }(HPP)=\frac{p^{}}{8\pi M_H^2}|𝒜|^2,$$
(1)
where $`p^{}`$ is the center-of-mass (c.m.) 3-momentum of each final particle, and $`M_H`$ is the mass of the decaying particle. The kinematic factor of $`p^{}`$ is appropriate for the S-wave final state. The amplitude $`𝒜`$ will thus have a dimension of (energy). For $`PV`$ decays, on the other hand, a P-wave kinematic factor is appropriate instead, and

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }(HPV)=\frac{p_{}^{}{}_{}{}^{3}}{8\pi M_H^2}|𝒜|^2.$$
(2)
In this case, $`𝒜`$ is dimensionless.

In the numerical calculation, we use for the charmed mesons $`M_{D^+}=1.8693\pm 0.0005`$ GeV with $`\tau (D^+)=1051\pm 13`$ fs, $`M_{D^0}=1.8645\pm 0.0005`$ GeV with $`\tau (D^0)=411.7\pm 2.7`$ fs, and $`M_{D_s^+}=1.9685\pm 0.0006`$ GeV with $`\tau (D_s^+)=490\pm 9`$ fs Hagiwara:pw .

## III CABIBBO-FAVORED DECAYS

In Tables 1 and 2 we summarize predicted and observed amplitudes for Cabibbo-favored decays of charmed mesons to $`PP`$ and $`PV`$. The experimental values are based on Ref. Hagiwara:pw  and supersede those quoted in Ref. JR99 . We then extract amplitudes for specific flavor topologies and their relative phases. Only the preferred solutions in Ref. JR99  with updated data analysis are quoted in Table 3. These parameters are needed since we will be using flavor SU(3) to relate them to the singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decays. For the sign of relative strong phases, we use the convention that $`\delta _{AB}`$ means the angle subtended from the amplitude $`B`$ to $`A`$.

Using the relation $`E_V=E_P`$ for the $`PV`$ modes in Table 3, one would get the following strong phases for the last three amplitudes, all relative to $`T_V`$,

$$\delta _{T_PT_V}=(3\pm 25)^{},\delta _{C_VT_V}=(170\pm 13)^{},\delta _{E_VT_V}=(92\pm 11)^{}.$$
(3)
It is interesting to observe that in this case $`T_P`$ and $`T_V`$ are roughly pointing in the same direction on the complex plane. The same is also true for $`C_P`$ and $`C_V`$, but pointing in almost the opposite direction to that of $`T_P`$ and $`T_V`$. $`E_P`$ and $`E_V`$, on the other hand, are close to $`90^{}`$ from the above line.

In Ref. JR99  we did not fit amplitudes involving the annihilation terms $`A_P`$ and $`A_V`$. Normally we would have expected that $`A_P=A_V`$ and hence that the decay $`D^+\pi ^+\omega `$ would be suppressed while $`D^+\pi ^+\rho ^0`$ would provide information on the magnitude of $`A_P`$. This pattern was anticipated some time ago by Lipkin on the basis of a G-parity argument HJL89 . Instead, it is the latter decay which appears to be suppressed, while the former occurs with a measurable rate. It may be that the $`\omega `$ contains a small admixture of strange quarks, which would permit it to be produced via a $`T_V`$ amplitude, or rescattering effects could induce annihilation-like terms not respecting $`A_P=A_V`$. Other Cabibbo-favored processes not fitted in this scheme JR99  include the decays $`D_s^+\rho ^+\eta `$ and $`D_s^+\rho ^+\eta ^{}`$.

## IV SINGLY-CABIBBO-SUPPRESSED DECAYS

The topological amplitude decomposition of singly-Cabibbo-suppressed two-body $`D`$ decays is listed in Table 4 ($`PP`$ modes) and 5 ($`PV`$ modes), where the relations $`E_V^{}=E_P^{}`$ and $`A_V^{}=A_P^{}`$ have been used.

### IV.1 U-spin relations

A number of relations between singly-Cabibbo-suppressed amplitudes follow from the U-spin symmetry interchanging $`s`$ and $`d`$ quarks GR01 ; MGU . The effective interactions inducing the transitions $`csu\overline{s}`$ and $`cdu\overline{d}`$ occur with equal and opposite CKM factors, leading to a term transforming as $`U=1,U_3=0`$. One then obtains the following relations:

$`PP`$ decays:

$$𝒜(D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{})=𝒜(D^0K^+K^{}),$$
(4)
$$𝒜(D^0K^0\overline{K}^0)=0,$$
(5)
$$𝒜(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)=𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0).$$
(6)
It has been known for some time that the relation (4) fails. The rate for $`D^0K^+K^{}`$ is about three times that for $`D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$. The corresponding amplitudes differ by a factor of about 1.8, which can be ascribed to the product of a factor $`f_K/f_\pi 1.22`$ and a form factor ratio $`F_{DK}(M_K^2)/F_{D\pi }(m_\pi ^2)1.5`$ GR01 ; Fact . Alternatively, it can be interpreted as saying that the subprocess $`csu\overline{s}`$ leads to lower-multiplicity final states than $`cdu\overline{d}`$, since light quarks radiate extra pions easily. The $`csu\overline{s}`$ subprocess responsible for $`D^0K^+K^{}`$ has only one light quark capable of radiating soft pions (in the current-algebra sense), whereas $`cdu\overline{d}`$ responsible for $`D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ has three such quarks. (The $`\overline{u}`$ spectator quark also can radiate soft pions in either case.) Therefore, one would expect the higher-multiplicity states to be more important in the fragmentation of the $`cdu\overline{d}`$ subprocess. We shall see presently that an estimate of the amplitude for $`D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ and $`D^0K^+K^{}`$ decays based on Cabibbo-favored decays lies between the experimental values for these decays.

The amplitude for $`D^0K^0\overline{K}^0`$ is predicted to vanish in the U-spin limit. Both the initial and final ($`J=0`$) states have $`U=0`$, while the transition operator has $`U=1`$, as mentioned. The observed value of this amplitude is of the same order as the difference between the $`D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ and $`D^0K^+K^{}`$ amplitudes. Indeed, if one were to allow for different effective $`csu\overline{s}`$ and $`cdu\overline{d}`$ transition strengths in the $`E^{}`$ amplitudes alone, one would obtain the sum rule

$$𝒜(D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{})+𝒜(D^0K^+K^{})+𝒜(D^0K^0\overline{K}^0)=0,$$
(7)
which is satisfied when the amplitudes are relatively real with respect to one another. However, there is no reason for (7) to hold in general. The decay $`D^0K^0\overline{K}^0`$ simply seems to occur at a level approriate for SU(3) symmetry breaking in other Cabibbo-suppressed $`D^0PP`$ decays.

The relation (6) is untested so far. It predicts a branching ratio $`(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0)=(2.8\pm 0.3)\times 10^3`$ on the basis of $`(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)=(5.8\pm 0.6)\times 10^3`$ and kinematic correction factors. This should be an easy process to observe.

$`PV`$ decays:

$$𝒜(D^0\pi ^+\rho ^{})=𝒜(D^0K^+K^{}),$$
(8)
$$𝒜(D^0\pi ^{}\rho ^+)=𝒜(D^0K^{}K^+),$$
(9)
$$𝒜(D^0K^0\overline{K}^0)=𝒜(D^0\overline{K}^0K^0),$$
(10)
$$𝒜(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)=𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0),$$
(11)
$$𝒜(D^+\overline{K}^0K^+)=𝒜(D_s^+K^0\rho ^+).$$
(12)
The relations (8) and (9) are untested as yet because of the absence of $`D^0\pi ^\pm \rho ^{}`$ branching ratios. These processes should be observable in the CLEO-c detector. The relation (10) should be testable in the presence of an $`E_P^{}`$ amplitude, whose magnitude we shall estimate presently. The relation (11) is satisfied within $`1\sigma `$; it predicts $`(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0)=(3.6\pm 0.4)\times 10^3`$. Finally, the relation (12) is interesting since $`(D^+\overline{K}^0K^+)=(3.1\pm 1.4)\%`$ would entail a predicted branching ratio $`(D_s^+K^0\rho ^+)=(2.4\pm 1.1)\%`$. We shall see, however, that it is difficult to understand the large branching ratio for $`D^+\overline{K}^0K^+`$ when extrapolating from the Cabibbo-favored $`PV`$ decays of charmed particles CL02 , even when one allows for the most favorable possible interference between contributing amplitudes.

### IV.2 Relations between Cabibbo-favored and singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decays

We now make use of the amplitudes determined in Ref. JR99  and updated in Sec. III for Cabibbo-favored $`PP`$ and $`PV`$ decays to predict the magnitudes and phases of amplitudes for singly-Cabibbo-suppressed processes. We shall see that with the single exception of $`D^+\overline{K}^0K^+`$, all results are consistent with a flavor SU(3) symmetry whose breaking does not exceed expected limits. The magnitudes of the topological amplitudes for singly-Cabibbo-suppressed modes can be obtained from those for Cabibbo-favored ones listed in Table 3 by multiplying a Cabibbo suppression factor of $`\lambda 0.2256`$. We assume the relative strong phases stay the same. The resulting amplitudes are shown in Table 6.

In the singly-Cabibbo-suppressed $`PP`$ decays, some modes can be directly related to their counterparts in the Cabibbo-favored ones. Assuming $`SU(3)`$ symmetry, we obtain

$`|𝒜(D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{})|=|𝒜(D^0K^+K^{})|=\lambda |𝒜(D^0K^{}\pi ^+)|(5.60\pm 0.07)\times 10^7\mathrm{GeV},`$
$`|𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\pi ^0)|=\lambda |𝒜(D^0\overline{K}^0\pi ^0)|(4.34\pm 0.21)\times 10^7\mathrm{GeV},`$
$`|𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\pi ^0)|={\displaystyle \frac{\lambda }{\sqrt{2}}}|𝒜(D^+\overline{K}^0\pi ^+)|(2.12\pm 0.07)\times 10^7\mathrm{GeV},`$
$`|𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^0K^+)|={\displaystyle \frac{\lambda }{\sqrt{2}}}|𝒜(D_s^+\overline{K}^0K^+)|(3.76\pm 0.57)\times 10^7\mathrm{GeV}.`$
Both $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$ and $`D_s^+\pi ^+K^0`$ involve the combination $`T^{}A^{}`$, which does not have a counterpart in the Cabibbo-favored modes. Therefore, we use the values given in Table 6 to estimate the magnitude of their amplitude:

$`|𝒜(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)|=|𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0)|(5.47\pm 1.30)\times 10^7\mathrm{GeV}.`$
In the $`PV`$ decays, the following results are obtained:

$`|𝒜(D^0\pi ^+\rho ^{})|=|𝒜(D^0K^+K^{})|=\lambda |𝒜(D^0K^{}\pi ^+)|(10.90\pm 0.45)\times 10^7,`$
$`|𝒜(D^0\pi ^{}\rho ^+)|=|𝒜(D^0K^{}K^+)|=\lambda |𝒜(D^0K^{}\rho ^+)|(15.25\pm 0.60)\times 10^7,`$
$`|𝒜(D^0K^0\overline{K}^0)|=|𝒜(D^0\overline{K}^0K^0)|=2\lambda |𝒜(D^0\overline{K}^0\varphi )|(13.78\pm 0.81)\times 10^7,`$
$`|𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\rho ^0)|(5.83\pm 0.78)\times 10^7,`$
where the last line is computed directly using Table 6. It is seen that all the above predicted amplitude magnitudes agree well with those inferred from the measured branching ratios, apart from small differences that can be attributed to $`SU(3)`$ breaking. Table 7 summarizes the comparison of predicted and experimental amplitudes.

An upper bound on $`A_P`$ can be extracted from Cabibbo-favored modes: $`|A_P|(|𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+\rho ^0)|^2+|𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+\omega )|^2)^{1/2}1.4\times 10^6`$ at the $`3\sigma `$ level. This in turn implies that the corresponding singly-Cabibbo-suppressed amplitude satisfies

$$|A_P^{}|=\lambda |A_P|3.1\times 10^7.$$
(13)
Other information about the contribution of $`A_P^{}`$ can be directly learned from, for example, the decay mode $`D^+\pi ^+\rho ^0`$. In order to reproduce the $`1\sigma `$ lower limit on its amplitude, using

$`|𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\rho ^0)|=|\sqrt{2}A_P^{}{\displaystyle \frac{\lambda }{\sqrt{2}}}𝒜(D^+\overline{K}^0\pi ^+)|,`$
one must have $`|A_P^{}|0.36\times 10^7`$, assuming that the two contributions interfere constructively. Since $`|T_V^{}|(8.2\pm 2.6)\times 10^7`$, a small $`|A_P^{}|`$ of about $`2\times 10^7`$ improves agreement with the extracted amplitude of $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$, assuming constructive interference. However, there is trouble when one tries to interpret the experimental data for $`D^+\overline{K}^0K^+`$. With $`|T_P^{}|=\lambda |T_P|(13.6\pm 2.6)\times 10^7`$, one would need $`|A_P^{}|(13.7\pm 6.7)\times 10^7`$ in order to reach the experimental result in Table 5, where the lower bound on $`A_P^{}`$ assumes maximal constructive interference. This apparently contradicts the upper bound (13) obtained from the Cabibbo-favored modes. Since currently the branching ratio of $`D^+\overline{K}^0K^+`$ is measured only at a level of slightly more than $`2\sigma `$ Frab95 , a definite conclusion cannot be drawn without more statistics.

### IV.3 Triangle and quadrangle relations

From the $`PP`$ modes listed in Table 4, one can find the following sum rules:

$`\sqrt{2}𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\pi ^0)\sqrt{2}𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\pi ^0)𝒜(D^0\pi ^+\pi ^{})=0,`$
$`\sqrt{2}𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\pi ^0)+𝒜(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)\sqrt{2}𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^0K^+)=0,`$
$`\sqrt{2}𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\pi ^0)𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0)\sqrt{2}𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^0K^+)=0,`$
$`2\sqrt{2}𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\eta )+𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\eta ^{})+\sqrt{6}𝒜(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)+3\sqrt{3}𝒜(D^+\pi ^+\pi ^0)=0,`$
$`2\sqrt{2}𝒜(D_s^+\eta K^+)+𝒜(D_s^+\eta ^{}K^+)+\sqrt{6}𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^+K^0)+3\sqrt{3}𝒜(D_s^+\pi ^0K^+)=0.`$
Moreover, any three amplitudes selected from $`𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\pi ^0)`$, $`𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\eta )`$, $`𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\eta ^{})`$, $`𝒜(D^0\eta \eta )`$, and $`𝒜(D^0\eta \eta ^{})`$ with appropriate coefficients can form a triangle.

### IV.4 Decays involving $`\eta `$ and $`\eta ^{}`$

The amplitudes for decays involving $`\eta `$ and $`\eta ^{}`$ contain unknown contributions corresponding to disconnected quark diagrams, such as $`SE^{}`$ and $`SA^{}`$ in the decays to $`PP`$. A satisfactory description of Cabibbo-favored decays to $`PP`$ was obtained in Ref. JR99  without the help of such contributions, but the Cabibbo-favored decays to $`PV`$ final states involving such contributions were not seen to follow a pattern describable through the flavor-topology approach. In the present subsection we discuss a test for the amplitudes $`SE^{}`$ and $`SA^{}`$ which can determine whether a flavor-topology description is suitable for singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decays of charmed mesons to $`PP`$.

We express all amplitudes involving $`\eta `$ or $`\eta ^{}`$ in Table IV in terms of an unknown parameter $`SE^{}`$ or $`SA^{}`$ with unit coefficient: For example,

$$\sqrt{6}𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\eta ^{})=2E^{}C^{}+SE^{},$$
(14)
$$\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}𝒜(D^0\pi ^0\eta ^{})=\frac{1}{2}(C^{}+E^{})+SE^{},$$
(15)
$$\frac{3}{2\sqrt{2}}𝒜(D^0\eta \eta )=C^{}+SE^{},$$
(16)
$$\frac{3\sqrt{2}}{7}𝒜(D^0\eta \eta ^{})=\frac{1}{7}(C^{}+6E^{})+SE^{},$$
(17)
with four similar expressions (two for $`D^+`$ and two for $`D_s^+`$) involving $`SA^{}`$. Assuming $`SE^{}=SA^{}=0`$ one can then plot these expressions in the complex plane, obtaining figures whose origins can be shifted by an amount corresponding to the unknown amplitude $`SE^{}`$ or $`SA^{}`$. The amplitudes plotted are summarized in Table 8 and described in Figs. 1 and 2.

The points for these $`D^0`$ decays all lie on a line, since the coefficients of $`C^{}`$ and $`E^{}`$ always sum to 1. This is another way of expressing the linear dependence of the various decays mentioned in the previous subsection. In the case of $`D^+`$ and $`D_s^+`$ decays this linear dependence is not present.

The rates for $`D^+\pi ^+\eta `$ and $`D^+\pi ^+\eta ^{}`$ have been measured. Consequently, one may use them to draw circles about the corresponding points to search for common intersections. The line between each of these common intersection points and the origin corresponds to the complex amplitude $`SA^{}`$ needed to reproduce the data. One solution corresponds to very small $`SA^{}`$, while the other corresponds to a value comparable to the other amplitudes. Measurement of rates for $`D_s^+\eta K^+`$ and $`D_s^+\eta ^{}K^+`$ will permit a choice between these two solutions and a test of consistency of the description. A corresponding construction also will clearly be possible for $`D^0`$ decays once these are measured.

In principle similar techniques would be suitable for $`PV`$ decays. The decays $`D^0\pi ^0\omega `$ and $`D^0\pi ^0\varphi `$ involve just the one unknown singlet amplitude $`SE_P^{}`$, allowing a two-fold solution in the manner of Fig. 2. Similarly, the decays $`D^0\eta \rho ^0`$ and $`D^0\eta ^{}\rho ^0`$ involve $`SE_V^{}`$, and again there will be a two-fold solution. One can then test whether the four possible combinations of these solutions are compatible with the observed branching ratios for $`D^0\eta \omega `$, $`D^0\eta ^{}\omega `$, and $`D^0\eta \varphi `$, which involve both $`SE_P^{}`$ and $`SE_V^{}`$.

In the case of $`D^+`$ and $`D_s^+`$ singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decays to $`PV`$, the presence of $`A_P^{}`$ and $`A_V^{}`$ in many amplitudes makes a similar program problematic. Without information on these quantities, which we found difficult to extract from Cabibbo-favored decays, the best one can do is to extract two possible solutions for $`SA_P^{}`$ from the decay rates for $`D^+\pi ^+\omega `$ and $`D^+\pi ^+\varphi `$, and two possible solutions for $`SA_V^{}`$ from the decay rates for $`D^+\eta \rho ^+`$ and $`D^+\eta ^{}\rho ^+`$. One can, at least, see whether there is a need for disconnected diagrams in these processes.

## V REMARKS ON $`VV`$ DECAYS

The branching ratio for $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$ appears to be enhanced beyond that for a typical singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decay CL02 . The amplitude relation

$$𝒜(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)=𝒜(D_s^+\rho ^+K^0)$$
(18)
should hold separately for each partial wave ($`L=0,1,2`$) as a consequence of U-spin. The kinematic correction factors behave as $`(p^{})^{2L+1}/M_H^2`$, so they cannot be directly applied unless we know the partial-wave decomposition of the decays. However, we can obtain a lower limit on the predicted branching ratio for $`D_s^+\rho ^+K^0`$ by assuming that the decays are dominated by $`L=0`$. Given that $`p^{}=273`$ MeV for the $`D^+`$ decay and 524 MeV for the $`D_s^+`$ decay, we find that $`(D^+K^+\overline{K}^0)=(2.6\pm 1.1)\%`$ implies $`(D_s^+\rho ^+K^0)=(2.1\pm 0.9)\%`$. If components with $`L0`$ are present this value becomes a lower bound.

## VI OPEN QUESTIONS AND SUMMARY

We have some evidence that the flavor-topology approach is limited in usefulness from the failure of the Cabibbo-favored decays $`D_s^+\pi ^+\rho ^0`$ and $`D_s^+\pi ^+\omega `$ to fit any reasonble pattern for the amplitudes $`A_P`$ and $`A_V`$. Furthermore, it appears that disconnected quark diagrams, neglected in Ref. JR99 , appear necessary to fit the large branching ratios claimed for $`D_s^+\pi ^+\eta `$ and $`D_s^+\pi ^+\eta ^{}`$. One would expect analogues of these puzzles to appear in the singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decays. Certainly the processes $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$ and $`D^+K^+\overline{K}^0`$ noted by Close and Lipkin CL02  are the most prominent candidates for such puzzles. It will be interesting to see the progress of future experimental studies, for example at CLEO-c, of these decays.

We have shown that aside from the two decays just noted, a reasonable description of $`PP`$ and $`PV`$ singly-Cabibbo-suppressed decays of charmed mesons appears possible by extrapolation from the Cabibbo-favored decays. As in the case of Cabibbo-favored decays, various amplitudes have non-trivial relative strong phases, indicating that these amplitudes are probably generated by final-state interactions governed by long-distance physics.

Decays involving $`\eta `$ and $`\eta ^{}`$ can be described if one is prepared to consider flavor topologies involving disconnected diagrams. The magnitudes of such amplitudes remain to be studied, but there are enough processes that once a few of them have beem measured, predictions will be possible for the remaining ones. Such studies bear the promise of useful insights on the strong interactions governing final-state interactions in charm decays, and may also shed indirect light on such interactions at the higher energies characterizing the decays of hadrons containing $`b`$ quarks.

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank H. J. Lipkin for discussions. J. L. R. is grateful to the Theory Group at Argonne National Laboratory for hospitality during part of this study. This work was supported in part by the United States Department of Energy, High Energy Physics Division, through Grant No. DE-FG02-90ER-40560 and Contract No. W-31-109-ENG-38.


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# Untitled Document

hep-th/0209204, HWS-200203

A Mechanism for Charge Quantization

Theodore J. Allen tjallen@hws.edu

Department of Physics, Eaton Hall

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, NY 14456 USA

Costas J. Efthimiou**costas@physics.ucf.edu

Department of Physics and Astronomy

University of Central Florida

Orlando, FL 32816 USA

Donald Spector spector@hws.edu

Department of Physics, Eaton Hall

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, NY 14456 USA

We analyze a potential that produces background charges which are automatically quantized. This introduces a new mechanism for charge quantization, although so far it has only been implemented for background charges. We show that this same mechanism can also lead to an alternative means of hiding extra dimensions that is analogous to the Kaluza-Klein approach.

09/2002

1. Introduction

The quantization of electric charges has been a puzzle since it was discovered by Millikan  nearly a hundred years ago. There have been two conventional explanations of this phenomenon. The first, due to Dirac , considered the effect of magnetic monopoles. Dirac showed that, in the presence of a magnetic monopole, only quantized electric charges are allowed.1 A generalized condition follows for dyons . Thus, should a magnetic monopole be discovered, quantization of electric charge would, of necessity, follow. The alternative explanation is one based in gauge theories. If the $`U(1)`$ gauge group of electromagnetism is embedded in a non-abelian gauge group, then charge quantization is automatic, for group theoretic reasons . The commutation relations for the non-abelian group impose non-abelian charge quantization, and thus the embedding of the $`U(1)`$ group in the non-abelian group implies quantization for the electric charge.

We will here present a theory that exhibits a quantized electric charge, but in a very different way. The theory in question will be an example from non-relativistic quantum mechanics, and give us an entirely different way to think about the origins of charge quantization by naturally producing a situation in which there are background charges, and for which these background charges are quantized. One of the bonuses of this method is that it also gives us a novel way to think about the possibility of higher dimensions, and gives us a way in which such dimensions can appear small without being explicitly compactified.

In some sense, the structure we identify is more like that typically found when there are topological charges. We find discrete sectors of the theory, sectors which can be understood as being related by the addition of quantized potential terms. The difference is that these sectors do not arise for topological reasons in the case that we study here.

We should note that, at present, the potential function that we examine in this paper is constructed in very much an ad hoc way. We do not yet have a natural mechanism for causing this potential (or one like it) to appear, or incorporate it in such a way as to lead to quantization of dynamical, as opposed to background, charges. However, what we do have, even with these caveats, is a new conceptual approach to the question of what can enforce charge quantization or lead to dimensional compactification. While we would of course have preferred already to have developed the full application of this idea, we recognize that often such work must be developed in stages. It is in this light that we therefore present this first stage here, presenting both the concept and its initial implementation, while we reserve for future work the further technical developments that will extend the applicability of these ideas.

2. The Digamma Potential

The function $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(x)`$ is well-known, of course; it is the analytic function that generalizes the factorial, with the relation holding for all arguments

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }(x+1)=x\mathrm{\Gamma }(x).$$

The digamma function is then defined as

$$\psi (x)=\frac{d}{dx}\mathrm{ln}(\mathrm{\Gamma }(x))=\frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }^{}(x)}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(x)}.$$

This function satisfies the identity

$$\psi (x+1)=\psi (x)+1/x.$$

We warn the reader not to confuse the digamma function with the quantum mechanical wavefunction, as both are typically denoted with the same Greek letter. We will reserve for “$`\psi `$” for the digamma function, and will not need any particular symbol for the wavefunction.

Suppose, now, that we consider the non-relativistic quantum mechanical Hamiltonian which has the digamma function as its potential,

$$H=\frac{\mathrm{}^2}{2m}\frac{d^2}{dx^2}+\psi (x),$$

where the coordinate $`x`$ labels the real axis. The potential has poles at every non-negative integer. Note that at large positive $`x`$, $`\psi (x)`$ behaves asymptotically as $`\mathrm{ln}(x)`$ (this can be seen from the Stirling approximation), while at each negative integer, the function diverges to $`\mathrm{}`$ on the right and to $`+\mathrm{}`$ on the left.

Because of the infinities, the behavior of the wavefunction at these negative integer values must be controlled. One way to do this would be to specify put boundary conditions on the wavefunction at these points, so as to produce a self-adjoint extension. Our analysis of this problem indicates that one can do so in a way that imposes the condition that at these points the wavefunction vanishes, while its derivative need not be continuous.

However, we can also adopt a simpler approach that achieves the same results. All the properties of the potential that will be necessary in our analysis can be preserved if we add a periodic term to the digamma function potential. We therefore can consider the generalized potential

$$\stackrel{~}{U}(x)=\psi (x)+\frac{1}{\mathrm{sin}^2\pi x}.$$

This potential still satisfies (2.1), but at the same time causes the potential to diverge to a positive infinite value at every negative integer, whether one approaches from the left or the right, as there is now a double pole at each of these points. We thus imagine that we have added such a term to the potential. Note that the potential we have added is, when considered by itself, exactly soluble, and related by shape invariance  to the infinite square well. This guarantees that the boundary conditions in the presence of this new term are such that the wavefunction vanishes whenever $`x`$ is a negative integer, with the wavefunction generally being discontinuous at these points, as the new term dominates the digamma function at these locations, and hence determines the behavior of the wavefunction.

Whichever approach one takes – either constructing self-adjoint extensions or adding the extra term to the potential – will have the same effects, and will lead to the conclusions presented in this paper. For the sake of simplicity of presentation, we will suppress the addition of the $`1/\mathrm{sin}^2(\pi x)`$ term, as it does not affect the mechanism behind the key results we obtain, but the reader should be aware that such a term can, if one chooses the latter scheme, be added throughout the analysis of this paper, although we will our frame our results without reference to a specific choice between these two options.

Each interval $`(m+1)<x<m`$, where $`m`$ is a non-negative integer, we will term a sector. Since the wavefunction vanishes at the endpoints of each sector, and the derivatives need not be continuous at these points, we see that wavefunctions which are non-zero in only one sector can be perfectly good eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, and so we can choose to focus on such functions as the eigenfunctions of interest. One then solves the Schrödinger equation in each sector, finding the corresponding wavefunctions. Due to the boundary conditions imposed by either of our techniques, it is acceptable to consider this theory exclusively on the negative real axis, which for simplicity we will do here (although we will see later that we can remove this limitation). Thus the eigenfunctions for the different sectors, when put together, form a complete basis on the space in question.

What would a theory on this half-line look like? As we discussed above, one way to think of it would be as a set of separate sectors. However, this theory, as we will show shortly, is equivalent to another theory: one with only a single spatial sector, but with different background charges. The important feature here is that the background charges must be quantized.

Let us refer to the region in the interval $`(m+1)<x<m`$ as the $`m^{th}`$ sector of the theory. Then when we are studying the wavefunctions confined to this sector, we need simply solve the Schrödinger equation with the potential $`V_m(x)=\psi (x)`$ in the $`m^{th}`$ sector, and with barriers preventing penetration into the adjacent sectors.

We can, however, label the sectors using shifted coordinates, so that in each sector, we restrict the spatial variable $`x`$ to the interval $`1<x<0`$. Then in each sector, we must solve the Schrödinger equation with a suitable potential. We denote the potential in the $`m^{th}`$ sector as $`U_m(x)`$. Then we have

$$U_0(x)=\psi (x),$$

$$U_1(x)=\psi (x1)=\psi (x)\frac{1}{x1}=U_0(x)\frac{1}{x1},$$

$$U_2(x)=\psi (x2)=\psi (x1)\frac{1}{x2}=U_0(x)\frac{1}{x2}\frac{1}{x1},$$

and, in general,

$$U_k(x)=U_0(x)\frac{1}{x1}\frac{1}{x2}\mathrm{}\frac{1}{xk}.$$

Consequently, we can think of the theory in sector $`m1`$ as equivalent to the theory in sector $`m`$ provided that an additional charge, with its associated “Coulombic” potential2 We put the term Coulombic in quotation marks, as it is only in three spatial dimensions that the Coulomb potential goes as $`1/r`$. having been added to the theory. The coefficient of the attendant $`1/(xm)`$ term is a charge of the theory, as it determines the strength of the force on the dynamical particle.

Iterating this process as we have in (2.1), we see that every sector is equivalent to the $`0^{th}`$ sector with a series of additional charges added to the theory through the background potential, with each of these additional charges having strength $`1`$. Thus, the $`m^{th}`$ sector can be understood as equivalent to the $`0^{th}`$ sector in the presence of $`m`$ background charges of charge $`1`$. (These charges also appear at discrete locations.) This fixed charge strength tells us, then, that these background charges are quantized.

Thus we have a theory which, although initially formulated on the semi-infinite negative real-axis, should actually be understood as being confined to a single finite interval, but in the presence of various background charges, with these charges quantized. This is the crux of our mechanism: that the potential itself automatically generates a quantization of charge. As a consequence, we have a distinct and novel mechanism for explaining the appearance of charge quantization. Even though the present model cannot by itself be a realistic model of nature, the mechanism itself may well prove fruitful when developed in more elaborated settings.

We note, too, that there are natural ways to generalize this phenomenon, ways that are already straightforward to characterize. For example, as we have already discussed, one can add any periodic potential to this system in the original definition of the Hamiltonian (2.1) without altering our analysis; thus we are not restricted specifically to the unmodified digamma function potential. Indeed, this idea underlay our addition in (2.1) of a $`1/\mathrm{sin}^2(\pi x)`$ term in lieu of constructing a self-adjoint extension, but one can of course also add other periodic potentials that are everywhere finite, and still maintain the mechanism for the appearance of quantized background charges.3 In fact, now that we have presented the main analysis, one sees that the division into distinct sectors with quantized background charges will hold for all $`x`$, not just the negative half of the $`x`$-axis, when we add the $`1/\mathrm{sin}^2(\pi x)`$ term to the potential. One can also easily imagine extending this to higher dimensions, using, for example, a potential in three-dimensions such as $`U(x,y,z)=\psi (x)\psi (y)\psi (z)`$. This gives rises to a theory which can be viewed as consisting of various cubical sectors, although the potentials will not be properly Coulombic, but rather involve terms like $`1/(xa)`$, $`1/(yb)`$, and $`1/(zc)`$. One can imagine more complicated variations, such as a spherically symmetric three-dimensional potential, say $`U(r)=\psi (r)`$, in which case there would be relationships among different spherical shells (which would also involve the centrifugal term).

In addition, we can use integrals or derivatives of the digamma function to get sectors related by the addition of quantized non-Coulombic terms. One interesting example is $`U(r)=\psi ^{}(r)`$, as here the extra term from shifting $`r`$ by $`1`$ can be absorbed as a modification to the centrifugal term. As a consequence, shifting from one spherical shell to another can be reinterpreted as a modification of the angular momentum term in the radial Schrödinger equation to a non-standard value. Exploration of this theory is left as an exercise for the interested reader.

3. Extra Dimensions

The notion of extra dimensions — extra, that is, beyond the usual four of spacetime — goes back to the 1920s and the work of Kaluza  and Klein . The Kaluza-Klein approach has become one of the standard tools in modern attempts at explaining the origins of the forces, and is especially important in the context of string theory.

The model we have presented gives a way besides compactification for large dimensions to look small. Suppose we have a theory in which the fifth dimension has the topology of a ray, and is endowed with a potential $`\psi (y)`$, where $`y`$ is the coordinate along this ray, with the ray stretching along $`y<0`$.4 Or imagine that a $`1/\mathrm{sin}^2(\pi y)`$ term has been added, so that we may include the whole $`y`$-axis. In this extra dimension, which is infinite, the particle will be confined to some sector of, in suitable units, length 1. Alternatively, one can view this as a fifth dimension which is of length 1, but for which one has the possibility of different background charges being inserted. By exchanging the extent of space for background charges, we get charge quantization and dimensional compactification automatically, without invoking the familiar Kaluza-Klein mechanism, and thus without having to seek a dynamical explanation for the compactification of the extra dimensions. Thus what started out as a new mechanism for generating charge quantization has turned into a new mechanism for compactifying extra dimensions.

4. Conclusions

We have shown that a perfectly reasonable quantum mechanical theory in one infinite dimension is equivalent to a quantum theory on a sector of length 1, with the addition of background charges, the values of which must be quantized. The addition or subtraction of these charges arises based on which sector one is considering. The essential observation is that the amount of charge that can be added or subtracted is quantized.

We note, too, that this same mechanism helps us see a new way to have extra dimensions, with the price for the apparent compactification of the extra dimensions being the appearance of quantized background charges. For both the charge quantization and dimensional reduction applications, it is clear that one can add any periodic potential to the theory without modifying the results.

It is interesting to see sectors of different charge arising in this case without topology. The similarity to topological charges rests in the appearance of sectors and the quantization of charge. However, the mechanism is entirely different, and arises here independent of any particular topological considerations.

Transforming this mechanism into an effective and realistic approach to the question of charge quantization will clearly take some work. Given the importance of the problem, however, having an alternative way to think about charge quantization (and dimensional reduction/compactification) is clearly of great interest, and we are currently considering ways to enlarge the applicability of this idea to higher dimensional quantum mechanics and to quantum field theory. We will leave a more careful consideration of these possibilities to future papers.

DS acknowledges the support of NSF Grant PHY-9970771 under which this work was begun.

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