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# Spatial representation of temporal information through spike timing dependent plasticity

## I Introduction

Animals are challenged in various ways to learn, produce, reproduce and predict temporal patterns. A prominent example are the numerous motor programs necessary to interact efficiently with the environment. One specific manifestation is the vocal motor system of song birds. It has been shown that the temporal sequence of syllables in a bird’s song corresponds to temporal sequences of bursts in the neurons of the forebrain control system Hahnloser et al. (2002); Dave et al. (1998); Yu and Margoliash (1996). These are learned and stored by the adolescent bird.

Temporal codes seem to be used for a variety of other tasks as well. Temporal coding in the retina v. Rullen and Thorpe (2001) is an example, as is information transport in the olfactory system of the locust. In the latter it has been shown that the purely identity coded information of the receptor neurons is transformed into an identity-temporal code inside the antennal lobe Laurent et al. (1998); Laurent (1999); Laurent et al. (2001).

Whereas there is a long history of research on sequence learning and recognition in the framework of abstract neural networks (cf the relevant chapters in Hertz et al. (1991) and Trappenberg (2002) and references therein) it is an open question how the learning and memory of time sequences is accomplished in real biological neural systems. Three main principles for representing time in neural systems are frequently discussed:

* The first makes use of delays and filters. There are various ways of processing of temporal information in the dendritic tree Vetter et al. (2001); Häusser et al. (2000); Koch (1999, 1984) or through axonal delays Jeffres (1948); Sompolinsky and Kanter (1986); Herz et al. (1988, 1989); Gerstner et al. (1993); Hertz and Prügel-Bennett (1996); Leibold et al. (2002). Other examples are multilayer neural networks in which the delay of the synaptic connections between layers allows to represent or decode temporal information and propagating waves as known from the thalamo-cortical system Rinzel et al. (1998); Colomb et al. (1996).
* The second principle rests on feedback. Through delayed feedback temporal information can be processed on the level of individual neurons as well as on the level of larger structures. A prominent example for this are recurrent multi layer neural networks which play a role in sequence memory in the hippocampus Lisman and Otmakhova (2001); Lisman (1999).
* The third principle is to transform the temporal information into spatial information. This can occur through the dynamics of a network with asymmetric lateral inhibition Tonkin and Pinter (1996).

In this paper we demonstrate an alternative mechanism which maps the temporal information to the strength of synapses in a network through spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). Similar mechanisms have been suggested for predictive activity and direction selectivity in the visual system Rao and Sejnowski (2000) and learning in the hippocampus Abbott and Blum (1996); Lisman and Otmakhova (2001); Lisman (1999) as well as prediction in hippocampal place fields and route learning in rats Mehta et al. (1997); Gerstner and Abbott (1997); Jensen and Lisman (1996). In contrast to these earlier works we focus on questions of learning of several distinct input sequences in one system and a sparse coding scheme. This learning capability is necessary in order to process the identity-temporal code believed to be generated by winnerless competition in sensory systems Laurent et al. (2001); Rabinovich et al. (2001).

Synaptic plasticity in the connections among neurons allows networks to alter the details of their interaction and develop memories of previous input signals. The details of the methods by which biological neurons express plasticity at synapses is not fully understood at the biophysical level, but many aspects of the phenomena which occur when presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons are jointly activated are now becoming clear. First of all, it seems well established that activity at both the presynaptic and the postsynaptic parts of a neural junction is required for the synaptic strength to change. Arrival of a presynaptic action potential will induce, through normal neurotransmitter release and reception by postsynaptic receptors, a postsynaptic electrical action which generally leads to no change in the coupling strength at that synapse. Depolarization of the postsynaptic cell by various means coupled with arrival of a presynaptic action potential can lead to changes in synaptic strength in a variety of experimental protocols. It is quite important that changes in the synaptic strength, which we denote in terms of a conductivity change $`\mathrm{\Delta }g`$ can be either positive, called potentiation, or negative, called depression. When the expression of $`\mathrm{\Delta }g`$ is long lasting, several hours or even much longer after induction, increases in $`g`$ are called long term potentiation or LTP, and decreases in $`g`$ are called long term depression or LTD. Good reviews of the current situation are found in Malenka and Nicoll (1999); Linden (1999); q. Bi and m. Poo (2001).

LTP and LTD can be induced by (1) depolarizing the postsynaptic cell to a fixed membrane voltage and presenting presynaptic spiking activity at various frequencies, by (2) inducing slow (LTD) or rapid (LTP) release of $`\text{Ca}^{2+}`$ Yang et al. (1999), or by (3) activating the presynaptic terminal a few tens of milliseconds before activating the postsynaptic cell, leading to LTP, or presenting the activation in the other order, leading to LTD Markram et al. (1997); q. Bi and m. Poo (1998).

In this paper we study numerically a network composed of integrate-and-fire neurons which are densely coupled with synaptic interactions whose maximal conductances are permitted to change in accordance with the observations on closely spaced spike arrival times to the presynaptic and postsynaptic junctions of the synapse.

The response of a learning synapse to the arrival of a presynaptic spike at $`t_{\text{pre}}`$ and a postsynaptic spike at $`t_{\text{post}}`$ is a function only of $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=t_{\text{post}}t_{\text{pre}}`$ and for $`\mathrm{\Delta }t>0`$ $`\mathrm{\Delta }g(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ is positive, LTP, and for $`\mathrm{\Delta }t<0`$ $`\mathrm{\Delta }g(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ is negative, LTD.

$`\mathrm{\Delta }g(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ $`=A_+{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }t}{\tau _+}}e^{\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }t}{\tau _+}}\text{for}\mathrm{\Delta }t>0`$
$`\mathrm{\Delta }g(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ $`=A_{}{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Delta }t}{\tau _{}}}e^{\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }t}{\tau _{}}}\text{for}\mathrm{\Delta }t<0`$ (1)
where $`A_+`$, $`A_{}`$, $`\tau _+`$ and $`\tau _{}`$ are positive constants (see Fig. 1). Synaptic plasticity of this type is often referred to as spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP). For many mammalian in vitro or cultured preparations the characteristic LTD time $`\tau _{}`$ is about two or three times longer than the characteristic LTP time $`\tau _+`$.

Here we inquire how a network composed of familiar integrate-and-fire neurons can develop preferred spatial patterns of connectivity when interacting through synapses which update their strength according to the STDP learning rule just given. This rule is a simplification, which applies for our setting of spiking neurons, of more general models Lisman (1989); Holmes and Levy (1990); Zador et al. (1990); Gold and Bear (1994); Schiegg et al. (1995); Shouval et al. (2002); Abarbanel et al. (2002) which indicate how $`\mathrm{\Delta }g(\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ behaves under stimulus of arbitrary presynaptic and postsynaptic waveforms.

The transformation of temporal information into synapse strength through STDP maps a temporal sequence of excitations of neurons to a chain of stronger or weaker synapses among these neurons. If the synapses are excitatory, a strengthened chain of synapses facilitates subsequent excitations of the same temporal pattern up to a point that activation of a few neurons from the temporal sequence allows the system to complete the remaining sequence. The temporal sequence thus has been learned by the system. We demonstrate this type of sequence learning in a computer simulation of a system with integrate-and-fire neurons and Rall type synapses and investigate the reliability of learning, the storage capacity in terms of the number of stored sequences, the scaling of both with system size and sequence length and the robustness against different types of noise.

## II Model system

### II.1 Components and Connections

To explore the learning principle we simulated a network with the topology shown in Fig. 2. In this network $`n`$ integrate-and-fire neurons are connected all-to-all while each neuron also receives input from one “input neuron” (filled ovals in Fig. 2).

The “input neurons” generate rectangular spikes of $`3ms`$ duration at times determined by externally chosen input sequences. Each of these spikes is sufficient to trigger exactly one spike in the receiving neuron (see Fig. 3). The input sequences are chosen such that only one “input neuron” spikes at any given time and the time between input spikes was fixed in the normal test setup. In section IV these input neurons are replaced by Poisson neurons with random spike times.

The membrane voltage of the integrate-and-fire neurons used in this study for sub-threshold activity is given by

$`C{\displaystyle \frac{dV}{dt}}=g_{\text{Leak}}(V(t)V_{\text{Leak}})+I_{\text{Synapse}}(t)`$ (2)
where $`C=0.2nF`$, $`g_{\text{Leak}}=0.3\mu S`$ and $`V_{\text{Leak}}=60mV`$. Whenever the membrane potential $`V(t)`$ reaches $`V_{\text{th}}=40mV`$, it is set to the firing voltage $`V_{\text{max}}=50mV`$, kept at that voltage for $`t_{\text{fire}}=2ms`$ and then released into the normal integration state. The neuron is subsequently refractory for $`t_{\text{refract}}=40ms`$ before another firing event is allowed. During the refractory period the neurons integrates normally but the transition of the firing threshold has no effect. In the implementation of integrate-and-fire neurons used in this work no crossing of the firing threshold from below is necessary to elicit a spike in a super-threshold neuron after the refractory period. See Fig. 3, middle panel, for typical spike forms.

A neuron connected to all neurons in the network (large filled circle in Fig. 2) provides global inhibition whenever the activity in the network exceeds a certain threshold. The inhibitory neuron is an integrate-and-fire neuron governed by (2) with $`C=1.0nF`$, $`g_{\text{Leak}}=0.01\mu S`$, $`V_{\text{Leak}}=60mV`$, $`V_{\text{th}}=40mV`$, $`V_{\text{max}}=50`$ and $`t_{\text{fire}}=5ms`$. In contrast to the memory neurons this neuron is reset to its resting potential $`V_{\text{Leak}}`$ after each firing. Then the membrane potential is fixed to $`V_{\text{Leak}}`$ for $`t_{\text{refract}}=10ms`$ until normal integration resumes. The inhibitory neuron was implemented as a resetting integrate-and -fire neuron because it has a very weak leak current allowing integration over long time windows. This weak leak current would cause very unnatural broad spikes in a non-resetting neuron. A typical voltage trace is shown in the lowest panel of Fig. 3.

Our model of the synapses comes from Rall Rall (1967, 1989) and now is a standard model for simplified synaptic dynamics Destexhe et al. (1998). In particular, we use

$`I_{\text{Synapse}}=g_{\text{syn}}g(t)(V_{\text{post}}(t)V_{\text{syn}}),`$ (3)
where $`g(t)`$ satisfies

$`{\displaystyle \frac{df(t)}{dt}}`$ $`={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\tau _{\text{syn}}}}(\mathrm{\Theta }(V_{\text{pre}}(t)V_{\text{th}})f(t))`$
$`{\displaystyle \frac{dg(t)}{dt}}`$ $`={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\tau _{\text{syn}}}}(f(t)g(t)),`$ (4)
and $`V_{\text{syn}}=0mV`$, $`V_{\text{th}}=20mV`$, $`\tau _{\text{syn}}=15ms`$, $`V_{\text{pre}}(t)`$ and $`V_{\text{post}}(t)`$ are the pre- and postsynaptic membrane potentials and $`g_{\text{syn}}`$ is the strength of the synapse. $`\mathrm{\Theta }(u)=0,u0`$ and $`\mathrm{\Theta }(u)=1,u>0`$ is the usual Heaviside function. Typical EPSPs generated by these synapses can be seen in the middle panel of Fig. 3.

The synaptic strength of the internal synapses is adjusted according to the synaptic plasticity rule shown in in Fig. 1 whenever a spike in their presynaptic and postsynaptic neuron occurs. In itself, this rule may lead to “run-away” behavior of the synaptic strengths. While this may be avoided in the dynamical model of synaptic plasticity Abarbanel et al. (2002), we need to address this within the simpler model used here. We do so by two approaches: (1) we add a long term, slow decay to the synaptic plasticity which would, all other factors being absent, bring it back to a nominal allowed level a long time after alteration by our rule. This we implement with

$`{\displaystyle \frac{dg_{\text{raw}}}{dt}}={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\tau _g}}(g_{\text{raw}}(t)g_{0,\text{raw}})`$ (5)
where $`g_{0,\text{raw}}`$ is the initial value of the unmodified synapse strength. So after potentiation or depression according to the synaptic plasticity rule, the synaptic strength is allowed to slowly decay back to its original value. The time scale of this exponential decay is set by $`\tau _g=200s`$. (2) $`g_{\text{raw}}`$ is an intermediate variable which is then translated into the synaptic strength $`g_{\text{syn}}`$ via a sigmoid saturation rule

$`g_{\text{syn}}=g_{\text{max}}\frac{1}{2}\left(\mathrm{tanh}\left(g_{\text{slope}}(g_{\text{raw}}g_{1/2})\right)+1\right),`$ (6)
where $`g_{\text{max}}`$ is the largest allowed value for the synaptic conductivity, and $`g_{1/2}`$ sets the threshold where saturation to this value is implemented. All data shown in this work was obtained with $`g_{\text{max}}=2.8\mu S`$, $`g_{1/2}=1/2g_{\text{max}}`$ and $`g_{\text{slope}}=1/g_{1/2}`$. In addition the globally inhibitory neuron tends to curb the tendency of the network to saturate its synaptic strengths.

These features of our model reflect our lack of knowledge of the biophysical factors setting the synaptic strength in the first place and our equivalent lack of knowledge how these factors bound the eventual rise or fall of synaptic strength. Our assumption in using these rules is that the actual mechanisms, while surely more complicated in detail, will provide the same effective bounding feature.

The complete system is realized in C++ using an order $`5`$/$`6`$ variable time step Runge-Kutta algorithm Butcher (1987). The error goal per time step was $`10^7`$ in all simulations. A run of $`100`$ simulated seconds of a system with 50 neurons takes about $`3`$ hours on an Athlon $`1.4`$ GHz processor.

This model system mimics the situation of a highly connected piece of cortex receiving input from the neural periphery. Our input can be interpreted in two ways. It might be a single strong excitatory postsynaptic potential (EPSP) received from an upstream neuron which is strong enough to trigger a spike. It could also be interpreted as the coincidence of several weaker EPSPs received from various presynaptic neurons being sufficient to cause a spike.

### II.2 Operations and Activity

To test the ability of this network to store (learn) and retrieve (remember) temporal-identity patterns it was trained with sets of randomly chosen sequences of inputs. These sequences were chosen without repetition of neurons within the sequence. Note that this implies a minimal time of the order of the length of the sequence between spikes in each neuron. For this reason the choice of resetting or non-resetting neurons is not important as the integration times of the neurons are small compared to the total length of the sequences and the time scale of the global inhibition. Our choice of non-resetting integrate-and-fire neurons was mainly guided by the more natural spike form of the non-resetting variety.

The sequences were presented continuously with the first neuron of the sequence following the last with the same time delay as the neurons within the sequence. The global inhibition of the system partitions this continuous input of spikes into pieces of about $`68`$ spikes at a time. Between these input windows the whole system is inhibited and thus reset. This mechanism can be seen in the example training session shown in Fig. 3. Note that the details of the global inhibition mechanism do not matter as long as the system is efficiently reset after an appropriate amount of activity.

The learning rate $`A_+`$ and the time scale of forgetting $`\tau _g`$ in the synaptic plasticity learning rule were chosen such that learning reaches a steady state after a learning time of about $`1600\mathrm{\Delta }t`$, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ is the fixed inter spike interval between input activations. For an example of the learning protocol see Fig. 3. In all studies described below $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ was chosen as $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=10ms`$, $`15ms`$ or $`20ms`$. The learning rule has to accommodate all these input speeds and possibly values in between. In particular we here chose $`A_+=0.3\mu S`$, $`A_{}=2/3A_+`$, $`\tau _+=16ms`$, $`\tau _{}=3/2\tau _+`$ and $`\tau _g=200s`$.

After the training phase the network was presented with pieces of the training patterns. We presented all possible ordered pieces of one to four input spikes and recorded the number and identity of spiking neurons in the network in response to this input. Perfect learning of the patterns would correspond to obtaining a spike from each of the network neurons in a given pattern when presenting a piece of two or three inputs from that pattern to the “input neurons”. Furthermore, all other network neurons should remain inactive if the pattern is reproduced exactly.

As a result of incomplete or ineffective learning two types of errors can occur. (1) Neurons which should be excited within the given pattern do not spike or (2) neurons which are not supposed to spike do so. Due to overlap of input patterns, the learning efficiency is a function of the number of learned patterns as well as the size of the network. Therefore, estimating the expected amount of overlaps in the randomly chosen input sequences provides information about the optimally achievable system performance.

The probability distribution for the number $`Y_{ijrkn}`$ of ordered $`j`$-tuples occurring in at least $`i`$ out of $`r`$ patterns with $`k`$ neurons each for a system with a total number of $`n`$ neurons can be calculated in the following way: First consider a given ordered $`j`$-tuple and a given pattern with $`k`$ neurons. The sequence is presented continuously and therefore needs to be interpreted as cyclically closed. Thus there are $`k`$ possibilities to position the $`j`$ tuple in the sequence (starting at neuron $`1`$ to starting at neuron $`k`$) and $`(nj)!/(nj(kj))!`$ possibilities to choose the remaining neurons in the sequence. The total number of sequences of length $`k`$ is $`n!/(nk)!`$. Therefore, the probability $`p_j`$ to have a given ordered $`j`$-tuple in a given pattern with $`k`$ active neurons is given by

$`p_j=k{\displaystyle \frac{(nj)!}{(nk)!}}/{\displaystyle \frac{n!}{(nk)!}}=k{\displaystyle \frac{(nj)!}{n!}}.`$ (7)
If $`r`$ sequences of length $`k`$ are chosen independently, the probability to have any given ordered $`j`$-tuple of neurons in $`i`$ or more of the $`r`$ sequences is given by the binomial distribution with parameters $`r`$ and $`p_j`$,

$`p_j^i={\displaystyle \underset{s=i}{\overset{r}{}}}\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}}\right)(p_j)^s(1p_j)^{rs}.`$ (8)
In good approximation one can treat the events of one given $`j`$-tuple being in $`i`$ or more sequences and another $`j`$-tuple being so as independent. In this approximation the probability distribution for $`Y_{ijrkn}`$ is again a binomial distribution with parameters $`\frac{n!}{(nj)!}`$ and $`p_j^i`$,

$`P(Y_{ijrkn}=l)\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\frac{n!}{(nj)!}}{l}}\right)(p_j^i)^l(1p_j^i)^{\frac{n!}{(nj)!}l}.`$ (9)
Fig. 4 shows a comparison of the expectation value for $`𝐄Y_{2,2,10,8,n}`$ obtained from this approximate distribution compared to the relative number of occurrences in $`100000`$ randomly generated sets of $`10`$ sequences of length $`8`$. There is no significant discrepancy which demonstrates the precision of the estimate.

The probability distribution for the number $`X_{ijrkn}`$ of unordered $`j`$-tuples occurring in at least $`i`$ out of $`r`$ patterns with $`k`$ neurons each for a system with a total number of $`n`$ neurons can be calculated pretty much in the same way. Now the the probability $`\widehat{p}_j`$ to have a given unordered $`j`$-tuple in a given pattern with $`k`$ active neurons is

$`\widehat{p}_j=\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{nj}{kj}}\right)/\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}}\right).`$ (10)
Then, the probability $`\widehat{p}_j^i`$ to have any given unordered $`j`$-tuple of neurons in $`i`$ or more of $`r`$ independently chosen patterns is the binomial distribution with parameters $`r`$ and $`\widehat{p}_j`$,

$`\widehat{p}_j^i={\displaystyle \underset{s=i}{\overset{r}{}}}\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}}\right)(\widehat{p}_j)^s(1\widehat{p}_j)^{rs}.`$ (11)
Again taking the approximation of assuming independence for the occurrence of distinct tuples this leads once more to a binomial distribution, now with parameters $`\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{j}\right)`$ and $`\widehat{p}_j^i`$,

$`P(X_{ijrkn}=l)\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{j}\right)}{l}}\right)(\widehat{p}_j^i)^l(1\widehat{p}_j^i)^{\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{j}\right)l}.`$ (12)
The comparison of the expectation values $`𝐄X_{2,3,10,8,n}`$ with numerically observed relative numbers of occurrence in Fig. 4 shows again a perfect match.

The model parameters were chosen such that two to three spiking predecessors of a given neuron in a trained sequence are sufficient to excite that neuron. The learning performance is therefore poor as long as there is a significant amount of ordered $`2`$-tuple overlaps in the patterns. The rule of thumb $`𝐄Y_{22rkn}<0.5`$ for the expectation value of $`Y_{ijrkn}`$, provides an estimate for number $`r`$ of pattern of length $`k`$ that can be successfully stored in a system of $`n`$ neurons. Another estimate for the number of learnable sequences is provided by the rule of thumb $`𝐄X_{23rkn}<0.5`$, i.e. the overlaps in input sequences should have negligible impact on the learning if there is no significant amount of unordered $`3`$-tuples occurring in more than one pattern.

Typically capacity estimates are given in the limit of the system size $`n`$ tending to infinity. As shown in Appendix A the leading term of the Taylor expansion of $`p_j^i`$ with respect to $`p_j`$ around $`p_j=0`$ is

$`p_j^i=\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{i}}\right)(p_j)^i+𝒪((p_j)^{i+1})`$ (13)
such that the asymptotic equation

$`\underset{n\mathrm{}}{lim}𝐄Y_{ijrkn}\stackrel{!}{=}ϵ`$ (14)
leads to

$`\underset{n\mathrm{}}{lim}{\displaystyle \frac{n!}{(nj)!}}\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{i}}\right)\left(k{\displaystyle \frac{(nj)!}{n!}}\right)^i=ϵ`$ (15)
$``$ $`\underset{n\mathrm{}}{lim}{\displaystyle \frac{r^i}{i!}}k^in^{j(i1)}=ϵ`$ (16)
such that the capacity $`r(n,k,ϵ)`$ is asymptotically

$`r(n,k,ϵ)={\displaystyle \frac{1}{k}}(i!ϵ)^{\frac{1}{i}}n^{\frac{j(i1)}{i}}.`$ (17)
In the same way

$`\underset{n\mathrm{}}{lim}𝐄X_{ijrkn}\stackrel{!}{=}ϵ`$ (18)
leads to

$`\widehat{r}(n,k,ϵ)={\displaystyle \frac{(kj)!}{k!}}(i!j!ϵ)^{\frac{1}{i}}n^{\frac{j(i1)}{i}}.`$ (19)
The dashed lines in Fig. 5 are some examples for the first rule of thumb $`𝐄Y_{22rkn}=\frac{1}{2}`$ and the thin solid lines are the corresponding values of $`r(n,k,\frac{1}{2})`$. The estimates based on the rule $`𝐄X_{23rkn}=\frac{1}{2}`$ are shown as dash-dotted lines in Fig. reffigure5 and the corresponding values of the asymptotically correct $`\widehat{r}(n,k,\frac{1}{2})`$ are again shown as thin solid lines. The correspondence between the exact evaluation of the capacity estimators and the asymptotically correct capacity functions $`r(n,k,ϵ)`$ and $`\widehat{r}(n,k,ϵ)`$ is noteworthy. The relative capacities $`r^{}(k):=kr(n,k,ϵ)/n^{\frac{j(i1)}{i}}=(i!ϵ)^{\frac{1}{i}}`$ and $`\widehat{r}^{}(k):=k\widehat{r}(n,k,ϵ)/n^{\frac{j(i1)}{i}}=\frac{(kj)!}{(k1)!}(i!j!ϵ)^{\frac{1}{i}}`$ behave quite differently. Whereas the former is constant with respect to $`k`$ the latter is falling in $`k`$. So, depending whether a system is more sensitive to ordered tuple overlaps or to unordered tuple overlaps, the relative capacity is constant or falling in $`k`$. In particular for systems sensitive to unordered tuple overlaps it will be beneficial to store many short sequences instead of a few long ones.

## III Results

The synaptic plasticity of synapses transforms time sequences of excitation of neurons into directed spatial patterns as intended. A simple example is shown in Fig. 6 for one input pattern. For randomly chosen input sequences the patterns are structured in the same way but are not so easy to detect with the human eye.

During training the synapses between consecutively active neurons are strengthened if pointing in the direction of the activation order or weakened if connecting the neurons in the wrong direction. An example of the development of the average synaptic strength of synapses between neurons of one out of $`5`$ trained sequences is shown in Fig. 7. Note that the time course and final strength of the synapses depends on the speed with which the sequences are entrained due to the non-constant learning curve (1).

The ability to store more than one pattern was tested in various setups. We mainly varied choice, number and length of input sequences and the speed of entrainment.

A typical example for a network of $`50`$ neurons trained with $`5`$ sequences of length $`8`$ is shown in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9. There are several important features to point out. First of all the recall never comprises all $`8`$ neurons of the trained sequence but only up to $`7`$ active neurons. This is however not a universal feature but rather a characteristic of the global inhibition circuit shutting down the system after ca. $`7`$ spike occurrences, see Fig. 8. Furthermore, note that the recall of the sequences speeds up toward the end of the sequence. This is partly due to the fact that the integrate-and-fire neurons used here do not have a finite rise time for their spikes which allows them to instantaneously affect their postsynaptic neurons.

In a network with more realistic neurons one would expect that there is a lower limit on the speed with which sequences can be recalled in the system. Preliminary studies with realistic Hodgkin-Huxley type neurons show this effect Nowotny et al. (2002). It has clear advantages for maintaining the correct order of recall in the system. The microscopic internal dynamics of the neurons thus seems to be non-negligible for the macroscopic performance of the system. This will be discussed in more detail in forthcoming work.

The quality of recall of sequences depends very much on the sequence and the piece presented as a cue. This is however also no surprise because sequence overlaps occur at certain neurons in the sequence and if these are used as a cue the performance is less good as when other neurons are used. In Fig. 9 one can see how some sequences are reproduced very well and error free while others lead to activation of quite a few incorrect neurons.

To test for the capacity of the system systematically we trained a network of $`50`$ neurons with $`2`$ up to $`10`$ sequences of length $`8`$. For each number of sequences $`5`$ independent sets of randomly chosen sequences were tested. Fig. 10 shows the average response of the trained systems to pieces of $`2`$ inputs taken from the learned sequences. The averages are over all possible subsequences and all $`5`$ input sequence sets for each data point. This experiment was done with $`3`$ different input speeds, i.e. the input was presented with fixed inter spike intervals of length $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=10ms`$, $`15ms`$ and $`20ms`$. As one can see in Fig. 10 the performance dramatically decreases for the slowest entrainment speed. This is due to the fact that the fixed width of the learning window in (1) leads to weaker synapses for all the synapses in this case as spikes are separated further in time, see last row of Fig. 7. The minimum and maximum possible speed of the entrainment are thus directly determined by the learning window. If one chooses a larger learning window the slower sequences could be entrained as well. However, this would also lead to decreased performance for faster sequences.

To test for the dependence of learning success on the length of presented sequences we entrained a $`50`$ neuron system with sets of $`5`$ sequences of length $`6`$ to $`9`$. Fig. 11 shows the performance of the system. On first sight it is surprising that the system performs less good for shorter sequences. Naively one would expect a better performance because overlaps are less likely. Indeed one really can see that the number of erroneous spikes is smaller. On the other hand the number of correct spikes is also considerably smaller. This is due to the fact that the spikes preceding a given spike in a sequence are also succeeding it because of the periodic presentation of the sequences (see e.g. Fig. 3). Synapses between the corresponding neurons are therefore enhanced as well as depressed. For shorter sequences the last presentation of the sequence is closer and the depression effect therefore stronger leading to lesser overall synapse strength, cf Fig. 12. This creates the fewer retrieved spikes for shorter sequences in Fig. 11. To some extent this can be seen as an artifact because longer learning time or slightly larger learning increments $`A_+`$ could diminish this effect. On the other hand this might have negative effects on the performance of the system in other parameter regions.

## IV Robustness

Biological neural systems are subject to various external and internal noise sources. Starting from internal thermal noise within the system this ranges over noisy or unreliable input and influences from other parts of the organism up to external electromagnetic fields. To test the effect of noise on the learning success of our model systems we focused on two types of noise. We implemented a Gaussian white noise in the membrane potential of the integrate-and-fire neurons and we implemented unreliable input.

The internal white noise was added to the membrane potential of each neuron independently. It is fully characterized by its mean, $`0mV`$ and its variance for which several values between $`0.2mV`$ and $`1.0mV`$ were tested.

To simulate unreliable input we implemented Poisson input neurons. These neurons produce rectangular spikes of width $`t_{\text{spike}}=3ms`$ as before but the time of spiking is stochastic. The spike times are determined by the Poisson distribution

$`P(n_{\text{spike}}=k)=e^{\lambda t}{\displaystyle \frac{(\lambda t)^k}{k!}}`$ (20)
where $`n_{\text{spike}}`$ is the number of spikes occurring in an interval of length $`t`$ and the parameter $`\lambda `$ is the mean firing rate. For small $`t`$ this can be approximated by $`P(n_{\text{spike}}=1)=\lambda t`$, $`P(n_{\text{spike}}=0)=1\lambda t`$ and $`P(n_{\text{spike}}=k)=0`$ for $`k>1`$. This is the probability distribution we use to decide whether a neuron fires within a time step of the Runge Kutta algorithm used. After firing the neurons are refractory for $`t_{\text{refract}}=10ms`$. The training protocol is that the mean firing rate of the first neurons is switched from $`0`$ to some activity level $`\lambda _{\text{on}}`$ for $`2\mathrm{\Delta }t`$, the next neuron is switched on after $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ for also $`2\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ and so on. Different reliability of the input can be adjusted by the parameter $`\lambda _{\text{on}}`$.

Figs. 13 and 14 show the impact of the two types of noise on the learning performance. Fig. 13 shows the effect of additive white noise at the membrane potential in the learning stage and in both learning and recalling. As mentioned, the standard deviation of the noise was chosen between $`0.3mV`$ and $`1.5mV`$. The system seems to be more or less unaffected by noise of this magnitude. As to be expected the learning is even less sensitive to noise than the recalling due to the fact that the effect of the temporally uncorrelated noise on the synaptic strength is averaged out over time.

Fig. 14 shows the learning success if the input neurons fire stochastically during learning only and during learning and recall as described above. The parameter $`\lambda _{\text{on}}`$ was varied from $`60`$ to $`160Hz`$. The stochastic firing of the input neurons seem to only affect the overall number of spikes, i.e. correct spikes as well as incorrect ones but not their ratio. This indicates that mainly missing input spikes during the training and especially during testing are responsible for the decreased spikes in the response. It is to be expected that longer training can diminish these effects even more. Like in the case of noise in the membrane potential the learning stage is not affected as much by the noisy input as the recall. Again the same argument applies. the effects of the stochasticity of the input spikes is averaged out over time during the multiple repetitions in the training phase.

## V Discussion

It has been demonstrated that STDP allows the transformation of temporal information into spatial information providing an efficient mechanism for storing temporal sequences which does not require a sophisticated network topology. It is however not obvious how to quantify the storage capacity of the system from the observed recall performance for different numbers of stored sequences. Taking the heuristic rule to allow for successful storage on average one incorrect spike in recall, the capacity of a system of $`50`$ neurons is about $`56`$ sequences (see Fig. 10. The capacity estimates for $`n=50`$ and $`k=8`$ are $`r(8,50,\frac{1}{2})6.3`$ and $`\widehat{r}(8,50,\frac{1}{2})2.6`$. The storage capacity of the system therefore seems to be mainly limited by the statistical properties of the input, i.e. the overlap probabilities for randomly chosen input sequences. The biologically found STDP learning rule obviously does not imply severe restrictions on the ability to learn sequences but on the contrary seems to be very well suited for this task. There are indications that the learning mechanism is even more reliable with biologically more realistic conductance based model neurons which have non-trivial intrinsic dynamics which to some extent prevents the speedup in recall already discussed above.

The successful storage of arbitrary input sequences, however, crucially depends on the existence of the corresponding synapses making the all-to-all connections in the investigated system a necessary requirement. In realistic systems such global all-to-all connections can not be found, but this might be compensated through divergence and redundancy of the input. If the density of connections and the number of neurons each input excites is high enough, pairs of connected neurons being excited by successive inputs will appear on a statistical basis. This mechanism will be discussed more thoroughly in forthcoming work.

The realistic implementation of saturation of synaptic strength for additive learning rules is another important topic. For the system investigated here we implemented a combination of two mechanisms. On the one hand the synaptic strength was directly bounded by use of the sigmoid filtering function applied to the bare synaptic strength subject to the additive learning rule, a technique commonly used by biologists. On the other hand the steady decay of synaptic strength and the continuous stimulation of the network by the inputs lead to a dynamical steady state thereby bounding the synaptic strength dynamically.

Whereas the direct bound through a sigmoid filtering function might capture some aspects of the behavior of real synapses, the decay of synaptic strength necessary to achieve a realistic dynamical steady state is clearly too fast to be realistic. The system forgets much too fast if it is not continuously stimulated with appropriate input.

Alternative solutions to the saturation problem include competition based mechanisms suggested by recent findings of interactions of various kinds between neighboring synapses on a dendritic tree Arnth-Jensen et al. (2002) and learning rules which depend on the synaptic strength itself like e.g. multiplicative learning rules.

The system is reasonably robust against noise. It is noteworthy that it is not very sensitive to internal high-frequency noise. In the range of noise applied in our trials the recall barely depended on the level of noise (see Fig. 13. Whether this is an effect of the integrate-and-fire neuron model used here is beyond the scope of this work. The tolerance to biologically more relevant noise in the spike timing of the input is also rather impressive taking into account that $`\lambda _{\text{on}}=60Hz`$ corresponds to a total firing probability of only $`36\%`$ for each of the input neurons within their activity window of $`20ms`$. Nevertheless the system still was able to store at least parts of the presented sequences at this high noise level.

## Acknowledgments

We thank Walter Senn for numerous helpful remarks and suggestions. This work was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Engineering and Geosciences, under Grants No. DE-FG03-90ER14138 and No. DE-FG03-96ER14592, by grants from the National Science Foundation, NSF PHY0097134 and NSF EIA0130708, by a grant from the Army Research Office, DAAD19-01-1-0026, by a grant from the Office of Naval Research, N00014-00-1-0181, and by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, NIH R01 NS40110-01A2.

## Appendix A Taylor expansion of $`𝐩_i^j`$

We first need to proof the identity

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d^n}{dx^n}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)x^s(1x)^{rs}={\displaystyle \underset{k=\mathrm{max}\{n+sr,0\}}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{s,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!}{(sk)!}\frac{(rs)!}{(rs(nk))!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}\right)(1)^{nk}x^{sk}(1x)^{rs(nk)}.`$ (21)
The proof is by induction. Let $`n=0`$. Then the equation reduces to

$`\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)x^s(1x)^{rs}=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!}{s!}\frac{(rs)!}{(rs)!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{0}{0}\right)(1)^0x^s(1x)^{rs}`$ (22)
which is clearly true. Assuming the validity of (21) for $`n`$ we can calculate

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d^{n+1}}{dx^{n+1}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)x^s(1x)^{rs}`$ (23)
$`={\displaystyle \frac{d}{dx}}\left({\displaystyle \underset{k=\mathrm{max}\{n+sr,0\}}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{s,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!}{(sk)!}\frac{(rs)!}{(rs(nk))!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}\right)(1)^{nk}x^{sk}(1x)^{rs(nk)}\right)`$ (24)
$`={\displaystyle \underset{k=\mathrm{max}\{n+sr,0\}}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{s,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!}{(sk1)!}\frac{(rs)!}{(rs(nk))!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}\right)(1)^{nk}x^{sk1}(1x)^{rs(nk)}`$ (25)
$`+{\displaystyle \underset{k=\mathrm{max}\{n+sr,0\}}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{s,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!}{(sk)!}\frac{(rs)!}{(rs(n+1k))!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}\right)(1)^{n+1k}x^{sk}(1x)^{rs(n+1k)}.`$ (26)
Shifting the index in the first sum by one, using the well known identity $`\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}\right)+\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k1}\right)=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n+1}{k}\right)`$ and obvious identities like $`1=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n+1}{0}\right)`$ one obtains equation (21) for $`n+1`$ which completes the proof.

The Taylor expansion for $`p_j^i`$ is then straightforward:

$`p_j^i`$ $`=1{\displaystyle \underset{s=0}{\overset{i1}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)p_j^s(1p_j)^{rs}`$ (27)
$`={\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{s=0}{\overset{i1}{}}}\left({\displaystyle \underset{k=\mathrm{max}\{n+sr,0\}}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{s,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!}{(sk)!}\frac{(rs)!}{(rs(nk))!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{k}\right)(1)^{nk}p_j^{sk}(1p_j)^{rs(nk)}\right)|_{p_j=0}{\displaystyle \frac{(p_j)^n}{n!}}.`$ (28)
For all $`k<s`$ the $`n`$-th derivative contains a non-zero power of $`p_j`$ and is thus $`=0`$ at $`p_j=0`$. Furthermore, if $`s>n`$ then all $`k`$ are less then $`s`$ and therefore the whole sum over $`k`$ is empty. We end up with

$`p_j^i`$ $`={\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{s=0}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{i1,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{s}\right)\frac{s!(rs)!}{(rn)!}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{s}\right)(1)^{ns}{\displaystyle \frac{(p_j)^n}{n!}}`$ (29)
$`={\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{s=0}{\overset{\mathrm{min}\{i1,n\}}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{n}\right)\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{s}\right)(1)^{ns}(p_j)^n.`$ (30)
For any $`ni1`$ the inner sum is

$`\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{n}\right)(p_j)^n{\displaystyle \underset{s=0}{\overset{n}{}}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n}{s}\right)(1)^{ns}1^s=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{n}\right)(p_j)^n(11)^n=0.`$ (31)
Therefore, the leading term of the Taylor expansion of $`p_j^i`$ is

$`p_j^i=\left({\displaystyle \genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{r}{i}}\right)(p_j)^i+𝒪((p_j)^{i+1}).`$ (32)


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# Magnetotransport properties of a polarization-doped three-dimensional electron slab

## I Introduction

In a recent paperMyNewAPL , we reported the creation of polarization-doped three-dimensional electron slabs (3DES) in a graded AlGaN layer. In this work, we present magnetotransport studies of the polarization-doped 3DES. The 3DES exhibits strong Shubnikov de-Haas oscillations. A study of these oscillations reveals the effective mass of carriers, the collisional broadening due to quantum scattering , and the nature of transport in the polarization-doped 3DES.

In a polar crystal with uniform composition, $`n=𝐏=0`$ (where $`𝐏`$ is the polarization vector), and there is no bulk polarization charge. The polarization of the crystal manifests only as sheet charges at surfaces and interfaces, owing to the change in polarization across them ($`\sigma =(𝐏_1𝐏_2)\widehat{𝐧}`$, where $`\sigma `$ is the sheet charge, $`𝐏_\mathrm{𝟏},𝐏_\mathrm{𝟐}`$ are the polarization vectors on the two sides of the junction, and $`\widehat{𝐧}`$ is the normal to the junction). An alloy of spatially constant composition of two polar materials with different magnitudes of polarization will also have $`n=𝐏=0`$. However, if the composition changes spatially, the divergence of the polarization vector becomes non-vanishing. This leads to an immobile polarization charge $`N_\pi ^D=𝐏`$ in a graded alloy region.

The III-V nitride family of crystals of the wurtzite crystal structure is among the first material systems that is strongly polar(compared to other III-V semiconductors) along the c-(0001) axis, is semiconducting (most strongly polar crystals are insulators and used as dielectrics), its binaries (GaN, AlN, InN) have different polarizations, and they can be grown expitaxially with sufficiently pure crystalline quality. These unique properties of the material system enables us to exploit the concept of polarization bulk doping. The large difference in polarization between AlN and GaN (both spontaneous and piezoelectric) bernardini  and the good control of epitaxial growth of AlGaN alloys prompted its choice for this experiment.

Figure I shows a schematic of charge control and band diagram of the technique of polarization doping that we have employed. Also shown in the figure is the sample structure we have used. The sample is a Ga-face structure grown by plasma-induced molecular beam epitaxy ben  on a metal-organic chemical vapor deposition grown semi-insulatingsten  GaN on a sapphire substrate. The growth is along the polar c(0001) axispatrick . The top 100nm of the structure is linearly graded AlGaN; the composition of Al is changed from 0-30% by controlling the aluminum flux by a computer programMyNewAPL . This is the layer that is polarization doped.

The linear grading leads to a fixed chargenotenonlinear  doping $`N_\pi ^D=𝐏`$ terminated by a opposite sheet charge $`\sigma _\pi ^S=|𝐏|/ϵ`$ at the surface. The large electric field created by the jellium of fixed polarization charge extracts electrons from surface donor states ibbo  to form a mobile 3-dimensional electron slab (3DES). The mobile 3DES is characterized by a temperature independent carrier concentration for $`0.4KT300K`$ verifying that the carriers are degenerate, and thus distinct from carriers activated from shallow donors MyNewAPL . We now proceed to study the magnetotransport properties of the 3DES created by this novel process.

## II Magnetotransport

In the presence of a quantizing magnetic field, the unperturbed 3-dimensional density of states (DOS) $`g_0(\epsilon )`$ undergoes Landau quantization to quasi 1-dimensional density of states and acquires an oscillatory component. Dingledingle  showed that inclusion of collisional broadening removes the divergence at the bottom of each 1-dimensional subband and damps the DOS oscillation amplitudes exponentially in $`1/B`$.

As is well known from the theory of the magnetic quantum effects, this oscillation of the density of states manifests in oscillations of both the diamagnetic susceptibility (manifesting in the de-Haas Van Alphen effect) and transport coefficients (manifesting in the Shubnikov de-Haas or SdH oscillations). In particular, the transverse ($`𝐁𝐄`$) magnetoresistance $`R_{xx}`$ shows oscillations in $`1/B`$. Kubo kubo  derived the transverse magnetoresistance at high magnetic fields using the density-matrix approach to solve the transport problem. The expression for $`R_{xx}`$ can be decomposed into a background part and an oscillatory contributionrothargyres  $`R_{xx}=R_{xx}^{Back}+\mathrm{\Delta }R_{xx}^{osc}`$. The background term is attributed to sample inhomogeneities and disorder. The amplitude ($`A`$) of the oscillatory component can be cast in a form hamaguchi  that is simple to use and captures the physical processes reflected in the measured magnetoresistance -

$$\mathrm{\Delta }R_{xx}^{osc}A=\underset{D_t(T)}{\underset{}{\frac{\chi }{\mathrm{sinh}\chi }}}\times \underset{D_c(B)}{\underset{}{\mathrm{exp}(\frac{2\pi \mathrm{\Gamma }}{\mathrm{}\omega _C})}}\times (\frac{\mathrm{}\omega _c}{2\epsilon _F})^{1/2}\mathrm{cos}(\frac{2\pi \epsilon _F}{\mathrm{}\omega _C}\delta )$$
(1)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }R_{xx}^{osc}`$ is the oscillating part of the magnetoresistance with the background removed, $`\epsilon _F=(\mathrm{}^2/2m^{})(3\pi ^2n_{3DES})^{2/3}`$ is the Fermi energy of the 3DES, $`\mathrm{}`$ being the reduced Planck’s constant and $`n_{3DES}`$ is the carrier density of the 3DES, and $`\omega _C=eB/m^{}`$ is the cyclotron frequency. $`\chi =2\pi ^2k_BT/\mathrm{}\omega _c`$ is a temperature dependent dimensionless parameter and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is the collisional broadening energy due to quantum scattering events. $`\delta `$ is a phase factor that is unimportant for our study. The terms $`D_t(T)`$ and $`D_c(B)`$ are the temperature and collision damping terms respectively; it is easily seen that in the absence of damping of the oscillations due to temperature ($`lim_{T0}D_t(T)=1`$) and in the absence of damping due to collisions ($`lim_{\mathrm{\Gamma }0}D_c(B)=1`$), the magnetoresistance would exhibit a weakly modulated ($`B^{1/2}`$) cosine oscillations in $`1/B`$. In fact, the two damping terms $`D_t(T),D_c(B)`$ are used as probes to tune the temperature and magnetic field independently to extract the effective mass and the quantum scattering time. The period of the cosine oscillatory term yields the carrier density of the 3DES since the period is linked to $`n_{3DES}`$. $`R_{xy}`$, the Hall resistance is linear with $`B`$, and should show plateaus at the minima of $`R_{xx}`$ when a small number of Landau levels are filled.

For magnetotransport measurements on our 3DES, ohmic contacts were formed in a Van-der Pauw geometry (Figure 1 inset). The sample was immersed in a $`{}_{}{}^{3}He`$ low-temperature cryostat with a base temperature of $`300mK`$. Magnetic fields in the range $`0TB14T`$ were applied. $`R_{xx}`$ and $`R_{xy}`$ was measured as in the geometry depicted in the figure using the standard low-frequency lock-in technique.

In Figure II we show a plot of the oscillatory transverse magnetoresistance $`\mathrm{\Delta }R_{xx}^{osc}`$ and $`R_{xy}`$ at $`T=400mK`$ plotted against the applied magnetic field. We have removed the background using a FFT filter for plotting $`R_{xx}`$. We will briefly describe our FFT process later in this work. The Hall mobility determined from the slope of the $`R_{xy}`$ curve is $`\mu _H3000cm^2/Vs`$, which is higher than 77K low-field Hall mobility of $`\mu _{77K}2500cm^2/Vs`$. Also, assuming that the 3DES is spread over a thickness $`d`$, the sheet carrier density of the 3DES is calculated to be $`n_{3DES}\times d=1/R_He=B/eR_{xy}=7.2\times 10^{12}/cm^2`$. This is consistent with the 77K low-field Hall measured sheet density of $`7.5\times 10^{12}/cm^2`$. The spread of the 3DES is calculated from a self-consistent Poisson-Schrodinger band calculation to be $`d=75nm`$ due to of $`25nm`$ depletion of the 3DES from the surface potential. This depletion in the graded AlGaN layer has also been verified by capacitance-voltage profilingMyNewAPL . Thus, the Hall 3-dimensional carrier density is $`n_{3DES}10^{18}/cm^3`$.

## III Analysis of magnetotransport data

We begin our study by analyzing the oscillatory component of the transverse magnetoresistance (Figure III). For achieving this, we first take the raw $`R_{xx}`$ vs $`B`$ data and interpolate it to create an equally spaced $`N=2^{15}`$ size FFT window. We then find the FFT power spectrum. This is repeated for $`R_{xx}`$ measured at different temperatures. A typical FFT power spectrum (at T=2.5K) is shown in the inset of Figure III. There is a clearly resolved peak at the fundamental oscillation period $`B_0=34.01T`$. A band pass filter \[$`f_{pass}=`$28-150T\] is then employed to remove the background component. The resulting $`\mathrm{\Delta }R_{xx}^{osc}`$ for various temperatures $`0.4K<T<9.5K`$ is plotted against $`1/B`$ in Figure III. As is clear from the plot, the period of oscillations is $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\frac{1}{B})=0.0294T^1=1/B_0`$. The oscillations are strongly damped with increasing $`1/B`$ as well as with increasing temperature, as predicted by the theory (Equation 1).

### III.1 Carrier concentration

First, we observe from Equation 1 that the period $`\mathrm{\Delta }(\frac{1}{B})`$ is linked to the carrier density of the 3DEG by the relation $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/B)=e\mathrm{}/m^{}\epsilon _F=\frac{2e}{\mathrm{}}(3\pi ^2n_{3DES})^{2/3}`$. From the plot, the period $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/B)=0.0294`$T<sup>-1</sup> yields a direct measurement of the 3-dimensional carrier concentration $`n_{3D}^{SdH}=1.1\times 10^{18}cm^3`$. Thus, the carrier density measured from the quantum oscillations is close to the carrier density measured by classical Hall technique ($`n_{3DES}=10^{18}cm^3`$).

### III.2 Effective mass

The second important property of the 3DES that is accessible from the SdH oscllations is the effective mass of the electrons. This can be calculated from a controlled temperature damping of the oscillation amplitudes, i.e., by tuning the term $`D_t(T)`$ (which is the only temperature dependent term). The approximationelhamri  $`\mathrm{sinh}(\chi )exp(\chi )/2`$ converts Equation 1 into

$$\mathrm{ln}(\frac{A}{T})=C(\frac{2\pi ^2k_Bm^{}}{e\mathrm{}B})T$$
(2)
where the constant $`C`$ absorbs all terms independent of temperature. Thus, when $`\mathrm{ln}(\frac{A}{T})`$ is plotted against $`T`$ for a fixed magnetic field, it results in a straight line with slope $`S=\frac{2\pi ^2k_Bm^{}}{e\mathrm{}B}`$. Since the effective mass is the only unknown, it can be calculated. We calculate the effective mass by employing this procedure.

We choose the amplitude maxima at three different magnetic fields $`B=8.9T,10.5T,12.0T`$ for extracting effective mass of the 3DES. These maxima are indicated by arrows in Figure 3. The plots of $`\mathrm{ln}(A/T)`$ against temperature ($`2.5K<T<14.5K`$) for these magnetic fields are shown in Figure IV(a). The slopes of the plots at $`B=8.9T,10.5T,12.0T`$ yield effective masses $`m^{}=0.189,0.197,0.189m_0`$ respectively. The accepted effective mass of electrons in bulk GaN is $`m^{}=0.2m_0`$. SdH measurement of electron effective mass in bulk GaN is difficult since the activated carriers in donor-doped samples freeze out at low temperatures MyNewAPL . Since the electrons in our 3DES are degenerate, they resist freezeout effects and remain independent of temperature. However, the 3DES electron is not in bulk GaN but in an alloy with a changing composition; we expect the effective mass to be a spatial average. The effective mass of electrons in AlN is predictedvurgaftman  to be $`m^{}=0.32m_0`$; a linear interpolation gives an expected effective mass of $`m^{}=0.21m_0`$ at an average alloy composition of $`x=(0.75\times 0.3)/2=0.11`$ for the mobile 3DES. This is slightly higher than our measured average value $`m_{av}^{}=0.19m_0`$. The result is reasonable within limits of experimental error. We also note that the effective mass of electrons in two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) at AlGaN/GaN heterojunctions has been measured by SdH oscillation technique elhamri , knap , saxler , arakawa  and reported to be various values around $`m^{}0.2m_0`$, which is close to our measured value.

### III.3 Scattering times

The third important parameter of the 3DES that is measured from the SdH oscillations is the collisional broadening energy $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ (due to Dingle). This term is a measure of the smearing of the delta-function discontinuities in the DOS due to quantum scattering events, and it appears as the imaginary part of the single-particle self energy function. Collisional broadening energy is linked to the quantum scattering time $`\tau _q`$ and the Dingle temperature $`T_D`$ by the relation $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=\mathrm{}/2\tau _q=\pi k_BT_D`$. This quantity is experimentally accessible from a controlled Landau damping of the oscillation amplitudes with $`1/B`$ at a fixed temperature; in other words, by tuning $`D_c(B)`$. Equation 1 can be cast in the form

$$\mathrm{ln}(\frac{A^{}}{(\frac{\mathrm{}\omega _c}{2\epsilon _F})^{\frac{1}{2}}D_t(T)})=C(\frac{\pi m^{}}{e\tau _Q})\frac{1}{B}$$
(3)
for extracting $`\tau _q`$ and the related quantities $`\mathrm{\Gamma },T_D`$. Here $`A^{}`$ are the extrema points of the damped oscillations, forming the exponentially decaying envelope. Equation 3 suggests that a plot of the natural log of the left side quantity against $`1/B`$ (‘Dingle plot’)should result in a straight line whose slope is $`\pi m^{}/e\tau _q`$. Since we have already measured the effective mass $`m^{}`$, we can extract $`\tau _q`$ from the slope.

Figure IV(b) shows the Dingle plot for $`T=400mK`$, yielding a $`\tau _q=0.27ps`$. An averaging of the quantum scattering times over a range of low temperatures yields a value $`\tau _q^{av}=0.3ps`$. The quantum scattering time does not show any discernible trend with temperature in this range. We calculate the corresponding level broadening $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.1meV`$ and Dingle temperature $`T_D=4K`$. We mention in passing that the Landau level separation at $`B=10T`$ is $`\mathrm{}\omega _C=5.8meV`$, sufficiently larger than both the measured collisional broadening of the Landau levels ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.1meV`$) and the thermal broadening $`k_BT=0.09meV`$ at $`T=1K`$, thus satisfying the conditions required for clear Shubnikov de-Haas oscillations.

Whilst $`\tau _q`$ (the quantum lifetime of an electron in a magnetic quantum state) is determined by all scattering events, the transport (classical, or momentum) lifetime $`\tau _c`$ is weighted by a scattering angle factor $`(1\mathrm{cos}\theta )`$, where $`\theta `$ is the angular deviation in the scattering event. Thus,

$$\frac{1}{\tau _q}=P(\theta )𝑑\theta $$
(4)
as opposed to the momentum scattering time, which is averaged by the angular contribution for small angle scattering

$$\frac{1}{\tau _c}=P(\theta )(1\mathrm{cos}\theta )𝑑\theta $$
(5)
here $`P(\theta )`$ is the transition probability between the initial and the scattered states determined by Fermi’s golden rule. It can be seen that for isotropic scattering events with no angular preference ($`P(\theta )`$ is independent of $`\theta `$), the quantum and classical scattering times are the same $`\tau _c/\tau _q=1`$. If the dominant scattering process has a strong angle dependence, the ratio is much larger than unity. This fact has been utilized to identify the dominant scattering mechanism in modulation-doped AlGaAs/GaAs two-dimensional electron gases harrang .

The low-temperature Hall mobility gives us a direct measurement of the classical scattering time for the 3DES via the relation $`\mu _H=e\tau _c/m^{}`$; the value is $`\tau _c=0.34ps`$. Within limits of experimental error, the ratio $`\tau _c/\tau _q1`$, i.e., is close to unity.

### III.4 Scattering mechanisms

As Hsu and Walukiewicz have shownhsu\_walu , one has to exercise caution before declaring that the dominant scattering process in the 3DES is of short-range nature. They show that it is possible to have the ratio close to unity if there are different scattering mechanisms responsible for the quantum and classical lifetimes. At the low temperatures at which we measure the scattering time, both acoustic and optical phonon modes of scattering are frozen out and the charges from any unintentional background donors are frozen onto the donor sites, rendering them neutral. Size effect scattering walu\_size  that occurs if the width of the 3DES is much less than the mean-free path of electrons is negligible since our 3DES has a mean free path $`\lambda =\mathrm{}k_F\mu /e60nm`$ whereas the width of the 3DES is $`d_075nm`$. The chief scattering mechanisms that can affect mobility are alloy disorder scattering (since the 3DES is in a graded alloy), charged dislocation scattering (owing to the high density of dislocations $`N_{disl}10^9cm^2`$), and ionized impurity scattering from the remote donors at the surface states.

Hsu and Walukiewicz hsu\_walu  show that remote ionized impurity scattering strongly favors small angle scattering, thus causing the ratio $`\tau _c/\tau _q1`$. Since $`\tau _c/\tau _q1`$ for our 3DES, remote ionized impurity scattering is unimportant.

The ratio of classical to quantum scattering times due to charged dislocation scattering has not been found yet. Looklook\_prl  recently applied the classical scattering time due to charged dislocations and applied it to explain the mobility of bulk doped GaN samples. The ratio classical to quantum scattering times due to charged dislocation scattering in a degenerate 3DES is given bymynewpaper

$$\frac{\tau _{disl}^c}{\tau _{disl}^q}=1+2k_F^2\lambda _{TF}^2$$
(6)
where $`k_F=(3\pi ^2n_{3DES})^{1/3}`$ is the Fermi wavevector and $`\lambda _{TF}^2=2ϵ\epsilon _F/3e^2n_{3DES}`$ is the Thomas-Fermi screening length for a degenerate 3DES. The ratio, which depends only on the 3D carrier density for a degenerate 3DES, is evidently greater than unity; for our 3DES, the ratio is $`2.3`$, which is larger than what we observe. So dislocation scattering is not the dominant scattering mechanism for determining the quantum scattering rate. The dislocation scattering dominated classical scattering rates is strongly dependent on the amount of charge in the dislocation cores, which is low for our 3DES due to the lack of shallow dopantswright . Thus, we exclude dislocation scattering to be the most important scattering mechanism for classical scattering rate.

So we converge on alloy scattering as the dominant scattering mechanism for low temperatures. The quantum and classical scattering rates for alloy disorder scattering are the same since the scattering potential $`V_0`$ is of a short range nature, which makes the scattering process angle independent.

The scattering rate due to alloy disorder with a short range potential $`V_0`$ has been shownhamaguchi  to be given by

$$\frac{1}{\tau _{alloy}(k)}=\frac{2\pi }{\mathrm{}}V_0^2\mathrm{\Omega }(x)x(1x)g_{3D}(\epsilon _k)$$
(7)
where $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0(x)`$ is alloy composition-dependent volume of the unit cell over which the alloy scattering potential $`V_0`$ is effective, and $`x`$ is the alloy composition. $`g_{3D}(\epsilon )`$ is the 3-dimensional DOS. Since the 3DES is highly degenerate, only carriers with wavevectors very close to $`k=k_F`$ contribute to transport at low temperatures; hence, the scattering rate is evaluated at the Fermi energy $`\tau _{alloy}^1=\tau _{alloy}^1(\epsilon _F)`$. Besides, the alloy is graded, and Matheissen’s rule which is accurate for low temperature transport analysis is used for a spatial averaging of the scattering rate

$$\tau _{alloy}^1=\frac{1}{x_0}_0^{x_0}\tau _{alloy}^1(x)𝑑x$$
(8)
where $`x_0=0.225`$ is the alloy composition experienced by 3DES electrons at the edge of the depletion region. Using this simple result, we conclude that to achieve a low-temperature transport mobility of $`3000cm^2/Vs`$, an alloy scattering potential of $`V_0=1.8eV`$ is necessary.

It is important to point out that the alloy scattering potential as defined in the model for alloy disorder is at best a fitting parameter. Due to the lack of experimental values, it is common practice to assume the scattering potential to be the conduction band offset between the binaries forming the alloy ($`V_0=\mathrm{\Delta }E_c=2.1eV`$ for AlN,GaN). We note that with an alloy scattering potential of $`V_0=2.1eV`$, the calculated mobility is lower ($`2000cm^2/Vs`$) than the measured value. Besides, our 3DES mobility is dominated by alloy scattering and all other scattering mechanisms are removed by measuring the mobility at low temperatures, making it a clean measurement of the alloy scattering potential. Our report presents the first direct measurement of the alloy scattering potential in the AlGaN material system.

## IV Summary

We finally summarize our findings in this work (see Table I). By exploiting the polarization charges in the AlGaN/GaN semiconductor system, we are able to create a 3DES without intentional doping. The mobile carriers in the 3DES are degenerate and exhibit a high mobility even to the lowest temperatures. The lack of carrier freezeout enables us to observe Shubnikov de-Haas oscillations in magnetotransport measurements of the 3DES. The oscillations reveal several important facts about the 3DES. First, the temperature damping of oscillations reveals the effective mass of electrons to be very close to that in bulk GaN ($`m^{}=0.19m_0`$). Next, the quantum scattering time of electrons in the 3DES is found from the Dingle plot to be $`\tau _q=0.3ps`$. The ratio of the classical (momentum) scattering time to the classical (momentum) scattering time is found to be close to unity $`\tau _c/\tau _q1`$. The ratio suggests predominantly short-range scattering dominating transport properties at low temperatures. This scattering mechanism is identified to be alloy scattering. This lets us extract another valuable parameter, the alloy scattering potential in Al<sub>x</sub>Ga<sub>1-x</sub>N to be $`V_0=1.8eV`$.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors would like to thank Jasprit Singh, and Herbert Kroemer for useful discussions, and Huili Xing for a critical reading of the manuscript. Funding from POLARIS/MURI (Contract monitor: C. Wood) is gratefully acknowledged.


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

The AdS/CFT correspondence identifies a large $`N`$ $`𝒩=4`$ super Yang-Mills theory with string theory propagating on an $`AdS_5\times S_5`$ background . In order to verify the correspondence, one would hope to solve string theory in this background, or at least be able to find the spectrum of the free string states. Major progress along this direction was made in , where it was shown that for a certain plane wave limit of $`AdS_5\times S_5`$ , the spectrum of the string states is exactly solvable. Given this spectrum for the string states, Berenstein, Maldacena and Nastase (BMN) showed how to identify these particular string states with gauge invariant operators with large $`R`$-charge $`J`$  . The energies of the string states should be directly related to the dimensions of the operators, and the authors in  showed that the identification was consistent, at least to one loop level. In  it was shown that the identification was consistent with a two loop calculation and, modulo an assumption, all higher loops as well. In , using a very elegant argument, it was shown that the BMN result was consistent with all planar contributions. It has also been recently shown how to match up string loop corrections with nonplanar diagrams for large $`J`$ operators with two scalar impurities ,,, as well as operators with derivative impurities , 222 However there are also subtleties in matching higher point functions to the full string field theory results of - because of mixings between single and double trace operators -..

However, the plane wave limit of BMN just describes one particular corner of the complete set of gauge invariant operators in the field theory, so it would be nice to be able to make some statements for string motion in $`AdS_5\times S_5`$ that does not correspond to this large $`J`$ limit.

The authors in  described one way of doing this. Their idea was to consider the Nambu-Goto action for string motion in $`AdS_5\times S_5`$, with the string motion limited to highly symmetrical motion. The main example that they discussed was a spinning string stretched in the $`AdS_5`$ space. They considered the classical motion for this string, which by its symmetry, is solvable via quadratures. If the stretching of the string is very small, then the string does not really see the curvature of the space, so the results should be almost identical to motion in flat space. For such motion, they find a relation between the energy of the string and its spin which is

$$E^2=2(\lambda )^{1/2}S,$$
(1.1)
where $`\lambda `$ is the ’t Hooft coupling. Since the dimension of the operator is equal to the energy of the dual string state $`E`$, one finds the result

$$\mathrm{\Delta }=(2\sqrt{\lambda }S)^{1/2}.$$
(1.2)
The corresponding operator is

$$\text{Tr}(\varphi ^I(^+)^S\varphi ^I),$$
(1.3)
where $`\varphi ^I`$ are the six adjoint fields and $`^+`$ is the covariant derivative circularly polarized in the plane that the string is spinning in. This result is consistent with  where it was argued that the dimension for an operator corresponding to an excited string state is

$$\mathrm{\Delta }=2(\sqrt{\lambda }n)^{1/2},$$
(1.4)
where $`n`$ is the level of the string state. For the spinning string, the level is $`S/2`$.

However, for large enough $`S`$, there must be some change in the behavior of $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$. This is because the bare dimension is increasing linearly in $`S`$, while (1.1) is only increasing as $`\sqrt{S}`$. If this formula were to hold for all $`S`$, then at some point the bare dimension of the operator would be greater than the full dimension, violating unitarity.

The resolution of this problem is that for large enough $`S`$, the string starts seeing the curvature of the space, which will begin to modify $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$. In particular, for very large $`S`$, the authors in  found that

$$\mathrm{\Delta }=S+\frac{\sqrt{\lambda }}{\pi }\mathrm{log}S.$$
(1.5)
Remarkably, the $`\mathrm{log}S`$ behavior appears in perturbative Yang-Mills computations , albeit with a factor of $`\lambda `$. Further study of this string motion was carried out in -

The spinning string analysis in  was essentially semiclassical, since it was assumed that the spin is quantized. It is then clear how to relate the level of the string state to the spin. The purpose of this note is to consider other string motion where a semiclassical analysis can be done, giving us a means to compute an energy and hence a dimension of an operator, and then relate this dimension to a string level.

We will consider two types of symmetric motion. The first type corresponds to a multiwrapped circular pulsating string expanding and contracting in the $`AdS_5`$ subspace. One can then do a WKB analysis and relate a quantum number, namely the excitation level of the string, to a dimension of an operator. This quantum number should be twice the level of the corresponding string state. In this case, we will find that the anomolous dimension of the corresponding gauge theory operator behaves as

$$\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Delta }_b(m\sqrt{\lambda }n)^{1/2}$$
(1.6)
for large $`n`$, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }_b=2n`$ is the bare dimension of the operator, $`m`$ is the number of times the string wraps over itself and $`mn`$ corresponds to the string level.

We then consider a circular pulsating string expanding and contracting on the $`S_5`$. For very large quantum numbers, the string easily oscillates by expanding about the north pole and shrinking about the south pole and then going back again. In this case, we find that

$$\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Delta }_b\frac{m^2\lambda }{2n}.$$
(1.7)
Hence, the anomalous dimension is analytic about $`m^2\lambda /(2n)^2=0`$, which seems to indicate that this result can be directly verified in perturbation theory. We also find that $`m^2\lambda /(2n)^2`$ acts as an expansion parameter, which is similar to the BMN case where $`m^2\lambda /J^2`$ is the expansion parameter. Since $`m`$ is closely related to relative phases in the BMN case , we conjecture that the same is true for the dual operators considered here. Using this assumption we are led to conjectures for the form of the operators in both cases considered here.

In section 2 we start by considering a circular pulsating string in flat space. In section 3 we consider the string pulsating in the $`AdS_5`$ space. Using a WKB analysis we compute the energy of the string state as a function of a large quantum number. From our results in the previous section, we are able to relate this quantum number to the string level. In section 4 we consider the string pulsating in the $`S_5`$. Using ordinary perturbation theory, we are able to compute corrections to the energies for large quantum numbers. We also argue that the operator dual to the string state approaches a chiral primary as $`n`$ becomes large. In section 5 we give our conclusions.

## 2 The pulsating string in flat space

As a warmup, let us consider quantization of a circular pulsating string in flat space. We will assume that all motion is in a two dimensional plane and so the relevant metric is

$$ds^2=dt^2+dr^2+r^2d\theta ^2.$$
(2.1)
The Nambu-Goto action is

$$S=\frac{1}{2\pi \alpha ^{}}𝑑\tau 𝑑\sigma \sqrt{det(_\alpha X^\mu _\beta X_\mu )}.$$
(2.2)
This can be reduced by invoking the reparameterization invariance to set $`t=\tau `$ and $`\theta =m\sigma `$, where we allow for a string that is multiwrapped. Assuming that the radial coordinate has no angular dependence, the action in (2.2) becomes

$$S=\frac{m}{\alpha ^{}}𝑑tr\sqrt{1\dot{r}^2}.$$
(2.3)
The canonical momentum is

$$\mathrm{\Pi }=\frac{r\dot{r}}{m\alpha ^{}\sqrt{1\dot{r}^2}},$$
(2.4)
and so the Hamiltonian is

$$H=\mathrm{\Pi }\dot{r}L=\sqrt{\mathrm{\Pi }^2+m^2r^2/\alpha ^2}.$$
(2.5)
Hence the square of the Hamiltonian looks like an ordinary harmonic oscillator, although constrained to the even states since $`r`$ is a radial component. Hence, for large energy states, the energy squared satisfies333We are ignoring the zero point corrections. They are unimportant for the discussion contained here.

$$(E_n)^2=2(2nm)/\alpha ^{},$$
(2.6)
where $`n`$ is an integer. The product $`nm`$ is the level.

It is simple to see where these states come from in the more canonical way of treating closed strings in flat space. The solutions for the classical equations of motion are

$$X^\mu (\tau ,\sigma )=p^\mu \tau +x^\mu +\underset{n0}{}\frac{\alpha _n^\mu }{n}e^{in(\tau \sigma )}+\frac{\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_n^\mu }{n}e^{in(\tau +\sigma )},$$
(2.7)
with the constraints

$$\dot{X}^\mu \dot{X}_\mu +X_{}^{}{}_{}{}^{\mu }X_{}^{}{}_{\mu }{}^{}=0\dot{X}^\mu X_{}^{}{}_{\mu }{}^{}=0.$$
(2.8)
Clearly, one solution is

$$X^1=A\mathrm{cos}m\tau \mathrm{cos}m\sigma X^2=A\mathrm{cos}m\tau \mathrm{sin}m\sigma ,$$
(2.9)
which corresponds to

$$\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_m^1=\alpha _m^1,\alpha _m^2=i\alpha _m^1,\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_m^2=i\alpha _m^1,$$
(2.10)
along with similar relations for the complex conjugate variables. All other $`\alpha _n^\mu `$ are zero. In terms of the components $`X^\pm =X^1\pm X^2`$, we have

$$\alpha _m^+=\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_m^{}\alpha _m^{}=\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_m^+=0.$$
(2.11)
Hence, for the quantized string, the level $`nm`$ state corresponding to the circular string state is

$$(\alpha _m^+)^n(\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_m^{})^n|0,$$
(2.12)
which clearly has $`E^2=4nm/\alpha ^{}`$.

There is another circular state in this plane, which comes from interchanging the $`+`$ and $``$ polarizations between the left and right movers. In terms of the solutions in (2.9), this corresponds to the transformation $`X^2X^2`$, which is a parity inversion.

We can compare this to the solution of the spinning string. In this case we have that

$$X^1=A\mathrm{cos}\tau \mathrm{cos}\sigma X^2=A\mathrm{sin}\tau \mathrm{cos}\sigma ,$$
(2.13)
which corresponds to

$$\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_1^1=\alpha _1^1,\alpha _1^2=i\alpha _1^1,\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_1^2=i\alpha _1^1,$$
(2.14)
and so

$$\alpha _1^+=\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_1^+\alpha _1^{}=\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_1^{}=0.$$
(2.15)
The corresponding quantum state is

$$(\alpha _1^+)^n(\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_1^+)^n|0.$$
(2.16)
It was argued in  that this string state is dual to the twist 2 operator $`\text{Tr}(\varphi ^I(^+)^{2n}\varphi ^I)`$.

Hence, it is natural to expect that the pulsating string corresponds to the trace of $`n`$ $`^+`$ operators and $`n`$ $`^{}`$ operators sandwiched between two adjoint fields. Unlike, the spinning string where the covariant derivatives are automatically symmetric, we expect that for the pulsating case, it will be necessary to symmetrize over all orderings of $`^+`$ and $`^{}`$. We should also have to include some $`m`$ dependent phases. Also, the opposite parity string state should correspond to interchanging $`^+`$ with $`^{}`$.

## 3 The pulsating string in $`AdS_5`$

In this section we consider the semiclassical quantization of a circular string that expands and contracts in $`AdS_5`$. The classical motion for this was first considered in . The Nambu-Goto action is

$$S=\frac{1}{2\pi \alpha ^{}}𝑑\tau 𝑑\sigma \sqrt{det(G_{\mu \nu }_\alpha X^\mu _\beta X^\nu )},$$
(3.1)
where $`G_{\mu \nu }`$ is the $`AdS_5`$ metric

$$ds^2=R^2(\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho dt^2+d\rho ^2+\mathrm{sinh}^2\rho d\mathrm{\Omega }_3^2),$$
(3.2)
and where $`R^4=\lambda \alpha _{}^{}{}_{}{}^{2}`$ with $`\lambda `$ the ’t Hooft coupling. As usual, it is convenient to parameterize the 3-sphere metric as

$$d\mathrm{\Omega }_3^2=\mathrm{cos}^2\theta d\psi ^2+d\theta ^2+\mathrm{sin}^2\theta d\varphi ^2.$$
(3.3)
We will look for solutions with $`\theta =\pi /2`$ and the string wrapped $`m`$ times around the $`\varphi `$ direction. Using the reparamerterization invariance of (3.1), we identify $`t=\tau `$ and $`\varphi =m\sigma `$. Hence the action reduces to

$$S=m\sqrt{\lambda }𝑑t\sqrt{\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho \dot{\rho }^2}\mathrm{sinh}\rho .$$
(3.4)
To proceed, it is convenient to choose a new variable $`\xi `$ whose relation to $`\rho `$ is

$$\xi =\mathrm{sin}^1(\mathrm{tanh}\rho ).$$
(3.5)
Using the $`\xi `$ variable, the action becomes

$$S=m\sqrt{\lambda }𝑑t\mathrm{tan}\xi \mathrm{sec}\xi \sqrt{1\dot{\xi }^2}.$$
(3.6)
The canonical momentum is given by

$$\mathrm{\Pi }=m\sqrt{\lambda }\mathrm{tan}\xi \mathrm{sec}\xi \frac{\dot{\xi }}{\sqrt{1\dot{\xi }^2}},$$
(3.7)
and so the Hamiltonian is

$$H=\mathrm{\Pi }\dot{\xi }L=\sqrt{\mathrm{\Pi }^2+m^2\lambda \mathrm{tan}^2\xi \mathrm{sec}^2\xi }.$$
(3.8)
Hence, we see that $`\frac{1}{2}H^2`$ is an ordinary one dimensional quantum mechanical system with potential

$$V(\xi )=2m^2\lambda \mathrm{tan}^2\xi \mathrm{sec}^2\xi .$$
(3.9)
The potential in (3.9) is zero at $`\xi =0`$ and diverges at $`\xi =\pi /2`$. Hence for states with large energies, the potential is approximately that of a square well, with $`\xi `$ constrained to be positive. Alternatively, we can consider the case where $`\xi `$ ranges from $`\pi /2`$ to $`\pi /2`$, but only wave-functions even in $`\xi `$ are considered. That is the approach that we will take here. For large energy states, we then find that the approximate wave functions are

$$\psi _n(\xi )\mathrm{cos}((2n+1)\xi ),$$
(3.10)
and the approximate energies are

$$E^2(2n+1)^2.$$
(3.11)
Hence, we find that the dimensions of the operators approach

$$\mathrm{\Delta }2n+1,$$
(3.12)
which is the bare dimension of the operator.

However, we can do better than this and make a prediction for the leading order correction for the energy of the string state, which would correspond to the anomalous dimension of the operator. We can do this by doing a Bohr-Sommerfeld analysis for the quantization of the states. Since we are only looking for even wave functions, the quantized states satisfy

$$(2n+1/2)\pi =_{\xi _0}^{\xi _0}\sqrt{E^2m^2\lambda \mathrm{tan}\xi \mathrm{sec}\xi }+\mathrm{O}(n^1).$$
(3.13)
The values $`\pm \xi _0`$ are the turning points, which satisfy

$$E=m\sqrt{\lambda }\mathrm{tan}\xi _0\mathrm{sec}\xi _0.$$
(3.14)
If we define $`B=E/(m\sqrt{\lambda })`$ and define a new variable $`y=(B)^{1/2}\mathrm{tan}\xi `$, then the integral in (3.13) can be written as

$$2m\sqrt{\lambda B}\left[_0^{y_0}\frac{dy}{B^1+y^2}_0^{y_0}\frac{dy}{B^1+y^2}\left(1\sqrt{1y^2/By^4}\right)\right].$$
(3.15)
The first integral inside the square brackets is

$$_0^{y_0}\frac{dy}{B^1+y^2}=\sqrt{B}\left(\frac{\pi }{2}\frac{1}{\sqrt{B}}\right).$$
(3.16)
The second integral is finite in the limit $`B\mathrm{}`$. In this limit the integral becomes

$$_0^1\frac{dy}{y^2}(1\sqrt{1y^4})=1+\frac{(2\pi )^{3/2}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1}{4}\right)^2}.$$
(3.17)
Putting everything together, we see that for large values of $`E`$, the expression in (3.13) can be approximated as

$$(2n+1/2)\pi E\pi \frac{4\pi (2\pi )^{1/2}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1}{4}\right)^2}m^{1/2}\lambda ^{1/4}\sqrt{E}.$$
(3.18)
Inverting this we find

$$\mathrm{\Delta }=E2n+\frac{8\pi ^{1/2}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1}{4}\right)^2}\lambda ^{1/4}\sqrt{nm}.$$
(3.19)
Note that the numerical coefficients are similar to those that appeared in the Wilson loop computations of ,.

Hence, from (3.19) we see that this operator with a large bare dimension has an anomalous piece which is of the same form as a nonchiral operator with a low bare dimension. For such an operator, the full dimension was found to be

$$\mathrm{\Delta }2\lambda ^{1/4}\sqrt{nm},$$
(3.20)
for level $`nm`$. For the case described in (3.19) the prefactor is

$$\frac{8\pi ^{1/2}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1}{4}\right)^2}1.0787.$$
(3.21)
Let us rewrite $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ in (3.19) as

$$\mathrm{\Delta }2n\left(1+\frac{8\pi ^{1/2}}{\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1}{4}\right)^2}\left(\frac{\lambda m^2}{n^2}\right)^{1/4}\right).$$
(3.22)
Hence, we see that $`\frac{\lambda m^2}{n^2}`$ acts as an expansion parameter, which is quite similar to the expansion parameter in BMN. In their case, the role of $`n`$ is played by $`J`$, the value of the $`R`$-charge. The role of $`m`$ appears the same; it corresponds to the level of each oscillator. Note further that this expansion parameter is multiplied by a factor of $`n`$, suggesting that this state corresponds to one with $`n`$ right and left moving oscillators. We will see an even closer similarity to the BMN results in the next section.

Let us conclude this section by postulating an operator that is dual to this string state. The bare dimension should be $`2n`$ and the total spin is zero. The motion is entirely in the $`AdS_5`$, suggesting that the operator is built out of a symmetrized sum over the product of covariant derivatives. The analysis of BMN also suggests that the level of each oscillator introduces a phase $`e^{2\pi im/n}`$ when a $`^+`$ operator goes through a $`^{}`$ operator. Hence, one might guess that the operator is

$$\frac{n!}{\sqrt{(2n)!}}\underset{perms}{}\text{Tr}\left(\varphi ^I(^+)^{n_1^+}(^{})^{n_1^{}}(^+)^{n_2^+}(^{})^{n_2^{}}\mathrm{}(^+)^{n_k^+}(^{})^{n_k^{}}\varphi ^I\right)\mathrm{exp}(i\phi (n_1^+,n_1^{},\mathrm{}n_k^+,n_k^{})),$$
(3.23)
where the sum is over all orderings of the covariant derivatives. We also have that $`kn`$ and that the $`n_i^+`$ and $`n_i^{}`$ satisfy

$$\underset{i=1}{\overset{k}{}}n_i^+=\underset{i=1}{\overset{k}{}}n_i^{}=n.$$
(3.24)
The phase is given by

$$\phi (n_1^+,n_1^{},\mathrm{}n_k^+,n_k^{})=\frac{2\pi m}{n}\underset{ij}{\overset{k}{}}n_i^+n_j^{}.$$
(3.25)
Notice that the operator is not invariant under the exchange of $`^+`$ with $`^{}`$ because of the phase terms. This fits with our expectation that changing the orientation of the string leads to a new string state. Note further that the transformation of $`mnm`$ is equivalent to changing the orientation. This operator must have the same dimension as the original operator. This seems at first to contradict the result in (3.22). However there is no contradiction, since in order for the approximation to work, we must assume that $`\frac{\lambda m^2}{n^2}`$ is small. Since $`\lambda `$ is assumed to be large, if $`\frac{\lambda m^2}{n^2}`$ is small then $`\frac{\lambda (nm)^2}{n^2}`$ is large.

## 4 The pulsating string on $`S_5`$

As our other example444This section has been expanded from the earlier version. I thank Arkady Tseytlin, for pointing out an error in the previous version of this section., let us consider a circular pulsating string expanding and contracting on $`S_5`$. Let us write the metric on $`S_5`$ as

$$ds^2=R^2(\mathrm{cos}^2\theta d\mathrm{\Omega }_3^2+d\theta ^2+\mathrm{sin}^2\theta d\psi ^2).$$
(4.1)
We will assume that the string is stretched along $`\psi `$ and is at a fixed point on the $`S_3`$ and the spatial components of the $`AdS_5`$. Hence, the relevant metric for us is

$$ds^2=R^2(\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho dt^2+d\rho ^2+d\theta ^2+\mathrm{sin}^2\theta d\psi ^2).$$
(4.2)
We have chosen to keep the radial piece of the $`AdS_5`$ in order to account for quantum fluctuations in this space. Identifying $`t`$ with $`\tau `$ and $`\psi `$ with $`m\sigma `$ to again allow for multiwrapping, the Nambu-Goto action reduces to

$$S=m\sqrt{\lambda }𝑑t\mathrm{sin}\theta \sqrt{\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho \dot{\rho }^2\dot{\theta }^2}.$$
(4.3)
Hence, the canonical momentum are

$`\mathrm{\Pi }_\rho `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{m\sqrt{\lambda }\mathrm{sin}\theta \dot{\rho }}{\sqrt{\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho \dot{\rho }^2\dot{\theta }^2}}},`$ (4.4)
$`\mathrm{\Pi }_\theta `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{m\sqrt{\lambda }\mathrm{sin}\theta \dot{\theta }}{\sqrt{\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho \dot{\rho }^2\dot{\theta }^2}}}.`$ (4.5)
Solving for the derivatives in terms of the canonical momenta and substituting into the Hamiltonian, we find

$$H=\mathrm{cosh}\rho \sqrt{\mathrm{\Pi }_\rho ^2+\mathrm{\Pi }_\theta ^2+m\lambda \mathrm{sin}^2\theta }.$$
(4.6)
If we were to fix $`\rho =0`$, then the squared Hamiltonian looks very much like a one dimensional pendulum.

For small energy states, $`\mathrm{sin}\theta <<1`$, so the squared Hamiltonian reduces to the usual harmonic oscillator in flat space. We are interested in the opposite limit, where $`E^2>>m^2\lambda \mathrm{sin}^2\theta `$. The potential term comes from the stretching of the string, so if we ignore it, we should expect particle like behavior. The wave functions are for a free particle on $`AdS_5\times S_5`$, and are assumed to have $`\rho `$ and $`\theta `$ dependence only. Hence, they satisfy

$$E^2\psi (\rho ,\theta )=\frac{\mathrm{cosh}\rho }{\mathrm{sinh}^3\rho }\frac{d}{d\rho }\mathrm{cosh}\rho \mathrm{sinh}^3\rho \frac{d}{d\rho }\psi (\rho ,\theta )\frac{\mathrm{cosh}^2\rho }{\mathrm{sin}\theta \mathrm{cos}^3\theta }\frac{d}{d\theta }\mathrm{sin}\theta \mathrm{cos}^3\theta \frac{d}{d\theta }\psi (\rho ,\theta ),$$
(4.7)
where we have taken into account the directions transverse to $`\rho `$ and $`\theta `$ in expressing the momentum operators. Hence, these wave functions are

$$\psi _{2n}(\rho ,\theta )=(\mathrm{cosh}\rho )^{2n4}P_{2n}(\mathrm{cos}\theta ),$$
(4.8)
with energies

$$E_{2n}=\mathrm{\Delta }=2n+4.$$
(4.9)
The $`P_{2n}(\mathrm{cos}\theta )`$ are spherical harmonics on $`S_5`$, which are even about $`\theta =\pi /2`$, assuming that the wave functions are constant on the $`S_3`$.

To find the anomalous dimension, we can do ordinary perturbation theory. The wavefunctions are highly peaked around $`\rho =0`$ for large $`2n`$, so we simply fix $`\rho `$ and only worry about the $`\theta `$ dependence. We may also approximate the spherical harmonics as

$$P_{2n}(\mathrm{cos}\theta )\sqrt{\frac{4}{\pi }}\mathrm{cos}2n\theta .$$
(4.10)
Hence, the first term in the perturbative expansion gives

$$\delta E^2=_0^{\pi /2}𝑑\theta \psi _{2n}^{}(0,\theta )m^2\lambda \mathrm{sin}^2\theta \psi _{2n}(0,\theta )=\frac{m^2\lambda }{2}.$$
(4.11)
Including a few higher order terms gives

$$\delta E^2=\frac{1}{2}m^2\lambda +\frac{1}{32}\frac{m^4\lambda ^2}{4n^2}+\mathrm{O}(m^8\lambda ^4),$$
(4.12)
where the third order perturbation turns out to be zero. Thus we find that the dimension of the corresponding operator is

$$\mathrm{\Delta }4=2n\left(1+\frac{1}{4}\left(\frac{m^2\lambda }{(2n)^2}\right)\frac{1}{64}\left(\frac{m^2\lambda }{(2n)^2}\right)^2+\mathrm{O}\left(\frac{m^2\lambda }{(2n)^2}\right)^3\right)$$
(4.13)
It is clear from (4.13) that again there is a natural expansion parameter $`\frac{m^2\lambda }{(2n)^2}`$ which is similar to the large $`J`$ expansion parameter $`\frac{m^2\lambda }{J^2}`$. In both cases, the term in the denominator is the square of the bare dimension of the operator. As in the BMN case, we see that even if $`\lambda `$ is large, the expansion parameter can be chosen small by choosing $`n`$ large enough. What is further significant about (4.13), and unlike the case in the previous section, is that the anomalous piece is analytic about $`\frac{\lambda }{(2n)^2}=0`$. This suggests that there exists a direct verification of this result in perturbation theory.

There is one other interesting similarity between BMN and this situation. For BMN, the string state with $`q`$ $`\alpha _m`$ and $`q`$ $`\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_m`$ oscillators has $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ equal to

$$\mathrm{\Delta }=J+2q\sqrt{1+\frac{m^2\lambda }{J^2}}=J+2q\frac{1}{2}\frac{m^2\lambda }{J^2}+\mathrm{O}\left(\left(\frac{\lambda }{J^2}\right)^2\right).$$
(4.14)
In (4.14) $`2q`$ is the number of oscillators, $`qm`$ is the level and $`J`$ is the bare dimension, assuming $`q<<J`$. In (4.13), $`2n`$ is the number of oscillators, $`nm`$ is the level and $`2n`$ is the bare dimension. So in this sense the linear piece in the two expressions matches, except that our result indicates that there is a factor of 2 suppression because of the large number of oscillators.

The corresponding operator for this string state would be expected to have bare dimension $`2n+4`$, or $`2n`$, depending on whether or not $`F^2`$ is inserted into the trace. The chiral primary (corresponding to $`m=0`$) should contain $`2n`$ scalar fields in a symmetric representation of $`SO(6)`$. The particular primary should also be invariant under an $`SO(4)\times U(1)`$ subgroup of $`SO(6)`$. So for example, the primary without $`F^2`$ for $`n=1`$ is

$$\text{Tr}\left(\underset{I=1}{\overset{4}{}}\mathrm{\Phi }_I^22Z\overline{Z}\right).$$
(4.15)
If $`m0`$, then the corresponding operators are no longer chiral, but they should be almost chiral in a manner similar to BMN. We expect that this works by introducing phases in the symmetrization over the scalar fields. Since the string has no excitations on the $`S_3`$ subspace of the $`S_5`$, we expect that the $`SO(4)`$ subgroup is unbroken. Hence, no phases should be introduced when exchanging the $`\mathrm{\Phi }_I`$ amongst themselves. But phases should be inserted when exchanging $`Z`$ with $`\overline{Z}`$ or $`Z`$ with $`\mathrm{\Phi }_I`$. This will also insure that the operator is not invariant under $`Z\overline{Z}`$.

## 5 Conclusions

In this paper, we discussed the semiclassical treatment for two examples of highly symmetric string motion. We learned that the curvature of the background appears to assure us of positive anomolous dimensions when identifying energies of string states with dimensions of gauge invariant operators.

In the case of motion on $`S_5`$ we found that the anomalous dimension is analytic about $`\lambda /(2n)^2=0`$, which would seem to indicate that the results can be directly compared with perturbation theory. The fall off is not as rapid as for BMN operators. This is reasonable, since we expect the number of excited oscillators to be roughly the same as the bare dimension. Whether or not one can find such behavior in a field theory computation is presently being investigated .

It would also be interesting to generalize these semiclassical solutions to less symmetric motion. For example, one can consider doing small perturbations about the motion as was recently discussed in ,. This is presently being studied.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank I. Klebanov, A. Tseytlin and especially K. Zarembo for helpful conversations and K. Zarembo for comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank the Aspen Center for Physics and the CTP at MIT for hospitality during the course of this work. This research was supported in part by Vetenskaprådet.