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# Coherent Manipulation of Quantum Delta-kicked Dynamics: Faster-than-classical Anomalous Diffusion

## Abstract

Large transporting regular islands are found in the classical phase space of a modified kicked rotor system in which the kicking potential is reversed after every two kicks. The corresponding quantum system, for a variety of system parameters and over long time scales, is shown to display energy absorption that is significantly faster than that associated with the underlying classical anomalous diffusion. The results are of interest to both areas of quantum chaos and quantum control.

The kicked-rotor system (KR) has long served as a paradigm for classical and quantum chaos casatibook . Its atom optics realization raizenetc  makes it possible to directly compare fundamental theoretical work with corresponding experimental studies. The KR is also of interest to a variety of other fields such as molecular physics fishman ; averbukh , condensed matter physics casatiprl  and quantum information facchi ; georgeot .

It is well known that quantum coherence suppresses classical chaotic (normal) diffusion. The suppression mechanism is well understood in terms of “dynamical localization” casatibook  in KR. By contrast, much less is known about quantum interference effects in the case of classical anomalous diffusion, a phenomenon induced by the fractal boundary between regular and chaotic regions in phase space. Of particular interest is the quantum dynamics of delta-kicked systems where the underlying classical chaos coexists with transporting regular islands, e.g., the accelerator modes in KR grigolini ; raizen ; zaslavsky99 ; zaslavsky02 ; schanz . In this case it is found that anomalous diffusion induced by transporting islands causes the early breakdown of quantum-classical correspondence (QCC) grigolini  and enhances fluctuations of dynamical localization length raizen ; zaslavsky99 ; zaslavsky02 , and that quantum eigenstates in the semiclassical limit may ignore classical phase space structures schanz .

Motivated by our recent studies on coherent manipulation of classically chaotic dynamics gong01 ; gong02 , we consider here a modified kicked-rotor model (MKR) in which the kicking potential is reversed after every two kicks danapre . As shown below, this apparently slight modification of the KR system has a profound effect on the dynamics. First, it results in the appearance of transporting regular islands that are much larger and of a different nature than those previously observed. Second, and more importantly, we find a new phenomenon: that the corresponding quantum system, for a variety of system parameters and over considerably long time scales, displays energy absorption that is significantly faster than that associated with the underlying classical anomalous diffusion. This result constitutes an important and intriguing aspect of quantum interference effects in classically chaotic systems. Furthermore, the drastic difference in quantum dynamics between KR and MKR is a demonstration of spectacular quantum control controlbooks  over delta-kicked systems, achieved here by periodically reversing or delaying the kicking field. These results are of broad theoretical and experimental interest.

The Hamiltonians for the KR and MKR systems are given by

$`H^{KR}(\widehat{L},\theta ,t)=\widehat{L}^2/2I+\lambda \mathrm{cos}(\theta ){\displaystyle \underset{n}{}}\delta ({\displaystyle \frac{t}{T}}n),`$ (1)
and

$`H^{MKR}(\widehat{L},\theta ,t)=\widehat{L}^2/2I+\lambda \mathrm{cos}(\theta ){\displaystyle \underset{n}{}}f(n)\delta ({\displaystyle \frac{t}{T}}n).`$ (2)
Here $`|f(n)|=1`$ and it changes sign after every two kicks (i.e., $`f(n)=1`$ if $`n=4j+1`$, or $`4j+2`$, and $`f(n)=1`$ if $`n=4j+3`$ or $`4j+4`$, where $`j`$ is an integer), $`\widehat{L}`$ is the angular momentum operator, $`\theta `$ is the conjugate angle, $`I`$ is the moment of inertia, $`\lambda `$ is the strength of the kicking field, and $`T`$ is the time interval between kicks. The basis states of their Hilbert spaces are given by $`|m`$, with $`\widehat{L}|m=m\mathrm{}|m`$. The quantum propagator in the KR case for times $`(N0^+)T`$ to $`(N+10^+)T`$ is given by

$`\widehat{F}^{KR}(\tau ,k)=\mathrm{exp}(i{\displaystyle \frac{\tau }{2}}{\displaystyle \frac{^2}{\theta ^2}})\mathrm{exp}[ik\mathrm{cos}(\theta )],`$ (3)
with dimensionless parameters $`k=\lambda T/\mathrm{}`$ and the effective Planck constant $`\tau =\mathrm{}T/I`$. The classical limit of the KR quantum map, i.e., the standard map, depends only on one parameter $`\kappa k\tau `$ and takes the following form:

$`\stackrel{~}{L}_N`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{L}_{N1}+\kappa \mathrm{sin}(\theta _{N1}),`$
$`\theta _N`$ $`=`$ $`\theta _{N1}+\stackrel{~}{L}_N,`$ (4)
where $`\stackrel{~}{L}L\tau /\mathrm{}`$ is the scaled c-number angular momentum and $`(\stackrel{~}{L}_N,\theta _N)`$ represents the phase space location of a classical trajectory at $`(N+10^+)T`$. With similar notation, the quantum map associated with MKR, for times $`(4j+10^+)T`$ to $`[4(j+1)+10^+]T`$, can be written as

$`\widehat{F}^{MKR}(\tau ,k)=[\widehat{F}^{KR}(\tau ,k)]^2[\widehat{F}^{KR}(\tau ,k)]^2.`$ (5)
The classical limit of the MKR quantum map \[Eq. (5)\] is given by

$`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+1}`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j}+\kappa \mathrm{sin}(\theta _{4j}),\theta _{4j+1}=\theta _{4j}+\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+1},`$
$`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+2}`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+1}+\kappa \mathrm{sin}(\theta _{4j+1}),\theta _{4j+2}=\theta _{4j+1}+\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+2},`$
$`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+3}`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+2}\kappa \mathrm{sin}(\theta _{4j+2}),\theta _{4j+3}=\theta _{4j+2}+\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+3},`$
$`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+4}`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+3}\kappa \mathrm{sin}(\theta _{4j+3}),\theta _{4j+4}=\theta _{4j+3}+\stackrel{~}{L}_{4j+4}.`$ (6)
The well-known accelerator modes in KR are closely related to the existence of the marginally stable points: $`(\stackrel{~}{L}=2\pi l_1,\theta =\pm \pi /2)`$ for $`\kappa =2\pi l_2`$, where $`l_1`$ and $`l_2`$ are integers. These points are shifted by a constant value ($`\pm 2\pi l_2`$) in $`\stackrel{~}{L}`$ after each iteration. For values of $`\kappa `$ close to $`2\pi l_2`$, there still exist interesting transporting regular islands on which classical trajectories simply jump to other similar islands located in adjacent phase space cells, resulting in a ballistic increase of rotational energy. For trajectories initially outside the accelerator modes, the “stickiness” of the boundary between the accelerator modes and the chaotic sea induces anomalous diffusion over the energy space, i.e., energy increases in a nonlinear fashion, but not quadratically.

Examining the classical MKR map \[Eq. (6)\], we find a different type of marginally stable points. That is, for $`\kappa =(2l_2+1)\pi `$, trajectories emanating from $`\stackrel{~}{L}=(2l_1+1)\pi ,\theta =\pm \pi /2`$ are shifted by a constant value ($`\pm (2l_2+1)\pi `$) in $`\stackrel{~}{L}`$ after each kick. As confirmed by our numerical experiments, this suggests that by reversing the kicking potential after every two kicks one may create new transporting regular islands. For example, in Fig. 1 we show classical phase space structures of both KR and MKR for $`\kappa =3.5`$. The main regular islands seen in Fig. 1a in the KR case are not transporting, consistent with the fact that $`\kappa =3.5`$ is far from $`2\pi l_2`$. By contrast, a simple computation reveals that those islands clearly seen in Fig. 1b in the MKR case are transporting (note that $`\kappa =3.5`$ is not far from $`\pi `$). A number of additional remarks are in order: (1) The transporting islands shown in Fig. 1b are much larger than the well-studied accelerator modes in KR. A rough estimate gives their area at least 10 times larger than the accelerator modes in KR with $`\kappa =6.908745`$, and 4 times larger with $`\kappa =6.476939`$ zaslavsky02 ; (2) The transporting islands are stable with changes in $`\kappa `$, e.g., the $`\kappa =3.4`$ or $`\kappa =3.6`$ case gives transporting islands of similar size; (3) Unlike the accelerator modes in KR, the transporting islands of MKR are far away from $`\stackrel{~}{L}=0`$. This latter feature favors the observation of anomalous diffusion, insofar as any initial state with sufficiently low energy will not overlap with the transporting islands of MKR; (4) After each kick, trajectories initiated from those islands shown in Fig. 1b will increase their $`\stackrel{~}{L}`$ by $`\pm \pi `$ approximately, although the phase space structures have a period of $`2\pi `$; (5) There exist interesting extensions of MKR. For instance, consider the cases in which the kicking potential is reversed after every $`N>2`$ kicks where $`N=6,10,14\mathrm{}`$. Then, for $`\kappa =(2l_2+1)\pi `$, trajectories emanating from $`(\stackrel{~}{L}=(2l_1+1)\pi ,\theta =\pm \pi /2)`$ are also transporting, with their shift of angular momentum after each kick alternating between different constant values. However, we have found that the transporting islands associated with these generalized cases are extremely small and very sensitive to the value of $`\kappa `$.

Consider now quantum versus classical energy absorption behavior in each of KR and MKR. We choose $`\kappa =3.5`$ as an example; the results described below can be observed for a wide range of the parameter $`\kappa `$ (e.g., for $`3.3<\kappa <5.0`$). We define the dimensionless scaled rotational energy averaged over the quantum or classical ensemble as $`\stackrel{~}{E}_q\widehat{L}^2\tau ^2/2\mathrm{}^2`$ or $`\stackrel{~}{E}_c\stackrel{~}{L}^2/2`$. The effective Planck constant $`\tau `$ is first chosen to be 0.1, a value far from the semiclassical limit but relatively small compared to the area of the transporting islands shown in Fig. 1b. Further, this value of $`\tau `$ ensures that the nongeneric behavior associated with quantum resonances (i.e., $`\tau =2\pi l_1/l_2`$) is avoided. The initial quantum state here is chosen to be $`|0`$, which evidently does not overlap with the transporting islands. The corresponding classical initial state is given by $`\stackrel{~}{L}=0`$ with $`\theta `$ uniformly distributed in $`[0,2\pi ]`$. Figure 2a displays a quantum-classical comparison in the KR case. Clearly, quantum effects in KR strongly suppress classical energy absorption and the QCC break time $`t_b^{KR}`$ in Fig. 2a is $`20T`$. By contrast, Fig. 2b shows that both the quantum and classical MKR systems display characteristics of anomalous diffusion: an excellent $`\mathrm{log}`$-$`\mathrm{log}`$ linear fit of the results in Fig. 2b after the MKR QCC break time $`t_b^{MKR}`$ \[that is, we numerically fit the results with $`\mathrm{log}(\stackrel{~}{E}_q)=a\mathrm{log}(N)+b`$ and $`\mathrm{log}(\stackrel{~}{E}_c)=a^{}\mathrm{log}(N)+b^{}`$, where $`a`$, $`b`$, $`a^{}`$,and $`b^{}`$ are parameters\] gives that $`\stackrel{~}{E}_qN^{1.85}`$ (solid line) and $`\stackrel{~}{E}_cN^{1.36}`$ (dashed line), where $`N`$ is the number of kicks. Hence, significantly, the quantum energy absorption is seen to be far greater than that associated with the underlying classical anomalous diffusion. This rapid quantum growth is even more visible in Fig. 2c, which shows that the faster-than-classical excitation process shown in Fig. 2b persists for much longer time scales, as well as for an effective Planck constant that is ten times smaller (see the discrete points in Fig. 2c). Note also that in the MKR case shown in Fig. 2b, quantum dynamics agrees fairly well with the classical result for up to $`t_b^{MKR}200T`$, much longer than $`t_b^{KR}20T`$ in Fig. 2a. In addition, $`t_b^{MKR}`$ is also an order of magnitude larger than the characteristic QCC time scale found in the KR model in the presence of accelerator modes with the same effective Planck constant grigolini . This is understandable because the main transporting regular islands of MKR are larger than the accelerator modes of KR and therefore classical phase space structures can be “seen” more clearly by the quantized MKR.

Also evident in Fig. 2c is that a smaller effective Planck constant gives better QCC. Thus, in contrast to what was suggested in Ref. grigolini , the quantum anomalous diffusion here, approaches the underlying classical anomalous diffusion from above rather than from below as the effective Planck constant goes to zero. This leads to the conclusion that under nonresonant conditions quantization does not necessarily induce suppression of energy absorption. Note that one previous work lima  also reported computations (in the kicked-Harper model) on faster-than-classical diffusion under nonresonant conditions. However, in Ref. lima  the growth in the second moment of angular momentum is always quadratic and the issue of faster-than-classical energy absorption cannot be addressed since the kinetic energy therein is a $`\mathrm{cos}`$-function of angular momentum. It should also be pointed out that, unlike gravity-induced quantum accelerator modes in KR schlunk , quantum anomalous diffusion in MKR is shown to have a well-defined classical limit and does not require the value of $`\tau `$ to be near quantum resonance conditions.

It is interesting to view MKR from a quantum control controlbooks  perspective. The time-evolving wave function can be expanded as a superposition of different $`|m`$ states, i.e., $`_mC_m\theta |m`$, where $`C_m`$ are the expansion coefficients. Since $`\mathrm{cos}(\theta +\pi )=\mathrm{cos}(\theta )`$, and $`C_m\theta +\pi |m`$=$`_m(1)^mC_m\theta |m`$, the effect of reversing the kicking potential is equivalent to adding a $`\pi `$ phase difference between all neighboring basis states. As such, the potential reversal in MKR can be regarded as periodically introducing quantum phases into KR and therefore as a significant extension of our previous coherent control work gong01 . In addition, noting that

$`\widehat{F}^{MKR}(\tau ,k)=\left[\mathrm{exp}(i\pi {\displaystyle \frac{^2}{\theta ^2}})\widehat{F}^{KR}(\tau ,k)\widehat{F}^{KR}(\tau ,k)\right]^2,`$ (7)
we have that MKR can be effectively realized by using KR and introducing a time delay $`t_d=2\pi T/\tau `$ of the kicking field after every two kicks.

Figure 3 displays a comparison between KR and MKR in terms of the occupation probability $`P(m)`$ of $`|m`$ after 3000 kicks, with $`\kappa =3.5`$, $`\tau =0.1`$, and the initial state $`|0`$. It is seen that for many states (e.g. for $`90000>|m|>8000`$), $`P(m)`$ of MKR is greater than that of KR by a factor larger than $`10^{20}`$! Further, we find that $`\stackrel{~}{E}_q`$ of MKR at $`t=3000T`$ is three orders of magnitude larger than that of KR, whereas classical dynamics only gives an energy-absorption difference of $``$ 2.5 times. We stress (1) that this vast quantum control over energy absorption is achieved by simply reversing the kicking potential, or, alternatively, by introducing a certain time delay after every two kicks, and (2) that the control mechanism here is uniquely based upon quantum anomalous diffusion in MKR, and is thus far more effective than that in amplitude-modulated shepelyansky ; casati  or phase-modulated kicked-rotor systems gongpre03  in the absence of transporting islands. We also note that if we regard MKR as controlled KR then we see that we still have control for an effective Planck constant as large as $`\tau =1.0`$ gongpre03 .

It remains to examine the possibility of observing faster-than-classical quantum anomalous diffusion in atom optics experiments. In atom optics experiments on KR the angular variable $`\theta `$ is replaced by the position variable of atoms raizenetc  so that there is no periodic boundary condition as $`|\psi (\theta =0)=|\psi (\theta =2\pi )`$ in KR. Further, in the experiments translational Gaussian states, which are different from the initial state that we have examined thus far, are typically used as initial states. Thus, of particular concern here is that the faster-than-classical quantum anomalous diffusion is found to be insensitive to the periodic boundary condition and to the initial conditions. That is, in sharp contrast to quantum resonances in KR, the faster-than-classical anomalous diffusion shown in Fig. 2b and Fig. 2c is found to be stable with respect to small variations of all system parameters and initial conditions. For example, Fig. 4 shows similar faster-than-classical anomalous diffusion with the arbitrary choice of $`\tau =2\pi /(60+\sigma )`$, where $`\sigma =(\sqrt{5}1)/2`$, $`k=33`$, the initial state being given by a Gaussian $`|\psi (\theta )=\mathrm{exp}(\theta ^2/18)/\sqrt{3}\pi ^{1/4}`$, and the periodic boundary condition changed from $`|\psi (\theta =0)=|\psi (\theta =2\pi )`$ to $`|\psi (\theta =0)=|\psi (\theta =512\pi )`$. This kind of result suggests that faster-than-classical quantum anomalous diffusion should be observable in atom optics experiments, provided that the relatively small effective Planck constant $`\tau 0.1`$ is achieved.

We qualitatively explain faster-than-classical anomalous diffusion in terms of a quantum tunneling mechanism zaslavsky02 . At early times, both the quantum and classical systems that are not initially on the transporting regular islands tend to be trapped by the fractal structures lying between the main transporting regular islands and the chaotic sea, resulting in excellent QCC in anomalous diffusion. Later, for $`tt_b^{MKR}`$, a non-negligible part of the time-evolving quantum state has tunneled from the chaotic sea to the large transporting islands, whereas each classical trajectory can only sojourn in the neighborhood of the transporting islands for a certain time. Thus, if the mean sojourn time of classical trajectories is relatively short compared to the characteristic time scale over which the transporting-island component of the time-evolving quantum state builds up and then tunnels back to the chaotic sea, the quantum tunneling effects can strongly enhance the transport in phase space, and therefore quantum anomalous diffusion can be significantly faster than classical anomalous diffusion. This also makes it clear that quantum anomalous diffusion in MKR will slow down and dynamical localization can take place when significant tunneling in the reverse direction (i.e., from the transporting islands to the chaotic sea) occurs. Indeed, additional numerical results (not shown) for longer time scales (e.g., $`12000`$ kicks in the case of $`\tau =0.1`$) and for larger effective Planck constants indicate that quantum anomalous diffusion in MKR will eventually be suppressed by dynamical localization, with a larger $`\tau `$ giving earlier suppression.

In conclusion, we have found large transporting regular islands in the classical phase space of a modified kicked-rotor system, and have shown that the associated quantum anomalous diffusion can be significantly faster than classical anomalous diffusion over long time scales. The results are of interest to both areas of quantum chaos and quantum control.

This work was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. HJW was partially supported by the Studien-stiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the Barth Fonds of ETH Zürich.


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# Decoherence and the Loschmidt echo

## Abstract

Environment–induced decoherence causes entropy increase. It can be quantified using, e.g., the purity $`\varsigma =\mathrm{Tr}\rho ^2`$. When the Hamiltonian of a quantum system is perturbed, its sensitivity to such perturbation can be measured by the Loschmidt echo $`\overline{M}(t)`$. It is given by the average squared overlap between the perturbed and unperturbed state. We describe the relation between the temporal behavior of $`\varsigma (t)`$ and $`\overline{M}(t)`$. In this way we show that the decay of the Loschmidt echo can be analyzed using tools developed in the study of decoherence. In particular, for systems with a classically chaotic Hamiltonian the decay of $`\varsigma `$ and $`\overline{M}`$ has a regime where it is dominated by the classical Lyapunov exponents.

Environment-induced decoherence is an essential ingredient of the quantum–classical transition DecoRef . Its implications for the quantum versions of classically chaotic systems are especially intriguing, as they go beyond the restoration of the quantum–classical correspondence. Two of us discussed this issue for the first time in ZP94 , presenting a surprising result that has been since amply corroborated Sarkar ; Patanayak ; Monteoli1 ; Bianucci : For a quantum system with a classically chaotic Hamiltonian the rate at which information about the initial state is degraded by the environment becomes independent of the system–environment coupling strength. This rate (e.g., the von Neumann entropy production rate computed from the reduced density matrix of the system) is set by the classical Lyapunov exponents, provided that the coupling strength are within a certain (wide) range. This result has important implications and can be a way to define quantum chaos ZP95 . A related but independent way to do this was considered first by Asher Peres Peres  by appealing to a property of quantum systems with a classically chaotic counterpart: Although quantum dynamics is insensitive to small differences in initial conditions, it seems to be highly sensitive to perturbations in the Hamiltonian. The similar idea of “hypersensitivity” was studied in an information theoretic framework by Caves and coworkers CavesSchack . More recently, Levstein, Pastawski and collaborators PastawskiExp ; PastawskiEnt  experimentally studied sensitivity to perturbations by measuring the Loschmidt echo in a many-body spin system. Their work underscored the need for a systematic study of various aspects of the true nature of the sensitivity displayed by quantum systems when their Hamiltonian is perturbed. Further analytical PastawskiJalab  and numerical Cucchietti  work triggered an intense activity that helped clarify some aspects of the temporal dependence of the echo Jacquod ; CucLewen ; Prosen .

The measure of the echo signal is the overlap between two states that evolve from the same initial wave function $`\mathrm{\Psi }_0`$ under the influence of two Hamiltonians (the unperturbed one, $`H_0`$, and the perturbed one $`H_\mathrm{\Delta }=H_0+\mathrm{\Delta }`$). More precisely, when $`U_0`$ and $`U_\mathrm{\Delta }`$ denote the corresponding evolution operators, the echo is defined as

$$M_\mathrm{\Delta }(t)=|\mathrm{\Psi }_0|U_\mathrm{\Delta }^{}(t)U_0(t)|\mathrm{\Psi }_0|^2.$$
(1)
The quantity $`\overline{M}(t)`$, obtained by averaging $`M_\mathrm{\Delta }`$ over an ensemble of perturbations, can be studied analytically and displays a rich temporal dependence. One interesting regime was analyzed by Jalabert and Pastawski PastawskiJalab  who showed, using a semiclassical approximation, that there is a window of values for the perturbation strength for which $`\overline{M}(t)`$ decays with a rate equal to the classical Lyapunov exponent. In spite of the simple discussion presented above, the physically relevant evolution will typically not be unitary: Decoherence caused by the interaction with the environment will suppress the echo even in the absence of the perturbation $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$. We shall, however, adhere to the usual assumption PastawskiExp ; PastawskiEnt ; PastawskiJalab ; Cucchietti ; Jacquod ; CucLewen ; Prosen  that the evolutions are unitary, and show that even in that case of decoherence–free echo supression it is possible to draw useful conclusions from the analogy we discuss below.

In this letter we establish a direct connection between decoherence and the decay of the Loschmidt echo. In particular, we relate the evolution of $`\overline{M}(t)`$ and the linear entropy (or purity) of an open quantum system. The existence of a kinship between decoherence and the decay of the Loschmidt echo is not unexpected: such possibility was noted, for example, in Refs. PastawskiJalab ; PastawskiEnt , but was never formally established. Demonstrating the relation of these two important areas is interesting not just from a fundamental point of view but may also prove useful since it allows one to use results obtained in the theory of open quantum systems to understand better the behavior of the echo.

The key step in our demonstration is a simple observation: The average echo $`\overline{M}(t)`$, for an ensemble of perturbations characterized by a probability density $`P(\mathrm{\Delta })`$, is

$$\overline{M}(t)=D\mathrm{\Delta }P(\mathrm{\Delta })|\mathrm{\Psi }_0|U_\mathrm{\Delta }^{}(t)U_0(t)|\mathrm{\Psi }_0|^2.$$
(2)
This equation can be rewritten in a more convenient way by defining the density matrix of the average perturbed state:

$$\overline{\rho }(t)=D\mathrm{\Delta }P(\mathrm{\Delta })U_\mathrm{\Delta }(t)|\mathrm{\Psi }_0\mathrm{\Psi }_0|U_\mathrm{\Delta }^{}(t).$$
(3)
In fact, $`\overline{M}(t)`$ is simply the overlap between the average state $`\overline{\rho }(t)`$ and the unperturbed density matrix $`\rho _0(t)`$ evolved from the initial state, $`\rho _0(t)=U_0(t)|\mathrm{\Psi }_0\mathrm{\Psi }_0|U_0^{}(t)`$:

$$\overline{M}(t)=\mathrm{Tr}\left(\overline{\rho }(t)\rho _0(t)\right).$$
(4)
Once we recognize this simple fact we can go one step further and notice that the state $`\overline{\rho }`$ generally evolves in time according to a master equation which is of the same kind as the ones arising in the study of decoherence. Hence, the evolution of the echo $`\overline{M}(t)`$ is directly placed in the context of open quantum systems and decoherence.

Equation (4) can be used to establish an inequality between the average echo $`\overline{M}(t)`$ and the purity $`\varsigma (t)=\mathrm{Tr}\overline{\rho }^2(t)`$ (used to characterize decoherence). Using Schwartz inequality (applied to the inner product between two hermitian operators) and assuming that the initial state is pure we find that

$$\overline{M}^2(t)\varsigma (t).$$
(5)
Related inequalities were noticed and used in a somewhat different context in Prosen ; Saraceno . Eq. (5) implies that when the purity $`\mathrm{Tr}\overline{\rho }^2`$ decays exponentially with a rate $`\gamma _D`$, then the overlap $`\overline{M}(t)`$ should also decay exponentially (or faster) with a rate that should be no less than $`\gamma _D/2`$. However, as we will see later (and as has been established in the literature Monteoli1 ; PastawskiJalab ; Cucchietti ), there is an important regime (the so–called Lyapunov regime) where both quantities decay with the same rate set by the Lyapunov exponent.

Let us now analyze some generic features of the evolution of the average state $`\overline{\rho }(t)`$. It is useful to notice that $`\overline{\rho }`$ generally obeys a master equation with non–unitary terms. These terms arise because averaging of the evolution over an ensemble of perturbations yields an effect analogous (although not equivalent) to the tracing out of the unobserved degrees of freedom DecoRef . We will find it convenient to consider a simple form of perturbation (even though results are not strongly dependent on it). Let us assume that $`\mathrm{\Delta }(x,t)=V(x)J(t)`$, where $`V(x)`$ is a function of the coordinates of our system and $`J(t)`$ is an external source. For this case, averaging over the perturbation $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ consists of averaging over functions $`J(t)`$. We will also assume that the probability density $`P(J)`$ is a Gaussian functional whose width defines the temporal correlation function for the sources. Thus, we will use

$$P(J)=N\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{1}{2}𝑑t𝑑t^{}J(t)\nu ^1(t,t^{})J(t^{})\right),$$
(6)
where $`N`$ is a normalization factor. The correlation function of the source is then $`DJP(J)J(t)J(t^{})=\nu (t,t^{})`$. Using this, we can show that the evolution operator for $`\overline{\rho }(t)`$ has a path integral representation with an influence functional FV  given by

$$F[x,x^{}]=\mathrm{exp}(\frac{1}{2}𝑑t𝑑t^{}V_{}(t)\nu (t,t^{})V_{}(t^{})),$$
(7)
where $`V_{}(t)=V(x(t))V(x^{}(t))`$. In some simple but physically relevant cases it is possible to write a master equation for $`\overline{\rho }(t)`$. In fact, when the noise is white, i.e. $`\nu (t,t^{})=2D\delta (tt^{})`$, we can show that

$$\dot{\overline{\rho }}=\frac{1}{i\mathrm{}}[H_0,\overline{\rho }]D[V(x),[V(x),\overline{\rho }]].$$
(8)
While the first term on the rhs of this equation generates unitary evolution, the second term is responsible for decoherence: It induces a tendency towards diagonalization in position basis and, in the Wigner representation, it gives rise to a diffusion term. For the simplest case of $`V(x)=x`$ the equation for the Wigner function reads

$$\dot{W}(x,p)=\{H_0,W\}_{MB}+D_{pp}^2W(x,p),$$
(9)
where the bracket in the rhs is the so–called Moyal bracket, responsible for unitary evolution DecoRef .

Equations like (8) and (9) arise if we consider a quantum system interacting with a quantum environment formed by a collection of harmonic oscillators CL . In such a case the absolute value of the influence functional generated by the environment is identical to (7) provided one chooses the spectral density and the initial state of the environment in such a way that the noise–kernel it produces is equal to the kernel $`\nu (t,t^{})`$ appearing in (7). However, in general the influence functional is a complex number whose phase is responsible for dissipation (noise and dissipation kernels are connected as mandated by the fluctuation–dissipation theorem). There is a physically relevant limit (usually associated with high temperatures) where relaxation effects can be ignored. This is the most interesting limit in decoherence studies aimed at understanding the quantum–classical correspondence DecoRef . Thus, in such a limit, the evolution of the average state $`\overline{\rho }`$ is identical to that of a quantum system that interacts with an environment.

A convenient way to visualize the transition from quantum to classical is provided by the Wigner function, whose oscillations are the signature of quantum interference. They should be suppressed by the decoherence term to make the quantum–classical correspondence possible. This is indeed what happens: When the Wigner function oscillates with a well defined wave–vector $`k_p`$ along the momentum direction ($`W(x,p,t)A(x,t)\mathrm{cos}(k_pp)`$), the decoherence term in (9) washes out oscillations exponentially fast with a rate $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_D=Dk_p^2`$. We can see the behavior of a typical Wigner function for a chaotic system (a driven double well analyzed in Monteoli1 ) with and without decoherence in Figure 1. Taking into account our previous discussion, the echo $`\overline{M}(t)`$ is obtained by computing the overlap between the two Wigner functions displayed in the figures. The purity $`\varsigma `$ should be computed by taking the overlap of the decohered Wigner function with itself. Below, we will discuss the relation between these two quantities.

The master equation (9) can be used to obtain the time derivatives of the purity $`\varsigma `$ and the echo $`\overline{M}`$:

$`\dot{\varsigma }`$ $`=`$ $`2D{\displaystyle 𝑑x𝑑p\overline{W}(x,p)_{pp}^2\overline{W}(x,p)},`$ (10)
$`\dot{\overline{M}}`$ $`=`$ $`D{\displaystyle 𝑑x𝑑pW_0(x,p)_{pp}^2\overline{W}(x,p)}.`$ (11)
Equation (10) has been used before to show the existence of a domain of exponential decay for the purity $`\mathrm{Tr}\overline{\rho }^2`$ ZP94 ; ZP95 ; Patanayak ; Monteoli1  with a rate that, for classically chaotic systems, is independent of the diffusion $`D`$. The central piece of the argument is the following: After integrating by parts, equation (10) can be rewritten as $`\dot{\varsigma }/\varsigma =2D/\overline{\sigma }^2`$, where $`\overline{\sigma }`$ characterizes the dominant wavelength in the spectrum of the Wigner function (i.e. $`\overline{\sigma }^2=(_p\overline{W})^2/\overline{W}^2`$). Thus, the rate of change of the purity becomes independent of the diffusion constant when $`\overline{\sigma }^2`$ is proportional to $`D`$. This happens indeed as a consequence of the competition between two effects. The first one is the tendency of chaotic evolution to generate (exponentially fast, at a rate set by the Lyapunov exponent $`\lambda `$) small scale structure in the Wigner function. The second effect is due to diffusion, which tends to wash out small scales exponentially fast at a rate determined by the product $`Dk_p^2`$. As demonstrated in ZP94 , these two effects reach a balance when the scale is such that $`\overline{\sigma }^2=2D/\lambda `$. When this equilibrium is reached, the purity $`\varsigma `$ decreases exponentially at a rate fixed by $`\lambda `$.

For this behavior to take place the diffusion constant should be above a threshold ZP95 . Otherwise the critical width is not established (indeed, in the previous argument the implicit assumption is that the time scale for diffusion to wash out a $`k_p`$–oscillation is shorter than the time scale for the oscillations to be regenerated by the dynamics). This simple scenario enables us to understand why there is a regime where purity decreases exponentially with a Lyapunov rate. The same argument can also be used to analyze the exponential decay of the Loschmidt echo. In fact, equations (10) and (11) just differ by a factor of $`2`$ and by the presence of $`W_0`$ instead of $`\overline{W}`$ inside the integral. As before, we can transform the evolution equation of the echo into $`\dot{\overline{M}}/\overline{M}=D/\sigma ^2`$, $`\sigma ^2=W_0_{pp}^2\overline{W}/W_0\overline{W}`$. When decoherence is effective and the dominant structure in $`\overline{W}`$ approaches the critical value, the smallest scales of the pure Wigner function $`W_0`$ continue contracting and developing smaller and smaller scales (sub–Planck scales are reached quickly in chaotic quantum systems ZurekNature ). In such a case, one can easily conclude that $`\overline{\sigma }^2=2\sigma ^2`$. This is readily seen even in the crude approximation of $`\overline{W}\mathrm{exp}(p^2/2\overline{\sigma }^2)`$ and $`W_0\mathrm{exp}(p^2/2\sigma _0^2)`$, with $`\sigma _0\mathrm{exp}(\lambda t)`$ and $`t1/\lambda `$. Therefore, when the purity starts decaying at the Lyapunov rate the echo does precisely the same.

Using the above ideas we are now in a position to present a more complete and illustrative picture of the time dependence of the echo $`\overline{M}(t)`$ and the purity $`\varsigma (t)`$. For the sake of simplicity we focus on the echo but the same reasoning applies to the purity. To compute the overlap $`\overline{M}=𝑑x𝑑pW_0\overline{W}`$ we can split the phase space integral into two regions: the region $`A_C`$ close to the classical unstable manifold of the initial state, where $`W_0`$ is positive, and the region $`A_O`$ over which $`W_0`$ oscillates (see Figure 1):

$$\overline{M}(t)=_{A_O}𝑑x𝑑pW_0\overline{W}+_{A_C}𝑑x𝑑pW_0\overline{W}.$$
(12)
In the oscillatory region we can estimate the value of the integral assuming that there is a dominant wave vector $`k_p`$. In such a case, from Eq. (9) we can assume that $`\overline{W}W_0e^{Dk_p^2t}`$. If more than one scale is present the result would be a sum of terms like this one. For the second integral, we can also use a crude estimate assuming that $`W_0`$ and $`\overline{W}`$ are constant over their respective effective support. In particular, $`W_01/A_C`$ since its integral over $`A_O`$ cancels out. As $`\overline{W}`$ approaches the critical width $`\overline{\sigma }`$ along the stable manifold, the area of its effective support grows exponentially. Therefore, one gets that the second integral is $`_{A_C}W_0\overline{W}W_0A_C\overline{W}\overline{W}e^{\lambda t}`$. Thus, combining the two results we find that the expected behavior of the Loschmidt echo is

$$\overline{M}(t)=a\mathrm{exp}(\lambda t)+b\mathrm{exp}(Dk_p^2t)$$
(13)
for appropriate prefactors $`a`$ and $`b`$.

This result was previously derived for the Loschmidt echo using semiclassical techniques PastawskiJalab . The first term gives the Lyapunov decay, while the second one describes the so–called Fermi golden rule regime (FGR) Jacquod . In this case the rate is proportional to the diffusion coefficient (which is itself proportional to the square of the strength of the perturbation). As mentioned above, a similar result is expected for the purity.

Our treatment is valid in a semiclassical regime where the evolution of the Wigner function is dominated by the classical Hamiltonian flow and the corresponding interference fringes generated when its phase space support folds. The virtue of this analysis, entirely based on properties of the evolution of $`\overline{W}`$ derived in the context of decoherence studies, is not only its simplicity but also the fact that it enables us to identify the regions of phase space that can be associated with each of the terms appearing in (13): the FGR contribution arises from the decay of the interference fringes while the Lyapunov contribution is associated with the behavior of $`\overline{W}`$ near the classical unstable manifold. Recent studies using semiclassical techniques point in the same direction CookPreparation .

It is interesting to perform a better estimate of the integral over the region $`A_C`$. Assuming that the local Lyapunov exponent is constant along the unstable manifold, one can approximate the value of the integral by using the corresponding result for the simplest system with an unstable fixed point: the inverted oscillator (IO) with Hamiltonian $`H_0=p^2/2mm\lambda ^2x^2/2`$. In such a case, the echo can be computed exactly and turns out to be

$$\overline{M}_{IO}(t)=\left(1+r\mathrm{sh}(2\lambda t)+r^2\left(\mathrm{sh}^2(\lambda t)\lambda ^2t^2\right)\right)^{1/2}.$$
(14)
Here $`r=\overline{\sigma }^2/4\sigma _i^2`$, where $`\sigma _i`$ is the momentum dispersion of the initial state. This exact result shows that for long times ($`\lambda t\mathrm{log}(r)/2`$) the echo $`M_{IO}`$ always decays as $`\mathrm{exp}(\lambda t)`$. For initial times a decay with a rate determined by diffusion is observed but this transitory regime always leads to a decay dominated by the Lyapunov exponent. The initial transient is sensitive to the details of the noise statistics. For example, we can also exactly evaluate the echo when the noise kernel is flat (i.e., $`\nu (t,t^{})`$ independent of $`t`$ and $`t^{}`$). For such extreme case the long time behavior of the echo is not changed but the initial transient displays a quadratic decay.

We expect the analogy between Loschmidt echo and decoherence not only to enable intuitive derivations like the one leading us to equation (13) but also to provide new insights into theoretically unexplained experimental features such as the quadratic decay observed in PastawskiEnt . Our results are also relevant for quantum computation as the Loschmidt echo is a measure of the fidelity with which a given algorithm is implemented. The Lyapunov decay of the fidelity could hinder the practical implementation of such computers, which would then have to deal with an exponential increase of error probability at a rate which is independent of the coupling to the environment and is solely fixed by the (possibly chaotic) nature of the underlying physical system. The high sensitivity of chaotic systems to perturbations seems to be connected to the efficiency of these systems to produce decoherence on other systems, which has been under recent investigation ChEnviron .

We thank Diana Monteoliva for help in producing the Figure. We also acknowledge support of ARDA/NSA grant. JPP received also partial support from a grant by Fundación Antorchas.


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# Oscillations in Arcturus from WIRE photometry

## 1 Introduction

Recent results (Bedding et al., 2001; Bouchy & Carrier, 2001; Frandsen et al., 2002) supplied the first strong evidence for solar-like oscillations in stars and opened a new era in this field. In principle, asteroseismology has the potential to determine the basic parameters of the stars such as mass, composition etc. This promise motivates extending our knowledge on solar-like oscillations.

$`\alpha `$ Boo, at V$``$0 is the brightest star in the northern hemisphere. It is classified as a K1.5 III red giant (Keenan & McNeil, 1989). Its effective temperature and radius were estimated as $`4290\pm 30K`$ and $`23R_{}`$ (Griffin & Lynas-Gray, 1999). Its parallax derived by Hipparcos is 88.85$`\pm `$0.74 milli-arc sec (Perryman et al., 1997), which translates to a distance of 11.26$`\pm `$0.09 pc.

Belmonte et al. (1990a, b) carried out a radial velocity study of $`\alpha `$ Boo during 82 hours in two weeks in 1988 April-May. They found variability at frequencies around several $`\mu `$Hz. The highest peak in their power spectrum corresponded to 4.3 $`\mu `$Hz, with an amplitude of 60 ms-1. Belmonte et al. listed 19 frequencies and suggested a frequency spacing of $``$ 5 $`\mu `$Hz, although this interpretation was questioned by Kjeldsen & Bedding (1995). In addition, Belmonte et al. obtained 18.5 hours of photometry of the star during three nights in 1988 April and argued that these are consistent with the results of the radial measurements. They concluded that the most plausible explanation for the variability of $`\alpha `$ Boo is stellar oscillations.

Hatzes & Cochran (1994) observed $`\alpha `$ Boo in radial velocity during eight consecutive nights in 1992 June. They found power at frequencies of 4.70, 3.05 and 1.36 $`\mu `$Hz. Merline (1995) presented three and a half years of intermittent radial velocity measurements on Arcturus. These show clearly that it has variations of the order of several hundreds ms-1 on the long-term. While analysis of densely covered parts of the data suggests the presence of several periodicities, the strongest at $``$ 3 d, there was no dominant peak in the power spectrum of the whole data. Merline (1995) concluded that these variations are non-coherent stellar oscillations.

To our knowledge, the only high-precision photometry of Arcturus to date is from Hipparcos (Bedding, 2000). These show that $`\alpha `$ Boo has optical variations with an amplitude of a few percent. Here we present new photometric observations of $`\alpha `$ Boo from the WIRE spacecraft and argue that the variability of Arcturus can indeed be understood by stellar oscillations, although it is not clear whether these are coherent p-mode oscillations.

## 2 Observations and Reduction

After the failure of the main mission of the Wide Field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) satellite, launched by NASA in 1999 March, its star tracker was extensively used for asteroseismology of bright objects (Buzasi et al., 2000; Buzasi, 2002; Poretti et al., 2002; Cuypers et al., 2002).

The observations of $`\alpha `$ Boo were obtained during 19 successive days in 2000 July-August using a $`512\times 512`$ SITe CCD with 27 $`\mu m`$ pixels; each pixel subtends approximately one arc minute on the sky. The camera is unfiltered and the effective response is roughly $`V+R`$. The observations were carried out with a cadence of 0.5 seconds. As described by Buzasi (2000), data reduction began by applying a simple aperture photometry algorithm, which involved summing the central $`4\times 4`$ pixel region of the window of $`8\times 8`$ pixels that can be read. The background level, due primarily to scattered light from the bright Earth, was estimated from the four corner pixels of each image, and subtracted. We note that $`\alpha `$ Boo was bright enough to cause overflows of the onboard analog-to-digital converter in the central region of the image. However, we verified through examination of count histograms for individual CCD pixels that the CCD itself was never saturated, and we were thus easily able to reconstruct the actual count rates. A total of 1,284,164 data points were acquired during the observing run.

Following aperture photometry, a clipping algorithm was applied to the time series, resulting in the rejection of any points deviating more than $`2.5\sigma `$ from the mean flux, image centroid, or background level. In practice, at this point in the data reduction process, the rms noise in the signal was extremely large (about 25 parts per thousand (ppt)) due to incomplete subtraction of scattered light, so clipping in this way only removes truly deviant points. The majority of these were due either to data from the wrong $`8\times 8`$ CCD window being returned, or to data acquired before the spacecraft pointing had settled during a particular orbital segment.

The crude scattered light removal discussed above is clearly inadequate, particularly for observations made early in each orbital segment when the target was close to the limb of the bright Earth and the background level was therefore especially high. In fact, much of the difficulty inherent in the reduction of WIRE photometric data is in successfully characterizing and removing the scattered light signature (Buzasi, 2000). In this case, we phased the background data at the satellite orbital period (96 min) and binned the result in steps of phase $`10^3`$. The result is shown in Fig. 1, where the zero point for orbital phase is arbitrarily chosen. The spikes at $`\varphi `$=0.34 and $`\varphi `$=0.75 represent the start and end, respectively, of observations during the orbit. Note that points with large scattered light levels are confined to a small range of orbital phase ($`0.34<\varphi <0.37`$ and $`0.73<\varphi <0.81`$) and that these points represent only a small fraction of the observations, especially since the majority of orbital segments do not even contain observations made at these phases. Accordingly, we simply discarded points with $`\varphi <0.37`$ and $`\varphi >0.73`$. For the remaining points, we fitted a spline to the relation shown in Fig. 1 and removed it from the data. The resulting time series contained 1,163,420 points, with an rms noise level reduced by an order of magnitude, to 2.5 ppt.

## 3 Analysis

The upper panel of Fig. 2 presents the light curve of Arcturus. The data from each orbit have been binned into a single mean value, resulting in 252 final points. At JD=2451762 there was a jump of about 5.5 ppt in the brightness of $`\alpha `$ Boo, however, at this time the location of the centroid of the star on the CCD was shifted relatively significantly (Fig. 2, two middle panels). The jump is, therefore, instrumental. A further comparison between the light curve and the position of $`\alpha `$ Boo on the CCD suggests that some of the wiggles in the light curve are instrumental. In particular, the light curves of single satellite orbits typically show linear trends of about 1 ppt, which were definitely correlated with the location of the star on the CCD. These effects are presumably due to sub-pixel structure in the CCD sensitivity.

To remove the effect that minor shifts in the location of the star in the CCD have on the light curve, we used the decorrelation method (Brown et al., 1991; Robinson et al., 1995). We assumed that the brightness of $`\alpha `$ Boo was constant during single satellite orbits and that the short-term light changes were purely an instrumental effect. Using only the data from the first orbit we fitted a linearized dependence between the coordinates of the star centroid and brightness as $`f(x,y)=a+bx+cy`$, where $`f(x,y)`$ is the measured signal, $`a`$ is the assumed constant flux of the star and $`b`$ and $`c`$ are the instrumental coefficients. By subtracting $`bx+cy`$ from the data in all other orbits , we largely remove the instrumental effect. The result is shown in the bottom panel of Fig. 2. It is clear that most of the dependence in the location of the star has disappeared and that $`\alpha `$ Boo shows changes on time scales of several days. We note that using different orbits to measure the coefficients or adding the higher term ($`dx^2+ey^2+fxy`$) to the above function had negligible effect on the decorrelated light curve.

The upper panel of Fig. 3 displays the amplitude spectrum of the observations after subtracting a linear term from the raw data. The second and third panels represent the amplitude spectrum of the shifts in the x- and y-axis respectively. The fourth panel in Fig. 3 shows the amplitude spectrum of the decorrelated data. There is an excess of power at low frequencies, which is centered around 0.35 d-1 (4.07 $`\mu `$Hz). This periodicity reflects the obvious changes in the light curve (Fig. 2).

We analysed the amplitude spectrum using the conventional method of iterative sine-wave fitting. A synthetic light curve was built using a sinusoid at a frequency of 4.07-$`\mu `$Hz, with the same amplitude as in the data and sampled according to the window function (Fig. 3, fifth panel from top). We subtracted the 4.07-$`\mu `$Hz signal from the data and calculated the amplitude spectrum of the residuals. The highest peak was at 0.27 d-1 (3.09 $`\mu `$Hz). We then returned to the original data, fitted simultaneously these two frequencies (4.07 and 3.09-$`\mu `$Hz) and found the third highest peak in the residual amplitude spectrum. This process was repeated for ten iterations. The result after subtracting eight peaks is shown in the bottom panel of Fig. 3. There is still some excess of power at low frequencies. Table 1 lists the ten highest peaks in the amplitude spectrum found by simultaneous fitting of the frequencies. The typical errors on the frequencies are $``$ 0.1 $`\mu `$Hz. Peak 5 (1.56 $`\mu `$Hz) is questionable, since the data extend over only $``$ 2.5 cycles.

Fig. 4 presents the power spectrum (amplitude squared) at the frequency range of 0-20 $`\mu `$Hz. The dotted vertical lines show the locations of the ten highest peaks. The long-dashed curve is the Lorentzian fit to the power excess at low frequency using the maximum -likelihood method given by Toutain & Fröhlich (1992).

## 4 Discussion

The WIRE photometry clearly shows that $`\alpha `$ Boo is variable on time scales of a few days. There are several frequencies with semi-amplitudes of about one ppt or less in the amplitude spectrum. The amplitude and frequency of the power excess in Arcturus found in this work are in excellent agreement with the predictions for solar-like oscillations based on scaling from the Sun (Kjeldsen & Bedding, 1995). In addition, the shape of the power excess is typical of solar-like oscillations (Toutain & Fröhlich, 1992) and could be explained by a single mode with a damping life time of about 2 days (Fig. 4). Alternatively, to establish the presence of p-mode oscillations, we must demonstrate a regular series of peaks in the power spectrum.

### 4.1 Search for a regular series of peaks

To locate a possible p-mode structure in the $`\alpha `$ Boo data we first tried to fit a simple regular series of peaks to the frequencies we found (assuming an asymptotic relation for radial modes). Indeed, the frequencies fit a simple regular series having a separation between the modes of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu `$=0.825$`\pm `$0.049 $`\mu `$Hz. We note that we assume here that $`l=0`$ is the dominant mode and non-radial modes are negligible, which is expected from theoretical models (Dziembowski et al., 2001). Our suggested value for the frequency splitting is in excellent agreement with the expected value of 0.9$`\pm `$0.2 $`\mu `$Hz (Kjeldsen & Bedding, 1995) and perhaps consistent with the estimate of 0.6 $`\mu `$Hz reported by Merline (1995) 111Merline (1995) actually concluded that $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu `$ 1.2$`\mu `$Hz by assuming that the mode l=1 is also present., but not with the value of 5.0 $`\mu `$Hz suggested by Belmonte et al. (1990a, b).

Our value of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu `$ is, however, close to our frequency resolution ($``$ 0.64 $`\mu `$Hz), which is set by the length of the run. The same was true for the observations by Belmonte et al. (1990a, b) and Merline (1995).

We carried out simulations to determine whether the regularity in the WIRE data can be attributed to p-modes. We generated a simulated time series as the sum of two noise sources: white noise (i.e., normally distributed) plus non-white noise (a random walk with a high-pass filter). We generated five simulations, each with the same sampling as the real data, but with different seeds for the random number generator. We then analyzed each noise spectrum in the same way as the real WIRE dataset.

All simulations showed a somewhat regular series of peaks, with 6 to 8 peaks fitting the model. The value for the separation between the individual peaks was only slightly different from the value we found in Arcturus (within a half sigma). The scatter on the separation for the simulated time series data is also only slightly worse than what is found in Arcturus (within one sigma). We therefore conclude that we do not need a regular series of p-mode oscillations in order to produce the regularity observed in the WIRE data. We are thus unable, from the present data, to decide whether p-mode oscillations exist in Arcturus or not.

The above effect in Arcturus is also able to explain the regular series of peaks, with a separation of 2.94 $`\mu `$Hz, observed in $`\alpha `$ UMa A by Buzasi et al. (2000). A simulation similar to the one above for $`\alpha `$ Boo indicates that one, even in data containing pure noise and with a sampling like the one for $`\alpha `$ UMa A, will find a separation of 3.0$`\pm `$0.3 $`\mu `$Hz with low scatter. This may explain the difference between observations and model calculations by Guenther et al. (2000).

### 4.2 Granulation noise?

Could granulation noise, rather than oscillations, be responsible for the excess power? This is unlikely, since the variability is also detected in velocity, with a semi-amplitude of $``$ 60 m$`s^1`$ at 4.3 $`\mu `$Hz (Belmonte et al., 1990a, b). The ratio of the velocity amplitude to the photometric amplitude is about 60 ms-1ppt-1. This is about twice that expected for sound waves (Kjeldsen & Bedding, 1995, Eq. 5), but more than seven times greater than observed in solar granulation noise (Pallé et al., 1999). Also, the power spectrum from granulation noise would be expected to continue rising towards low frequencies, which is not observed.

## 5 Conclusions

We strongly established the suggestion that Arcturus is photometrically variable. We conclude that the oscillations in Arcturus can be explained by sound waves, but it is not clear whether these are coherent p-mode oscillations or perhaps a single mode with a short lifetime. The latter would explain the different frequencies found by various authors (Section 1). A longer time series is required to distinguish between the two options.

As theory predicts that non-radial modes should be unobservable in red giants (Dziembowski et al., 2001), asteroseismology probably will not supply detailed information on these objects. Detecting the $`l=0`$ modes of stellar oscillation has, however, the potential of estimating reliably the poorly known masses in red giants. Our observations of Arcturus are the first step towards this goal.

We are grateful to all the people who made the use of the WIRE satellite possible. We thank two anonymous referees for their useful comments which significantly improved the paper and Ariel Marom for fruitful discussions. AR, TRB and LLK are supported by the Australian Research Council and HK by the Danish Natural Science Research Council and the Danish National Research Foundation through its establishment of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center. DLB acknowledges support from NASA (NAG5-9318).


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# The VIRMOS deep imaging survey: I. overview and survey strategy

## 1 Introduction

Deep imaging over large areas is required for many fields of astronomy, to survey large numbers of objects or to search for rare, low projected density objects. It is a key tool to our understanding of the universe, from solar system studies to the most distant galaxies. The measurement of positions, magnitudes, colors, and shape are key observable to all astronomical investigations. From astrometric and photometric measurements, a census of the number and positions of various classes of objects can be conducted as a function of magnitude, color, or shape.

Progress in detector area have allowed to design and build large CCD mosaics covering a significant fraction of the field available on wide field telescopes see Groom 2000 for a review . These mosaics have enabled survey work on large areas which had only been possible previously with photographic plates at the focus of Schmidt and prime foci of major telescopes. Probing scales larger than 0.5 degree in one single exposure with the sensitivity of CCDs has become possible at a few facilities in the past few years (Cuillandre et al, 2000; Boulade et al, 2000; Miyazaki et al, 2002; Kuijken et al, 2002), enabling a wealth of new deep survey initiatives (Postman et al, 1998; Nonino et al, 1999; McCracken et al, 2001; McMahon et al, 2001; Wilson, 2003)

This paper is the first of a serie that describes the deep survey we have undertaken starting when the CFH12K camera became available at CFHT prime focus in 1999. The main survey covers a total of 16 deg2 in 4 areas, each $`2\times 2`$deg2, which have been imaged in B,V,R and I bands, at a depth equivalent to $`I_{AB}=24.8`$ for a $`3\sigma `$ detection in a 3 arc-second circular aperture for all the area, with a deeper area imaged to $`I_{AB}=25.3`$. We focus here on the survey goals and strategy, and the observations performed, together with an overview of the pipeline processing and the content of the photometric catalogs. Other papers in this series (McCracken et al, 2003); (Gwyn et al., 2003 in preparation) describe in details the procedures followed to build the astrometry and photometry of the large image mosaics, and the quality control applied. The VIRMOS survey has been used already for cosmic shear studies and 8 refereed papers have been published so far from this data set by the virmos-descart project (see van Waerbeke & Mellier 2003 for a review, ).

## 2 Survey Goals

The survey has been designed to address a broad range of astrophysical questions in one single observing strategy. Several main science drivers have been identified:

* study the evolution of galaxies from redshifts $`5`$,
* study the evolution of large scale structures over 100 $`h^1`$ Mpc from redshifts $`5`$,
* measure weak lensing signature of large scale structures,
* measure the properties of galaxy biasing using together the dark matter (from weak lensing) and the galaxy distribution,
* identify new high redshift clusters of galaxies,
* identify faint AGN and study their evolution,
* identify new Kuiper belt objects to give new insights into the formation of the solar system,
* identify very faint halo white dwarfs,
* study high redshift Lyman-break galaxies with $`3.5<z<4.2`$. using the multi-color data set of the optical and U-band survey

The data is also being used with time series to search for high redshift supernovae.

This imaging survey is being used to select the targets of the VLT-VIRMOS deep redshift survey of more than 100000 galaxies with $`0<z<5+`$ (Le Fèvre et al, 2003), to obtain large catalogues of galaxy shapes for cosmic shear studies and as the optical counterpart to the XMM medium deep survey (http://vela.astro.ulg.ac.be/themes/spatial/xmm/LSS/) being carried out with XMM Pierre et al. (2003). The deep VIRMOS field is also completed by a U-band follow up done at ESO, with the WFI camera (Radovich et al 2003), as well as in radio wavelength with the VLA Bondi et al (2003). A tiny area of the deep field has also been observed in K-band, with SOFI at the ESO/NTT (Iovino et al 2003).

## 3 Survey Strategy

### 3.1 Field Selection

Survey fields have been selected with the following criteria:

* along the celestial equator to allow for visibility from northern and southern hemispheres observatories,
* galactic latitude higher than $`l=45`$ deg.,
* low cirrus absorption as seen from the DIRBE maps available when the survey started in 1998,
* visibility of any 2 fields at any time of the year to fill observing nights.

The four fields selected are listed in Table 1 and their position in the dust sky map shown in figure 1.

### 3.2 Survey depth

The survey has been designed to reach a limiting magnitude $`I_{AB}=24.5`$ (at $`5\sigma `$ in a 3 arcsec diameter aperture) in all of the area surveyed, with a smaller 1.3 $`deg^2`$ area in the 0226-04 field observed to $`I_{AB}=25`$. The depth of this imaging survey is then at least one magnitude deeper than the limiting magnitude(s) of the VIRMOS-VLT Deep Survey (VVDS), set to be $`I_{AB}=22.5`$ for the wide areas and $`I_{AB}=24`$ for the deep area (Le Fèvre et al., 2003), and ensure that the imaging survey will not introduce any bias in galaxy samples selected for the spectroscopic survey.

The actual measured completeness limits are presented in section 6.2

### 3.3 The CFH12K camera

Observations have been carried out with the CFHT-12K camera build by CFHT and the University of Hawaii (Cuillandre et al, 2000). The CFH12K camera (http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/Instruments/Imaging/CFH12K/) is a particularly powerful system. It is based on a mosaic of 12 3-edge buttable MIT/Lincoln-Labs. CCID20 thinned backside illuminated CCDs, each $`2048\times 4096`$ pixels for a total array size of $`12288\times 8192`$ pixels (18.4 cm $`\times `$ 12.3 cm in physical size). The pixel size (15 microns) corresponds to a scale of 0.205 arcsec/pixel at CFHT prime focus, well adapted to the mean seeing at the CFHT prime focus ($`0.8\mathrm{"}`$). It covers a field of view $`42\times 28`$ arcmin2. The camera is composed of two different types of CCDs. Three are high resisitivity chips and nine are epitaxial silicon devices. The high resistivity CCDs have better efficiency than the epitaxial beyond 500 nm, but are less efficient in the blue (see figure 2). This difference is corrected during the pre-processing step that rescales each CCD with respect to a reference device of the camera.

None of the CCDs has a readout noise higher than 6 electrons $`rms`$ nor shows dark current signal over 1 hour time scale, which is largely sufficient for deep imaging surveys with sky background noise dominated images. The readout time is about one minute, which permits to easily split long exposures into short ones without increasing significantly the overheads. In addition to facilitate the construction of master flat fields and fringe patterns and to simplify the cosmic ray rejection process, the image splitting also permits a better control of the camera focus and to reject bad seeing exposures. The autonomy of the LN2 reservoir is much longer than a full single night observation process and we never detected any temperature drift during the 45 nights dedicated to the VIRMOS survey.

BVRI broad band filters are available on CFH12K. VRI are rather standard Mould filters, but B is special (see figure 2). They have been designed in order to cover the whole optical spectral range in a continuous manner. The photometric informations have therefore no gaps from one band to the other allowing to probe the whole redshift range from $`z=0`$ to $`z=5`$ continuously. This advantage is however obtained at the expense of photometric redshift accuracy for high-$`z`$ galaxies.

### 3.4 Observing strategy

Each $`2\times 2`$ deg2 field has been divided in a series of CFH12K pointings covering the full area, with a slight overlap of $`30`$ arcsec between each pointing. A classical shift-and-add observing strategy has been adopted, each pointing being observed between 5 and 12 times depending on the filters and depth. Because during our first 2 observing runs 2 of the 12 CCDs were of poor quality, the grid of pointings has had to be adjusted to the available pixels for these runs. We started operating with $`35\times 28`$ arcmin2 fields, switching to the full $`42\times 28`$ arcmin2 field when new CCDs were installed in the first observing period of 2000. The field geometry is therefore non rectangular in some of the bandpasses.

5by several arcseconds (typically $`1020`$ arcsec) between each exposure.

We aimed to bring first the I-band coverage to $`2\times 2`$deg2 in each of the fields to ensure that reference catalogs would be available for the magnitude selected VIRMOS-VLT Deep redshift Survey. We have then completed the coverage in other bands in a uniform way, proportional to the actual number of clear nights.

During the acquisition of a sequence of exposures, the aperture flux of control stars was monitored for changes in photometric conditions. The exposure times were extended in case a loss of flux was detected during sub-exposures.

## 4 Observations

### 4.1 Observed pointings

The individual pointings observed are listed in http://www.oamp.fr/virmos, with the date of observations, the FWHM measured on point sources images on the detectors, and the corresponding CFHT archive files.

The final CFH12K mosaics resulting from the combination of these individual pointings are listed in Table.2 for each of the 4 fields and 4 bands, together with the resulting exposure times and limiting magnitudes ($`5\sigma `$ in a 3 arcsec circular aperture).

### 4.2 calibrations

Standard photometric fields from Landolt (1992) have been acquired each night survey observations have been obtained. The fields SA92, SA101 and SA110, have been observed several times over the period 1999-2002 in order to check the reliability of the photometric calibration and the stability of the CFH12K performances. The detailed process of photometric calibration, relative from exposure to exposure within a set of exposures of a pointing in each bandpass, as well as the absolute flux calibration from the observed standards is described in details in (McCracken et al, 2003).

### 4.3 Image quality

The image quality of each exposure acquired for the survey is presented in Figure 3 for each of the bands. The median seeing is FWHM=0.75 arcsec in the I band but increases to 0.88 arcsec in V and R, and 0.97 arcsec in B. Moreover, the V and R seeing distributions are significantly broader than the I and B data sets. This trend reflects that atmospheric dispersion is negligible in I-band and increases towards the B-band. However, it mostly results from our observing strategy since we preferentially did I-band observations during good seeing periods in order to get high quality I-band selected catalogues for the VMOS spectroscopic sample as well as for the cosmic shear studies.

## 5 Data Processing

### 5.1 Pre-processing

All data are pre-processed using the FLIPS software package (Cuillandre et al., 2002). FLIPS (http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/jcc/Flips/flips.html) is composed of C-language programs and Cshell commands that automatically generate master bias, dark and flat images, build a model of the fringe pattern and subtract the master bias, dark files and fringe pattern as well as the overscan to raw CFH12K images. Each pixel and each image is then rescaled to account for intrinsic efficiency. A binary mask image provided by CFHT at each observing run identifies all bad and hot pixels over each CCD of the camera. They are taken into account during the master file generation process. The final data products are pre-calibrated images that includes the description of the pre-processing history in the FITS header and the value of the CCD to CCD rescaling coefficient, according to the different gains of each CCD output and the quantum efficiency difference between epitaxial and high resisitivty CCDs. At this stage, all CCDs are therefore in the same ADU scaling units and arbitrarily normalised to the CCD#04 efficiency.

The FLIPS package has been installed at the Terapix center described below in order to handle the pre-processing locally.

### 5.2 The Terapix facility

The Terapix facility (http://terapix.iap.fr) has been set up as a French national center to handle the processing of large imaging cameras. The facility includes the hardware and software environment required to process data on a Terabyte scale. Three COMPACQ XP1000 workstations with up to 2 GB of RAM memory and connected to 4 Terabytes of hard discs installed in a secured raid-5 configuration have been devoted to the VIRMOS image processing (Mellier et al, 2002). Over the past four years, Terapix has processed more than 10,000 CFH12K images for the VIRMOS survey, totalling about 2.5 TB of input data. A database environment allows to streamline data access and storage.

### 5.3 Pipeline processing

Pipeline processing allows efficient data processing with excellent quality control. The stable behavior of the CFH-12K camera allows for very accurate bias, flat field, and fringing correction.

The pipeline software has been developped within the Terapix environment. The main steps are described in (McCracken et al, 2003) as well as in the Terapix progress reports (Mellier et al, 2002). The software tools developped for the object detection, image astrometry, photometry, pixel weighting and flaging, image resampling and stacking, object classification and catalogue construction are described at http://terapix.iap.fr/soft/ and can be downloaded freely from this site. The http://terapix.iap.fr/soft/releases.html also provides a documentation for all software tools.

The astrometric projection of all images into a common system used to build the large mosaic images has been developed to ensure an overall absolute calibration to the USNO reference catalogue (Monet et al, 98) accurate to better than 0.3 arcsecond, while the relative position accuracy within the catalogs is better than 0.1 arcsec r.m.s. The photometric calibration ensures that all individual images are calibrated on the same reference. Photometric zero point uncertainties are better than 0.1 magnitudes across the final mosaics. A detailled description and application of the pipeline, with a comprehensive description of quality assessments are described in (McCracken et al, 2003). Similar procedures applied to the wide VIRMOS survey and the deep U-band survey have been used by Gwyn et al (2003, in preparation) and Radovich et al (2003), respectively.

## 6 Results: survey images and catalogs

### 6.1 Field coverage

The final multi-wavelength coverage of the four survey fields is shown in Figure 4 to Figure 7.

### 6.2 Catalog content

The catalogs are built using the SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts, 1996). Particular care has been taken to ensure uniform source detection, using a matched xi-squared image (see Fig. 8) produced from the individual band images, or a local threshold algorithm. The difference between these two methods has been demonstrated to be marginal, with no effect in the magnitude range to the completness limit (McCracken et al, 2003).

Because of the large area covered, bright stars are present in the mosaics, creating increased background around them. In addition, there are areas in the images not useable for accurate photometry. These can be areas for which the signal to noise is too low like e.g. areas of overlap between individual CCDs, areas affected by internal reflexions or ghosts from bright stars around the field, or even areas affected by transient effects like satellite trails. Masks are therefore computed for each mosaic.

The catalogs contain the following information for each object extracted from the SExtractor V.2.3 used with the generic configuration files given in the Appendix and which were used as templates for all optical data from the CFH12K part of the survey:

* Identifier
* Positions:

+ X-IMAGE (pixel) , Y-IMAGE (pixel), and
    + ALPHA\_J2000 (decimal degrees) and DELTA\_J2000  (decimal degrees)
* Flux and Magnitudes in the AB photometric system, defined as -2.5log(flux in ADU)+ZP (mag. zero point), including the associated errors:

+ the total flux and magnitude FLUX\_AUTO (ADU), MAG\_AUTO,
    + the isophotal flux and magnitude, FLUX\_ISO (ADU), MAG\_ISO,
    + the corrected isophotal flux and magnitude FLUX\_ISOCOR (ADU), MAG\_ISOCOR,
    + the best of mag\_auto and mag\_isocor, FLUX\_BEST (ADU), MAG\_BEST,
    + the aperture flux and magnitude FLUX\_APER(2) (ADU), MAG\_APER(2),

Colors can then be derived directly using the aperture magnitudes computed within the same aperture for all bands.
* Shapes:

+ image size, KRON\_RADIUS (pixel) and ISOAREA\_IMAGE (pixel2),
    + major axis A\_IMAGE (pixel) , A\_WORLD (decimal degrees),
    + minor axis B\_IMAGE (pixel), B\_WORLD (decimal degrees) ,
    + position angle of main axes (all angles are measured counter-clockwise from the east. theta denotes the position angle between the major axis, ”a”, and the naxis1 (east-west) image axis), THETA\_IMAGE (decimal degrees), THETA\_J2000  (decimal degrees),
    + the values of the values of the weighted second moment matrix coefficients, X2\_IMAGE (pixel2), Y2\_IMAGE (pixel2), XY\_IMAGE (pixel2),
    + X2\_WORLD (decimal degees2), Y2\_WORLD (decimal degees2), XY\_WORLD (decimal degees2),
    + peak surface brightness MU\_MAX (mag/arcsec2),
    + detection threshold above the background MU\_THRESHOLD (mag/arcsec2).
* Flags: several flags (FLAGS) are stored for each object. they indicate:

+ saturated pixels,
    + pixel located inside a masked area, as defined above.
    + Star-Galaxy classification: A star / galaxy classifier defined from the half-light radius vs. magnitude diagram (see (McCracken et al, 2003)). Stars are selected along the vertical branch at fixed radius corresponding to seeing disk size. This method initally described in (Fahlman et al, 1994) turns out to be more reliable than the initial CLASS\_STAR of SExtractor,

The photometry and astrometry quality have been assessed through many quality checks. The positional accuracy has been checked against the USNO catalog. The photometry accuracy has been first assessed through the Elixir queue observing program part of the queue observations at CFHT, which monitors the photometric zero points accross nights. The magnitudes of objects common to adjacent CCDs have been compared and showed differences in the range 0.05–0.1 magnitudes. The comparison of colors for the bright stellar objects in the fields with the observed and predicted locus of stars has shown color errors less than 0.1 magnitudes. Counts of galaxies are in full agreement with the litterature. Finally, the angular correlation function shows similar shape and amplitude as from other imaging surveys. All these quality checks are extensively described in (McCracken et al, 2003). They ensure that the data are free of systematics before science analysis can be conducted.

In the I band, a total of 2.175 million objects have been detected. Among these, 1.15 million objects have $`17.5I_{AB}24`$, in the range of the VIRMOS-VLT Deep Survey.

An example of a multi-color set is given in Figure 9.

### 6.3 Database access

All catalogs and mosaic images are stored in an interactive database implemented under the Oracle-8 environment. Specific database development have been conducted to allow for easy database query and data retrieval.

The catalogs are now in direct access to the CFHT-VIRMOS consortium. They will be released for general use for CFHT users starting July 1st, 2003 (http://www.oamp.fr/virmos). To access the database, first a password should be requested sending an email to virmos.database@oamp.fr.

The database allows to query the photometric catalog and to retrieve image sections. Any parameter listed in the photometric catalog can be used to define a user selection, e.g. magnitudes, colors, and/or positions. A user catalog is then produced with entries as selected by the user from the list of catalog parameters.

## 7 Conclusions

A deep imaging survey has been conducted in 4 high galacitic latitude areas with the CFH-12K camera. A total area of more than $`17`$deg2 has been imaged in I band, and significant coverage of the survey area has been performed also in B, V and R.

Pipeline processing has been conducted at the Terapix facility at IAP to produce large mosaic images calibrated in astrometry and photometry.

Photometric catalogs containing positions, magnitudes, colors, shapes of more than 2 million objects have been produced for more than 17deg2 and quality control has been applied as described in joint papers. These catalogs and mosaic images will be released for general use starting July 1st, 2003, at http://www.oamp.fr/virmos.

While many scientific programs are under way, the survey has already been used for cosmic shear. The virmos-descart cfht survey (http://www.terapix.iap.fr/Descart/cfhtsurvey.html) primarily focusses on the I-band sample to measure galaxy shape with high accuracy and probe the dark matter properties and cosmological parameters. Because these cosmic shear results provide also an estimate of systematics on galaxy shapes and can be cross-checked with independent cosmic shear results from other teams, they also provide quality assessments on the VIRMOS data set. In addition to the detection of cosmic shear signal (van Waerbeke et al, 2000), constraints on $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m`$, $`\sigma _8`$ (van Waerbeke et al, 2002), the biasing properties of the dark matter (Hoekstra et al, 2002; Pen et al 2003a, ) as well is its non-Gaussian properties (Bernardeau et al, 2002; Pen et al 2003b, ) and the 3-dimension power spectrum of the dark matter (Pen et al 2003a, ) have already been provided using the VIRMOS survey for cosmic shear.

The VIMOS spectroscopic survey is now started at the ESO/VLT and more than 20,000 spectra have been collected (Le Fèvre et al, 2003). The joint U-band, optical, near infrared and spectroscopic informations are now under process to probe the star formation history, the clustering history of galaxies up to redshift $`z`$ 5 and the properties of the light and dark matter relations.

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank the CFHT time allocation committee for continuous support of this long term program, the CFHT staff for the execution of the observations performed in queue scheduling mode, the Terapix staff for its continuous help during the VIRMOS image processing period, the CNRS-INSU, CEA/DAPNIA and the Programme National de Cosmologie for support of the Terapix facility and IAP and OAMP for funding of this program.

## A1: SExtractor configuration files

Tables 3 and 4 list the parameters used for all $`\chi ^2`$-images and all wide field analysis of VIRMOS optical obervations with the CFH12K.


text:
# Grid-based access control for Unix environments, Filesystems and Web Sites

## I Introduction

The overall security infrastructure of the EU DataGrid (EDG)edg  project has been described elsewhereSCGCHEP . In brief, it consists of Certificate Authorities (CA) granting X.509 cryptographic certificates to users and hosts, and providing authentication; and Virtual Organisations (VO) which authorize users to use resources allocated to the VO. Authorization information is currently published as VO membership lists using LDAP, but VOMS, a system based on attribute certificates has been developed and describedSCGCHEP .

This paper describes ways in which this authorization information is used to control access to local resources, such as Unix accounts, disk filesystems and the virtual filesystems exported by file and web servers.

## II Unix Account Management

The remote job execution middleware used by EDG is based on the Globusglobus  gatekeeper, and this uses a static mapping from grid identities, based on X.509 certificates, to local Unix user accounts. A text file lists grid identities and corresponding local accounts and when a job is received for execution, it is forked as a process owned by the local Unix user account. Whilst adaquate for small Virtual Organisations, this procedure is insufficient for VOs with hundreds of users at tens of sites. To address the maintainence of the list of acceptable grid identities, EDG has developed software to allow VOs to publish membership lists and for sites to construct the mapping text fileSCGCHEP .

However, this still leaves the creation and management of the local Unix accounts themselves. To address this for EDG, we have developed a system of dynamically allocated Pool Accountsgppauthz , which are created by the site administrator and then allocated to users as new job or file server requests are received. A directory of lock files is maintained to retain a one-to-one mapping between grid identities and allocated user accounts. This also ensures that if two requests overlap, they are assigned to the same Unix user account, which allows sharing of files between multipart jobs, and between jobs and fileserver requests.

Since Unix operating systems implement filesystem permissions in terms of Unix accounts, this also provides a rudimentary way of preventing jobs from different grid users from interfering with each other.

Accounts may be returned to the pool of unused accounts once all jobs running as that account have terminated and after leaving a grace period for file retrieval. Since the account allocation book keeping is maintained by lock files, this is straightforward to implement as a Unix shell script which is run periodically and which can be tailored to individual site requirements.

## III Grid Access Control Lists

To describe fine-grained access control of files and other file-like resources, EDG has developed GACLgppauthz , a format for access control lists, written in XML and in terms of grid identities or Virtual Organisation membership.

Each GACL access control list is divided into one or more entries, each of which has a set of permissions which are granted if that entry’s credential requirements are met. Permissions are to Read (to read files), List (to obtain directory listings), Write (to create or write to files, to create directories, or to delete files or directories) and Admin (to modify access control lists.)

An entry may have one or more credentials which must be present, including X.509 certificate identities, VO groups or VOMS attribute certificates. Two generic credentials, Authuser (any user with a valid certificate) and Anyuser (any user irrespective of credentials), allow access to be granted to users with no affiliation to the site.

An API and library are provided for manipulating GACL lists, and this is the foundation of the filesystem and fileserver access control described in the remainder of this paper, and of the EU DataGrid Storage Element described elsewherese .

## IV SlashGrid filesystems

We have paid particular attention to applying the GACL access control to standard local filesystem operations, using the SlashGridgppauthz  framework described here.

Most applications use a filesystem interface to access local files on the same machine. This organises data into files, contained in a hierarchy of folders or directories, each accessible by name. For interactive use, a graphical file browser is commonly used, displaying files as icons which may be opened and accessed using a mouse. File access within an applications uses an analogous programming interface, which in most programming languages is based on a set of functions to ‘open’, ‘read’, ‘write’ etc.

The security associated with these operations is traditionally tied to credentials which only have meaning on the machine (or in some cases the computing site or cluster) in question. Typically, this takes the form of a short username or group name, and a specific file may have one user who has permission to write to that file. For EDG testbed sites, these are dynamically allocated pool accounts, but there may be static accounts in other parts of the system, such as user-interface hosts.

As we connect machines and sites together with Grid technology, these local credentials become increasingly inappropriate for managing authorisation to use resources, as they cannot readily be shared across the Grid. For example, a user may have the username mcnab at one site, but amcnab at another, and at a third site user mcnab may be a completely different individual.

Although the pool accounts system described above automates the management of local accounts, the system cannot readily be used when creating long lived files, since the username they are owned by is only temporarily associated with a specific Grid identity.

Initially to resolve this shortcoming, we have produced a file system framework, SlashGrid, which allows file and directory authorisation to depend on long-lived Grid identities. SlashGrid creates a hierarchy of directories under /grid where an application’s username, whether static or temporary, is irrelevant to whether it can create, read or modify files: what matters are the Grid credentials the application currently holds on behalf of the user, wherever they are on the Grid.

For interoperability with other products of the EU DataGrid and related projects, SlashGrid uses the GACL library and access control lists stored in per-directory or per-file control files.

SlashGrid has also been designed to be readily extensible, by the use of third-party plugins to add additional filesystem types. In particular, we have implemented an HTTP/HTTPS filesystem, in which the contents of remote websites can be accessed by applications as if they were local files, and in the case of HTTPS, may prove the user’s identity to remote servers to obtain access to restricted files.

This has the potential to allow existing applications to operate on the Grid, indifferent to the true location of the files they manipulate, with remote Grid file access provided as a service by the operating system layer.

## V GridSite web and file servers

Web browsers represent the most common, familiar and most widely installed application used to access remote resources on the current Internet. However, most websites are built using HTTP technology, which can only implement cumbersome authentication and authorisation mechanisms. Typically, this involves the user choosing a short memorable password for each site to which they need to identify themselves. Consequently, the user may find themselves having to enter multiple usernames and passwords as they pass between websites run by their employer, their bank, online merchants etc. As well as the inconvenience involved, this is also vulnerable to “brute force” attacks by third parties due to the short length of the passwords.

Since the mid-1990’s, most web browsers have also supported the HTTPS protocol, which uses X.509 digital certificates and has been widely used to provide authentication of websites to users. This allows a user to send credit card details to a merchant’s website, for instance, with some confidence that the site is not being impersonated by a malicious third party.

Although the corresponding user authentication to websites has been supported since the adoption of HTTPS, it has been far less used, due to the administrative overhead and cost of verifying users’ identity before giving them a meaningful X.509 user certificate.

However, with the large-scale deployment of X.509 certificates to members EDG and other Grid projects across the world, this is changing, and it is now practical to base a High Energy Physics collaboration’s website on HTTPS rather than HTTP technology, without requiring users to install any special software.

The GridPP project, which represents the UK involvement in EDG, has chosen to implement its collaboration website in this way, and to produce a general website management tool, GridSitegppauthz , which is flexible enough for other projects to use for their own sites.

Since GridSite is able to uniquely and securely identify users by their X.509 certificate, they can be granted rights to edit and upload webpages, images and binary files. This is enforced using the GACL access control lists described above. Access control can be specified in terms of individuals or Virtual Organisation groups, with membership managed by the group’s administrators through the same web interface.

This has allowed GridPP to devolve maintenance of the website down to the level of those directly involved in each area of work. Since the administration of group authorisation is also devolved, the administrative overhead normally carried by the website manager is greatly reduced.

Since GridSite permits several users to maintain a set of documents, this has also made collaboration between GridPP members at different institutions considerably easier; and tools are provided to retain old versions and record document histories to automate the book-keeping of who has changed a document and at what date.

Initially, GridSite has been implemented as a self-contained executable run from the web server to handle each HTTP or HTTPS request. It has now been divided into standalone executables to handle interactive management of the site and groups by administrators, and a loadable module which is dynamically linked directly into the Apacheapache  webserver used. By incorporating GridSite and GACL technology directly in the webserver, all technologies support by the webserver, including static file serving, and dynamic content provided by CGI scipts, PHP, ASP or JSP server-parsed pages, for example, can be subject to grid-based access control.

This flexibility allows a GridSite server to simultaneously operate as an efficient file server, as a web host with dynamic content and as a grid host with Grid Services in Java and other languages operating in their favoured environments.

## VI Future Developments

Future developments will include porting of the SlashGrid filesystems framework and the GridSite server management system to platforms other than Linux. Support for additional authorization credentials, such as Globus CAS, will be added to the GACL library, along with support for access control languages recommended by the GGF Authorization Working Group.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work has been supported by the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and the European Union.