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# Faraday Rotation as a Diagnostic of Galactic Foreground Contamination of CMB Maps

## 1 Introduction

The DMR (Differential Microwave Radiometer) instrument on board the COBE satellite ushered in the era or precision cosmology by measuring primordial temperature fluctuations of order $`\mathrm{\Delta }T/T=10^5`$ in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation \[Smoot et al. 1992\]. The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) recently took CMB cosmology onto a higher level by mapping the last scattering surface with much higher angular definition and greater sensitivity (Bennett et al. 2003; Hinshaw et al. 2003). But before either of these experiments could produce cosmological information various sources of contaminating radiation had to be eliminated.

Among the foregrounds that may affect CMB observations are Galactic dust, synchrotron and free–free emission, extragalactic point sources and the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect due to hot gases in galaxy clusters. These fluctuations were measured by the COBE-DMR instrument on angular scales larger than $`7^\mathrm{o}`$ and at 3 different frequencies (31.5, 53 and 90 GHz) corresponding to a window where the Galactic emissions are minimum. Instruments such as COBE-DMR, which probe large angular scales, are most sensitive to the diffuse foreground emission of our galaxy \[Gawiser & Silk 2000\]. Synchrotron emission associated with the motion of electrons in the Galactic magnetic field dominates at $`\nu `$ 20 GHz. Free-free emission, due to electron-ion collisions in the interstellar medium, dominates in the range 25-70 GHz. Galactic dust grains absorb UV and optical light from the interstellar radiation field and emit the energy in the far-infrared. This foreground dominates at $`\nu `$ 90 GHz. CMB instruments can identify foregrounds by their spectral signatures across a range of frequencies, making reliable foreground subtraction feasible. WMAP was designed to make accurate measurements of the CMB down to angular scales of $`12`$ arcmin; to allow efficient foreground subtraction this experiment mapped the full sky at five widely separated frequencies from 23 GHz to 94 GHz. The quest for even better foreground prediction and subtraction will be an important part of future CMB work as finer details of the temperature pattern are probed with increasing precision. This is likely to be particularly challenging for polarization studies, in which the contamination is larger in proportion to the CMB signal than for the temperature field \[Davies & Wilkinson 1998, Sazhin, Sironi & Khovanskaya 2002\]. It is therefore extremely important to find ways of testing that foreground modelling and subtraction has been carried out accurately, particularly given the evidence that exists already for unusual features on the CMB sky revealed by WMAP (e.g. Chiang et al. 2003).

In this paper we show how it is possible to construct an independent probe of foregrounds using measurements of Faraday rotation along lines of sight to extragalactic objects. The layout of the paper is as follows. In the next section we give a brief overview of possible foreground contaminations of CMB maps, and explain how they might be correlated with Faraday rotation measures taken along random lines-of-sight. In Section 3, we carry out a simple and robust test to verify that there is a link between the strength of the sources and their location in the sky. In Section 4 we explain our non-parametric cross-correlation technique. In Section 5, we confirm the link between the RM values and Galactic foregrounds by determining correlations between the RM catalogue and maps of various contributions, including the survey of Haslam et al. (1982) at 408 MHz, synchrotron maps compiled by the WMAP team, as well as dust and free–free maps. We also explore correlations between the RM-values and the temperature field values in the DMR and WMAP data at the location in the sky of the sources to see if there is any evidence of residual contamination in published maps. The conclusions are presented and discussed in Section 6.

## 2 Faraday Rotation and Foregrounds

Faraday rotation measures (RM) of extragalactic radio sources are direct tracers of the Galactic magnetic field. When plane-polarized radiation propagates through a plasma with a component of the magnetic field parallel to the direction of propagation, the plane of polarisation rotates through an angle $`\psi `$ given by

$$\psi =\lambda ^2,$$
(1)
where the Faraday rotation measure (RM) is denoted by the symbol $``$ and measured in $`\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2`$ where

$$=\frac{e^3}{2\pi m_e^2c^4}n_eB_{}𝑑s.$$
(2)
Note that $`B_{}`$ is the component of the magnetic field along the line-of-sight direction. The observed RM of extragalactic sources is a linear sum of three components: the intrinsic RM of the source (often small); the value due to the intergalactic medium (usually negligible); and the RM from the interstellar medium of our Galaxy \[Broten, MacLeod & Vallée 1988\]. The latter component is usually assumed to form the main contribution to the integral. If this is true, studies of the distribution and strength of RM values can be used to map the Galactic magnetic field \[Vallée & Kronberg 1975\]. Even if the intrinsic contribution were not small, it could be ignored if the magnetic fields in different radio sources were uncorrelated and therefore simply add noise to any measure of the Galactic field \[Frick et al. 2001\]. In a similar vein, the distributions of RM values have been used to measure local distortions of the magnetic field, such as loops and filaments, and attempts have also been made to determine the strength of intracluster magnetic fields \[Kim, Tribble & Kronberg 1991\]. In what follows we shall use RM values obtained from a catalogue of extragalactic sources compiled by Broten et al. (1988) (updated in 1991) not to attempt mapping the Galactic $`B`$-field but to look for statistical correlations over the whole sky.

There are various ways in which rotation measures of external galaxies could be diagnostic of foreground contamination. The most obvious at first sight is Galactic synchrotron. The magnitudes of rotation measures of extragalactic sources trace the Galactic magnetic field strength which, in turn, is correlated with the strength of synchrotron emission resulting from the acceleration of electrons in the Galactic magnetic field. The emission is dependent on both the energy spectrum of the electrons, $`N(E)dE`$ and the strength of the magnetic field, $`B`$. For a power-law distribution of energies of the form

$$N(E)dE=\kappa E^\beta dE,$$
(3)
the intensity spectrum of the emitted radiation takes the form

$$I(\nu )\kappa B_{}^{\alpha +1}\nu ^\alpha .$$
(4)
The normalisation constant $`\kappa `$ is related to the overall number density of electrons, $`n_e`$. The intensity spectral index $`\alpha `$ is related to the index of the energy spectrum $`\beta `$ via $`\beta =2\alpha +1`$, but $`\alpha `$ is expected to vary with both position and frequency \[Lawson et al. 1987\]. Radio surveys at frequencies below 2 GHz are dominated by synchrotron emission \[Davies & Wilkinson 1998\] so these have been used to extrapolate this contribution to the higher frequencies at which CMB instruments operate. However, the only complete-sky survey is that of Haslam et al. (1982) at 408 MHz. Extrapolating from such a low frequency measurement is prone to problems with zero levels and scanning errors. Moreover, it is known that the spectral index $`\alpha `$ varies by $`\mathrm{\Delta }\alpha 0.5`$ \[Davies, Watson & Gutierrez 1996\] which could have a big effect on extrapolations over a large frequency range. If the DMR or WMAP data correlate with RM measurements then this may suggest that synchrotron emission has not been completely removed. Our approach is intended to be complementary to the standard extrapolation.

On the other hand, correlation with Galactic synchrotron is not the only possible diagnostic use of rotation measure data, and may indeed not be the most important. Note that, while the formulae for both rotation measure (2) and synchrotron intensity (4) both depend on $`B`$, the former depends on the line-of-sight component and the latter on the perpendicular component. If the magnetic field were disordered on a relatively small scale one might still expect correlations to exist between the two, but it is certainly possible to imagine field configurations that result in large synchrotron emission but no Faraday rotation (and vice-versa). On the other hand, although free–free emission does not rely upon the presence of a $`B`$-field, it does depend on the electron density as does the rotation measure. A correlation between RM and free–free emission is therefore possible even if the field configuration leads to a negligible correlation with synchrotron emission in the observer direction. Dust may likewise be indirectly correlated; this correlation may be further complicated if the dust is aligned in some way with the Galactic magnetic field.

It is not obvious a priori which of the potential contaminants would correlate best with the measured RM values nor what the meaning of any measured correlation would be. For example, free–free, synchrotron and dust emission all vary strongly with Galactic latitude. For this reason alone they are expected to correlate with each other. A cross-correlation with RM could therefore, on the face of it, simply be a Galactic latitude effect. On the other hand, such a cross-correlation could instead indicate more complex, smaller-scale spatial association between these foregrounds. We therefore adopt an entirely empirical approach to this question; we return to the issue of Galactic dependence later, in Section 5.

## 3 The Distribution of Rotation Measures

Broten et al. (1988) present an all-sky catalogue of rotation measures for 674 extragalactic sources (i.e. galaxies or quasars). It is believed that very large RM values do not reflect the contribution of the Galactic magnetic field, but are instead due to the magnetic field in the source or are perhaps simply unreliable determinations of RM \[Ruzmaikin & Sokoloff 1979\]. The catalogue contained 39 sources where $`||>300\mathrm{rad}\mathrm{m}^2`$; 25 of these are within the Galactic “cut” of the DMR data used in Section 5.2 and 27 are within the Kp2 mask region of the WMAP data used later in Section 5.3. While noting this complication, we decided nevertheless to use the complete sample for this study. The large-valued rotation measures would only be expected to dilute observed correlations if they were entirely intrinsic; we comment on this later, in Section 5.

Our first point of investigation was to look at the distribution of rotation measures across the sky. If we have a set of points on the celestial sphere labelled with some particular characteristic that is independent of the direction on the sphere, any subsample selected using this characteristic should display the same behaviour as the sample as a whole. In particular, any measure of the spatial correlations of the subsample should have the same form as the complete sample (scaled to take into account the smaller sample size). Looking at the clustering characteristics of subsamples of the Faraday rotation measure catalogue can thus indicate whether the RM values for the sources are intrinsic or determined by their spatial positions.

Owing to the small size of the sample available for this analysis, a simple but robust statistic is needed. We chose the conditional distribution of neighbour distances, $`\eta (\theta )`$, i.e. the probability that there is a neighbour within an angle $`\theta `$ of a given point. This has the advantage of being closely related to the angular two–point correlation function (Peebles 1980). The function $`\eta (\theta )`$ is straightforwardly calculated by determining the angle between the $`i`$th source and each remaining source, and repeating the process for every $`i`$. The resulting angles were placed in 100 bins of equal width leading to the distribution of $`\eta (\theta )`$.

The sample was divided into two sets; those with positive RM values (364 sources) and those with zero or negative values of RM (310 sources). We calculated $`\eta (\theta )`$ for two subsamples: those with positive rotation measures and those with negative ones, giving $`\eta ^+(\theta )`$ and $`\eta ^{}(\theta )`$ respectively. The two distributions were compared through Monte Carlo (MC) simulations in which the locations of the sources in the sky were maintained, but the RM values were randomly reallocated to the position of the sources. This method ensures the underlying distribution of $`\eta (\theta )`$ for real and MC samples was the same, but any link between the RM values and spatial position would be severed in the MCs. We extract $`\eta ^+(\theta )`$ and $`\eta ^{}(\theta )`$ from each simulation and constructed an average of distribution over 1000 simulations. Since the distributions are binned it is natural to compare MC distributions with the real data to the average distributions via a $`\chi ^2`$ test, using

$$\chi ^2=\underset{i}{}\frac{\left[\eta (\theta _i)\overline{\eta }(\theta _i)\right]^2}{\overline{\eta }(\theta _i)},$$
(5)
where $`\overline{\eta }(\theta )`$ is the average distribution. The larger $`\chi ^2`$ is the less likely the distribution is drawn from the population represented by $`\overline{\eta }(\theta )`$. The $`\chi ^2`$statistic obtained from the positive distributions for the MCs and Broten et al. data were ranked (lowest value to highest). The same was done for the statistics obtained from the negative distributions. Thus, the higher the rank of the real data the more likely the rotation measures and positions are correlated.

The distribution $`\eta ^{}(\theta )`$ calculated from the Broten et al. catalogue and sample Monte Carlo simulations are shown in Fig.1. The distributions of $`\eta ^+(\theta )`$ are not shown, but they behave in a similar fashion. The $`\chi ^2`$ values obtained when comparing both subsamples distributions with the average MC distributions were larger than those obtained by all 1000 MC subsamples. Indeed, Fig.1 demonstrates that there are visible differences between the measured distribution and the MC simulations. This demonstrates that the real data show a significant correlation between the sign of rotation measure and the source’s spatial location. This fits in with the idea that there is an asymmetry about the meridian about the Galactic centre; a dominance of negative rotation measures at $`0<l<180^\mathrm{o}`$ and positive RM at $`180^\mathrm{o}<l<360^\mathrm{o}`$ (Vallée & Kronberg 1975; Han et al. 1997). Furthermore, the average distribution of both subsamples are identical in shape; the peaks and troughs correspond to the same angles. This reinforces the view that both distributions yield similar information. Overall the results support the view that rotation measures trace the Galactic magnetic field at the angular location of the source, which is encouraging for this study.

## 4 Correlating Rotation Measures with Sky Maps

In order to look for correlation between the temperature measurements and the rotation measures at the locations of the sources we use a non-parametric measure of correlation. The temperature ($`T_i`$) at the location of source $`i`$ and the rotation measure $`_i`$ of source $`i`$ are drawn from unknown probability distributions. However, if the value of each $`T_i`$ is replaced by the value of its rank among all the other $`T_i`$ then the resulting list of numbers will be drawn uniformly from integers between 1 and the sample size $`N`$ (which is 674 for the whole sample). The same procedure is followed for the $`_i`$. We are interested in the magnitude of $``$ as this is determined by the magnetic field strength; the sign is irrelevant to the intensity of emission at that point. If measurements share the same value then they are assigned the mean of the ranks that they would have had if their values slightly differed. In all case the sum of all ranks should be $`N(N+1)/2`$, where $`N`$ is the number of sources.

The Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient is constructed as follows. If $`x_i`$ is the rank of $`T_i`$ among the other $`T_i`$’s, and $`y_i`$’s is the rank of $`_i`$ among the other $`_i`$. Then the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient, $`r_s`$ is then given by

$$r_s=\frac{_i(x_i\overline{x})(y_i\overline{y})}{\sqrt{_i(x_i\overline{x})^2}\sqrt{_i(y_i\overline{y})^2}}$$
(6)
A perfect positive correlation is represented by $`r_s=1`$, whereas $`r_s=1`$ is a perfect negative correlation. This is a better statistic than the usual product-moment correlation coefficient because there is no reason to suppose a linear relation between the two variables. In more general terms it is worth stressing that the non-parametric nature of the Spearman test renders it insensitive to highly skewed distributions. What it measures relates to the ordering of the measurements rather than their actual values so the shapes of marginal distributions of $`x`$ and $`y`$ are irrelevant.

In order to establish the significance of a non-zero $`r_s`$ value obtained from comparing the two sets of measurements, the value was compared to those obtained through MC simulations. The simulations were designed such that the temperature field at a particular point was not linked to the rotation measures. However, the sources could not be simply placed randomly in any location the sky since the real data is clustered which may affect the significance level of any result. There are two ways this could have been simulated to take this into account: the rotation measures of the sources could be shuffled, or the coordinate frame of the source positions could be rotated. The former option was chosen as it is computationally faster. We performed 10,000 MCs and a value of $`r_s`$ was obtained for each one. This allows us straightforwardly to establish the significance level of any measurement in terms of the fraction of simulated $`r_s`$ values exceeded by the real measurement.

## 5 Application to Sky Maps

### 5.1 Foreground Maps

The idea of using rotation measures to hunt for Galactic contamination in CMB data hinges on the assumption that foregrounds are related (directly or indirectly) with the Galactic magnetic field. As we explained above in Section 2, this assumption seems theoretically well-founded but not empirically proven. If the two sets of measurements were found to be uncorrelated, it could be that our understanding of the physics of foreground emission needs adjusting or that the belief that the the main contribution to the integral in equation (2) relates to the Galactic magnetic field might be incorrect. In order to verify that there is indeed a correlation between synchrotron emission and rotation measures we looked at a number of “foreground” maps.

To start with, we looked at 8 “pure” synchrotron maps: three of these are derived from the 408 MHz survey of Haslam et al. (1982) and 5 are produced by the WMAP team (Bennett et al. 2003); maps for the latter (and of the data we use later in this section) are available in HEALPix111http://www.eso.org/science/healpix/ format (Gorski, Hivon & Wandelt 1999) from the NASA archive at http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov. The WMAP maps have a resolution parameter of $`N_{\mathrm{side}}=256`$ corresponding to $`12\times 256^2=786,432`$ pixels. The 408 MHz map has a resolution of 51 arcmin and has been reproduced in HEALPix format with $`N_{side}`$=128. We also looked at this survey smoothed to COBE resolution ($`N_{side}`$=32). The WMAP team produced their maps using a maximum entropy method (MEM) with the 408 MHz map furnishing a prior spatial distribution; the details of the method are described in Bennett et al. (2003).

The first 8 rows of Table 1 summarise the results from these maps. The method identifies weak but highly significant correlations between the rotation measures and the 8 maps. The WMAP-derived maps yield particularly strong signals, with measured $`r_s`$ values exceeding those in all 10,000 MCs except for the W-band derived case. These strongly significant correlations add weight to the belief of the WMAP team that they have produced synchrotron-only maps for the 5 frequencies. While the 408 MHz map is at such a low frequency that synchrotron emission completely dominates the sky, the WMAP maps are produced at frequencies where the CMB is significant. Furthermore, these maps have been produced by trying to model and remove other sources of contamination (dust and free–free). The $`r_s`$ values decrease with frequency across the WMAP range. This is not entirely unexpected, because synchrotron emission (4) decreases with frequency. On the other hand simply boosting or suppressing the amplitude should not influence the non-parametric correlation if the spatial distribution did not change with frequency. This effect may therefore be an artifact of variations in $`\alpha `$.

To explore the possible relationship between free–free radiation and RM values we used two maps: one by Finkbeiner (2003), which is a composite all-sky H$`\alpha `$ map using data from various surveys, and the other produced by the WMAP team at the K-band frequency using the MEM approach mentioned above. Perhaps surprisingly, the results in Table 1 demonstrate a stronger correlation between these maps and RM than there is in the synchrotron maps, suggesting that the correlation may relate to regions of where the Galactic magnetic field is largely constant or varies parallel to the line-of-sight but in which the electron density fluctuates. Free-free radiation will depend on the square of the electron density so fluctuations in $`n_e`$ in a region with constant $`B`$ may produce larger of correlations of RM of free–free emission than synchrotron.

As far as dust is concerned we again use two maps: one is a map constructed by the WMAP team at 94 GHz using models produced by Finkbeiner, Davis & Schlegel (1999) and the other is produced by the WMAP team using MEM at the W-band frequency. Once again the resulting correlations are significantly stronger than those displayed by the synchrotron maps.

One possible explanation of the free–free and dust results is that the cross-correlation with RM we are seeing is basically an effect of Galactic latitude. If all sources (and $`B`$) vary with Galactic latitude then they will correlate with each other. This is possible, but one piece of evidence against this explanation is that if we mask out low Galactic latitudes using the Kp2 mask advocated by Hinshaw et al. (2003), the results for synchrotron do not decrease dramatically while those for dust and free–free actually increase slightly.

As a final comment it is worth noting that we repeated the cross-correlation analysis of these maps, excluding the sources in the Broten et al. catalogue that yield very large rotation measures, i.e. $`>300`$ rad m-2. The resulting values of $`r_s`$ were all slightly reduced by a maximum of about $`0.04`$ in $`r_s`$. What is interesting about this result is that it shows that these sources probably do contain some information about the Galactic magnetic field because their RM measures are not entirely intrinsic. If these sources only added noise to the cross-correlation, as we suggested above that they might, then the result on the cross-correlation of excluding them would be random rather than systematic.

### 5.2 COBE DMR Data

The DMR instrument comprised six differential microwave radiometers: two nearly independent channels, labelled A and B, at frequencies 31.5, 53 and 90 GHz. We use data from the region $`|b|>20^\mathrm{o}`$ with custom cutouts near the Galactic centre \[Banday et al. 1997\]. There are 460 sources from the Broten et al. catalogue in this region to compare with the DMR data. The dipole anisotropy of amplitude $``$ 3 mK is largely removed in pre-map-making process \[Banday et al. 2003\]. We chose to look for correlations in 15 maps from the DMR data: the raw data from each of the six radiometers; the (A+B)/2 sum maps and (A-B)/2 difference maps for each frequency; and the (A+B)/2 sum maps after smoothing with a $`7^\mathrm{o}`$ beam up to $`l`$=20 using the ’smoothing’ routine in the HEALPix package. The sum maps should represent the true CMB signal whereas the difference maps should measure the level of instrument noise. The COBE-DMR four year sky maps used for this analysis have a resolution parameter of $`N_{\mathrm{side}}=32`$ corresponding to $`12\times 32^2=12,288`$ pixels in the HEALPix representation.

The results of looking for correlations between the DMR maps and the rotation measures are shown in table 2. The sum maps (corresponding to CMB + contaminants) should show the strongest signs of correlations if there are any to be seen. However, none of the maps show any evidence of correlation with the Broten et al. catalogue. In order to see how stable the probability values are, the simulations were repeated for the 90 GHz (A+B)/2 smoothed map a further three times giving probabilities of 0.16, 0.15 and 0.15. This indicates that the probabilities and thus any conclusions drawn from them are valid. Although the main factor may well be the relatively low signal-to-noise in the COBE-DMR data, we can say that our method shows no evidence for any residual foreground component in these maps.

### 5.3 WMAP 1 yr Sky Maps

The WMAP instrument comprises 10 differencing assemblies (consisting of two radiometers each) measuring over 5 frequencies ($``$23, 33, 41, 61 and 94 GHz). The two lowest frequency bands (K and Ka) are primarily Galactic foreground monitors, while the highest three (Q, V and W) are primarily cosmological bands \[Hinshaw et al. 2003\]. For CMB analyses, it is necessary to mask out regions of strong foreground emission. Bennett et al. (2003; B03) provide masks for excluding regions where the contamination level is large. The masks are based on the K-band measurements, where contamination is most severe. The masks, of differing levels of severity, are available from the NASA archive. The severity of the mask is a compromise between eliminating foregrounds and maximising sky area in analyses. We chose to use the Kp2 mask used by Hinshaw et al. (2003) to calculate cross-spectra from the three high frequency data leading to the angular power spectrum. The mask removes 15 % of pixels (including bright sources) leaving 338 faraday sources to compare with the maps. There should be no correlations between the rotation measures and the high frequency maps, once the mask has been applied. If there are correlations, this would question whether the amplitude of the angular power spectrum is cosmological in origin.

The WMAP team have also released an internal linear combination (ILC) map that combined the five band maps in such a way to maintain unity response to the CMB whilst minimising foreground contamination. The construction of this map is described in detail in Bennett et al. (2003). To further improve the result, the inner Galactic plane is divided into 11 separate regions and weights determined separately. This takes account of the spatial variations in the foreground properties. Thus, the final combined map does not rely on models of foreground emission and therefore any systematic or calibration errors of other experiments do not enter the problem. The final map covers the full-sky and should represent only the CMB signal.

Following the release of the WMAP 1 yr data Tegmark, de Oliveira-Costa & Hamilton (2003; TOH) have produced a cleaned CMB map. They argued that their version contained less contamination outside the Galactic plane compared with the internal linear combination map produced by the WMAP team. The five band maps are combined with weights depending both on angular scale and on the distance from the Galactic plane. The angular scale dependence allows for the way foregrounds are important on large scales whereas detector noise becomes important on smaller scales. TOH also produced a Wiener filtered map of the CMB that minimises rms errors in the CMB. Features with a high signal-to-noise are left unaffected, whereas statistically less significant parts are suppressed. While their cleaned map contains residual Galactic fluctuations on very small angular scales probed only by the W band, these fluctuations vanish in the filtered map.

In all, 13 maps derived from the WMAP data were used to seek correlation with the Broten et al. catalogue: the five band maps, the five band maps with the Kp2 region removed, the internal linear combination map, and the cleaned and Wiener maps of TOH.

The results of looking for correlations between the WMAP derived data and the rotation measures are shown in Table 3. The uncut frequency maps are all significantly correlated with the rotation measures, except the highest frequency map (W band). This confirms the expected contamination of the data across these frequencies. The strength of correlation decreases with increasing frequency, which may be understood by looking at the contribution of all the foregrounds to the total sky signal across these bands. Combining the contributions of synchrotron, free–free and dust, with sychrotron given a weighting of 0.5 due to its weaker correlation, would reproduce this trend. Once the Kp2 mask has been applied, the correlations vanish for all but the K and Ka band map. The reason that a correlation is still found with the K band data is probably that the cut only excludes the very strongest signals so both bands are still heavily contaminated. This is probably not a problem for CMB analysis because these will be projected out in the likelihood analysis. Moreover, the results from the masked maps indicate that calculating the angular power spectrum from the 3 high frequency bands with the Kp2 cut is valid. The contamination from Galactic foregrounds correlated with Faraday rotation on these studies is therefore probably small. Finally, no correlations are found between the rotation measures and two of the CMB-only maps, suggesting that the levels of contamination are indeed low, as the authors claim. Nevertheless, the result from the Wiener filtered map of TOH suggests a correlation at 95% confidence level.

Finally, we mention that on the NASA archive there are maps from each high frequency assembly that are supposedly clean of foreground contaminants outside the Kp2 cut region. The results in Table 4 show there are indeed no significant residual correlations in these data when the Kp2 mask is applied.

## 6 Discussion and Conclusions

The aim of the paper was to look for traces of Galactic contamination in the COBE-DMR 4 yr data and WMAP 1 yr data using correlations between the maps and the rotation measures of Broten et al. (1988).

We first studied the relationship between the spatial position and the RM values of the sources in the catalogue by looking at the angular correlations of subsets drawn from it. The results clearly indicate a correlation, and confirm the basic view expressed by other authors on properties of the Galactic magnetic field. We then investigated the relationship between the rotation measure of a source and the synchrotron emission at the location of the source. Synchrotron maps derived from the 408 MHz survey of Haslam et al. (1982) and produced by the WMAP team were found to be correlated with RM values, showing that these do indeed provide some sort of probe of the Galactic magnetic field.

We found stronger positive correlations of RM values with both dust and free–free maps than for synchrotron. This is consistent with indirect association of the different sources, but is probably not simply a Galactic latitude effect because the correlation persists even when a Galactic cut is applied. Exactly how this correlation arises is an issue for further study, but it may provide an insight into the possible role of spinning dust (Draine & Lazarian 1998) in Galactic foregrounds \[de Oliveira-Costa et al. 1999\] as this may align with the local magnetic field. Clearly much more detailed modelling is needed to understand these correlations theoretically, but the empirical approach we have adopted still provides a useful consistency check on foreground analysis even if the origin of the correlation is not well understood.

The correlations between the temperature strength of the DMR and WMAP data at the location of sources and the RM values were then studied using the Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient. All 15 maps compiled from the temperature field measured by the DMR instrument were found to be uncorrelated with the rotation measurements. Correlations were found with the uncut WMAP frequency maps and the cut K and Ka band maps. However, the maps used by the WMAP team to extract cosmological information were found to be uncorrelated. Furthermore, two foreground-subtracted CMB-only maps were found to be uncorrelated with the rotation measure catalogue. The results of this analysis provide no evidence of residual foregrounds in the COBE-DMR maps or the WMAP ILC map, but do yield a positive correlation for the Tegmark Wiener-filtered map. Owing to the small size of our RM sample we used these results are only suggestive, but they do demonstrate the virtue of looking for independent probes of Galactic foreground contamination. Much larger compilations of RM values would be needed to make more definite statements about contamination in temperature maps. It is also very likely that much could be learnt about polarized foregrounds using a similar approach.

## Acknowledgements

We thank Anvar Shukurov for sending us the rotation measure catalogue used for this work and Tony Banday for supplying us with the COBE-DMR data and synchrotron maps in a convenient format. We gratefully acknowledge use of the HEALPix package and the Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis (LAMBDA). Support for LAMBDA is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science. Finally, we are immensely grateful to an anonymous referee who provided us with many helpful suggestions which enabled us to improve the paper substantially.


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# Sharing a conceptual model of grid resources and services

## I INTRODUCTION

Grid technologies aim at enabling a coordinated resource-sharing and problem-solving capabilities over local and wide area networks and span locations, organizations, machine architectures and software boundaries. The heterogeneity of involved resources and the need for interoperability among different grid middleware solutions require the sharing of a common information model in order to enable both intra- and inter-grid resources awareness.

The research area of computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (HENP) is populated by several Grid related projects that mostly rely on basic services provided by the Globus Toolkit GLOBUSTK  and the Condor Project CONDOR . Due to the large adoption of the provided functionalities, interoperability issues are mostly related to what is built on top of these components. For the purpose of enabling HENP Grid middlewares interoperability, the Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment (GLUE) collaboration GLUEEFFORT , a joint US and EU High Energy Physics projects effort, has been set up.

One of the main achievements of this collaboration has been carried out in the context of the GLUE Schema activity. The main purpose was to define a common resource information model to be used as a base for Grid Information Service (GIS) for both resource discovery and monitoring activities. Starting from the Globus MDS schema MDSSchema  and the EU DataGrid (EDG) schema, the first implementation-neutral agreement on services (such as batch computing and storage managers) and systems (such as the hierarchy cluster, sub-cluster, host and the storage library) has been defined GLUESchema . The EU DataTAG (EDT) project EDT  has contributed in the collection of requirements from several projects (mainly EDG) and has developed both the implementation-neutral description by means of Unified Modeling Language (UML) UML  class diagram and schema implementation for the LDAP data model GLUE4LDAP .

In this paper, we recall the outcomes of the collaboration to which we have participated, and we also suggest refinements and improvements based on our experience related to both analysis, implementation and deployment within EDG EDG , EDT EDT  and LCG LCG  testbeds.

We present the involved entities categorized into two main categories:

* System: a set of connected items or devices which operate together as a functional whole.
* Service: actions that form a coherent whole from the point of view of service providers and service requesters.

From the viewpoint of discovery and monitoring, the distinction between systems and services is fundamental, since even though they are strongly related (systems provide services), they have different life-cycle and different status related attributes. The main focus was on the service level in order to enable an efficient service selection. Recently, within the DataTAG project, extensions for the host system have been done in order to improve monitoring capabilities.

This paper is organized as follow: in section II we describe entities within the system category, while in section III services are discussed. In both cases, defined concepts are recalled and feedback from our deployment experience is described. In section IV, the implementation results are presented, while in section V related works are mentioned and compared to the GLUE Schema. Finally, in section VI conclusions and plans for future work are depicted.

## II Modelling systems

As mentioned in the introduction, a system is here defined as a set of connected items or devices which operate together as a functional whole. Within the GLUE Schema, two main systems categories have been defined: cluster systems providing computing services, and storage systems providing storage spaces.

### II.1 Cluster Systems

A cluster is essentially a container that groups together computing nodes (hosts), such as a computing farm. Since in the context of computing in HENP, a cluster is composed by many nodes, in order to avoid poor performance in the resource discovery process, the concept of subcluster was introduced. A subcluster represents ‘homogeneous’ collection of computing nodes, where the homogeneity is defined by a collection whose some node attributes (which can be freely selected among the ones defined for the single node entity) all have the same value. For example, a subcluster could represent a set of nodes with the same architecture, operating system, CPU model, etc. It must be stressed that the elements of a subcluster are homegeneous only with respect to the considered chosen attributes. Subclusters therefore provide a convenient way of representing collection of nodes, useful in the resource discovery process. The host (computing node) element represents detailed information (related to both hardware and software) of a specific node.

In summary, a cluster is a set of nodes, and nodes can be partitioned in disjointed sets called subclusters, for which a summary description is available.

From our point of view, the cluster definition should be refined enforcing the property of being a system. This implies that some functionality is provided. In the cluster case, the provided functionality is the ability of executing jobs. Therefore, all nodes managed by the same batch system, form a unique cluster.

### II.2 Storage Systems

In a Grid environment, storage systems can vary in complexity from a single disk server to hierarchical massive storage systems. Within the first phase of the GLUE Schema activity, the main goal was mainly oriented towards the service component modelling (see section III.2), more than the system component. The modelled storage system is called Storage Library and represents the machine providing for the storage manager service. This entity presents the file system component offered to the service, an architecture component and a performance component.

Our opinion is that this concept should be refined. As is for the cluster system, a storage system should allow the representation of all entity participating in the service.

## III Modelling services

A service can be defined as an activity that performs some task. Within core grid services, the computing service and the storage manager service have been defined. Each modelled service has a unique identifier, a human-readable name, a set of policies, a set of access rights and a state.

Referring to the access rights, one of the main design guideline was to move from the current practice of user-grained access right to the virtual organization-grained one. This approach is beneficial for the activity of authorization management in a distributed environment such as the Grid. The idea is that virtual organizations set up agreements with service providers. When a service is requested by a user, both his membership and his capabilities are verified using organization-based authorization services. Considering this approach, local resources can therefore avoid to maintain and publish the list of authorized user identities. The two main proposals in this area are the Virtual Organization Membership Service (VOMS) VOMS  developed in the context of the EDG-EDT collaboration, and the Community Authorization Service (CAS) CAS  developed by the Globus Project.

### III.1 Computing Service

As computing service, we identify a service able to provide computing power to an application with a certain quality. Within the GLUE Schema, the modelled service is called Computing Element (CE) and it is a one-to-one mapping to an entry point into a batch queueing system. Essentially a Computing Element represents a queue of a local resource management system, such as PBS or LSF. Since it is a service, it presents policy, state and access rights attributes.

The CE concept was already present in the EDG Schema. With the GLUE Schema the separation between system and service related info was introduced.

In order to be able to perform a proper service selection, during the matchmaking process some data related to the system providing the service is needed (e.g. hosting operating system, available software packages). Moreover, the desired data should be provided as an aggregate description of the system part that can participate in the service functionality (e.g. in a cluster, only a subset of nodes can be assigned to a computing service). Such flexibility is not well modelled at present.

### III.2 Storage Manager Service

With Storage service we identify a service which task is the management of storage extents. With Storage Space, we identify a storage extent managed under a uniform set of policies and having the same access rights. Stored files can be accessed by means of Data Access Protocols (e.g. GridFTP, rfio).

Currently, the Storage Service has been modelled as a generalization of:

* trivial file system
* Storage Resource Manager (SRM) SRM
* EDG Storage Element (SE) SE

Current practice shows that there is lack of some information. For instance, a Storage Space is lacking of ownership info and of a unique ID, possibly in the form of a URI.

## IV Implementations

Currently, the implementation-neutral description of the GLUE Schema has been mapped into three different data models:

* LDAP data model GLUE4LDAP
* Relational data model GLUE4RGMA
* XML data model GLUE4XML

The LDAP implementation has been done within the DataTAG project and covers the full schema. The testing phase has been carried out within the DataTAG testbed based on the EU DataGrid middleware (release 1.4.x with Globus MDS 2.x). Strong support has been given for the rewriting of both information providers and EDG Broker interaction with the MDS. The schema implementation is going to be deployed as the base schema in the next release of EDG, LCG and VDT grid middlewares. This has been also contributed by INFN INFN  to the Globus Project under the signed Globus Contributor’s License.

The Relational implementation has been developed by DataGrid WP3 in the R-GMA RGMA .

The XML implementation has been developed by the Globus Project in Globus Toolkit 3.0 (at present, only cluster system and computing element).

## V Related work

The first resource information model introduced within the HENP Grid community was the one coming with the Globus MDS. This was mainly oriented at modelling computer systems and lacked in capabilities of modelling grid services. Conversely, the former DataGrid schema was mainly oriented at creating abstractions for grid services. While this presented new concepts useful for discovery and matchmaking purposes, it did not clearly separates systems from services.

Another work to mention is the NorduGrid information model NorduGrid . The distinguish feature is the User entity, modelled in order to provide per-user information, such as available storage space and processors. This is a different approach than the one taken within the GLUE Schema, where general authorization rules are on a per-organization base.

It is important to mention also the outcomes of the ongoing activities of the CIM Grid Schema Working Group of the Global Grid Forum (GGF CGS-WG) GGF\_CGSWG . The considered approach is not only targeted at discovery and monitoring purposes, but also at the more complex task of resource management. The chosen strategy is to extend the industry standard Common Information Model (CIM) CIM . While this approach provides detailed resource description and relationship, it needs special framework in order to offer the management interface. For the purpose of distributed discovery, it needs to be interfaced with the Grid Information Service. Due to the wider spectrum of goals envisioned by CIM, the information model is more complex.

## VI Conclusions and future work

In this paper we presented the results and the outcomes of the GLUE Schema activity. Besides presenting the modelled entities, both at the system and at the service level, the current shortcomings and some ideas to address them have also been described.

In the next future the focus will be on the the refinement of both subcluster and storage library entities. We also envision the evolution of the current proposal in order to model a general ancestor service. Moreover, attention will be given to monitoring requirements.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors wish to thank all the persons that have participated to the GLUE Schema activity.


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# Centrality dependence of charged hadron transverse momentum spectra in d+Au collisions at √𝑠__𝑁𝑁= 200 GeV

## Abstract

We have measured transverse momentum distributions of charged hadrons produced in d+Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s_{_{\mathrm{𝑁𝑁}}}}=`$ 200 GeV. The spectra were obtained for transverse momenta $`0.25<p_T<6.0`$ GeV/c, in a pseudorapidity range of $`0.2<\eta <1.4`$ in the deuteron direction. The evolution of the spectra with collision centrality is presented in comparison to $`p+\overline{p}`$ collisions at the same collision energy. With increasing centrality, the yield at high transverse momenta increases more rapidly than the overall particle density, leading to a strong modification of the spectral shape. This change in spectral shape is qualitatively different from observations in Au+Au collisions at the same energy. The results provide important information for discriminating between different models for the suppression of high-$`p_T`$ hadrons observed in Au+Au collisions.

PACS numbers: 25.75.-q,25.75.Dw,25.75.Gz

The yield of charged hadrons produced in collisions of deuterons with gold nuclei at an energy of $`\sqrt{s_{_{\mathrm{𝑁𝑁}}}}=200`$ GeV has been measured with the PHOBOS detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The data are presented as a function of transverse momentum ($`p_T`$) and collision centrality. The goal of these measurements is to study the modification of particle production due to initial state effects in the nuclear medium, in comparison to nucleon-nucleon collisions at the same energy. Measurements from proton-nucleus (p+A) reactions at lower collision energies have found that the cross-section for hadron production at $`p_T`$ of 1.5 to 5 GeV/c rises faster than the nuclear size $`A`$ cronin . This observation, which is commonly called the Cronin effect, has been described as the result of initial state multiple scattering, leading to a broadening of the $`p_T`$ distribution accardi .

The present interest in repeating these measurements at higher energies is motivated by results from Au+Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s_{_{\mathrm{𝑁𝑁}}}}=`$ 130 and 200 GeV. In these collisions, the expected scaling of hadron production with the number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions at $`p_T`$ of 2–10 GeV/c is strongly violated phenix\_quench ; phenix\_highpt\_npart ; star\_highpt\_npart ; phobos\_highpt\_npart . This effect had been predicted as a consequence of the energy loss of high-$`p_T`$ partons in the hot and dense medium formed in Au+Au collisions jet\_quench\_theory . The interpretation of the Au+Au data relies on the understanding of initial state effects, including gluon saturation kharzeev , which can be investigated with the d+Au data presented here wang\_dAu . Similar measurements are reported in phenix\_dAu ; star\_dAu . By studying the spectra as a function of collision centrality, we can control the effective thickness of nuclear matter traversed by the incoming partons.

The data were collected using the PHOBOS two-arm magnetic spectrometer phobos\_nim . The spectrometer arms are each equipped with 16 layers of silicon sensors, providing charged particle tracking both outside and inside the 2 T field of the PHOBOS magnet. Additional silicon detectors used in this analysis are the central single-layer Octagon barrel detector and the three single-layer forward Ring detectors located on either side of the interaction point.

The primary event trigger (Level 0) was provided by two sets of 16 scintillator counters (“Paddle counters”) covering pseudorapidities $`3<|\eta |<4.5`$. In addition, two higher level trigger conditions were used. Collisions close to the nominal vertex position $`z_{vtx}=0`$ along the longitudinal ($`z`$) direction were selected using the time difference between signals in two rings of ten Čerenkov counters. The counters covered $`4.9<\eta <4.4`$ and $`3.6<\eta <4.1`$, respectively. For part of the data set, a further online selection of events was accomplished using two arrays of horizontally segmented scintillator hodoscopes. One array was positioned immediately behind the spectrometer and the other at a distance of $`5`$ m from the interaction point. In combination with the known vertex position, a spatial coincidence from the hodoscopes was used to trigger on high-$`p_T`$ particles which traverse the spectrometer.

Previous measurements of p+A collisions have shown a strong dependence of the multiplicities and momentum distributions of produced particles on the size of the target nucleus cronin ; halliwell . For d+Au collisions, this implies the importance of characterizing the collision centrality. For a given event selection, the centrality can be quantified by a number of variables such as the average number of participating nucleons $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}`$ or the average number of binary nucleon-nucleon collisions, $`N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}`$. Neither of these variables can be directly measured. Estimates of $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}`$ or $`N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}`$ for a given event selection are typically obtained by matching the distribution of an experimental observable, such as the multiplicity in a certain $`\eta `$-region, with the results of a Glauber model calculation and detector simulation phobos\_cent\_200 .

The centrality cuts for this analysis were based on the signal ($`E_{\mathrm{𝑅𝑖𝑛𝑔}}`$) of the three Ring detectors in the region of $`3.0<|\eta |<5.4`$, which is proportional to the number of charged particles hitting these counters. In the MC simulations, centrality cuts on $`E_{\mathrm{𝑅𝑖𝑛𝑔}}`$ were found to introduce a bias on the yield in the spectrometer acceptance of less than 5% for $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}>3`$, compared to cutting directly on $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}`$. If the $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}`$ determination is based on a multiplicity region closer to the spectrometer acceptance, MC studies, as well as our data, showed a significantly larger bias at low and high centralities. For each of the four bins in $`E_{\mathrm{𝑅𝑖𝑛𝑔}}`$, $`N_{part}`$ and $`N_{coll}`$ were obtained from a Glauber model calculation using HIJING hijing  and a full detector simulation which included the experimental trigger and event selection efficiency. In the HIJING calculations, the default value for the inelastic nucleon-nucleon cross-section of 41 mb was used, consistent with previous calculations phobos\_cent\_200 .

The resulting estimates for $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}`$ and $`N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}`$ in the four $`E_{\mathrm{𝑅𝑖𝑛𝑔}}`$-based centrality bins are shown in Table I. The percentage numbers refer to the fractional cross-section in the unbiased HIJING distribution. The determination of $`N_{\mathrm{𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡}}`$ and $`N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}`$ takes into account the bias introduced in the centrality by the online and offline event selection in the relatively low-multiplicity d+Au events. The largest contribution to this bias comes from the online vertex trigger, leading to the average event selection efficiencies for the individual centrality bins shown in Table I.

Details of the track reconstruction algorithm can be found in pbarp\_200 ; phobos\_highpt\_npart . To optimize the momentum resolution and minimize systematic errors in the track selection, only particles traversing the full spectrometer arms were included in the analysis. These particles leave a minimum of 12 hits in the silicon detectors. This selection limits the usable vertex range to $`15\text{cm}<z_{vtx}<+10`$ cm. Due to the low multiplicity in d+Au collisions, a new algorithm for the offline determination of the collision vertex was developed, using hit position and energy information in the Octagon detector. MC studies show a resolution in the beam direction of $`\sigma _{vtx_z}=1.4`$ cm for the most peripheral events and $`\sigma _{vtx_z}=0.8`$ cm for the most central events. The transverse position of the event vertex was centered at the known position of the beam orbit. Unlike in the Au+Au track finding, the vertex position information was not included in the initial track seed.

To obtain the invariant yield of charged hadrons, we accumulated equal amounts of data with both magnet polarities. The transverse momentum distributions for each centrality bin were corrected for the geometrical acceptance of the detector, the efficiency of the tracking algorithm and the distortion due to binning and momentum resolution. The procedure for obtaining the correction factors was described in phobos\_highpt\_npart . The largest contributions to the systematic uncertainty come from the overall tracking efficiency (5–10% uncertainty) and the reduction in overall acceptance due to malfunctioning channels in the silicon detectors (5% uncertainty). The corresponding corrections are centrality independent. The next largest correction is the $`p_T`$ and centrality dependent momentum resolution and binning correction. The contamination by secondary particles and feeddown particles is small, due to the proximity of the tracking detectors to the collision vertex and the requirement for the reconstructed track to point back to the beam orbit to within 0.4 cm.

In Fig. 1, we present the invariant yield of charged hadrons as a function of transverse momentum, obtained by averaging the yields of positive and negative hadrons. Data are shown for four $`E_{\mathrm{𝑅𝑖𝑛𝑔}}`$ centrality bins. The plot shows the evolution of overall yield and spectral shape with increasing collision centrality.

The centrality evolution of the spectra can be studied in detail in Fig. 2, where we compare our d+Au data to results from UA1 for $`p+\overline{p}`$ collisions at the same energy ua1\_pbarp . To account for the difference in acceptance between UA1 ($`|\eta |<2.5`$) and PHOBOS, a correction function was determined using PYTHIA pythia . The quantity shown on the vertical axis in Fig. 2 is a direct measure of the modification of the spectral shape relative to $`p+\overline{p}`$ for each centrality bin in d+Au and is defined as follows: the fitted $`dN/dp_T`$ distribution for each centrality bin is divided by the corrected fit to the UA1 $`p+\overline{p}`$ data fit . The resulting distribution is normalized to unity at $`p_T=0.5`$ GeV/c. Then the value of the normalized ratio at four values of $`p_T`$ from 1 to 4 GeV/c is plotted against $`dN/d\eta `$ determined by integrating the hadron spectrum for each centrality bin. If there were no modification of the spectral shape relative to $`p+\overline{p}`$ collisions, the ratio would be flat at unity. This presentation of the data allows an investigation of the evolution of the spectral shape with increasing centrality, while eliminating the uncertainty associated with the determination of $`N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}`$. We observe that the relative yield for all $`p_T`$ regions grows smoothly as a function of $`dN/d\eta `$, with the biggest increase relative to $`p+\overline{p}`$ observed at the largest $`p_T`$. For all $`p_T`$ regions, the data extrapolate to the corrected $`p+\overline{p}`$ fit.

In Fig. 3 we present the nuclear modification factor $`R_{\mathrm{𝑑𝐴𝑢}}`$ as a function of $`p_T`$ for each centrality bin, defined as

$$R_{\mathrm{𝑑𝐴𝑢}}=\frac{\sigma _{p\overline{p}}^{inel}}{N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}}\frac{d^2N_{\mathrm{𝑑𝐴𝑢}}/dp_Td\eta }{d^2\sigma (\text{UA1})_{p\overline{p}}/dp_Td\eta }.$$
(1)
Consistent with our Glauber calculations, we used $`\sigma _{pp}^{inel}=41`$ mb. A value of $`R_{dAu}=1`$ corresponds to scaling of the yield as an incoherent superposition of nucleon-nucleon collisions. For all centrality bins, we observe a rapid rise of $`R_{dAu}`$ from low $`p_T`$, leveling off at $`p_T`$ of $`2`$ GeV/c. For comparison, we also plot the results from central Au+Au collisions at the same energy phobos\_highpt\_npart  in the lower right panel of Fig. 3. The average number of collisions undergone by each participating nucleon in the central Au+Au collision is close to 6, similar to that of each nucleon from the deuteron in a central d+Au collision. For central Au+Au collisions, the ratio of the spectra to $`p+\overline{p}`$ rises rapidly up to $`p_T2`$ GeV/c, but falls far short of collision scaling at larger $`p_T`$, in striking contrast to the behavior for central d+Au collisions.

Predictions for the evolution of $`R_{\mathrm{𝑑𝐴𝑢}}`$ from semi-peripheral collisions with $`N_{\mathrm{𝑐𝑜𝑙𝑙}}6`$ to central collisions were made in two qualitatively different models. Perturbative QCD calculations vitev  predict an increase in the maximum value of $`R_{dAu}`$ at $`p_T3.5`$ GeV/c by 15%. In contrast, a decrease in $`R_{\mathrm{𝑑𝐴𝑢}}`$ by 25–30% over the same centrality range is predicted in a parton saturation model kharzeev . The centrality evolution of $`R_{dAu}`$ is shown in Fig. 4, where the points were obtained from a fit to the $`p_T`$ dependence of $`R_{dAu}`$ in each centrality bin. Our data disfavor the prediction from the parton saturation model. This suggests that the observed suppression of high $`p_T`$ hadrons in Au+Au collisions phenix\_quench ; phenix\_highpt\_npart ; star\_highpt\_npart ; phobos\_highpt\_npart  cannot be accounted for by initial state effects that should also be present in d+Au collisions.

This work was partially supported by US DoE grants DE-AC02-98CH10886, DE-FG02-93ER40802, DE-FC02-94ER40818, DE-FG02-94ER40865, DE-FG02-99ER41099, W-31-109-ENG-38, US NSF grants 9603486, 9722606, 0072204, Polish KBN grant 2-P03B-10323, and NSC of Taiwan contract NSC 89-2112-M-008-024.


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# Flow-based analysis of Internet traffic

## 1 Introduction

Modeling the traffic at the packet level has proven to be very difficult since traffic on a link is the result of a high level of aggregation of numerous flows. Recently, a new trend has emerged, which consists in modeling the Internet traffic at the flow level. A flow here is a very generic notion. It can be a TCP connection or a UDP stream described by source and destination IP addresses, source and destination port numbers, and the protocol number. It is possible to get an idea about the response time of a flow and about the distribution of the flows that are active at a certain time in the network. From a simplicity standpoint, it is much easier to monitor flows than to monitor packets in a router.

Network operators need to know when their backbone or peering links have to be upgraded. As a clue for this, boundary values of network parameters may serve - as the current values of the network parameters reach some limit values, the links have to be upgraded. The problem is that there is no common view point on the set of parameters to monitor and on their boundary values. Each provider has its own technical specifications aimed on avoiding overloading and big providers, like Sprint , rely on the results of their own researches. Usually, network operators monitor peak and average link utilization levels and upgrade their links when utilization level lays in the range 30%-60%.

Academic research community should play an important role in providing analytical generalization and establishing common terminology for processes taking place in networks. Our aim is a paper where we accumulate our knowledge about the network quality and related terms like length of working part, points of overloading and etc, as well as to formulate basic recommendations for the moments for upgrading links. Traffic measurement and analysis should be extended to consider the case of a single path (hop) between two routers on a high-speed backbone. This lets to find bottlenecks on backbones like GEANT. Usually, network operators collect statistics on packet level that include source and destinational addresses, ports, protocols, packet flags, size, start and end time of UDP and TCP sessions, duration of the sessions and etc. Processing of such huge volume of data is a difficult task demanding powerful hardware, software, big human efforts, but, unfortunately, it does not always let to get enough information to give some recommendations for the network under consideration.

The contribution of the paper is a simple flow-based test to find a moment for upgrading of a backbone. In the next Section we use queuing theory for flow-based analysis of a backbone. Section 3 discusses three states of a network with different performances. A test for network quality is described in the Section 4. The results of the experiments conducted in the real networks of ISPs are given in the Section 5.

## 2 The model

In this paper we model traffic as a stationary stochastic process, using the results from the papers Barakat et al  and Ben Fredj et al .

In summary, presented model allows us to completely characterize the data rate on a backbone link based on the following inputs:

* Session arrivals in any period where the traffic intensity is approximately constant are accurately modeled by a homogeneous Poisson process of finite rate $`\lambda `$. In general, this assumption can be relaxed to more general processes such as MAPs (Markov Arrival Processes) , or non homogeneous Poisson processes, but we will keep working with it for simplicity of the analysis.
* The distributions of flow sizes $`\{S_n\}`$ and flow durations $`\{D_n\}`$. In this paper we denote by $`T_n`$ the arrival time of the $`n`$-th flow, by $`S_n`$ its size (e.g., in bits), and by $`D_n`$ its duration (e.g., in seconds).
* The flow rate function (shot) is $`X_n()`$. A flow is called active at time $`t`$ when $`T_ntT_n+D_n`$. Define as $`X_n(tT_n)`$ the rate of the $`n`$-th flow at time $`t`$ (e.g., in bits/s), with $`X_n(tT_n)`$ equal to zero for $`t<T_n`$ and for $`t>T_n+D_n`$. In other words, $`X_n(tT_n)`$ is zero if flow $`n`$ is not active at time $`t`$.

Define $`R(t)`$ as the total rate of data (e.g., in bits/s) on the modeled link at time $`t`$. It is the result of the addition of the rates of the different flows. We can then write

$$R(t)=\underset{n}{}X_n(tT_n)$$
(1)
The process from Eq. (1) can describe the number of active flows found at time $`t`$ in an $`M/G/\mathrm{}`$ queue , if $`X_n(tT_n)=1`$ at $`t[T_n,T_n+D_n]`$.

The model presented by Barakat et al  is able to compute the average and the variation of the backbone traffic. In summary:

* The average total rate of the traffic is given by the two parameters $`\lambda `$ and $`𝔼[S_n]`$:

$$𝔼[R(t)]=\lambda 𝔼[S_n]$$
(2)
* The variance of the total rate $`V_R`$ (i.e., burstiness of the traffic) is given by the two parameters $`\lambda `$ and $`𝔼[S_n^2/D_n]`$:

$$V_R=\lambda 𝔼[S_n^2/D_n]$$
(3)

It should be mentioned that Eq. (2) is true only for the ideal case of the backbone link of unrestricted capacity that can be applied to underloaded links. The arrival rate of flows $`\lambda `$ describes the user’s behaviour that doesn’t depend on the network utilization. The cumulative number of flows that arrive at a link will remain linear even if the network doesn’t satisfy all the incoming demands. The average flow size does not also depend on a specific system, but only on the current distribution of documents sizes found in the Internet. Thus the main drawback of the ratio (2) is lack of its definite usage limits, which is the result of the fact that variables describing the system are in no way connected with its current state.

Ben Fredj et al  consider a case where the link capacity $`C`$ is very large compared to the external rate limits and such that it is virtually transparent. By this they mean that the probability that the sum of external rate limits of all active flows exceeds link capacity $`C`$ is negligibly small. This assumption is reasonable for the large, moderately loaded links of major backbone providers.

The number of active flows is now unconstrained by the considered link which appears as an $`M/G/\mathrm{}`$ queue. Let $`𝔼[D_n]`$ be the mean duration of flow and $`N`$ the mean number of active flows. By Little’s law we have:

$$N=\lambda 𝔼[D_n]$$
(4)
This formula describes the network state more precisely as the average number of active flows on the bandwidth unit increases with the utilization. In other words, the average duration of flow enables us to judge the real network state in contrast to its average size.

## 3 Performance states on flow level

Analyzing the Eqs. (2) and (4) we may compare the ideal and the real states of the network link under consideration. In order to analyze the quality of the backbone area or link to provider we are going to construct a graphical dependence between the link loading and the number of active flows in it.

The suggested curve has been found on Fig. 1. On the given curve three parts corresponding to the different network states can be identified.

The first part of the curve highlighted in green describes the network state close to the ideal, which coincides with the domain of applicability of the more strict state equation (2). The possibility of an error considered, the points corresponding to the real network states are supposed to be on the straight line, which corresponds to the working network area. The end of the straight line, which can be found from an experiment, defines thus the length of the working area.

The second part of the curve highlighted in yellow corresponds to the moderately loaded network. This parts coincides with the scope of less strict equation of state (4), when the diversion from the ideal network state becomes obvious. Increased average duration of a flow compared to the working area and therefore a larger number of active flows on the bandwidth unit are characteristic of this network state.

The red part of the curve corresponds to the totally disabled network with considerable loss of packets.

## 4 Test for network quality

In order to prove our hypothesis we made experiment on border gateway routers of Ireland National Research and Education Network \- HEANet and Russian ISP ”SamaraTelecom”. Both networks have several internal and external links but basic load lies on one channel to Global Internet (622 Mbps for HEANet, 8 Mbps for ST). The utilization of these links varies in wide limits from 5% to 90% with a clearly identifiable busy period.

A passive monitoring system based on Cisco’s NetFlow  technology was used to collect values of links utilization and number of active flows in real-time.

We measured on the Cisco 7206 router with NetFlow switched on. The detailed description of Cisco NetFlow can be found in documentation of Cisco .

It should be mentioned that exporting of flows is to be switched on all interfaces from which the data is to be collected. Otherwise the data obtained while measuring won’t contain complete information. For example, we didn’t quite succeed in our experiment with Ireland National Research and Education Network (HeaNet) because of the incomplete setup of NetFlow support on the routers. Usually a network has only one or a few external links while internal connections remain considerably less loaded. That’s why we can construct dependence of the number of all active flows on the boundary router on the general loading of the external links. It is achieved by the following commands:

* sh ip cache flow \- gives information about the number of active and inactive flows, about the parameters of the flows at the real time.
* sh int \[a name for the external interface\] \- gives information about the current link loading.

The data obtained with the commands contain all the necessary values for the construction of the curve similar to the one drawn in Fig. 1. The values are to be recorded twenty-four hours a day every 30 minutes during a week to discover network behaviour while differently loaded. It’s quite easy to write a script, which will collect the data from the router to the management server.

## 5 Experimental validation

It has already been mentioned that such a test has been conducted on the boundary router of Samara Telecom Company. As external links four $`E1`$ links (4 x 2.048 Mbit/s) to different ISP were used. We have taken a number of points for different network loading states. The results of this measurement are represented on Fig. 2. On the $`X`$ axis there is the number of flows and on the $`Y`$ axis there is the network loading in percents from its maximal value.

The separate points on the curve from Fig. 2 correspond to the real network states and the discrete straight line, which consists of dashes of different length, depicts the ideal network behaviour corresponding to the Eq. (2). The angle of of this straight line is found as average of $`U/N_a`$ ratio taken from the states when the network loading didn’t exceed $`40\%`$.

The working area is limited from the top by a straight dotted line, which is the nearest approach to the description of the network behaviour when the loading is heavy. The crossing of the two straight lines allows finding the length of the working area $`(45\%)`$. When the number of flows is more than 2500 network experiences overloading which leads to the slowing down of the speed of the network connections. The overall link loading practically doesn’t increase along with the amount of requests and the connection quality becomes almost twice as bad. It should be mentioned that in the network under consideration transition area or moderately loaded network doesn’t virtually exist. (see Fig. 1). The experiment conducted is evidence of the fact that providers do not always guarantee the work within the working network area which is especially important for the applications requiring high network quality, for example, IP telephony and videoconferencing. At the hours when the network loading was the heaviest the actual network capacity proved to be nearly twice as low as stated.

## 6 Feature work

In this paper some methods are described which allow us to evaluate Internet link quality on the base of flow technology and increase their capacity in time. At the moment we are working on developing utilities, which will make it possible to construct dependence of link loading on the number of active flows automatically and calculate the length of the working area.

We also plan further research work, which suggests evaluation of the flow parameters and above different speed of data transfer. We propose to derive analytic dependence of flow speed, i. e. to evaluate the time of transfer of file of a certain size between the two remote IP addresses (end-to-end) on the packet delivery time and percentage loss. In other words to theoretically evaluate connection quality according to ping data and its analogue for TCP packets.

Unfortunately, low-speed Russian Internet links are only available for our research work. Our attempts to collect the necessary data from high-speed international links with preferable speeds of 622 Mbps and 2.4 Gbps failed. As we know from our own experience one can get the data in a necessary format only through personal communication with the staff of the researched network. That’s why we need assistance and joint projects for financing the trips to the place of research work.


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# Chandra observations of the X-ray luminous star-forming galaxy merger Arp 299

## 1 Introduction

Arp299 is one of the nearest (D=40.4 Mpc111Throughout this paper we assume an $`\mathrm{H}_\mathrm{o}=75\mathrm{km}/\mathrm{s}/\mathrm{Mpc}`$ and $`\mathrm{q}_\mathrm{o}=0.0`$) Luminous Infrared Galaxies (LIRGs; Sanders & Mirabel 1996; $`\mathrm{L}_{\mathrm{IR}}=5\times 10^{11}\mathrm{L}_{}`$) and is therefore an excellent candidate for detailed studies of their energy source222In some papers Arp299 is referred to as a ULIRG, based on the use of $`\mathrm{H}_\mathrm{o}=50\mathrm{km}/\mathrm{s}/\mathrm{Mpc}`$. Optical, infrared (IR) and radio observations show that it hosts galaxy-wide star-formation with estimated rates for discrete regions ranging from $`20`$ M$`{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{yr}_{}^{1}`$ up to $`140`$ M$`{}_{}{}^{}\mathrm{yr}_{}^{1}`$ and typical ages of $`10`$ Myr (Alonso-Herrero et al. 2000 henceforth referred to as AH00; Zhao et al. 1997). Mid IR observations indicate that the major part of this star-forming activity is obscured by large amounts of dust (Charmandaris et al. 2002).

X-ray observations show that Arp299 is one of the most X-ray luminous star-forming galaxies in the nearby universe, with an observed luminosity of $`4\times 10^{41}`$ erg s-1 in the 0.1-10.0 keV band (Zezas et al. 1998; Heckman et al. 1999). Its X-ray spectrum is well represented by a two component model with either a double thermal plasma or a thermal plasma and a power-law, and was found to be very similar to that of other much less luminous star-forming galaxies. However, recent observations of Arp 299 with Beppo-SAX revealed a heavily obscured AGN (Della Ceca et al. 2002). In order to further study the origin of the X-ray emission from this exceptionally luminous star-forming galaxy we obtained a relatively short exposure with the Chandra X-ray observatory (Weisskopf et al. 2000). In this paper we report on the properties of the discrete sources in Arp 299. A more detailed study of the X-ray emission from this system will be presented in a forthcoming paper.

## 2 Observations and Data Analysis

Arp 299 was observed with the ACIS-I camera (Garmire et al. 1997) on board Chandra for 24.2 ks on the 13th of July 2001. In our analysis we used the event-2 type files and followed the standard procedures for analysis of Chandra data333http://asc.harvard.edu using the CIAO v2.2 tool suite. We corrected the absolute astrometry for known offsets444http://asc.harvard.edu/ciao/threads/arcsec\_correction/. Comparison between the positions of the brightest isolated sources in the field and the coordinates of their radio counterparts (kindly provided by S. Neff) showed that the absolute astrometry is accurate to within $`1^{\prime \prime }`$. The background level during our observation was nominal.

We created images in the full (0.5-8.0 keV) as well as soft (0.5-2.5 keV), medium (2.5-4.0 keV) and hard (4.0-8.0 keV) bands. We adaptively smoothed these images using the csmooth tool, with a maximum signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio of 5. In order to avoid over-smoothing weak features we set the maximum FWHM of the smoothing Gaussian to 16′′, resulting in a minimum S/N of $`2`$ in regions of the galaxy with weak X-ray emission. Figure 1 shows a true colour X-ray image of the galaxy, constructed from the combined soft (red), medium (green) and hard (blue) band smoothed images. It is clear from this image that a significant fraction of the X-ray emission from the galaxy is associated with a diffuse soft component and that there are also a few hard discrete sources.

We searched the images in each band for discrete sources using the CIAO wavedetect algorithm (Freeman et al. 2002). This resulted in the detection of 18 discrete sources, 4 of which appear to have an extended component based on the wavdetect results. The properties of these sources are presented in Table 1. Figure 2 shows a full band image with the discrete sources indicated following the notation of Table 1. We estimated the intensity of each source from within an aperture including most of the observed emission (in the case of point-like sources the aperture radius was $`1.5^{\prime \prime }`$ and encompassed 90% of the total emission at 1.4 keV). These apertures are shown projected onto the X-ray image in Fig. 2. The background was derived from an annulus placed around each source (excluding any encompassed sources). The absorption corrected luminosity of the sources range from $`10^{39}`$ erg s-1 up to $`2.4\times 10^{40}`$ erg s-1 (0.1-10.0 keV), assuming a power-law ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.7`$) with the Galactic line-of-sight HI column density ($`\mathrm{N}_\mathrm{H}`$=$`1.0\times 10^{20}`$ cm-2 ; Stark et al. 1992). We note that because of the varying intensity of the diffuse emission over the galaxy, the detection limit is not uniform. The discrete sources contribute $`40`$% of the galactic X-ray emission in the broad 0.5-8.0 keV energy band. Their contributions are $`35`$% and 65% in the soft and medium bands, respectively.

For the 6 X-ray sources with more than 80 counts, (ie. Src2 = C1 in NGC 3690; Src3; Src4 = B2 in NGC 3690; Src6 = B1 in NGC 3690; Src14 and Src16 = A in IC 694, following the notation of AH00), we extracted X-ray spectra from the above apertures. We fitted these spectra using the XSPEC v11.2 spectral fitting package. In order to take account of the absorption due to the build-up on the window of the ACIS detector we used the acisabs model555http://asc.harvard.edu/cal/Acis/Cal\_prods/qeDeg/
http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/chartas/xcontdir/xcont.html. The results of the spectral fits are presented in Table 2. In all but one case (Src6) a power-law or a Raymond-Smith thermal plasma with an absorption column left free to vary, gave good fits. For these sources we derived power-law photon indices between $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.4`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }2.7`$. The best fit column density was consistent with values significantly in excess of the Galactic line of sight value in all cases.

For source Src 6, in order to obtain a reasonable fit an additional spectral component was required. We obtained the best fit ($`\chi _\nu ^2=8.3/9`$) using a double power-law model (note: a thermal plasma plus absorbed power-law model did not give a good fit; $`\chi _\nu ^2=12.2/8`$). In this case the best fit photon indices were $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_1=2.46`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_2=1.89`$, while the overall absorption was moderate ($`\mathrm{N}_\mathrm{H}`$=$`1.9\times 10^{21}`$ cm-2 ). By introducing a second absorber for one of the power-law components we obtain a photon index $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.6`$ and a column density for the second power-law component of $`\mathrm{N}_\mathrm{H}`$=$`8.9\times 10^{23}`$ cm-2 and a fit of similar quality ($`\chi _\nu ^2=7.7/9`$; the indices of the two power-laws were bound together, since when fitted individually they were poorly constrained). Our results strongly suggest that the AGN in Arp299 recently revealed at high X-ray energies (Della Ceca et al. 2002), is associated with this source, identified with the infrared source B1. The high spatial resolution of Chandra allows the source to be separated from the surrounding emission, and hence permits a much improved study of the spectrum below 10 keV than was possible using the Beppo-SAX data. We also modeled the spectrum with the best fit spectrum reported in Dela Cecca et al. (2002), keeping the parameters of the absorbed component (slope and normalization) fixed to the values determined from the Beppo-SAX data while leaving the other parameters free to vary. Our results show that neither a thermal component nor a strong Fe-K$`\alpha `$ line are required by the fit: the former most probably because of the very small region used in the spectral extraction, while the latter was because of the poor photon statistics in the 6 keV region. This fit gave an unabsorbed power-law of slope $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.26_{0.14}^{+0.3}`$, an overall $`\mathrm{N}_\mathrm{H}`$ of $`6.7\times 10^{20}`$ cm-2 ($`<2.3\times 10^{21}`$ cm-2 ) and a column density for the hard component of $`2.5_{0.25}^{+0.44}\times 10^{24}`$ cm-2 , very similar to the values derived from the Beppo-SAX data. For the other sources we calculated hardness ratios (Table 1), which are consistent with power-laws in the range $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=1.53.0`$.

### 2.1 Multiwavelength associations

We have compared the X-ray data with observations made in the radio (Zhao et al. 1997; Neff et al. private communication, 2002) and at NIR wavelengths (AH00). From complex-A we detect X-ray emission associated with sources A (=IC 694), A3-4 and A6 (following the notation of AH00). From complex-B we detect the X-ray counterparts of components B1 (=NGC 3690), B2, B21 and possibly B23. Finally from complex-C we detect a discrete X-ray source coincident with components C1-2 as well as diffuse emission in the neighborhood of C4 and C5.

In the radio regime, we can identify X-ray counterparts for all of the major radio components (A, B1, B2, C) based on the accurate radio coordinates kindly provided by S. Neff (private communication). We also find an X-ray counterpart (Src 8) for a radio source in the East of C, which we will refer to as C′′ ($`\alpha =11^h28^m31.7^s`$, $`\delta =+58^{}33^{^{}}49.5^{^{\prime \prime }}`$; J2000). In addition we have detected an X-ray counterpart (Src10) of the radio source IC 694+1990 (which lies 5′′ south-west of component A (Huang et al. 1990; Zhao et al. 1997; Neff et al. 2002) which is also associated with a NIR source (not identified by AH00). Its relatively soft X-ray colors suggest that it may be associated with a radio supernova, as was originally proposed by Huang et al. (1990), rather than a background QSO (Zhao et al. 1997).

## 3 Discussion

### 3.1 Discrete sources

This relatively short duration Chandra observation of Arp299 shows that 40% of the galactic X-ray emission in the (0.5-8.0) keV band arises from 18 discrete sources with luminosities above $`10^{39}`$ erg s-1, which is similar to results obtained for other star-forming galaxies eg. the Antennae (Fabbiano et al. 2001), M 82 (Zezas et al. 2001) and NGC 3256 (Lira et al. 2002). All of the major optical, NIR and radio components of the system (including the two nuclei) are detected in X-rays in this Chandra observation.

We have compared the luminosity distribution of the point-like sources in Arp 299 with that for sources detected in NGC 3256 (D=34 Mpc; Lira et al. 2002) and the Antennae (Zezas & Fabbiano 2002), after rebinning the X-ray data for the latter by a factor of 2 in order to match the spatial resolution of Arp 299. We find that the luminosity distributions, excluding the extended sources and the nuclei, are very similar indicating that these galaxies have comparable intrinsic numbers of luminous sources. Therefore the apparently large number of sources with luminosities above $`10^{39}`$ erg s-1 in both Arp 299 and NGC 3256 compared with the Antennae, is most likely due to source confusion (at 40 Mpc one resolution element corresponds to a physical scale of $`100`$ pc).

### 3.2 The nuclei

The excellent spatial resolution of Chandra allows us to individually study the two nuclei and to compare their X-ray properties with those at other wavelengths. The X-ray spectrum of Source 16 which is associated with the nucleus of IC 694 (infrared source A) is well fit with a heavily absorbed ($`\mathrm{N}_\mathrm{H}`$$`1.2\times 10^{22}`$ cm-2 ) power-law ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }1.4`$) consistent with either a population of X-ray binaries or an AGN. Its observed luminosity in the 0.1-10.0 keV band is $`3.9\times 10^{39}`$ erg s-1, that is $`5`$% of the overall emission from Arp 299. The measured absorbing column density is consistent with the extinction derived from mid-IR observations ($`\mathrm{A}_\mathrm{V}=17`$ mags; Charmandaris et al. 2002), and narrow-band NIR photometry and spectroscopy (AH00).

Although the contribution of the nuclear point source (Src 16) to the overall X-ray emission of Arp 299 is small, we detect a significant circumnuclear extended component ($`3.4\times 1.7`$ kpc). This region has an absorption corrected luminosity of $`3\times 10^{40}`$ erg s-1 (0.1-10.0 keV; providing 8% of the observed emission Arp 299 in this band). Based on modeling of the stellar population, the dominant stellar component in nucleus A has an age of 11 Myr. Given the large young stellar population, this region may be expected to contain a significant number of High Mass X-ray Binaries (HMXB). Taking the derived Lyman continuum flux (Lyc) of this region (Zhao et al. 1997; AH00) and assuming a mean Lyc flux of $`10^{49}\mathrm{s}^1`$ per O-type star, we estimate a population of $`5\times 10^5`$ O-type stars. Based on the minimum specific X-ray luminosity per O-type star found in the SMC (Helfand & Moran 2001) we estimate a luminosity of $`3.5\times 10^{40}`$ erg s-1 for the HMXB component, which is in good agreement with the intrinsic X-ray luminosity from this region.

Turning now to the case of X-ray Source 6, which we identify with the nuclear component B1 in NGC 3690, we find that it has a very hard X-ray spectrum typical of a heavily obscured AGN, indicating that this component is the nucleus of NGC 3690. In the light of these spectroscopic results we associate the recently discovered highly obscured AGN in Arp 299 (Della-Ceca et al. 2002) with the nucleus of NGC 3690. The observed luminosity of this nucleus is $`6.3\times 10^{40}`$ erg s-1 (0.1-10 keV), and contributes 2% and 15% of the overall X-ray emission of Arp 299 in the 0.1-2.0 keV and 2.0-10.0 keV X-ray bands respectively. However, as reported by Della Ceca et al. (2002), even its absorption corrected intrinsic hard X-ray luminosity, is only a small fraction of the bolometric energy output of Arp 299. From the combined Beppo-SAX Chandra fits we find that the spectrum below 10.0 keV is dominated by a relatively flat power-law, which could either be associated with scattered emission from the AGN or with a population of HMXBs in the circumnuclear region. The intrinsic luminosity of this spectral component is $`3.0\times 10^{40}`$ erg s-1 in the 0.1-10.0keV band, which is relatively high for a population of X-ray binaries given the physical size of the extraction region, unless it is dominated by a few Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources (ULXs) as has been seen in M 82 (e.g. Kaaret et al. 2001). Given the presence of diffuse hard X-ray emission (extending up to 8 keV) in the region of NGC 3690, some fraction of this luminosity might be associated with a starburst component. However, from Fig. 1, we do see a clear displacement between the location of the AGN and the peak of the diffuse emission (coincident with Src 4), indicating that the most vigorous star-formation is not spatially coincident with the AGN.

This extended X-ray source (Src 4) with a luminosity of $`6.6\times 10^{39}`$ erg s-1 (0.1-10.0 keV band) is associated with the second brightest near IR peak in NGC3690 (component B2). Its X-ray spectrum is quite soft ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }2.5`$) but has large uncertainties. It is also seen through a screen of relatively thick obscuring material ($`\mathrm{N}_\mathrm{H}`$$`4.0\times 10^{21}`$ cm-2 ), in agreement with the extinction derived from NIR observations (AH00). Its intrinsic luminosity is $`2.5\times 10^{40}`$ erg s-1 similar to the total luminosity from the central region of M82 (excluding the bright ULX source), and consistent with this component of NGC 3690 being associated with a compact starburst region.

Similar results are derived for the other sources with available X-ray spectra. The relatively large column density measured towards them indicates that most of the star-formation in Arp 299 is enshrouded by dust, in agreement with results from the mid-IR band (Charmandaris et al. 2002), and as expected for a young burst of star-formation. Stellar population evolutionary synthesis models give ages of $`515`$ Myrs (AH00), for most star-forming regions, indicating that the dominant X-ray components will be High Mass X-ray binaries and supernova remnants.

Finally, the non detection of X-ray emission from component C is quite consistent with a very young region (4 Myr) undergoing an instantaneous burst of star-formation (AH00). A calculation similar to that made above for IC 694, gives a total number of 60 HMXBs from the Lyc emission of C. However, given its probable young age, very few stars in binary systems have produced compact objects and even fewer will have reached the end of their main sequence lifetimes, when they become observable as X-ray binaries. Therefore the expected X-ray luminosity of this component would be much less than $`10^{39}`$ erg s-1 which is the typical detection limit of our observation.

## 4 Conclusions

We present preliminary results from a short Chandra ACIS-I observation of the merger system Arp 299. This observation reveals that the X-ray emission is produced by a population of discrete sources which dominate above 2.0 keV, as well as emission from a diffuse softer component. These properties are very similar to those found for other well studied merging star-forming galaxies (e.g. Antennae: Fabbiano et al. 2001, Zezas et al. 2002; NGC 3256: Lira et al. 2002). However, there is a single very hard source in the nuclear region of NGC 3690 which produces about 15% of the observed galactic emission above 2.0 keV in the Chandra energy band, which we identify with the AGN reported by Della Ceca et al. (2002). The X-ray and multiwavelength properties of the other near infrared nuclei are fully consistent with those found in other galaxies with nuclear starbursts, although the possibility of a relativelty weak mildly obscured AGN cannot be excluded in the case of Src16 (assocaited with near infrared source A).

These results together with the recent detection of two AGNs coincident which the double nuclei of the LIRG NGC 6240 (Komossa et al. 2002), suggest that galaxy mergers are a very efficient means of fueling AGNs (e.g. Combes et al. 2001). However, at the same time mergers may result in burying AGN within large concentrations of obscuring material, thereby rendering them invisible in all but the high energy X-ray domain. Although the AGN ouput may not dominate the bolometric energy budget, nevertheless their detection is important for any complete AGN demographic study, and also in furthering our understanding of the AGN/starburst connection.

We thank Susan Neff for providing results from the radio observations, prior to publication. We thank the CXC DS and SDS teams for the pipeline reduction the data and developing the software used for the pipeline reduction (SDP) and subsequent analysis (CIAO). This work has been partly supported by NASA Grant G01-2116X.