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# A Model for Grid User Management

## I Introduction

Grid computing for the high energy and nuclear physics communities will need to deal with thousands of users and hundreds of computing facilities in the near future. Traditional computing models require that each user must register individually with each computing facility. This model will not scale as the numbers of users and facilities increase. Some tools have already been developed to address the scalability problems by centralizing user registration with a central service for a distributed organization including CAS cas-ref  and VOMS voms-ref . As they are currently implemented, these approaches do not provide enough information about users to allow access to some sites, especially DOE laboratories. The separation of user management software from the user policy creates potential security problems for the sites. The purpose of this project was to adapt the existing Grid mapfile tools to the large laboratory environment. The particular problem that we intend to address is the need for strong pre-registration of users, and we believe that this builds nicely on some of the preliminary pieces that were available as early as 2001. Our focus has been on developing a user account management system and tools to allow sites to keep track of users. We intend all of these developments to be compatible with whatever VO management tools are adopted for the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid Project (LCG), although we do have some requirements to put on those tools.

Before a user can be authorized to use resources at a site, the site must have some basis for trusting the user and approving the request. For a site to perform user based authorization, the user must be known to the site. Different sites may have different requirements that must be satisfied before granting site access, but at a minimum, some basic user information must be collected and provided to the site by secure, trusted and auditable means. An additional requirement is to maintain history information of site access rites. To get started on solving these problems, we developed a user management model that has been presented at several open meetings over the past year, most strongly within the PPDG Site-AAA working group.

A primary requirement is that the user information is trustable, and this requires that the information is validated before it is distributed to resource providers. To accomplish this, a Virtual Organization must identify some set of members who will act as Registrars, meaning that they are the ones who can add users into the VO’s membership list. This list of registrars must be known and accepted by the resource providers who will be providing services to the VO. When a user joins the VO, she/he goes to one of the designated registrars and provides basic identification and contact info such as Grid Certificate, Distinguish Name(DN), real name, institution and email address. The exact info to be provided must be agreed among all of the resource providers. The user also ”signs” a User Agreement that is required by the VO. LCG is beginning to work on this registration model, and a prototype User Agreement is being used.

The registrar then adds the user to a VO database. The user record will include the information that is required by the resource providers plus the name of the registrar. Existing VO management tools do not keep track of enough user info to satisfy many resource providers, and better user registration and VO management tools will need to be developed.

Once the user is added to the VO database, sites will need tools to download and keep track of these users. This requires more than just a simple ”make-gridmapfile” tool. Sites need to be able to plug in local policy modules to control the user access. Historical access rights need to be kept track of.

## II VO User Management Requirements

Sites need to serve large sets of Grid users and many sites require pre-registration of Grid users. Grid users need access to a large number of sites without the detailed knowledge about these individual sites. To make the whole transaction scale to the Grid environment, sites and VOs should work out reliable Grid user registration mechanisms. Grid user registration process includes three parties: virtual organization (VO), Grid users and resource providers. Virtual organization needs to satisfy the requirements of existing large Grid resource sites with respect to the acceptance of Grid credentials for access to their services. Because those requirements are non-uniform, the user registration mechanisms and toolkits must provide to sites an interface to insert their own implementations of their requirements based on site policies. Sites must articulate what resources they are making available as Grid resources and the details of the access requirements. This user registration mechanisms should enable sites to restrict access to the members of a specific VO, not automatically grant access to anyone with authentication credentials from Grid. The requirements for these three parties are:

* Site Requirements: All sites currently have authentication systems for identifying users and verifying user identities. Any new user registration system must be capable of being integrated with site policy and site infrastructure. Sites need to collect sufficient information about users and the registration chain. Information must be provided to site in secure, trusted, auditable manner. The Grid user list to sites should be reasonably static.
* User Requirements: Users should be required to register only once per virtual organization. The registration process must be reasonably local to the user. Virtual organizations should only collect reasonable information without violating the user’s privacy. The items collected by VO should be relatively static. All of the private user information should be protected.
* VO Requirements Sites must have reasonably complete and up-to-date user list so that the Grid scheduler can distribute user jobs without keeping track of all users’ authorization information at each individual site.

## III Architecture of VO User Account Management Tool

The Grid user authentication infrastructure for virtual organization consists of two components: VO for large collaboration and Grid user management system for sites. The detailed implementation of these two components can be found in the remaining part of this section. Figure 1 shows how these two components are organized together to enable large number of Grid users to register with distributed site resources. The user registration authority obtains the user information and sends this information to upper-level registration authority via a feed up daemon. Then the user information is stored at VO user database. The local site daemon interacts with the VO user database to obtain user information and stores into the local database. The local policy is considered on whether the user can be registered at the local resource provider. If the user gets authorization, the Grid user management system interacts with the local user account management system on behalf of the user. In this section, we also discuss the security issues with the infrastructure and provide a solution based on Grid security infrastructure (GSI).

### III.1 Virtual Organization System

VO User Database: an expandable columnar database that contains one record per authorized user. Each record includes sufficient information to allow account creation at remote sites. Exact content of record is subject to negotiation between sites and VOs. The VO user databases must be secure both to safeguard potentially private user information but also to ensure a reliable and trustable source of information for sites. The VO user database will accept inputs from the remote user registration authorities in a secure and (two-way mutually authenticated) trusted way. Such inputs will be pushed from the registration authorities to the VO user database. The VO user database must also provide a capability for assigning users to one or more groups within the VO and this group membership information must be available to the sites together with other user information.

VO User Registration Authority: it basically tracks the same information about users as the primary VO user database and feeds this information up to the VO. The purpose is to distribute the responsibility of registering users. The functionality may be tiered with sub-registration authorities feeding up a chain. Any user registration authority could also function as a VO User database for a regional subsection of a VO, so the same implementation could be used for both the root VO and regional sub-VO, with the feed up communications handled by an external daemon. A local User registration authority may contain more information about a user than is required by the VO user database, and the feed up daemon would only push the information that is actually required.

Feed Up Daemon: This module establishes the secure, mutually-authenticated connection and pushes the required user information into the VO user database.

### III.2 Grid User Management System for Sites

Figure 2 provides the system architecture of local Grid user management system and how its components interact with each other to register the globally dispersed users to sites and allow them to use the site resources.

Site Daemon: This is the active piece that runs at each site to pull user information from a VO user database and invoke the local tools that track and manage local accounts. This daemon must use secure mutually-authenticated protocols to pull the user information from the VO server. The information required by the site may be a subset of the information available, and only the required information should be retrieved. The site daemon uses the information retrieved from the (one or more) VO user database together with local information such as a list of banned users or a list of existing non-Grid users to initiate and control the local functions described in the following paragraphs.

Local Database: Maintain a database tracking user information, including all of the information required by the site to create user accounts plus any additional local customization that may be required. This database should serve both current and historic information.

Create and maintain local accounts: This could mean different things at different sites, anywhere from directly invoking tools that actually create accounts to printing the user information for a human administrator to review and maintain accounts manually. The diversity of possible implementations requires a send request followed by an asynchronous process that obtains the results of the requests, possibly many hours later. The results can be (at a minimum) success or failure of the request. The actual local user identity assigned to the request is also returned as part of the results if it is a new account request.

Maintain the grid-mapfile: This means creating a record for each user with the user certificate. The user’s distinguished name is mapped to local account name, and the mapping information is written into a system file belonging to the Grid gatekeeper. If a new account request has not been successfully completely yet, obviously no grid-mapfile record is created for that user yet.

### III.3 Security Consideration

The Grid user registration system satisfies the requirements listed in Section II. When the sites fetch user information from a VO server, it uses the Grid security infrastructure (GSI) GSI  to mutually authenticate with the VO server. The site administrator must register his Grid certificate at the VO server. After he/she is authenticated as a legal site administrator, his Grid identify will be enrolled in the VO site administrator list. Then he is authorized to download user information. The LDAP-based VO ldap-1 ; ldap-2  server can use access control list (ACL) with different granularities for different site administrators. On the other hand, even compromising the Grid user management system could not grant illegal access to other resources.

## IV Software Tools for VO Management and Site Administration

The name of our software is “GUMS”, the acronym for the Grid User Management System. In this section, we will provide the install instructions and user manual for GUMS. Before you install GUMS, you should obtain the VO server information from the VO administrator of your collaboration. You also need to install and setup a MySQL server at your site. The MySQL server and the GUMS software do not need to be installed on the same host.

### IV.1 Building/Installing GUMS

The software package can be obtained without any restriction at Brookhaven National Laboratory111http://www.atlasgrid.bnl.gov/testbed/gums/.. After you obtain the software, you only need to execute the following commands to install and configure the software.

Install from tarball

* Obtaining and Unpacking the Package’s source code

```
  $ tar zxvf  gums-1.2.src.tar.gz
  $ cd gums-1.2

```
* Configuration

```
  $ ./configure [--prefix <PREFIX>]

```
* Building

```
  $ make

```
* Installation

```
  $ make install

```

Install from source RPM

* Obtaining and Unpacking the Source Package

```
  $ rpm -i gums-1.2-1.src.rpm

```
* Building

```
  $ cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
  $ rpm -ba gums-1.2.spec

```
* Installation

```
  $ rpm -Uvh gums-1.2-1.i386.rpm

```

Post-Installation
You need to setup your local MySQL database before you use the system commands. To set up the configuration file, go to your installation directory. If you install the GUMS rpm, the installation directory by default is /usr/local/GUMS/, the configure file is /usr/local/GUMS/etc/VO.conf, and the executables are in /usr/local/GUMS/sbin/.

* Select the VO LDAP server from which you could get user information and certificates. By defaults, it is ldap://spider.usatlas.bnl.gov:6200/ou=us-atlas,o=atlas,dc=ppdg-datagrid,dc=org.
* You need to choose a MySQL server to save your user information and certificates locally. Before you run any command, make sure your MySQL is started and you have proper permission.
* Initialize MySQL database, set up database, database tables and populate the table with records by running the command “initdb”.

### IV.2 Command Line Tools

The following tools are available for the GUMS software.

* initdb: it initializes the local MySQL database. This command setups the MySQL user account, creates tables, populates the tables with 100 local Grid accounts (grid001 to grid099).
* getVOusers/secgetVOusers: these commands download the user information from the VO servers specified by the configuration file, update the local Grid account databases. If a new user comes from a VO, his/her information is inserted to the database, the information about his role in VO is also be put into the user database. Based on his role, the user obtains the site authorization to execute his requests which abide by his role. At the current implementation, the role authorization is implemented based on UNIX group. For each role, a group is created with specific authorization for that role. These two command line tools keep track of all members of a VO server. If a member resigns from the VO, then the tools will disable the corresponding authorization assigned to this user by removing the user from the group. These tools send email to the site administrator for adding and removing a user to/from a group. The site administrator should be involved to do the actual operations.
* updategroup: it checks the user’s VO memberships and roles, and assigns the user to the UNIX group created for each role in the VO. The group is used to implement role based authorizations in a VO. For example, an ATLAS VO has three roles: simulation role, reconstruction role, and analysis role. We create three UNIX groups for these roles. Each group can use the computing resource and disk space according to their group allocations. If a VO member has the role for reconstruction, his/her account belongs to the UNIX group ”reconstruction” and he is authorized to do work on the computing resource allocated for reconstruction.

If this tool runs in ”cron” mode, it scans the pending group requests and sends the requests of updating the users’ group membership to the site administrator. If a new role in a VO is found, it sends emails to the site administrator to create a group for this new role. After the site administrator creates the group, he/she needs to insert the newly created group to the Grid user database. This tool provides the interface for the site administrator to access the database.
* generate\_gridmap: This script scans through all of user records stored in MySQL database and generates a gridmap file.

## V Conclusions and Future Work

In this paper, we discussed requirements for distributed, scalable Grid user registration. We presented a system we developed, called GUMS, which automates user registration and management at for a Grid site. GUMS is designed to satisfy the stated distributed registration requirements while incorporating site policies. Our experience using GUMS proved that this system was scalable, flexible and secure.

The distributed registration infrastructure and the trust relationships within a virtual organization are largely undeveloped at this time, but organizations such as the LHC (The Large Hadron Collider) Computing Grid Project are starting to address this issue. The current implementation of GUMS is based on plain password protected MySQL, but MySQL recently included the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the x509 certificate in its authentication module. We will incorporate these security enhancements in the MySQL-based local database which stores user information for GUMS.

###### Acknowledgements.

The authors wish to thank RHIC/USATLAS computing facility group for their valuable comments and discusses for this work. This work is supported by PPDG, PPDG Site AAA and ATLAS grants.


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# Spin splitting in open quantum dots

## Abstract

We demonstrate that the magnetoconductance of small lateral quantum dots in the strongly-coupled regime (i.e. when the leads can support one or more propagating modes) shows a pronounced splitting of the conductance peaks and dips which persists over a wide range of magnetic fields (from zero field to the edge-state regime) and is virtually independent of the magnetic field strength. Our numerical analysis of the conductance based on the Hubbard Hamiltonian demonstrates that this is essentially a many-body/spin effect that can be traced to a splitting of degenerate levels in the corresponding closed dot. The above effect in open dots can be regarded as a counterpart of the Coulomb blockade effect in weakly coupled dots, with the difference, however, that the splitting of the peaks originates from the interaction between the electrons of opposite spin.

There has been a lot of interest recently in the spin properties of semiconductor quantum dots. This is due not only to the new fundamental physics that these devices exhibit but also to possible applications in the emerging fields of spintronics and quantum information. Coulomb blockade (CB) experiments are often used to probe the nature of the spin states Tarucha ; Sivan ; Tarucha2000 ; Luscher ; MariuszPRB ; HawrylakPRB ; CiorgaPRL ; Fuhrer . The CB regime corresponds to a weak coupling between the dot and the leads, so that the number of electrons in the dot is integer and each peak signals an addition/removal of one electron to/from the dot. In strong contrast to the Coulomb blockade regime in the open dot dot regime electrons can freely enter and exit the dot via leads that support one or more propagating modes. In this case the charge quantization no longer holds and one may expect that the conductance is mediated by two independent channels of opposite spin resulting in a total spin $`S=0`$ in the dot. The degree of spin degeneracy in this regime was probed in Ref. Marcus  for a large chaotic dot where the statistical analysis of the conductance fluctuations indicated that a dot was spin-degenerate at low magnetic fields. In the present paper we present experimental evidence that in small open dots two spin channels are correlated and therefore the spin degeneracy can be lifted.

A gate device layout scheme has been recently developed which enables the number of electrons confined within an electrostatically defined quantum dot to be controllably reduced to zero MariuszPRB . These few electron devices were used to study the spin properties of quantum dots in the CB regime using Coulomb and spin blockade spectroscopic techniques HawrylakPRB ; CiorgaPRL . The measurements in this paper are on these same devices but in the strongly coupled regime using a resistance bridge with $``$1nA current with an estimated number of electrons in the dot from 25 to 90. Details of the two device designs and the AlGaAs/GaAS wafer used for the measurements are given elsewhere HawrylakPRB ; CiorgaPRL . For the open dot experiments the following experimental procedure was used. All the gates defining the quantum dot were swept simultaneously. The ranges of the sweeps on the individual gates were not identical but were chosen, making use of calibration measurements, to maintain approximately the same conductance at both the entrance and exit leads (i.e. the voltage was applied to the gates in a way at any point on the trace the entrance and exit QPCs contained the same number of propagating modes). The voltage in the figure corresponds to the value applied to one “representative” gate – the other voltages would be similar but not identical. Altogether measurements were made on four different quantum dots. Figure 1 illustrates typical experimental results. As can be seen clearly in the data there exists a remarkable splitting of all of the conductance peaks. The features discussed in this paper were present in all four dots and on several cooldowns. The amount of splitting varies from doublet to doublet with a typical value of 0.2meV. We stress that the observed splitting is almost two orders of magnitude larger that Zeeman splitting (which is 0.005meV at B=0.5T). The splitting of the conductance peaks is the main experimental result of this paper.

In order to model the magnetoconductance through the dot we use a tight-binding Hubbard Hamiltonian in the mean-field approximation PWAnderson ; Lee ; Henrickson ; Berkovits ; Sivan ; Nonoyama , $`H=H_{}+H_{}`$,

$`H_\sigma ={\displaystyle \underset{𝐫,𝚫}{}}t_{𝐫,\mathrm{\Delta }}a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫+𝚫\sigma }+U{\displaystyle \underset{𝐫}{}}a_{𝐫\sigma ^{}}^{}a_{𝐫\sigma ^{}}a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫\sigma },`$ (1)
where $`\sigma ,\sigma ^{}`$ describe two opposite spin states $`,`$ (or $`,`$), $`a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}`$ and $`a_{𝐫\sigma }`$ are the creation and annihilation operators at the lattice cite $`𝐫`$ for an electron with spin $`\sigma `$, $`𝚫`$ corresponds to nearest neighbors, and $`t_{𝐫,\mathrm{\Delta }}`$ is a hopping matrix between the neighboring sites where the magnetic field $`B`$ is incorporated in a standard fashion as the phase factor in the form of Peierls’ substitution Lee , and the onsite Hubbard constant $`U`$ describes the Coulomb interaction between electrons of different spin. The Hamiltonian (1) does not include the classical charging term $`e^2/C`$ because we concentrate on the open dot regime when the charging in unimportant. Note that the actual dot potential is unknown. On the basis of the experimental findings we however expect that the observed effect of the spin-splitting is generic to small quantum dots and thus rather insensitive to a detailed shape of the potential. We thus use the hard-wall confinement for the dot of a rectangular shape with the size $`0.21\times 0.36\mu `$m that is connected to infinite ideal leads with width $`w=80`$ nm (see below, inset to Fig. 3). We note that because of the uncertainty of the actual potential profile we do not expect a one-to-one correspondence between the calculated and measured conductance. The conductance of the dot is given by the Landauer formula $`G=G_{}+G_{}=\frac{e^2}{h}\left(T_{}+T_{}\right)`$, where $`T_\sigma `$ is the transmission coefficient for different spin channels. In order to calculate $`T_\sigma `$ we introduce the retarded Green function $`𝒢_\sigma =(EH_\sigma +iϵ)`$ and employ the standard recursive Green function technique Lee ; Datta . The expectation value for the electron number at site $`𝐫`$ for the spin $`\sigma `$ is given by Datta

$`N_{𝐫\sigma }=a_{𝐫\sigma }^{}a_{𝐫\sigma }={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\pi }}{\displaystyle _{\mathrm{}}^{E_F}}\mathrm{Im}\left[𝒢_\sigma (𝐫,𝐫,E)\right]𝑑E,`$ (2)
where $`E_F`$ is the Fermi energy, and $`𝒢_\sigma (𝐫,𝐫,E)`$ is the Green function in the real space representation. Equations (1), (2) are solved self-consistently. Because all the poles of the Green function are in the lower complex plane, the integration path in Eq. (2) can be transformed into the upper complex plane where the Green’s function is smoother than on the real axis. This also allows us to account for the bound states in the dot that are situated below the propagation threshold in the leads. In the calculations the lattice constant is chosen to be $`a=10`$ nm that insures that Eq. (1) with $`|t|=\frac{\mathrm{}^2}{2m^{}a^2}`$ corresponds to a continuous Schrödinger equation, with $`m^{}=0.067m_0`$ being the effective electron mass appropriate for GaAs. We neglect the Zeeman term as its effect on the dot conductance in the chosen field interval is negligible. All the results presented in the paper correspond to a typical value of $`U=3|t|`$ Berkovits ; Henrickson . (We also performed calculations where $`U`$ was varied in a broad range $`t<U<7t`$ and arrived to the qualitatively same results). Note that the present Hamiltonian reproduces Hund’s rule for the eigenspectrum of a closed parabolic dot Tarucha ; Hawrylak1996 .

Figure 2 (a) shows a linear conductance vs magnetic field $`B`$ and Fermi wave vector $`k_F`$ which includes no spin or Coulomb effects ($`U=0`$). For a comparison the single-particle spectrum of the corresponding closed dot is superimposed onto conductance plot in order to underline the relationships between them. The eigenspectrum of the dot for the case of $`U=3|t|`$ is shown in Fig. 2 (b) for a representative $`k_F`$ in the dot. The principle features of the single-particle eigenspectrum can still be traced in the eigenspectrum of Hubbard Hamiltonian (1). The spectrum of Eq. (1) is however shifted to higher energies because of the increased dot electrostatic potential due to the charge build-up described by the second term in Eq. (1). The major difference in comparison with the single-particle spectrum is that for certain regions of magnetic field the spin degeneracy is lifted and thus spin-up and spin-down eigenenergies are split. We shall demonstrate below that spin splitting effect is directly related to the Hubbard term in the Hamiltonian, where the spin species of one sort feel the potential from the electrons of the opposite spin. (This effect is absent for a spinless Hamiltonian with the Hartree-type term alone, as the spin-up and spin-down electrons would feel the same potential). Suppose, a particular eigenstate is spin-degenerate, close to $`E_F`$, and occupied by two electrons of opposite spin (let us concentrate for example on the eigenlevel that is close to the $`E_F`$ in the interval marked by a dashed circle in Fig. 2 (b)). As the magnetic field increases, the eigenenergy increases and eventually crosses $`E_F`$. If the Hamiltonian were spinless, this eigenstate would become totally unpopulated. However, because of the Hubbard term in Eq. (1), spin-up and spin-down electrons feel the Coulomb potential from electrons with opposite spin. Thus, if only one of the electrons, say spin-up, remains in the dot, it does not feel the electrostatic potential from the spin-down fellow electron it was sharing the same eigenlevel with, because the latter is no longer in the dot. As a result, the effective potential for the spin-up electron drops abruptly when the spin-down electron leaves the dot. This results in an abrupt drop of the eigenvalue for the spin-up electron, hence lifting of the spin-degeneracy of the spectrum. As the magnetic field increases further the eigenlevel under consideration (now singly occupied) rises and eventually crosses $`E_F`$ (at $`B0.08T`$). The level thus becomes totally depopulated and therefore the effective potentials for spin-up and spin-down electrons become equal. This, in turn, leads to the restoration of the spin degeneracy. Note that the origin of the spin-splitting of the eigenspectrum of the quantum dot described above is conceptually similar to Anderson model of the formation of the localized magnetic states on solute ions in nonmagnetic metals PWAnderson .

The spin splitting in the quantum dot eigenspectrum leads to a splitting of the conductance peaks/dips which become doublets as illustrated in Fig. 2(c),(d). (Note that because of significant computational time, the splitting of the peaks are shown as a 2D grey scale plots for two selected regions only. All other peaks/dips in other regions show the similar behavior). A detailed analysis of the doublet formation and its relation to splitting of the eigenlevels of the corresponding closed dot is discussed in Fig. 3. Note that in a closed dot all states in the vicinity of $`E_F`$ equally contribute to the spin splitting. In contrast, in an open dot, the states strongly coupled to the leads (with wide resonant broadenings $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$) have very little effect on the spin splitting. This is because of a short lifetime of these states $`\tau \mathrm{}/\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ which is not long enough to provide a sufficient charge build-up in the dot. In the $`B`$-field interval of Fig. 3, there are two eigenstates in the vicinity of $`E_F`$, labelled as $`A`$ and $`B`$. An analysis of the eigenfunction and linear conductance ($`U=0`$) shows that the state $`B`$ is strongly coupled to the leads and thus provide a nonresonant channel of transport with $`T1`$. In our further analysis we therefore will concentrate only on the state $`A`$ which is weakly coupled to the leads and thus responsible for a resonant channel of the conductance and the splitting of the peaks. When the magnetic field $`BB_1`$, this state is empty, see Fig. 3 (b). When this eigenstate approaches $`E_F`$ it splits because of the reasons discussed in the preceding paragraph. As the transport through the dot at zero temperature occurs at $`E_F`$, the spin-up resonant state will affect the conductance more strongly than the spin-down resonant state. This is because the former is situated at $`EE_F`$, whereas the later is shifted from $`E_F`$ by the distance determined by effective electrostatic potential from the spin-up electrons, see Fig. 3 (a),(b). Therefore, the first dip in the doublet is caused by spin-up electrons. (Note that unlike the CB regime the resonant state in an open dot can give rise to either a peak or a dip depending on the interference condition). As the magnetic field increases further, the spin-up resonant state moves farther away from $`E_F`$, whereas the spin-down state moves towards $`E_F`$. At some field $`B_2`$ the distances from the resonant states to $`E_F`$ becomes equal and both states contribute equally to the conductance. For $`BB_2`$ the spin-down resonant state becomes dominant and thus the second dip in the doublet is due to spin-down electrons. Eventually, when $`BB_3`$ both resonant states become populated and the spin degeneracy is lifted. Insets in Fig. 3 show the current density in the dot illustrating the role played by the bound states in formation of dips in the conductance doublet. Figure 3 (c) shows the electron number $`N`$ and total spin polarization $`S=\frac{1}{2}|N_{}N_{}|`$ inside the open quantum dot. It demonstrates that neither $`N`$ nor $`N_{},N_{}`$ are integer. This is in contrast to the case of weakly coupled dots in the Coulomb blockade regime when $`N`$ is always integer. We also find that in the vicinity of doublets $`S`$ is distinct from 0, (Fig. 3 (d), see also below, Fig. 4 (b)). This contradicts the conclusion of Folk et al.  Marcus  that an open dot is spin-degenerate. This difference may be attributed to the fact that Folk et al.  studied relatively large dots, and it is not clear whether the spin-splitting effect discussed here for small dots would survive in larger dots. Note that similar effects of spin splitting have been investigated in a number of model systems Nonoyama . In addition, spontaneous spin splitting has been suggested as the origin of the “0.7-anomaly” in the conductance of a quantum point contact QPC .

We would like to point out that the observed effect of the spin-splitting in open dots can be regarded as a counterpart to the Coulomb blockade effect in the weakly-coupled (closed) dots, because both effects are caused by the charging of the dot (Note that one usually do not expect charging in the open dot regime). The essential difference is that the CB peaks are separated by the distance given by a classical charging energy arising from the addition of one extra electron to the dot (regardless of its spin), whereas for the case of small open dots the peak splitting is determined by a charging effect that arises from the interaction of electrons of opposite spin.

The splitting of the conductance peaks/dips is the most pronounced manifestation of spin polarization in an open dot. However, the spin degeneracy in the dot can be lifted even when the conductance does not show an apparent doublet formation. This is illustrated in Fig. 4 where the dot conductance is plotted in the region containing three closely spaced eigenstates as shown in the inset. In this region the spacing between the levels is smaller than the energy splitting between spin-up and spin-down levels. As a result, more than one eigenstate can contribute to a particular peak/dip, and the conductance shows an erratic behavior where it is not possible to identify well-defined spin-split doublets (Fig. 4 (a)). Nevertheless, in the given energy interval the electron density shows a pronounced polarization as indicated in Fig. 4 (b).

It is interesting to note that practically all resonant peaks and dips have a characteristic asymmetric shape as a function of $`k_F`$. This is a signature of a Fano resonance that occurs in an open dot because of an interference between a resonant channel (related to a spin-resolved resonant state) and a non-resonant one (originated from the contributions from the tails of neighboring levels) Fano .

In conclusion, we find experimentally that conductance peaks and dips are split in small few electron open quantum dots. The numerical analysis of the conductance and the dot eigenspectrum demonstrates that this effect is related to a spin splitting in the corresponding closed dot when the interactions between the electrons with opposite spins is taken into account.

###### Acknowledgements.

Financial support from the National Graduate School in Scientific Computing (M.E.) and the Swedish Research Council (M.E. and I.V.Z) is acknowledged. A.S.S would like to acknowledge support from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.


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# HII regions in the spiral galaxy NGC 3389

## 1 Introduction

NGC 3389 is a spiral galaxy, classified by de Vaucouleurs et al. (1991) as SA galaxy and by Sandage and Tammann (1981) as Sc galaxy. NGC 3389 is one of the Leo triplet with the galaxies NGC 3384 and NGC 3379. The lack of detailed photometric studies for NGC 3389 and its normal undistorted morphology, although it lies in a group of galaxies, motivate us to do the photometry of NGC 3389 and study its stellar population properties. The basic parameters of NGC 3389 are given in the Table 1.

HII regions in galaxies are powered by the newly formed stars, therefore they give the clues for the recent star formation in galaxies. The total Hα luminosity can be used to quantify their current star formation rate. Therefore we concern firstly with the investigation of the HII region properties of NGC 3389; their luminosity and size distributions.

This is the first CCD work on the HII regions of NGC 3389. Hodge and Kennicutt (1983) presented the off-set positions for 50 identified HII regions in NGC 3389 in their photographic surveys of the HII regions in galaxies, while Kennicutt and Kent (1983) gave the total integrated Hα flux and luminosity for the galaxy.

## 2 Observations and data reduction

The V, I and Hα CCD observations of NGC 3389 were obtained using 1.23 m telescope of Calar Alto observatory on 5-6 February 1995 with a Tek CCD with 1024 $`\times `$ 1024 pixels with a pixel scale of 0.502 pixel-1. The sky was photometric with seeing varying from 0.7 to 1.2 during the night. Four Hα frames were taken with Hα interference filter of central bandpass at 6580 $`\AA `$ and a FWHM of 100 $`\AA `$. Four frames in V filter and three frames in I filter were observed. Table 2 gives the log of the observations. All data reduction were done using the image processing program MIDAS. The standard image processing routine has been done, then all frames were carefully aligned using the position of the common foreground stars in the frames. The sky background was measured using MIDAS task FIT/FLATSKY with cursor area offset from the galaxy in the frame margin. After sky subtraction, the cosmic ray effects are removed by median filter. A weighted mean image for each filter was computed. In order to get an accurate continuum level we have choosen two continuum bands on either side of Hα; V and I are used. The fluxes of the selected stars in the three bands (I, V and Hα) were measured, then correlations among them get the Hα continuum level. Then the Hα image was corrected for the continuum contribution. For flux calibration, we compare the integrated measurements within an aperture whose diameter equal to three arcminutes, which contains the entire visible disk of NGC 3389 to a limiting surface brightness of 25 mag/arcsec2 with the total absolute luminosity given by Bell and Kennicutt (2001). This total integration normalized by the total absolute luminosity quoted by Bell and Kennicutt (2001), for the same diameter size (3), to get the observed measurements in units of erg s-1. The absolute flux has been measured with the same Hα filter specification ($`\lambda `$ 6580/100 $`\AA `$) like that of ours. Bell and Kennicutt (2001) used to convert the fluxes to luminosity the adopted distance of 24 Mpc refering to Shanks (1997).

## 3 HII regions identification

The Figure 1 shows the continuum-subtarcted H$`\alpha `$ image of NGC 3389. A visiual identification of the HII regions was firstly done, by displaying the continuum-subtarcted H$`\alpha `$ image with different scaling factors and measure the boundaries at the discernable level. To measure the contour dimensions of each HII region ($`dx`$ and $`dy`$) using a graphically interface precedure within MIDAS was used. However if the HII regions are crowded or lie in a diffuse bright background the largest closed contour is used to measure the HII region boundary. From both methods we fixed dimensions of the HII regions. In some cases it was needed to justifity the aperture radius by hand. The aperture radius used for the flux integration was calculated as follows:

$$r=(\sqrt{dx^2+dy^2})/2$$
(1)
The aperture radius used to estimate the backgroud flux in the proximity of each HII region is varied according to how much HII regions are crowded.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the positions of 61 HII regions in NGC 3389 in comparison with those of Hodge and Kennicutt (1983); Hodge provided the off-set positions of HII regions from the center of NGC 3389 and a map of NGC 3389 by private communication. We find a good agreement between our position measurments and their position data for 40 objects. The rest ten HII regions of Hodge and Kennicutt (1983) have no counterparts in our data. These ten HII regions may lie below our identification criterion, their off-set positions and identification names are given in Table 3. Twenty one HII regions are newly identified.

The integrated flux and the background flux for each HII region are measured, then the flux corrected for the background to give the net flux. The main source of error in the net fluxes are due to either the estimation of the background or the inaccurate estimate of the boundaries, or both. To estimate the uncertainties in the flux measurements multiple trials have been done to measure the flux of some individuals HII regions. We found statistically that the uncertainities in the measured fluxes vary from less than 10$`\%`$ for the isolated regions to 20$`\%`$ for the crowded regions.

The measured Hα fluxes are corrected for Galactic extinction, A(0.65$`\mu m`$) = 0.073 mag (Schlegel et al. 1998). To remove the contamination by the \[NII\] emission lines in the measured Hα fluxes, the total fluxes were multiplied by a factor of 0.75 according to Kennicutt (1983); the factor gave the average ratio of Hα/(Hα+\[NII\]) in the spirals. They have used the same filter bandpass at 6580 $`\AA `$ and FWHM of 100 $`\AA `$ in their measurments for galaxies with radial velocities under 3000 $`\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$as NGC 3389. Sixty one HII regions were identified, and the equatorial coordinates of their positions, the diameters in parsec, the logarithmical lumnosities and the corresponding Hodge & Kennicutt (1983) identifications (HK-ID) are listed in Table 4.

## 4 The Luminosity Function

The Hα luminosity of the HII regions in NGC 3389 spans a range L(Hα) $``$ 3$`\times 10^{37}`$-6$`\times 10^{39}`$ erg s-1. This L(Hα) luminosity range is more frequent in Sa-Sb galaxies (see for example in Thilker et al. 2002). The HII regions with L(Hα) luminosity higher than 1039 erg s-1 are found in late-type (Sc-Irr) normal galaxies or in interacting galaxies (Kennicutt et al. 1989). The luminosites of the 61 HII regions are binned in logarithmic interval of 0.2 dex and ploted in Figure 3.

In the Figure 3, our LF data is compared with that of Feinstein (1997) on the Sb spiral galaxy NGC 6384. The HII regions in both galaxies exhibit nearly the same L(Hα) range, but the number of the HII regions of NGC 6384 is about four times larger than that of NGC 3389. The reason for that is the absolute blue luminosity of NGC 6384 (MB=-21.31) is approximately four times that of NGC 3389. A mimic relation is founded on NGC 6822 by Hodge et al. (1989).

In order to fit the luminosity distribution of the HII regions independantly of the choosing the LF bin size, the cumulative luminosity distribution have been done following Feinstein (1997). The cumulative LF is presented in Figure 4 in comparison with that of NGC 6384 (Feinstein 1997), both LFs for the two galaxies normalized by their number of the HII regions at log(L) of 38.6. The LFs are in agreement at the luminosities log(L) $``$ 39.0, while they are incongruent at higher luminosities log(L) $`>`$ 39.0. This is due to NGC 6384 has 49 HII regions with luminosities higher than 39.0 (log) while NGC 3389 contains only 4 HII regions. The two galaxies have different absolute blue luminosities as well as different spiral types. This result may confirm that NGC 3389 is neither Sc spiral nor an interacting galaxy.

The straight line in the Figure 4 gives the best fit for all data points of NGC 3389 LF, which correspondes to a power law in the form:

$$dN=AL^\alpha dL$$
(2)
With a power index $`\alpha `$=-1.95$`\pm `$0.24, which is in agreement with $`\alpha `$ = -2.0$`\pm `$0.2 for Sa-Sb galaxies quoted by Banfi et al. (1993) for a sample of 22 spirals and with $`\alpha `$ = -2.0$`\pm `$0.5 for a sample of 30 spirals (Kennicutt et al. 1989).

## 5 Diameter distribution

Figure 5 shows the diameter distribution for the HII regions of NGC 3389. The number of HII regions with diameter greater than a given diameter value plotted as a function of diameter. The data fit an exponential law, as proposed by the previous works from Van den Berg (1981), Hodge (1983), Hodge (1987) and many others. The exponential law in the form N = N$`{}_{}{}^{}e_{}^{D/D_{}}`$. We obtain $`D_{}`$ = 200 $`\pm `$ 7 pc, which is in agreement with that given by Hodge (1987); 180 pc for NGC 3389, if the smallest diameters were ignored in fitting.

## 6 Summary

We have identified 61 HII regions in the spiral galaxy NGC 3389. The positions of fourty of them are identical with those in Hodge & Kennicutt (1983) and 21 are newly identified. The diameters and the fluxes of 61 HII regions are measured for NGC 3389 for the first time. The Hα luminosities of HII regions span a range from 3$`\times `$ 1037 to 6 $`\times `$ 1039 erg s-1 as those in most Sa-Sb galaxies. The luminosity function fits well a power law with a power index is in agreement with that for early spiral galaxies. In a forthcoming paper, we will discuss the ionization sources of the HII regions and star formation activity in NGC 3389.

This work is financially supported by SEES-BK21 grant, Korean Government. Abdel-Hamid is very grateful to BK21 and School of Earth and Environmental Science (Astronomy Program) at Seoul National University for their support and good hospitality. We are grateful to P. Hodge for providing us his HII regions data for NGC 3389.


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# Untitled Document

The paper has been withdrawn by the author.


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# Amplitude squeezed fiber Bragg grating solitons

## Abstract

Quantum fluctuations of optical fiber Bragg grating solitons are investigated numerically by the back-propagation method. It is found for the first time that the bandgap effects of the grating act as a nonlinear filter and cause the soliton to be amplitude squeezed. The squeezing ratio saturates after a certain grating length and the fundamental Bragg soliton produces the optimal squeezing ratio.

In the literature, various types of optical soliton phenomena have been studied extensively in the area of nonlinear optical physics. These include the nonlinear Schrödinger solitons in dispersive optical fibers, spatial and vortex solitons in photorefractive materials/waveguides, and cavity solitons in resonators STrillo01 . It has also been well known that fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) with Kerr nonlinearity can exhibit optical soliton-like phenomena known as the Bragg grating solitons AAceves89 ; BEggleton96 . The FBGs are one-dimensional photonic bandgap crystals with weak index modulation. By utilizing the high dispersion of the FBGs near the bandedges, one can produce optical solitons in the anomalous dispersion side if the input pulse have suitable pulse-width and peak intensity. From the theoretical point of view, solitary waves in one-dimensional periodic structures can travel with different group velocities and have been verified in some experiments BEggleton96 . Even for two- or three-dimensional nonlinear photonic bandgap crystals, solitary waves can also exist ASukhorukov01  and have been observed recently Fleischer03 .

Most of the previous studies on Bragg grating solitons have been on the classical effects and there is almost no result on their quantum properties. The quantum theory of traveling-wave optical solitons has been intensively developed during the past 15 years and several approaches have been successfully carried out to calculate the quantum properties of different traveling-wave optical solitons including the family of nonlinear Schrödinger solitons Drummond87 ; Lai89a  as well as the self-induced-transparency solitons Lai90 . Bragg solitons belong to the class of bi-directional pulse propagation problems where the quantum theory is still lack of enough consideration. It is the aim of this study to bridge this gap by developing a general quantum theory for bi-directional pulse propagation problems and particularly applying the theory to the case of Bragg grating solitons. It will be shown that the output Bragg soliton pulses will quantum-mechanically get amplitude-squeezed and the squeezing ratio can be calculated theoretically.

In our modeling, we use the nonlinear coupled mode equations (NCMEs) to describe the two bi-directional waves propagating in a uniform FBG. We use the linearization approach to study the quantum effects of optical solitons in FBGs by extending the back-propagation method we previously developed YLai95  to the cases of nonlinear bi-directional propagation problems. By following the same spirit of the back-propagation method, we will first derive a set of linear adjoint equations from the linearized NCMEs in such a way that any inner product between the solutions of the two equation sets is conserved during the time evolution. Under the linearization approximation, the measurements performed after the time evolution can also be expressed in terms of the inner product between the perturbed quantum field operator and a measurement characteristic function. By back-propagating the measurement characteristic function to $`t=0`$ through the solution of the adjoint equations, we can express the measured operator in terms of the input field operators which have known quantum characteristics. In this way, the variance of the measured operator as well as its squeezing ratio can be calculated readily for a given measurement characteristic function.

To be more explicit, let us consider the wave propagation problem in a one dimension fiber grating structure with the nonlinearity coming from the third order nonlinearity of the optical fiber. With the self-phase modulation and cross-phase modulation effects, we model Bragg solitons by using the following NCMEs that describe the coupling between the forward and the backward propagating waves in a uniform FBG.

$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{v_g}}{\displaystyle \frac{}{t}}U_a(z,t)+{\displaystyle \frac{}{z}}U_a`$ $`=`$
$`i\delta U_a+i\kappa U_b+i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_a|^2U_a+2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_b|^2U_a`$
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{v_g}}{\displaystyle \frac{}{t}}U_b(z,t){\displaystyle \frac{}{z}}U_b`$ $`=`$
$`i\delta U_b+i\kappa U_a+i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_b|^2U_b+2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_a|^2U_b`$
Here $`U_{a,b}(z,t)`$ represent the forward and backward propagation pulses respectively, $`v_g`$ is the group velocity of the pulse, $`\kappa `$ is the coupling coefficient, $`\lambda _B`$ is the Bragg wavelength, $`\delta `$ is the wavelength detuning parameter, and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ represents the self-phase modulation coefficient.

This set of NCMEs has approximate analytical soliton solutions for the case of infinite grating length, as is shown by Aceves and Wabnitz with the introduction of the massive Thirring model AAceves89 . However, for gratings of finite length, no analytic solution can be found. So in our studies we directly use the finite difference numerical simulation method with the parameters based on the first experimental report in the literature BEggleton96 . We consider a 60 $`ps`$ FWHM sech-shaped pulse incidents into a uniform grating with 15.0 $`cm^1`$ wavenumber detuning from the center of the bandgap. The coupling strength of the fiber grating is 10 $`cm^1`$. When the input intensity is below the required value for forming a solitary pulse in the FBGs (about 4.5 $`GW/cm^2`$ in this case), the peak intensity of the pulse will decrease along the propagation. On the other hand, when the input intensity is above 4.5 $`GW/cm^2`$, the peak intensity oscillates. Only when the nonlinearity can exactly compensate the dispersion induced by the FBGs, we can have a stable solitary pulse inside the grating. After obtaining these classical solutions, we now turn to the calculation of their quantum properties.

Since for optical solitons the average photon number is usually very large, we can safely use the linearization approximation to study their quantum effects. By setting

$`U_a(z,t)`$ $`=`$ $`U_{a0}(z,t)+\widehat{u}_a(z,t)`$
$`U_b(z,t)`$ $`=`$ $`U_{b0}(z,t)+\widehat{u}_b(z,t)`$
and substituting them into Eq. (Amplitude squeezed fiber Bragg grating solitons-Amplitude squeezed fiber Bragg grating solitons) for linearization, we obtain the linear quantum operator equations in Eq. (9) that describe the evolution of the quantum fluctuations associated with the Bragg solitons. The quantum perturbation fields $`\widehat{u}_a(z,t)`$ and $`\widehat{u}_b(z,t)`$ have to satisfy the following equal time commutation relations:

$`[\widehat{u}_a(z_1,t),\widehat{u}_a^{}(z_2,t)]=[\widehat{u}_b(z_1,t),\widehat{u}_b^{}(z_2,t)]=\delta (z_1z_2)`$
$`[\widehat{u}_{a,b}(z_1,t),\widehat{u}_{a,b}(z_2,t)]=[\widehat{u}_{a,b}^{}(z_1,t),\widehat{u}_{a,b}^{}(z_2,t)]=0`$
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{v_g}}{\displaystyle \frac{}{t}}\left(\begin{array}{c}\widehat{u}_a\\ \widehat{u}_b\end{array}\right)`$ $`=`$ $`\left(\begin{array}{cc}\frac{}{z}+i\delta +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{a0}|^2+2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{b0}|^2& i\kappa +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}U_{b0}^{}\\ i\kappa +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}^{}U_{b0}& \frac{}{z}+i\delta +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{a0}|^2+2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{b0}|^2\end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{c}\widehat{u}_a\\ \widehat{u}_b\end{array}\right)`$ (9)
$`+`$ $`\left(\begin{array}{cc}i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}^2& 2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}U_{b0}\\ 2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}U_{b0}& i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{b0}^2\end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{c}\widehat{u}_a^{}\\ \widehat{u}_b^{}\end{array}\right)`$ (14)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{v_g}}{\displaystyle \frac{}{t}}\left(\begin{array}{c}u_a^A\\ u_b^A\end{array}\right)`$ $`=`$ $`\left(\begin{array}{cc}\frac{}{z}+i\delta +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{a0}|^2+2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{b0}|^2& i\kappa +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}U_{b0}^{}\\ i\kappa +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}^{}U_{b0}& \frac{}{z}+i\delta +2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{a0}|^2+2i\mathrm{\Gamma }|U_{b0}|^2\end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{c}u_a^A\\ u_b^A\end{array}\right)`$ (21)
$`+`$ $`\left(\begin{array}{cc}i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}^2& 2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}U_{b0}\\ 2i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{a0}U_{b0}& i\mathrm{\Gamma }U_{b0}^2\end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{c}u_a^A\\ u_b^A\end{array}\right)`$ (26)
If we define the inner product operation according to

$`\stackrel{}{f}|\stackrel{}{\widehat{g}}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}{\displaystyle 𝑑z[f_a^{}\widehat{g}_a+f_a\widehat{g}_a^{}+f_b^{}\widehat{g}_b+f_b\widehat{g}_b^{}]}`$ (27)
and introduce the corresponding set of adjoint equations in Eq. (21), then it is easy to show that the inner product between the solutions of the two equation sets is preserved along the time axis, $`\frac{d}{dt}\stackrel{}{u}^A|\stackrel{}{\widehat{u}}=0`$. By taking advantage of this property, we can express the inner product of the output quantum perturbation operator with a projection function in terms of the input quantum operator. This will allow us to calculate the quantum uncertainty for the inner product of the output quantum operator with any given projection function. For the photon number measurement, the pulse shape of the projection function is simply the classical output solution HHaus90 and the squeezing ratio can be calculated according to:

$`R(T)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{var[\stackrel{}{f}(z)|\stackrel{}{\widehat{u}}(z,t=T)]}{var[\stackrel{}{f}(z)|\stackrel{}{\widehat{u}}(z,t=0)]}}`$
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{var[\stackrel{}{F}_T(z)|\stackrel{}{\widehat{u}}(z,t=0)]}{var[\stackrel{}{f}(z)|\stackrel{}{\widehat{u}}(z,t=0)]}}`$
Here $`\stackrel{}{f}(z)`$ is the original projection function and $`\stackrel{}{F}_T(z)`$ is the back-propagated projection function.

In the following we shall present our results of simulation. The transmission of the FBGs with different input intensities for a constant FBG length (50 $`cm`$) is shown in the top curve of Fig. 1. The calculated photon number squeezing ratio is shown in the bottom for the same parameters. The squeezing ratio decreases monotonically when the intensity is smaller than the intensity of the fundamental soliton but will begin to oscillate strongly when the intensity is much larger than that of the fundamental soliton. The oscillation behaviors of the FBG transmission and the squeezing ratio match very well. That is, the squeezing ratio has a local minimum when the transmission has a local maximum. Intuitively the periodic grating structure acts like a spectral filter which can filter out the noisier high frequency components in the soliton spectrum and produce a net amplitude squeezing effect just as in the previous solution amplitude squeezing experiments where a spectral filter is cascaded after a nonlinear fiber Friberg96 ; TOpatrny02 . It is also intuitively clear that larger amplitude squeezing should occur when the transmission curve is saturated.

Fig. 2 shows the dependence of the calculated squeezing ratios for different FBG lengths. If we only consider the gratings with the length longer than 1 $`cm`$, we find that the squeezing ratio monotonically decreases with the FBG length and saturates at the length around 60 $`cm`$. Intuitively this is because the filtering effect of the grating will unavoidably introduce additional noises on the light fields and eventually cause the squeezing ratio to become saturated.

To summarize, we have developed a general quantum theory for bi-directional nonlinear optical pulse propagation problems and have used it to calculate the squeezing ratio of Bragg solitons in one-dimensional photonic bandgap crystals for the first time. We find that the output pulses can get amplitude squeezed and the squeezing ratio exhibits interesting relations with the fiber grating length as well as with the intensity of the input pulse. It will be very interesting to see if one can actually observe these effects experimentally in the future.


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# Gödel’s Universe in a Supertube Shroud

## I Introduction.

Einstein’s equations in General Relativity have many solutions that seem unphysical. Some have curvature singularities, which generically lie beyond the regime of validity of the classical theory. Other solutions may have no singularities, but violate causality, by having closed timelike curves. Hawking hawking  has presented arguments to support the Chronology Protection Conjecture: namely that when quantum mechanics is taken into account, backgrounds not having closed timelike curves do not develop them. Even if this is true, it seems to leave open the question of whether backgrounds having closed timelike curves to begin with have to be discarded or not.

The answer to such questions may not be found entirely within classical general relativity. One would like to know that the energy momentum tensor, serving as the source in Einstein’s equations corresponds to reasonable physical matter. Another direction to address the problem is to ask whether there is a way to make sense of physics on spaces with closed timelike curves in classical mechanics, quantum mechanics or quantum field theory.

Probably best of all is to ask those questions in string theory, which encompasses both general relativity and quantum physics. Just as string theory has managed to resolve certain curvature singularities, mainly timelike, by the addition of extra degrees of freedom, it is natural to wonder about the status of closed timelike curves in such a quantum theory of gravity. Are such backgrounds allowed in string theory? Does string theory realize the Chronology Protection conjecture? Some recent work in this direction is horava ; dyson ; Jarv:2002wu ; Gimon:2003ms ; Herdeiro:2002ft ; Biswas:2003ku .

In string theory, the existence of dynamical extended objects provides us with probes suited particularly well to study non-local issues like closed timelike curves. Instead of trying to quantize the string worldsheet theory in one of these backgrounds, finding its spectrum and adding interactions, our strategy will be to look for BPS states corresponding to extended branes in this vacuum and to analyze the dynamics of small fluctuations around them. For a specific subset of backgrounds having closed timelike curves we will find BPS states with a sickness in their effective action, signaling the invalidity of the solution.

Let us be more precise. There are many supergravity backgrounds having closed timelike curves. We will be interested in Gödel-like universes, which were first embedded in five dimensional supergravity gauntlett . Some other examples of similar metrics were found in horava ; harmark . All these solutions are generalizations of a four dimensional metric studied by Som and Raychaudhuri somray , and are very similar to the original Gödel universe godel .

All these solutions describe rotating spaces, where one can choose the planes of rotation as well as some fluxes that make the solution supersymmetric. We will concentrate on a specific solution of type IIA supergravity with rotation in a single plane, since this is the simplest example of such a metric with closed timelike curves.

This solution harmark  has a nontrivial metric in three dimensions, which we parameterize by the time coordinate $`t`$, and polar coordinates $`r`$ and $`\varphi `$ in the plane. There is a NS-NS flux as well as RR 2-form and 4-form fluxes, and we label the extra direction in which there is flux by $`y`$. The metric and fluxes are

$$\begin{array}{c}ds^2=\left(dt+cr^2d\varphi \right)^2+dr^2+r^2d\varphi ^2+dy^2+\underset{i=4}{\overset{9}{}}(dx^i)^2\\ H_3=2crdrd\varphi dy,F_2=2crdrd\varphi ,\\ F_4=2crdtdrd\varphi dy.\end{array}$$
(1)
This one parameter solution preserves 8 supercharges and we shall assume positive $`c`$ without loss of generality. If we consider motion in the periodic $`\varphi `$ direction at constant $`r`$, the corresponding spacetime curve becomes timelike for $`r>1/c`$, hence the closed timelike curves.

Though this seems like a perfectly valid solution to the equations of supergravity, we will demonstrate that, as it stands, it can’t be a valid solution of string theory. One way of realizing this fact is to notice that supertubes mateos ; emparan  can exist in the above background. Supertubes are bound states of D0-branes and fundamental strings having non-vanishing D2-dipole moment. They can be realized on the worldvolume of a cylindrical D2-brane with electric and magnetic fields turned on, such that they induce a non-vanishing angular momentum that balances the tension which would naturally tend to collapse the tube. In our discussion, supertubes extend in the $`y`$ direction and wrap the angular direction $`\varphi `$ at fixed radius $`r`$. It is not too surprising that this is the most interesting object to probe the above geometry with, since it has the correct rotational symmetry, and couples to all the background fields that were turned on. As will also be made clear below, this object preserves the same supersymmetries as the Gödel-like universe itself. Even though the tension of this supertube is just given by the sum of the D0-brane and fundamental string charges, and it can have an arbitrary size (by adjusting these charges), we will find that for a certain range of charges, some world-volume modes develop a negative kinetic term whenever the radius satisfies $`r1/c`$, so that the supertube wraps a closed timelike curve. This sickness is much like that found by considering a probe brane in the repulson background, which led to the enhançon mechanism enhancon . We interpret it as an instability of the vacuum itself, which indicates that these supertubes will want to condense.

The plan of the rest of the paper is the following. In the next section we shall briefly discuss the probe calculation of a supertube in our Gödel universe, and show that the world-volume theory may become sick at the radius where closed timelike curves appear. In Section 3, we describe a family of supergravity solutions, that locally look like the Gödel universe, but have a domain wall made out of smeared supertubes separating them from a space that does not have closed timelike curves asymptotically. The domain wall in these solutions can be thought of as a regulator, the initial solution (1) arising in the limit where the domain wall is sent to infinity. One might think it possible to enlarge the region inside the domain-wall to get closed timelike curves, but the same problem we encountered in the full Gödel universe prevents this from happening.

We conclude with some discussion of the analogy to the enhançon mechanism and how similar problems show up for other Gödel universes of supergravity, invalidating them too.

## II Supertubes in a Gödel-like universe.

As mentioned in the introduction, the type IIA Som-Raychaudhuri solution (1) has closed timelike curves. Thus, one may suspect that an extended probe would develop some sickness in this background. Our first goal is then to discuss the possible probes in this background. This task is simplified by the realization that the solution (1) is a particular case of a family of IIA solutions discussed in emparan ; paul . The authors of emparan  prove that in general these solutions admit D0 branes, fundamental strings and supertubes as probes that don’t break any further supersymmetry. Even better, they perform a probe analysis of these solutions, and show that when the solution presents closed timelike curves, the worldvolume theory on the supertube is ill-defined. Our computation is just a special case of theirs.

The supertube is a cylindrical D2-brane which is extended in the $`y`$ direction as well as the angular direction $`\varphi `$ at fixed radius $`r`$ about the origin.111The metric (1) is actually homogeneous. The addition of the supertube breaks translational invariance, but preserves the rotation around the origin. The world-volume theory on the supertube is just that of a D2-brane in curved background, which includes the Dirac-Born-Infeld and Wess-Zumino terms

$`S={\displaystyle e^\mathrm{\Phi }\sqrt{det(𝒢+)}}{\displaystyle (𝒞_3+𝒞_1)},`$ (2)
where $`𝒢`$ is the pullback of the metric and $`𝒞_1`$ and $`𝒞_3`$ the pullbacks of the RR potentials. The field strength $``$ includes the gauge fields that are turned on in the brane and those induced by the NS field

$`=FB_2=Edtdy+dyd\varphi .`$ (3)
$`E`$ is the electric field and $`=Bcr^2`$ the magnetic field, including the term induced by the background.

The equations of motion are solved by $`E=1`$ (which is not critical in the presence of magnetic field) and constant222The positivity of the magnetic field is enforced by supersymmetry. $`B>0`$, whereas the radius of the tube is fixed to be the angular momentum $`J`$, related to the D0 and fundamental string charge densities $`q_0=B`$ and $`q_s`$ by $`r^2=J=q_0q_s`$. It is a simple exercise to show that the supertube preserves the same supersymmetries as the background, which is also clear from the analysis of the next section, where the metric (1) is shown to belong to the family of metrics studied in emparan .

After adjusting the electric and magnetic fields as above, the Lagrangian density of the D-brane probe is simply the magnetic field $`=B`$. The supertube tension is just given by the sum of charges it carries, that of D0-branes and fundamental strings, as dictated by supersymmetry. Therefore we can seemingly make the tube as small or as large as we wish.

To verify that, we can start with a very small supertube and slowly increase the radius. There are a number of ways one could envision this happening. For instance, one could imagine a bath of D0-branes and fundamental strings surrounding the supertube, and allowing the supertube to change its radius by exchanging charges with the bath, satisfying the BPS condition at all times. Perhaps more naturally, one can also consider fluctuations of the radius, in time and/or in the $`y`$ direction, which don’t preserve the BPS condition. In this latter case, a non-zero potential would also appear.

This calculation was done in emparan  for the background generated by a collection of supertubes, and is trivial to adapt it to our metric. The result is that the expansion of the Lagrangian at small velocities is

$`=_0+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}M\dot{r}^2+\mathrm{}`$ (4)
where the dots can contain a potential term if the fluctuation doesn’t preserve the BPS condition. $`_0`$ is the static Lagrangian density and

$`M={\displaystyle \frac{(Bcr^2)^2+r^2c^2r^4}{B}},`$ (5)
is the mass of the excited mode. This is positive definite for $`r<1/c`$, but for larger radii, it becomes negative for a certain range of charges.

How do we interpret this singularity? In similar computations, e.g. when we encounter that the metric in moduli space becomes negative we interpret it as meaning that the effective Lagrangian is not valid, because it is missing some light degrees of freedom. One then corrects the effective description by adding those extra degrees of freedom. An example of this is the enhançon mechanism enhancon . It is not exactly clear how to apply this procedure to the case at hand. Recall that the Gödel universe (1) is homogeneous, so there are closed timelike curves through every point in space, and the sickness we found is not confined to a bounded region of spacetime. In addition we don’t have well defined asymptotic conditions, or well defined global charges that a new solution should reproduce (since it is not clear how to define charge in Gödel universes). What we can safely conclude is that the solution (1) is not a good string theory background.

## III A domain wall solution.

In the previous section we argued that the Gödel-type solution (1) can’t be a correct effective description of a string theory background. Nevertheless it is fairly easy to display supergravity solutions that locally are similar to Gödel, but are free of closed timelike curves. To do so, we start by recalling the family of IIA solutions considered in paul ; emparan .

$`\begin{array}{cc}\hfill ds^2=& U^1V^{1/2}(dtA)^2+U^1V^{1/2}dy^2\hfill \\ & +V^{1/2}{\displaystyle \underset{i=2}{\overset{9}{}}}(dx^i)^2\hfill \\ \hfill B_2=& U^1(dtA)dy+dtdy,\hfill \\ \hfill C_1=& V^1(dtA)+dt,\hfill \\ \hfill C_3=& U^1dtdyA,\hfill \\ \hfill e^\mathrm{\Phi }=& U^{1/2}V^{3/4}.\hfill \end{array}`$ (6)
Here $`U`$ and $`V`$ are harmonic functions in the eight dimensions spanned by $`x^i`$, and $`A`$ is a Maxwell field. Clearly the IIA Gödel like solution (1) is recovered if we take $`U=V=1`$ and $`A=cr^2d\varphi `$ (where $`r`$ and $`\varphi `$ are polar coordinates in the $`x^2`$, $`x^3`$ plane).

A very natural question is whether there are more general configurations which are Gödel near the origin, but are asymptotically different, with no closed timelike curves.333The idea of patching another metric outside a finite radius, to construct a solution free of closed timelike curves, was considered for the original Gödel metric in bonnor .. If we want to retain translation symmetry in $`\text{}^6`$ and rotational symmetry in $`\varphi `$, any source must be smeared in those directions, so $`U`$ and $`V`$ are harmonic functions on the plane with rotational symmetry.

We construct the solution by taking $`U=V=1`$ and $`A=cr^2d\varphi `$ near the origin. At a radius $`R`$ we put the smeared supertube, and for $`r>R`$ we choose

$`U=1+{\displaystyle \frac{Q_s}{2\pi }}\mathrm{ln}{\displaystyle \frac{r}{R}},V=1+{\displaystyle \frac{Q_0}{2\pi }}\mathrm{ln}{\displaystyle \frac{r}{R}},`$
$`A=cR^2d\varphi .`$ (7)
$`Q_s`$ and $`Q_0`$ are respectively the fundamental string and D0-brane charge densities, and are still arbitrary. The choice of $`A`$ is motivated by requiring continuity of the metric through the domain wall.

This space is identical to Gödel near the origin, but has very different asymptotics. For example, it has finite angular momentum, whereas for the original space it diverges. Also, inside the domain wall there are constant magnetic fields for the D0-brane and fundamental string, while outside there are mainly electric fluxes (the rotation of space mixes electric and magnetic fields). One bad feature is that the dilaton grows as $`r\mathrm{}`$.

It is easily verified that the solution satisfies the Israel matching conditions israel , with the supertube stress-energy tensor at the junction. Furthermore, the matching fixes the D2-brane density in terms of $`c`$. A similar calculation was done for the enhançon in myers .

There is a very good analog to these solutions in electromagnetism—a charged solenoid. Outside there is electric flux, with the potential behaving like a log. The current around the solenoid will induce some magnetic flux inside, but no electric fields.

From this construction it is also clear that the supertube preserves the same supersymmetries as the Gödel metric (1). After all, the latter is just the metric induced by a large collection of the same supertubes, but this can also be verified directly by the same calculations as in paul ; emparan ; quim .

So far we did not specify the radius where the domain wall is located. Clearly when $`R1/c`$ there are no closed timelike curves within the domain wall, but it can also be shown that there are no such curves outside the shell. At most, if $`R=1/c`$ there are closed null curves on the shell itself, which might warrant further study.

If we place the shell at a larger radius there will be causality violating curves. It is therefore natural to think of the full Gödel solution as the limit when the domain wall is taken to infinity and the region outside discarded. This picture may provide a better laboratory for studying the problems of the Gödel universe. In particular, if the radius is only slightly larger than $`1/c`$, there is only a thin shell of closed timelike curves. So the sickness is not spread over the entire space, and it should be possible to describe a process by which the shell contracts to eliminate the region with closed timelike curves.

In any event, it seems like those spaces cannot be created. A calculation similar to the one carried out in section II will show that, if one tries to increase the size of the region inside the shell, so it exceeds $`R=1/c`$, the same problems will appear, indicating that one cannot increase the radius of the shell further.

## IV Discussion

One of the most striking uses of D-branes in string theory is as probes of spacetime, often exposing the limitations of supergravity, and providing a cure to some of its pathological solutions. The enhançon mechanism enhancon  provides a beautiful example of this. Studying supertubes on the Gödel-like universe (1) teaches us a similar lesson, that the naive supergravity solution is not valid. As opposed to the enhançon case, we find that the space is sick everywhere, and the question of how to “cure” it does not seem well posed.

Nevertheless, the domain wall solutions we discussed in section III locally look like Gödel universes, and present certain analogies with the enhançon mechanism: in both cases, we keep part of the original metric, and replace the problematic part (the repulson singularity in one case, the region with closed timelike curves in the other) by another solution, separated by a shell formed by the probes themselves. Of course, an obvious difference is that in the enhançon case one keeps the asymptotic form of the metric and changes the interior, while in our case we do the opposite.

In this paper we concentrated on a specific Gödel universe solution of supergravity. Other solutions were studied in gauntlett ; horava ; harmark  involving rotations in more planes. It is a simple check to see that all the solutions in type IIA and IIB suffer from the same problems we described. One has to take the same supertube, or in some cases the T-dual objects, and place them so that their circles follow the closed timelike curves, and the rest of the calculation is identical. Therefore all those spaces are not good string theory backgrounds. We expect this to be a general mechanism that eliminates many solutions with closed timelike curves in string theory.

## Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to Ofer Aharony, Tom Banks, Micha Berkooz, Jacques Distler, Roberto Emparan, Willy Fischler, Surya Ganguli, Shinji Hirano, Eliezer Rabinovici and Kip Thorne for interesting discussions on related topics. We are particularly grateful to Roberto Emparan for pointing out a mistake in an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to thank the ITP at Stanford university and the organizers of the Stanford-Weizmann workshop, where this project started. BF would further like to thank the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics at UCSC and JS would like to thank the Perimeter Institute and ITP at the University of Amsterdam for their hospitality. BF is supported through a European Community Marie Curie Fellowship, and also by the Israel-U.S. Binational Science Foundation, the IRF Centers of Excellence program, the European RTN network HPRN-CT-2000-00122 and by Minerva. JS is supported by the Phil Zacharia Postdoctoral Fellowship.


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# Quantum Solution of Coordination Problems

## Abstract

We present a quantum solution to coordination problems that can be implemented with existing technologies. It provides an alternative to existing approaches, which rely on explicit communication, prior commitment or trusted third parties. This quantum mechanism applies to a variety of scenarios for which existing approaches are not feasible.

Keywords; coordination games, mechanism design, quantum information

Classification C71,C72

The existence of multiple equilibria in economic systems can lead to coordination failures and consequently to inefficient outcomes. Examples that have been extensively studied range from firms having to decide whether or not to enter a competitive market and and how to position their offerings, to the coordinated resolution of social dilemmas involved in the provision of public goods.

Coordination problems have long been studied in the context of game theory , where the coordination game is specified by a payoff matrix which yields several Nash equilibria. These equilibria can at times give the same payoff to all players, in which case the problem is for them to agree on which one to coordinate, or different payoffs, leading to a competitive coordination game in which players prefer different equilibria.

A simple example of a cooperative coordination game is that of two people having to choose driving on the left or the right side of the road, for which the payoff matrix is shown in Table 1. As can be seen, there are two Nash equilibria, with equal payoffs, corresponding to both drivers choosing the same side of the road. The coordination problem consists in both drivers finding a way to agree on which side of the road to drive.

This and many other instances of coordination problems can be solved in several ways. A first solution resorts to a trusted third party who knows the preferences of the participants and is given the authority to pick an equilibrium which is then broadcasted to the players. In the case of competitive coordination problems the trusted third party may also have enforcement powers, since some players may wish to move the group to a more preferable equilibrium.

Another solution to coordination problems involves communication among players so that they can negotiate a choice. In the case of cooperative games even one player flipping a coin and broadcasting the result as the corresponding choice provides an effective solution. In a competitive setting, the negotiation might be such that the players wish to choose their equilibria at random as it would then be perceived as a fair choice. This case would require a trusted mechanism of coin flipping over a communication line, which can be enforced through cryptographic protocols.

A third mechanism for solving coordination problems invokes social norms, in which common knowledge of the participants’ preferences can distinguish a given equilibrium from the others, as in the case of choosing the largest river as a boundary between two countries. Such distinguished equilibria are often called focal points .

While these mechanisms can solve in principle coordination problems, there are times when none of these options are available, either because they are too expensive, slow or difficult to implement, or because privacy worries prevent the participants from using any of these options. Even worse, a constraint from a larger context, such as the need to use a mixed strategy, might make it disadvantageous for players to have their choices revealed in advance. Furthermore in cases where communication between parties is asynchronous there is the additional problem of achieving common knowledge , i.e. all parties know that the others know how to act. A simple example is that of using email to coordinate a meeting when one is not sure that recipients have read their emails and acknowledgements before the start of the meeting .

It would appear that in these instances the only choice left for the participants is to choose at random which strategy to pursue, which would lead to many instances of coordination failures and a consequent reduction in their respective payoffs. Nevertheless, as we now show, there is an alternative and superior solution, which resorts to quantum mechanics to solve coordination problems without communication, trusted third parties or prearranged strategies. Moreover, this quantum solution is implementable in the real world, thus making coordination problems easier to solve.

The way quantum dynamics allows for the practical solution of a coordination problem is via the generation of particles in entangled states. Quantum entanglement results in the appearance of specific quantum correlations between parts of a composite system, which can be exploited for quantum information processing . In particular, parametric-down conversion techniques can produce twin photons which are perfectly quantum correlated in time, space and often in polarization . These photons can then be physically separated at arbitrary distances so that each participant gets one of the entangled particles.

In the simplest case, where players face two choices, 0, and 1, they can use entangled particles with two physically observable states, such as their spin or polarization. As shown in Fig. 1, the corresponding state is then given by a superposition of the two correlated possibilities, denoted as $`(|0,0+|1,1)/\sqrt{2}`$. At a time of their choosing, each participant observes the state of their particle, resulting into a 0 or a 1 state, and makes the corresponding choice. The key aspect that makes this technique different from random choices is that entanglement implies a definite correlation between the two measurements, i.e. both players get either a $`0`$ or a $`1`$, irrespective of the spatial separation between them, and without communication.

One could argue that this correlation could also be achieved classically by flipping two coins in advance, hiding them into two boxes given go the players which they then open at some later time. However, unlike the entangled quantum solution we just described, this procedure predetermines the outcome, which may not be desirable if the players wish to defer the choices as long as possible. In this case an adversary might learn how the players will choose long before they actually do, and thus adjust its strategy accordingly.

To illustrate this consider the case of two players trying to coordinate on a mixed strategy against a third one without resorting to previous agreement or communication, as in the case of a coordinated attack on a rival or enemy. For the sake of example, consider the game of rock, paper, scissors, in which the two allied players must make the same choice to have any chance of winning. If the allies make different choices their payoffs are zero and the third player gets a payoff of 1. When the two allies make the same choice the payoff to the allies and the third player are given the payoff matrix of the rock, paper scissors game, which is shown in Table 2.

This game has the feature that no single choice is best, i.e. there is no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. Instead, the best strategy for rational players is to make the choices randomly and with equal probability, which gives it a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium with expected payoff of 1/3.

For the full game without coordination the pair of allied players only has 1/3 chance of making the same choice, and another 1/3 to win against their opponent, leading to an expected payoff of 1/9. If they can be perfectly coordinated their payoff would be 1/3. In this example it is necessary to play random choices because any a priori commitment between the allied pair would no longer be a random strategy, and therefore discoverable by observation. If they instead use a pseudorandom number generator with a common seed, it could be compromised by the opponent discovering either the random pattern or the seed. On the other hand, if one of the allied pairs were to use a perfect private coin toss and communicated it to the other, it would risk being detected or jammed, leading to loss.

Using the quantum mechanism the players both can have undetectable randomness in their choices, no communication between them and still maintain complete correlation at every period of the game. Entanglement thus offers a way for the players to get correlated random bits they can use in addition to any public, broadcast information, without communication or prior agreement.

Furthermore, this quantum solution cannot be achieved via a classical simulation since we are requiring the absence of any communication among the participants. This is unlike the situation with other quantum games proposals .

Thus, quantum information processing, which already offers the potential for improved computation, cryptography and economic mechanisms  can lead to a perfect solution of complex coordination problems without resorting to the complex signaling procedures that have been discussed since they were first studied systematically. In particular it solves the problem of achieving common knowledge in the presence of asynchronous communication.

This quantum solution of a coordination problem is not just a theoretical construct, as it can be implemented over relatively large distances. It has been recently shown that it is possible to produce pairs of entangled photons using parametric down conversion, that can be sent separately over distances over many kilometers. If the lifetime of the entangled state is long, each participant can then receive an entangled photon and perform a polarization measurement later, thus not having to communicate with each other during the whole procedure. On the other hand, if the lifetime of the entangled state is shorter than the period of the game, photons can be regenerated periodically, thereby requiring a transmission channel from the source to the participants (but not between the participants). In this case the advantage lies not in avoiding the possibility of blocked communication by an adversary, but in avoiding the detection of a coordinated solution. This makes for a feasible quantum solution to coordination problems that can be implemented with current technology, in contrast with most schemes for arbitrary quantum computation.

This scheme can also be extended to situations involving many participants. If the problem can be decomposed into independent pairwise coordination that can be then coordinated at a higher level (hierarchy) then the solution we described above can be applied to each pair. More interestingly, it has been recently shown  that it is possible to create entangled states of many particles in a single step and on demand, which implies that coordination problems involving many participants can also be solved using the scheme proposed in this paper.

Finally, this quantum approach to coordination games is more general than it may first appear, as it can also be applied to a variety of economic situations that involve achieving some or partial coordination among members of a group.

One example is several groups participating in an auction in which the value of an item to a person depends on what others in their group get. For example imagine bidding for construction tools that members of a group share and the auction is for each item separately. In this case, the valuation depends on the complementarity of the goods that the whole group gets, rather than who in the group gets each item, While more complicated than the pure coordination game we discussed because, this problem also involves a bidding strategy, and thus the need for the group to coordinate without signaling to other groups. The coordination part of this problem can be solved by having a source produce a quantum state $`|S`$ given by an entangled state that for the case of two particles could be written as

$$|S=a|AA+a|BB+b|AB+b|BA$$
(1)
with the constants, $`a,b`$, chosen to favor a particular outcome and subject to the normalization condition $`2|a|^2+2|b|^2=1`$. Notice that these coefficients allow balancing the two parts of the utilities involved in this game, the desire for coordination and for low cost to the participants. For example, as cost difference increases, one could reduce $`a`$, and increase $`b`$. In other words, given a cost difference between items, one can pick a suitable superposition of states.

Another situation where our quantum mechanism could be useful is a coordination problem in which each player does not know others involved in the game, or they wish to remain mutually anonymous and avoid communication. If the interested players are known to be members of a larger group ), and entangled states are easily distributed among members of the larger group, those players interested in coordinating their activities can use the entangled states to ensure all players make the same choice.

As we have shown, the utilization of simple properties of quantum states gives a solution to coordination problems that does not require communication, trusted third parties involved in the decision making or prior commitment. Equally interesting, this solution is achievable with today’s technology and opens the practical use of quantum entanglement in real world problems.