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# Intermittency and scale-free networks: a dynamical model for human language complexity

## I introduction

This introduction is divided into two parts, the former being devoted to a general discussion concerning the challenging issue of the search for crucial events, in general. The second is of linguistic interest. This division reflects the twofold purpose of this paper. In fact, the main result of this paper is the foundation of the Zipf’ law, a subject of theoretical interest to understand the origin and evolution of language sole . The foundation of this important empirical rule is here discussed from a special perspective. This is the perspective of complexity conceived as a new condition of physics. Of course, this condition is not expressed by regular dynamics, and it is not expressed by thermodynamics, either. This is rather a regime of transition from dynamics to thermodynamics lasting for a virtually infinite time, so as to realize a new legitimate state of physics, affording a perspective valid also in the case of non-physical systems. A paradigm for this condition is given by the renewal theory processes cox . Thus, we make use of the renewal theory to define the concept of crucial events.

In conclusion, the first purpose of this paper is to contribute the progress of a statistical method for the search of crucial events, using written texts as an illustration of the method. On this important issue we do not reach conclusive results but the formulation of a conjecture for future work. However, we note that the linguistic results rest on a general approach to the detection of rare and significant events. This general approach to the detection of crucial events might yield useful applications to many fields, from the early diagnosis of diseases to the war against terrorism. Thus, we devote the first part of the introduction to the definition of crucial events. The second part of the introduction serves the purpose of introducing the reader to the ideas and jargon of linguistics, so as to fully appreciate the main result of this paper, which is, in fact, of linguistic interest.

### I.1 Definition of crucial events

Let us consider a generic time series. This is a sequel of values occurring at different times and mirroring the properties of a given complex system, this being either the heart-beating memorybeyondmemory , seismic movement earthquakes , or a written text, as in this paper. Let us label, or mark, some of these values with a given criterion, which depends, of course, on the conjectures that we make about the process under study. Labeling a value implies that we judge it to be significant. Thus, it is evident that the more we know about the process, the more plausible the conjecture behind the labeling criterion adopted. To give some illustrative example, let us mention some of the criteria recently adopted. In the case of heart-beating memorybeyondmemory , we are observing the time distances $`T`$ between a R peak and the next, which for a very large numbers of beats $`t`$ becomes equivalent to a continuous function, $`T(t)`$, of a continuous variable $`t`$. We divide the ordinate axis into small interval of size $`s`$, and we record, or mark, the beats at which $`T(t)`$ moves from one strip to another. In the case of earthquakes, we label only the seismic fluctuations of intensity larger than a given threshold earthquakes . Finally, in the case of a written text, as explained later in this paper, we mark the salient words, these being the words that in a given text appear with a frequency larger than in a suitable reference text.

Now we have to address the important issue of establishing whether the labeled values are crucial events, or not. This, in turn, requires that we define what we mean by *crucial* event. Let us define first the crucial events by mean of their statistical properties. Then we shall explain why events with these statistical properties must be considered crucial. We use the prescriptions illustrated in the fundamental paper of Ref. giacomo . We assign the symbol $`1`$ to all the marked values and the symbol $`0`$ to the others. Then we convert the time series into a set of random walks with the method detailed in Ref. giacomo . We use the walking rule that the walker makes a step ahead by the quantity $`1`$ any time we meet a marked value, namely, the symbol $`1`$. When we meet the symbol $`0`$ the walker remains in a state of rest. The marked values are much less numerous that the unmarked values. Thus, we shall have many $`0`$’s and a few $`1`$’s. A sequence of many $`0`$’s between two $`1`$’s is termed a laminar region. It is important to evaluate the time distance between one marked value and the next, which is equivalent to determining the distribution of the time lengths of the laminar regions. This will result in a time distribution $`\psi (t)`$. Let us assume that the waiting time distribution $`\psi (t)`$ is an inverse power law with index $`\mu `$. The Poisson case corresponds to $`\mu =\mathrm{}`$. Then we study the resulting diffusion process and we establish its scaling parameter $`\delta `$. If the index $`\mu `$ fits the condition $`2<\mu <3`$ and it is related to the scaling coefficient by the relation $`\delta =1/(\mu 1)`$, or, if the scaling index fits the condition $`\mu >3`$ and the scaling coefficient has the ordinary value $`\delta =0.5`$, the labelled values are crucial events.

Let us explain the physical motivation for this definition. First, meeting a $`0`$ is not significant because the $`0`$’s are closely correlated and meeting one of them implies that that we shall meet many other $`0`$’s, before finding a $`1`$ again. In a sense the $`0`$’s are driven by the $`1`$’s. A given $`1`$ is the beginning of a laminar region and, consequently, of a cascade of $`0`$’s. On the other hand, if $`\delta `$ and $`\mu `$ violate the relations for the $`1`$’s to be crucial, there might exist a correlation between two different laminar regions. This suggests that the $`1`$’s might be part of a predictable cascade of some other genuinely crucial events, not yet revealed by the statistical analysis, and that our conjecture is not correct.

We have to explain why $`\mu <\mathrm{}`$ is an important condition for our definition of crucial events. We limit ourselves to noticinggerardo  that $`\mu =\mathrm{}`$ is equivalent to setting Poisson statistics, implying, in turn, a memoryless condition that seems to be incompatible with the labelled values to be crucial. This is a poorly understood property, in spite of the fact that 32 years ago Bedeaux, Lindenberg and Shuler katja  wrote a clarifying paper on this subject. We refer the reader to this fundamental paperkatja  to understand the reasons why we imagine the crucial events to be incompatible with Poisson statistics. Actually, the labelled values seem to become crucial when the diffusion process they generate is anomalous, namely $`\delta >0.5`$, which implies $`\mu <3`$. It has to be pointed out that $`\mu <2`$ implies a condition where the mean length of the laminar region is infinite. This means that in this region the process becomes non-stationary, due to the lack of an invariant measure massi . From an intuitive point of view, the origin of non-stationary behavior is as follows. If we keep drawing random number from the distribution $`\psi (t)`$, the mean value of $`t`$ tends to increase with the number of drawings. This is so because, if it did not increase the overall mean value would be finite, in conflict with the fact that $`\mu <2`$ produces an infinite mean value. Thus the condition $`\mu =2`$ is the border between the stationary, $`\mu >2`$, and the non-stationary condition, $`\mu <2`$. As we shall see, this border has an interesting meaning for linguistics.

It would be an interesting issue to assess whether crucial events can be located in this region. We limit ourselves to noticing that the results of the statistical analysis of time series seem to denote that complex systems are characterized by values of $`\mu `$ very close to the border without ever entering the non-stationary dominion $`\mu <2`$. In conclusion, with the prescription of Ref. giacomo  we are in a position to assess if the marked values correspond to crucial events, or do not.

### I.2 The meaning of Zipf’s law in linguistics

Semiotics studies linguistic signs, their meanings, and identifies the relations between sign and meaning, and among signs. The relations among signs (letters, words), are divided into two large groups, namely the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic, corresponding to what are called Saussurre’s dimensions silverman . A clearcut definition of the two dimensions is outside the scope of this paper, but one can grasp an understanding of them by looking at Fig. 1. The abscissa axis represents the syntagmatic dimension, while the ordinate axis represents the paradigmatic one. Along the abscissa certain grammatical rules pose constraints on how words follow each other. We can say that this dimension is temporal, with a casual order. An article (as “a” or “the”), for instance, may be followed by an adjective or a noun, but not by a verb of finite form. At a larger “time-scale”, pragmatic constraints rule the succession of concepts, to give a logic to the discourse. The other axis, on the other hand, refers to a “mental” space. The speaker has in mind a repertoir of words, divided in many categories, which can be hierarchically complex and refer to syntactical or semantic “interchangeability”. Different space-scales of word paradigms can be associated to different levels of this hierarchy. After an article, to follow the preceding example, one can choose, at a syntactical level, among all nouns of a dictionary. However, at a deeper level, semantic constraints reduce the avalaible words to be chosen. For instance, after “a dog” one can choose any verb, but in practice only among verbs selected by semantic constraints (a dog runs or sits, but does not read or smoke). The sentence “a dog graduates”, for instance, fits paradigmatic and syntagmatic rules behind Fig. 1, but the semantics would in general forbid the production of such a “nonsensical” sentence.

The two dimensions are therefore not quite orthogonal, and connect at a cognitive level. The main focus of this paper is to show that this connection, which is well known at a short scales, is in fact reproduced at all scales. We will also show that both dimensions are scale free and that the very complexity of linguistic structures in both dimensions can be taken into account in a unified model, which is able to explain most statistical features of human language, including, at the largest scales, the celebrated Zipf’s law zipf .

Zipf’s law, which relates the rank $`r`$ of a words to its frequency $`f`$ in a corpus, obviuosly points to constraints on the frequencies of words. Remarkably, this does not mean that the probability of a word is actually defined. In fact, a word may have a small or large frequency depending on the genre of the corpus (i.e. a large collection of written text) under study, and even two extremely large corpora of the same type fail in reproducing the same word frequencies. It is however remarkable that the occurrence of words is such that for any corpus and for any natural language the same universal property emerges, this being that there are only a few frequent words and there are, on the contraty, many words that are encountered, for instance, only once or twice. To be more precise, let us define word rank $`r`$, which is a property depending on the corpus adopted, as follows. One assigns rank 1 to the most frequent word, rank 2 to the second frequent one, and so on. Each word is uniquelly associated to a rank, and, although this number varies form corpus to corpus, one always finds that

$$f\frac{1}{r},$$
(1)
We shall derive this law from a complexity model of language, along the following lines. We recognize that there is no experimental linguistic evidence that word frequencies tend to well-defined probabilities. However, we adopt a probabilistic approach, namely, we assume that there exists, for a randomly selected word, the probability of having the frequency $`f`$, denoted as $`P(f)`$. Operatively, we measure $`P(f)`$ by counting how many words have a certain frequency $`f`$. In Section III we show that a $`P(f)`$ compatible with the Zipf’s law can be directly derived from the model proposed herein, thus providing a solid experimental support to our model. In order to fulfill our program, we shall assume a long-range statistical mutual independence for the occurrence of different concepts. This hypothesis is appealing, since this assumption means that every and each occurrence of a concept makes entropy increase, and therefore we identify the mathematical information (i.e. entropy) with the common-sense information (i.e. the occurrence of concepts). Unfortunately, a concept is not, a priori, a well defined quantity. Herein we shall assume that concepts are represented by words (or better by lemmata) or by groups of semantically similar words or lemmata111A lemma is defined as a representive word of a class of words, having different morphological features. For instance the word “dogs”has lemma “dog”, and word “sleeping” has lemma “sleep”..

Because of the mutual independence among different concepts, we can extract from a single corpus as many “experiments” as the number of concepts. For each experiment we select only one concept and we mark the occurrence of the selected word or group of words corresponding to this concept. We shall use an advanced time-series analysis to study the statistical properties of the dynamical occurrence of the markers. In fact, as mentioned in the first part of this introduction, we adopt the DE method giacomo , which has been proved by earlier investigation memorybeyondmemory ; earthquakes  to be an efficient way to detect the statistics of crucial events. We shall discover the important result that the adoption of DE method allows us to assess whether a given set of “markers” can be identified with the crucial events or the crucial events are still unknown and we must consequently search for a different set of markers.

The results of the experiments will lead to a language model reproducing the language “complexity”, namely a combination of order and randomness at all scales. The overall dynamics, given by the flow of concepts over time, resemble the dynamics of intermittent dynamical systems, like the Manneville’s Map manneville : These systems have long periods of quiescence followed by bursts of activity. This variability of waiting times between markers of activity is responsible for long-range correlations.

A further aspect of the paper is the connection between space and time complexity, and its application to linguistics. We shall assume that atomic concepts exist and represent nodes of a complex network, connected by arcs representing, when existing, semantic associations between a concept and another. We assume that our markers are actually defined as a group of neighbor nodes. We then assume that language is the result of a random walk, namely a random “associative” travel from concept to concept. The scale-free properties of this network, independently measured by several research groups, including ours, provides a bridge to understand the intermittent dynamics earlier described. In this unified model the network is a representation of Saussurre’s paradigms, whose complexity mirrors the syntagmatic one in the asymptotic limit.

## II DE and concepts

Several papers have recently proposed a new way of detecting long-range effects of non-Poisson statistics giacomo ; giacomo2 ; earthquakes ; nicola ; giulia1 . In short, as mentioned in the first part of Section 1, we define a set of “markers” among the symbols or values of a time series, and we evaluate numerically the probability of having a number $`x`$ of markers in a window of length $`t`$, denoted as $`p(x;t)`$. This statistical analysis is done by moving a window of length $`t`$ along the sequences and counting how many times one finds $`x`$ markers inside this window. Finally, $`p(x;t)`$ is obtained by dividing this number by the total number of windows of size $`t`$, namely by $`Nt+1`$, where $`N`$ is the total length of the sequence. Since we typically deal with large values of both $`x`$ and $`t`$, we legitimately adopt a continuous approximation. Moreover, we make the ergodic and stationary assumption, thereby expecting the emergence at long times of the scaling condition expressed by

$$p(x;t)=\frac{1}{t^\delta }F\left(\frac{xwt}{t^\delta }\right),$$
(2)
where $`w`$ is the overall probability of observing a marker, $`\delta `$ is the scaling index and $`F`$ is a function, sometimes called “master curve”. If $`F`$ is the Gauss function, $`\delta `$ is the known Hurst index, and if the further condition $`\delta =0.5`$ is obeyed, then the process is Poisson, the variable $`x`$ undergoes ordinary Brownian diffusion. According to Ref. katja  the occurrence of markers in time is regulated by random fluctuations, and the diffusion process occurs with no memory.

It straightforward to show that the Shannon Information

$$S(t)=_{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}𝑑xp(x;t)\mathrm{ln}p(x;t)$$
(3)
with condition (2) leads to

$$S(t)=k+\delta \mathrm{ln}t,$$
(4)
where $`k`$ is a constant. The evaluation of the slope according to which $`S`$ increases with $`\mathrm{ln}t`$ provides therefore a measure for the anomalous scaling index $`\delta `$.

Let us briefly mention what we know about applying DE to time series with non-Poisson statistics. We derive from the time series under study an auxiliary sequence, by setting $`\xi _i=1`$ (this means that we find the marker at the $`i`$th position), or $`\xi _i=0`$ (the $`i`$-th symbol, or value, is not a marker). We then assume “informativity” for the markers. As explained in the first part of Section 1, this means that we assume the markers to be crucial events, and, that, consequently, the distance between a given “1”’ and the next does not depend on the distance between this given 1 and the preceding one. As mentioned earlier, if the lengths $`t`$ of the laminar regions are distributed as

$$\psi (t)=(\mu 1)\frac{T^{\mu 1}}{(t+T)^\mu }$$
(5)
($`\psi (t)t^\mu `$ asymptotically is a sufficient condition), then the theory based on CTRW and GCLT yields for $`p(x;t)`$ a truncated Lévy probability distribution function (PDF) giacomo . DE detects the approximate scaling $`\delta `$ of the central part, namely

$$\delta =\frac{1}{\mu 1}\text{if}\mathrm{\hspace{0.25em}2}<\mu <3,\delta =0.5\text{if}\mu >3.$$
(6)
We note that $`p(x;t)`$ is abruptly truncated by a ballistic peak at $`x=0`$ representing the probability of finding no marker up to time $`t`$. However, the diffusion entropy increase is essentially determined by the occurrence of crucial events, thereby leading to the scaling of Eq. (6).

It is worth explaining why the condition $`2<\mu <3`$ means long-range memory. The first, and probably easier way, is based on observing that truncated Lévy probability distribution $`p(x;t)`$ yields:

$$x^2(t)x(t)^2t^{4\mu }$$
(7)
thereby leading, as shown in Ref. elena  , to the correlation function

$$\frac{(\xi (t_1)\xi )(\xi (t_2)\xi )}{\xi ^2}\frac{1}{|t_2t_1|^{\mu 2}}.$$
(8)
Note that the memory stemming from the non-Poisson nature of markers, corresponds in this case to a non-integrable correlation function, which is therefore a clear signal of infinite memory. In the Poissonian case this correlation function would be exponential, thereby indicating a much shorter memory.

There exists a second, and more impressive way, of relating the non-Poisson distribution of waiting times to memory, according to the first part of Section 1. We are observing the fluctuations of a dichotomous variable $`\xi `$, with $`\xi =1`$ implying the occurrence of a crucial event, and $`\xi =0`$ the non-occurrence of events. If the role of time is played by the ordinal number of words, we shall show that a good choice of *semantic* markers makes Eq. (5) become a good model for the dynamics of concept of natural language. The occurrence of Poisson statistics would mean, according to Ref. katja , that the time evolution of markers is driven by fluctuations that are identical to white noise. In conclusion, Poisson statistics would be totally incompatible with the existence of any form of memory. The exponential decay of the correlation function of Eq. (8) would not be a short-time memory, but it would signal the complete lack of memory. The long-range correlation corresponding to $`\mu <3`$, on the contrary, is a clear manifestation of the infinitely extended memory of a text, associated to the strikingly non-Poisson character of the waiting time distribution of Eq.(5).

Eq. (6) giacomo  rests on uncorrelated waiting times between events. This means that if two markers are separated by intervals of words of duration $`\tau _k`$ (the distance in words between the $`k`$-th and the $`k+1`$-th occurrence of the marker) then $`\tau _i\tau _j\delta _{ij}`$, where $`\delta _{ij}`$ is the Kroeneker delta. Under these conditions each event carries the same amount of information. The statistical independence of different laminar regions means that the information carried by the events is maximal for a given waiting time distribution $`\psi (\tau )`$. In a linguistic jargon, we can say that if in a corpus we find a marker (e.g. a list of words) such that $`\delta 1/(\mu 1)`$ then this marker is informative in that corpus. If the markers are not informative, this important condition is violated. We shall see hereby that certain markers, e.g. punctuation marks, are not real events, but are rather modeled by a Copying Mistake Map (CMM) maria . This mean that discourse complex dynamics are such that, although the punctuation marks carry long-range correlations, and consequently the anomalous scaling of $`p(x;t)`$ , the waiting times in the laminar regions determined by these markers are correlate. Punctuation marks are not informative. Their complexity is just a projection of a complexity carried by “concept dynamics”, namely, by the really crucial events.

### II.1 The CMM and non-informative markers

The Copying Mistake Map (CMM) maria  is a model originally introduced to study the anomalous statistics of nucleotides dispersion in coding and non-coding DNA regions. The CMM is a sequence that can be derived from the long-range sequence generated by the waiting tiime distribution of Eq. (5), and corresponding to the long-range correlation function of Eq. (8) as follows. We define the probabilities $`p(1)=ϵ`$ and $`p(2)=1ϵ`$. For any site of the sequence, with label $`i`$, we leave the value $`\xi _i`$ unchanged with probability $`p(1)`$ and, with probability $`p(2)`$ we assign to it a totally random value (copying mistake).

The resulting waiting time distribution undergoes an exponential decay. This is so because the occurrence of a given $`1`$ depends on two distinct possibilities: it can be an “original” $`1`$, or an original $`0`$ turned into $`1`$ by a copying mistake. Formally, we write

$$\psi _{exp}(t)=\psi _{rand}(t)\mathrm{\Psi }_{corr}(t)+\mathrm{\Psi }_{rand}(t)\psi _{corr}(t),$$
(9)
where $`\mathrm{\Psi }(t)_t^{\mathrm{}}𝑑t^{}\psi (t^{})`$ and $`\mathrm{\Psi }_{rand}(t)_t^{\mathrm{}}𝑑t^{}\psi _{rand}(t^{})`$, and

$$\psi _{rand}(t)=\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{2}{1ϵ}\right)\left(\frac{2}{1ϵ}\right)^t.$$
(10)
We note that $`\psi _{rand}(t)`$ and, consequently, $`\mathrm{\Psi }_{rand}(t)`$ undergo an exponential decay. So it does, in the asymptotic limit, the function $`\psi _{exp}(t)`$. What about the DE curve? The theory predicts scafettalatora  a random ($`\delta =0.5`$) behavior for short times, a knee, and a slow transient to the totally correlated behavior. An example of CMM is given by punctuation marks in Natural Language. We choose punctuation marks as markers for an Italian corpus of newspaper and magazines, of more than 300,000 words length, called Italian Treebank (hereafter TB). We assign the value $`0`$ to any word that is not a punctuation mark, and $`1`$ when it is, namely to full stops, commas, etc. A sentence like “Felix, the cat, sleeps!” is therefore transformed into “$`0100101`$”.

Figs. II (a,b and c) show that the choice of these markers yield a time series with the typical properties of a CMM sequence. This means that the waiting times $`\tau _k`$ are correlated. According to section 1A this means that puntuation marks are not crucial events. Notice however that the use of the DE method detects an anomalous scaling parameter $`\delta `$. This means that there are hidden crucial events and that they generate an infinitely extended memory.

### II.2 Concepts as informative markers

More experiments, not reported here, show that the CMM behavior is typical for many characters, and are shared by all the letters of the alphabet, with a $`\delta 0.6`$. Obviously, If the marker is a given letter, the role of time is played by the ordinal number of typographical characters in the text. We note that in Italian the alphabetic characters mirror phonetic. Thus, it is worth of linguistic interest to move from a phonetic to a morphosyntactical level. To do so, a text has to be lemmatized and tagged with respect to its part of speech. After this procedure we can identify as a marker the occurrence of a certain part of speech e.g. article, adverb, adjective, verb, noun, preposition, numeral, punctuation etc.). For instance, the sentence “Felix, the cat, sleeps!” is now transformed into “N P R N P V P”, where N, P, R and V stand for nouns, punctuation, article and verb. If we select a verb as a marker, we have “$`0000010`$”. Fig 3 shows the result of this experiment for verbs and for numerals. We notice that both cases lead to the same asymptotic behavior of the DE, but to completely different behavior of the waiting-times distribution $`\psi (t)`$ (where $`t`$ is the number of words between markers). We notice that DE reveals a long-time memory in both cases. As to $`\psi (t)`$, it shows an exponential truncation at long times, in both cases. However, in the case of numerals we find an extended transient with a slope $`\mu _{numerals}<2`$, corresponding to the non-stationary, as pointed out in the first part of the introduction. This is in fact due to the uneven distribution of numerals in the corpus, since they are encountered more often in the economic part of the Italian newspapers. As incomplete as this analysis is, yet it reveals that numerals reveals carry more information than phonetic markers or even than the verbs, used as markers. This is linguistically interesting, since numerals denote a part of speech, but also a “semantic class”.

We are therefore led to suppose that informative markers are the ones associated with a semantically coherent class of words. This is however a problem, since every single concept is too rare in a balanced corpus (a long text with a variety of genres). The next level of our exploratory search for events is therefore to look for the occurrence of “salient words” in a specialist text. Such a corpus has been made available as the Italian corpus relative to the European project POESIA poesia . POESIA is a European Union funded project whose aim is to protect children from offensive web contents, like, e.g. pornography in WWW URLs. Salient “pornographic” words were automatically extracted by comparing their frequency in an offensive corpus, to the frequency of their occurrence in the balanced TB corpus earlier used. The definition adopted was

$$s(l)=\frac{f_{EC}(l)f_{TB}(l)}{f_{EC}(l)+f_{TB}(l)},$$
(11)
where $`f_{EC}(l)`$ is the frequency, in the erotic corpus, of the lemma $`l`$, and $`f_{TB}(l)`$ is the same property in the reference Italian corpus (Italian Treebank). Salient lemmata were automaticaaly chosen as the 5% with the highest value of $`s`$. Notice that in this experiment all “dirty” words are not taken into consideration, because they do not appear in the reference corpus, and therefore $`s=1`$, but, in effect, cannot be properly defined, especially for extremely rare words. However an offensive metaphoric use of terms is in fact detected, leading to a completely new way to automatic text categorization and filter poesia , using a method, based on DE analysis, called CASSANDRA granada .

Salient words were therefore used as markers for our analysis, as earlier described. The results are shown in Fig. 4, clearly showing that in a specialized corpus, salient words of this genre, pass the test of informativeness. Salient words, and plausibly words in general, are therefore distributed like markers generated by an intermittent dynamical model, with $`\mu 2.1`$ and, in agreement with (6), $`\delta 1/(\mu 1)=0.91`$. We see in the next section how this behavior is plausibly connected with a topological complexity at the paradigmatic level, and in Section III we derive the Zipf’s law from the resulting model.

## III Scale-free networks, intermittency and the Zipf’s law

In this section we outline a cognitive model that serves the purpose of connecting structure and dynamics. Allegrini et al. ilc  identified semantic classes in the Italian corpus, by looking at paradigmatic properties of interchangeability of classes of verbs with classes of nouns. They defined “super-classes” of verbs and nouns as “substitutability islands”, namely groups of nouns and verbs sharing the properties that in the corpus you find each verb of the class co- occurring, in a context, with each noun of the class ilc . This is precisely a direct application of the notion of “paradigm”. Let us call $`p_v(c)`$ and $`p_n(c)`$, respectively, the number of verbs or nouns belonging to a number $`c`$ of classes. They found that

$`p_v(c){\displaystyle \frac{1}{c^{1+\eta }}}`$
$`p_n(c){\displaystyle \frac{1}{c^{1+\eta }}},`$ (12)
where $`\eta `$ is a number whose absolute value is (much) smaller than $`1`$.

Working along the same lines, other authors smallworldenglish  found a “small world” topology smallworld , by looking at the number of synonyms in an English thesaurus, for each English lemma. We therefore assume that this kind of structure is general for any language. Let us therefore imagine that the paradigmatic structure of concepts is a scale-free network and consider a random walk in this “cognitive space”. Let us make the following assumptions:

* The statistical weight of the $`i`$-th node is $`\omega _ic_i`$
* The dynamics of the system is ergodic so that the characteristic recurrence time is $`\tau _ic_i^1`$
* The above properties hold for all nodes, with the same functional form for the recurrence time distribution, e.g. $`\psi _i(t)=(1/\tau _i)\mathrm{exp}\left(t/\tau _i\right)`$

Now we imagine that selecting a concept means selecting a few neighbouring nodes. This collection of nodes, due to the scale-free hypothesis, shares the same scaling properties as the complete scale free network, namely $`p(c)c^\nu `$. Therefore we have that

$`\psi _{concept}(t)={\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}\omega _i\psi _i(t){\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}c_i^2e^{c_it}{\displaystyle 𝑑cc^2e^{ct}\frac{1}{c^\nu }}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{t^{3\nu }}}.`$ (13)
Thus, we recover the intermittent model of Eq.(5).

At this stage, deriving the Zipf’s law $`fr^a`$, with $`a`$ close to unity, becomes a simple exercise Let us define frequency probability $`P(f)`$

$$P(f)df=prob(r)drP(f)f^{\frac{a+1}{a}}$$
(14)
Next, let us notice that $`P(f)`$ must be a stable distribution. In fact, the Zipf’s law is valid for every corpus. In particular, if it is valid for corpus $`A`$ and for corpus $`B`$, it is valid also for the corpus $`A+B`$, where $`+`$ means the concatenation of corpora. If we keep going on with this concatenating process, we shall have a corpus

Total Corpus = Corpus A + Corpus B + … .

Thus, the frequency of a word in the total corpus, $`f_{tot}`$, is written in terms of the single frequencies $`f_1`$, $`f_2`$, $`\mathrm{}`$, and of total lengths $`N_1`$, $`N_2`$, $`\mathrm{}`$ of the single corpora, as follows

$`f_{tot}={\displaystyle \frac{f_1+f_2+\mathrm{}}{N_1+N_2+\mathrm{}}}={\displaystyle \frac{1}{_iN_i}}{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}f_i,`$ (15)
i.e., the Generalized Central Limit Theorem GCLT  applies. This means that the probability of frequency $`P(f)`$ is a Lévy $`\alpha `$-stable distribution. This probability of finding $`f`$ occurrences of a word in a corpus of a given length can be identified with $`p(x;t)`$ of Section II, if we take into proper consideration the length $`t`$ as a parameter. We have earlier noticed that $`p(x;t)`$ in language is Lévy process, with $`\delta 1`$, and therefore with a tail $`P(f)f^2`$. In other words through (14) we recover (1) i.e. the Zipf’s law.

## IV conclusions

We have identified the cognitive process governing human language, and proved it to be complex at both syntagmatic and paradigmatic level. Although the study is conducted on Italian written corpora, we are inclined to believe that the property found is language independent, general and important, as emerging from a decade of studies on the Zipf’s law. Thus, we find that each concept corresponds to a scaling close to $`\delta =1`$, this being consistent with the Zip s law. The complexity of language is located at the border between the stationary ($`\mu >2`$ and non-stationary ($`\mu <2`$) condition massi . As pointed out in Section 1A, we adopt the perspective of complexity as a condition of transition from dynamics to thermodynamics. Within this perspective, we notice that, although the condition $`\mu >1`$ means aging jacopo  and a transition from dynamic to thermodynamics in a virtually infinite time, a thermodynamic condition exists, and diffusion process tends to approach the scaling regime with $`t\mathrm{}`$. In the case $`\mu <2`$, no thermodynamic condition exists, and the stationary condition cannot be realized, not even ideally. We see that specialist texts are located within the ergodic regime ($`\delta =0.91`$ in the experiment illustrated in this paper). We are convinced that this is a sign of the fact that language rests on the subtle balance between two opposite needs, *learnability*, which is the property consenting a child to learn a language, and variability, namely the need of exploring a virtually infinite cognitive space. Thus we are convinced that the results of this paper might help to understand the language complexity and evolution in children during the learning years, and in psychopathological subject. Thus we propose its use for future research work that might lead to the understanding of certain mental diseases with no recourse to invasive diagnostic methods.

We think that the results of this paper might also help understanding the complexity of really living systems. We have seen that a random walk through the network, with the scale-free hypothesis generates memory and long-range correlation. The speaker sets concepts in a temporal order, but this corresponds to complex relations in a non-linear space. We argue that a similar mechanism may also be chosen by really living systems. Thus, the relational interconnectivity of chemicals in the living cell may depend on the long-range memory of the cell function, or influence it. From a Language Engineering point of view, this study provides a theoretical background for a completely new strategy of automatic text categorization. A prototype is being implemented as a semantic filter poesia . We think that the proposed test for informativness for a set of markers will be beneficial more in general for the analysis of time series.

Finally, we want to stress that the method successfully adopted in this paper to establish the information content of markers, or labeled values, of the time series, might have possible applications to the war against terrorism. In fact, if the intelligence community affords suggestions on the possible crucial words of a new wave of terrorist attack, the adoption of this method allows an automatic way to identify the messages with a terrorist content, more or a less in the same way here illustrated to filter text with a pornographic content.

*Acnowledgments* Financial support from ARO, through Grant DAAD19-02-0037, is gratefully acknowledged.


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# Medium induced jet absorption in relativistic heavy ion collisions

## I Introduction

In relativistic heavy ion collisions at 62.4 $`<\sqrt{s_{NN}}<`$ 200 GeV in the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC), partons scattered with large $`Q^2`$ become a valuable tool to study nuclear matter under extreme conditions. Due to the large $`Q^2`$, the hard scattering occurs early in the collisions, thus the scattered partons may directly probe the subsequently produced hot, dense and strongly interacting medium.

In collisions of elementary particles, i.e. in the absence of a dense medium, the hard scattered partons typically fragment into two back-to-back jets of hadrons. These hadrons have large transverse momentum ($`p_T`$) and pronounced azimuthal angular correlations. The production cross sections can be calculated with perturbative QCD (pQCD) based on the fragmentation theorem and extrapolated to heavy ion collisions. Theoretical studies predict that the hard scattered partons suffer a large energy loss by multiple scattering and induced gluon radiation as they propagate through dense matter Gyu90 . Unlike energy loss in QED, the radiative gluon energy loss per unit length $`dE/dx`$ not only depends on the color charge density and the momentum distribution of the partons in the medium, but also linearly depends on the thickness of the medium, due to the non-Abelian nature of gluon radiation in QCD BDMPS ; baier .

Data from Au + Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ = 130 and 200 GeV have revealed rich information on high $`p_T`$ phenomena. One of the most interesting results is the apparent “jet quenching” in central collisions, observed as suppression of the hadron yield by a factor of 4–5 ppg014 ; ppg023 ; starch  and hadron back-to-back correlation strength by a factor of 5–10 starbtob , compared to expectations based on the underlying nucleon-nucleon collisions. The absence of these phenomena in $`d`$ \+ Au collisions suggests that the observed suppression in central Au + Au collisions is indeed an effect of the dense medium created during the collisions, consistent with parton energy loss in the dense medium ppg028 ; daustar ; dauphobos ; daubrahms .

Both the suppression of the high $`p_T`$ hadron yield and the back-to-back angular correlations show a characteristic centrality dependence, which seems to be independent of $`p_T`$ for $`p_T>`$ 4.5 GeV/$`c`$ ppg014 ; ppg023 ; starch . Interestingly, in this $`p_T`$ range, particle production seems consistent with jet fragmentation, despite the suppression. Specifically, experiments have observed:

1. An identical spectral shape compared to $`p`$ \+ $`p`$ collisions within systematic errors ppg023 ; starch .
2. A similar suppression for charged hadrons and $`\pi ^0`$’s ppg023  and for charged hadron, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, and $`K_s^0`$ starks .
3. A $`h/\pi ^0`$ ratio consistent with values observed in $`p`$ \+ $`p`$ collisions, indicating a similar particle composition in $`p`$ \+ $`p`$ and Au + Au at high $`p_T`$ ppg015 ; ppg023 .
4. Strength, width, and charge composition of near angle correlation consistent with jet fragmentation starbtob .
5. $`x_T`$ scaling of pion production cross section in Au + Au between $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ = 130 and 200 GeV is similar to $`p`$ \+ $`p`$ collisions ppg023 .

The data suggest that high $`p_T`$ particles come dominantly from jet fragmentation in vacuum.

In relativistic heavy-ion collisions, energy is deposited in the overlap region between two colliding nuclei. The size, shape and energy density of the medium formed in this region strongly depends on the impact parameter of the collision. The amount of medium a hard scattered parton traverses, and subsequently its energy loss, varies with the centrality of the collision and also the azimuthal angle with respect to the reaction plane. If the parton energy loss is large, the surviving partons will be emitted dominantly near the outer layer of the overlap region bjorken2 . The partons moving towards the surface (near side) traverse on average less material than those going in opposite direction (away side). Thus partons scattered to the near side are likely to escape with little energy loss, while the away side partons are likely to lose significant energy and thus are suppressed more strongly.

It was shown before xinnianprl ; ivanprl ; ursprl ; baier2  that for a static non-Abelian partonic medium, the mean total energy loss depends quadratically on the medium size. In addition, the ‘dynamical scaling law‘ allows to write the parton energy loss for an expanding medium in terms of an equivalent static medium with a linear dependence on the path length ursprl . Thus to the first order, one can decouple details of the energy loss formulation, which is complicated and model dependent, from the simple geometry of the medium. Recently, several authors have modelled the energy loss of hard scattered partons in Au + Au collisions xnwang3 ; vitevv2 ; mueller ; nara ; wangnew ; shuryak2 . Different theoretical approaches for the energy loss have been used and compared to experimental data like the nuclear modification factor $`R_{AA}`$, the back-to-back jet correlation strength, and the azimuthal anisotropy of particle production $`v_2`$. In general, reasonable agreement between the model calculations and experimental data can be achieved.

In this paper, we present a simple model of jet absorption in an extremely opaque medium, following the approach in Ref. shuryak1  that was used to set a limit on the expected azimuthal anisotropy due to jet quenching. The model is equivalent to an extreme jet energy loss scenario in which most of the energy is lost in a single scattering. We use this simplified model to focus on the geometric aspect of the jet propagation in dense medium. After incorporating a realistic nuclear geometry, we demonstrate that the centrality dependence of the high $`p_T`$ suppression of the yield and of the back-to-back correlation strength can be described quantitatively. We also discuss the sensitivity of our results on the jet absorption patterns and different collision geometry assumptions, and make predictions for the system size dependence.

## II Collision Geometry and Jet Absorption: the Model

Our discussion is limited to centrality dependence of the suppression pattern over the $`p_T`$ range of 4.5 to 10 GeV/$`c`$, where the hadron suppression is approximately constant ppg023 . Throughout the discussion, the average suppression values for each centrality bin from the data are used to compare with our calculation. Furthermore, since hadron production in this $`p_T`$ region seems to be consistent with vacuum jet fragmentation, we neglect the medium modification of jet fragmentation and assume that the suppression for partons is identical to the one observed for hadrons111Due to the steeply falling power-law spectra of scattered partons, the hadron $`p_T`$ spectra is dominated by fragments biased towards large $`z`$. As was shown in Ref.jacob , the shape of the hadron spectra becomes nearly identical to the shape of the parton spectra, independent of the fragmentation process. Since we model jet absorption at the parton level, the suppression of hadrons thus should be approximately the same as the suppression of partons..

The collision geometry is modelled by a Monte Carlo simulation of Au + Au collisions based on the Glauber approach glauber1 . For the Au nucleus a Woods-Saxon density distribution with radius $`R=6.38`$ fm and diffusivity $`a=0.53`$ fm is used glauber2 . We calculate for each simulated Au + Au collision the underlying number of nucleon-nucleon collisions ($`N_{\text{coll}}`$) and the number of participating nucleons ($`N_{\text{part}}`$), assuming the inelastic nucleon-nucleon cross section is $`\sigma _{NN}^{\text{inel}}=42`$ mb.

Centrality classes are defined from the fractional cross section by cutting on the impact parameter of the collisions. However, the centrality determination is insensitive to the specific cuts and consequently methods employed elsewhere ppg001 ; star ; dimacent  give similar results. The average number of participants, nucleon-nucleon collisions and impact parameter for different centrality classes are listed in Table. 1. For each centrality class, we also calculate the participant density profile, $`\rho _{\text{part}}(x,y)`$, and the nucleon-nucleon collision density profile, $`\rho _{\text{coll}}(x,y)`$, in the plane transverse to the beam direction. The density profiles for a central event class and a peripheral class are shown in Fig. 1; the peak values of the collision and participant densities are also listed in Table 1 for all centrality classes.

In the following we assume that the energy density is proportional to the participant density. This is motivated by the recognition that the bulk particle production scales approximately with the number of participants npartscale ; sasha ; Bialas ; dimacent . In a later section we study the sensitivity of our results on this assumption. To give the participant density a physical scale we relate it to the energy density using the Bjorken estimate bjorken ,

$$ϵ_{\text{bj}}=\frac{E}{\tau _0A}\frac{N_{\text{part}}}{\tau _0\pi r_0^2\left(\frac{N_{\text{part}}}{2}\right)^{2/3}}$$
(1)
where $`\tau _0`$ = 0.2 – 1 $`\text{fm}/c`$ is the formation time, $`r_0`$ = 1.2 fm is the effective nucleon radius, and $`N_{\text{part}}`$ is the number of participating nucleons. For central collisions the experimentally determined value of $`ϵ_{\text{bj}}`$ is $``$ 5 GeV/$`\text{fm}^3`$ ppg002  for $`\tau _0`$ = 1 $`\text{fm}/c`$. With approximately 350 participants the scale factor to convert participant density to $`ϵ_{\text{bj}}`$ is 2 GeV/fm for $`\tau _0=1\text{fm}/c`$ or 10 GeV/fm for $`\tau _0=0.2\text{fm}/c`$.

Binary scaling of hard scattering assumes that the incoming parton distribution in Au + Au collisions is a superposition of the individual nucleon parton distribution functions. According to the factorization theorem the probability for the hard scattering processes in Au + Au is then proportional to $`\rho _{\text{coll}}`$. Therefore we generate back-to-back parton pairs in the transverse plane with a distribution of $`\rho _{\text{coll}}(x,y)`$ and isotropically in azimuth. These partons are then propagated through the nuclear medium with density proportional to $`\rho _{\text{part}}(x,y)`$. The survival probability of a parton produced at $`(x,y)`$ along direction ($`n_x`$,$`n_y`$) is calculated as shuryak1

$$f=\text{exp}(\kappa I),$$
(2)
where $`\kappa `$ is the absorption strength, which is the only free parameter in the model. $`I`$ is the matter integral along the path of the parton, which is calculated as,

$$I=_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑ll\frac{l_0}{l+l_0}\rho (x+\left(l+l_0\right)n_x,y+\left(l+l_0\right)n_y)$$
(3)
This parameterization corresponds to a quadratic dependence of the absorption ($`ldl`$) in a longitudinally expanding medium ($`\frac{l_0}{l+l_0}`$222The effect due to transverse expansion was shown to be small vitevv2 . . Here we assume that partons travel with speed of the light and that they sense the dense matter after a formation time of 0.2 $`\text{fm}/c`$ or a distance of $`l_0`$ = 0.2 fm. However, the results presented in this paper do not depend strongly on the choice of $`l_0`$.

The absorption strength $`\kappa `$ is then fixed in central Au + Au collisions to reproduce the observed hadron suppression. In the following, we use $`\kappa `$ = 0.7 which gives a suppression factor of 4.35 as measured for 0–5% most central collisions by PHENIX ppg023 . This corresponds to an absorption length of $`\lambda 3.4`$ fm for a parton traversing an expanding medium with a constant participant density of 2.48 $`\text{fm}^2`$.

Fig. 2 shows the origination position $`(x,y)`$ of the hard-scattering partons that escape the medium in 0–5% most central collisions. The depletion at the center of the overlap region is evident. The origins of the surviving jets are almost uniformly distributed over the collision region, which biases jet emission towards the surface of the collision region. Partons emitted from the center of the collision region typically traverse matter with density of more than one participant per fm2 for a distance of $`5`$ fm and thus are frequently absorbed, while partons generated near the surface can easily escape if emitted towards the surface. Therefore, the short absorption length (less than half of the radius of the nuclear overlap) naturally leads to emission of jets and thus of high $`p_T`$ hadrons from outer layer of the medium.

## III Centrality dependence of jet absorption

Once $`\kappa `$ has been determined, the survival rate of jets, the probability to find back-to-back jets, and also the azimuthal anisotropy of emitted jets relative to the reaction plane is fixed for any centrality class. In Fig. 3 we compare our model calculation to the centrality dependence of three compilations of experimental data:

1. Charged hadron and $`\pi ^0`$ data from PHENIX ppg014 ; ppg023  and charged hadron data from STAR starch  are plotted on the top panels of Fig. 3. Shown are the ratios of the observed high $`p_T`$ hadron yields relative to the expected yield from the underlying nucleon-nucleon collisions, normalized to $`N_{\text{coll}}`$, $`R_{AA}`$ in panel a), or $`N_{\text{part}}`$/2, $`R_{AA}^{N_{\text{part}}}`$ in panel b), of the specific centrality class. The PHENIX data have a lower $`p_T`$ cut of 4.5 GeV/$`c`$, while the STAR data are given for $`p_T>`$ 6 GeV/$`c`$.
2. The bottom left panel (c) gives the back-to-back jet correlation strength measured by STAR starbtob . The away side correlation strength can be defined by wangnew

$`D_{AA}(p_T^{\text{trig}})=`$ (4)
$`{\displaystyle _{p_0}^{p_T^{\text{trig}}}}𝑑p_T{\displaystyle ^{|\varphi _1\varphi _2|>\varphi _0}}𝑑\varphi {\displaystyle \frac{d\sigma _{AA}^{h_1h_2}/d^2p_T^{\text{trig}}dp_Td\varphi }{d\sigma _{AA}^{h_1}/d^2p_T^{\text{trig}}}}`$
for an associated hadron $`h_2`$ with $`p_T`$ in backward azimuthal direction of a trigger hadron $`h_1`$ with $`p_T^{\text{trig}}`$. The STAR data are for charged trigger particles with $`4<p_T^{\text{trig}}<6`$ GeV/$`c`$ and associated charged hadrons with $`p_T>p_0=2`$ GeV/$`c`$ detected within $`|\varphi _1\varphi _2|>\varphi _0=2.24`$. The data are normalized to the expectation from $`p`$ \+ $`p`$ collisions, and corrected for combinatorial random background and the azimuthal anisotropy of bulk particle production.
3. The azimuthal anisotropy of high $`p_T`$ charged particles, quantified by $`v_2`$, the second Fourier coefficient of the $`dN/d\varphi `$ distribution, is shown in the bottom right panel (d). The PHENIX data are measured for $`4<p_T<5`$ GeV/$`c`$ with respect to the reaction plane ppg022 . The preliminary $`v_2`$ values from STAR experiment were determined using reaction plane method filimonov  around 6 GeV/$`c`$ and 4 particle cumulants for $`5<p_T<7`$ GeV/$`c`$ snellings .

The results of our model calculation are shown as thick solid lines on all panels. Once the absorption strength is adjusted to the observed yield from the most central collisions, the centrality dependence of the normalized yield is well reproduced. In Fig. 3b, the calculated $`R_{AA}^{N_{\text{part}}}`$ increases for peripheral collision, which is expected if the yield scales with the $`N_{\text{coll}}`$ (thin solid line). Only a small fraction of the partons is absorbed since the matter density and volume are small. As the centrality increases both matter density and volume increase; for collisions with more than 100 participants absorption overwhelms the increase due to point like scaling and the $`R_{AA}^{N_{\text{part}}}`$ decreases with centrality.

The jet absorption model also reproduces the magnitude and centrality dependence of the back-to-back correlations without further adjustments. The calculated suppression is negligible for peripheral collisions, increases continuously and reaches a suppression factor of 7 for the most central bin, consistent with the data within errors333We notice, however, due to the large errors of the STAR data, the suppress factor for central collisions is not well constrained.. The model suggests that the suppression of back-to-back correlations is almost a factor of 1.6 stronger than that for the single inclusive hadron yield. In the jet absorption model, most of the surviving partons come from near the surface of the overlap region. Thus their partner partons have to traverse on average a longer distance through the medium. This naturally leads to a stronger suppression of the back-to-back correlation. It should be noted that in our model, we assume that the jet fragments outside of the medium, in other words, the fragmentation is identical to $`p`$ \+ $`p`$ by construction. Therefore, the near angle jet correlation strength can not deviate from unity in our model.

Due to the asymmetry of the overlap region of the two nuclei, the average amount of matter traversed by a parton depends on its azimuthal direction with respect to the reaction plane, which leads to an azimuthal anisotropy of the emitted jets xnwang3 . This anisotropy reaches its maximum for collisions with an impact parameter of about 9 fm corresponding to approximately 100 participants. It is small for peripheral and central collisions. Our calculation reproduces the measured trend of the centrality dependence of $`v_2`$, but the magnitude is below the measured value 444We note that the 6% $`v_2`$ from our calculations corresponds to a factor of 1.3 larger jet survival probability in reaction plane than out of plane.. With a matter density profile deduced from a Woods-Saxon distribution, a large fraction of the surviving jets is emitted from the low density region at large radii (see Fig. 2b). Therefore the anisotropy is diluted. Larger values of $`v_2`$ are obtained for larger $`\kappa `$, but these reproduce neither the suppression of the yield nor the back-to-back correlation strength. For a Woods-Saxon nuclear profile, $`v_2`$ reaches a maximum at a certain $`\kappa `$ (for $`b`$ = 9 fm, $`v_2^{\text{max}}`$ = 10%), but then decrease to 0 as $`\kappa \mathrm{}`$ because all surviving jets come from the diffuse outer layer of the overlap region, which is essentially isotropic shuryak2 . The calculated $`v_2`$ values are very sensitive to the actual nuclear profile used, we shall come back to this in Section IV.2.

## IV Discussions

### IV.1 Dependence on Absorption Pattern

Parton energy loss through gluon bremsstrahlung is thought to be proportional to the path length squared in a static medium BDMPS ; baier . This motivated our ansatz in Eq. 3. We note that although $`I`$ calculated from Eq. 3 was interpreted as absorption $`l^2`$ in a longitudinally expanding medium it can also be treated as absorption $`l`$ in a static medium when $`l_0`$ is small. In the following, we denote it as $`I_1`$. In order to test the sensitivity of the data to discriminate between different types of energy loss we repeat the calculation for two additional types of absorption,

$`I_2`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑l{\displaystyle \frac{l_0}{l+l_0}}\rho (x+\left(l+l_0\right)n_x,y+\left(l+l_0\right)n_y)`$
$`I_3`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑ll\rho (x+ln_x,y+ln_y)`$ (5)
$`I_2`$ assumes absorption proportional to the path length $`l`$ in a longitudinally expanding medium as one may expect for a hadronic energy loss gallmeister  scenario; $`I_3`$ assumes a static source and absorption $`l^2`$. Again the absorption strength is adjusted to give a factor of 4.35 suppression of the yield for central collisions. We find $`\kappa =0.84`$ fm ($`\lambda =1.9`$ fm) and $`\kappa =0.06`$ ($`\lambda =3.6`$ fm) for $`I_2`$ and $`I_3`$, respectively.

The results are compared with each other in Fig. 4. The centrality dependence of the normalized yield is similar for the three different absorption patterns and thus gives little discrimination power. The correlation strength $`D_{AA}`$ is more sensitive, but the largest sensitivity is found for the anisotropy parameter $`v_2`$. The $`I_2`$ scenario tends to localize the absorption in the region within the distance of $`l_0`$ from the jet creation point. In this case, the suppression is dominated by the initial matter profile and is insensitive to the later evolution of the system. This naturally leads to a similar value between $`R_{AA}`$ and $`D_{AA}`$. The surviving jets are also emitted more isotropically resulting in a smaller $`v_2`$ 555In this analysis, we have ignored the transverse expansion, which can further reduce $`v_2`$, but only slightly change $`R_{AA}`$ and $`D_{AA}`$ vitevv2 ..

On the other hand, the absorption in a static medium with quadratic path length dependence ($`I_3`$) has a strong dependence on the jet path. Partons are absorbed along their full trajectory in the medium. Thus both the suppression of the $`D_{AA}`$ and the value of $`v_2`$ depend more strongly on the centrality of the collision. In particular, one observes a stronger centrality dependence of $`D_{AA}`$ than of the $`R_{AA}`$ and a larger $`v_2`$. Although the magnitude of $`v_2`$ is still below the experimental value.

### IV.2 Dependence on Density Profile

Motivated by the approximate $`N_{\text{part}}`$ scaling of bulk particle production, we have assumed that the initial energy density created is proportional to the participant density ($`ϵ\rho _{\text{part}}`$). A closer look at the data reveals that both the transverse energy $`E_T`$ and particle multiplicity increase faster than linear with $`N_{\text{part}}`$ ppg001 ; sasha ; phobos2 . In a two component model twocomponent , the additional increase is attributed to (mini)jet production, which should scale with $`N_{\text{coll}}`$. To test the sensitivity of our model to the initial energy density profile, we repeated the calculation assuming that the energy density is proportional to the collision density $`\rho _{\text{coll}}(x,y)`$.

The results of the calculation are presented in Fig. 5. Generally the agreements between the data and the model calculation are equally good for both matter density profiles. In detail the suppression of the inclusive yield (Fig. 5a and b) shows a slightly stronger centrality dependence. This is easily explained: the absorption strength $`\kappa `$ is fixed to reproduce the suppression of the yield in the most central collisions; $`\rho _{\text{coll}}(x,y)`$ varies by factor of 4 faster than $`\rho _{\text{part}}(x,y)`$ from peripheral to central collisions. As a result, the absorption is smaller in peripheral collisions. Similarly $`D_{AA}`$ is less suppressed in peripheral collisions, but decrease faster for intermediate centralities. On the other hand, the centrality dependence and magnitude of $`v_2`$ are similar to Fig. 4, indicating that the two density profiles produce an almost identical anisotropy for all three absorption patterns.

In some recent model calculations nuclear distributions different from a Woods-Saxon profile have been used, typically either a hard-sphere wangnew ; shuryak1  or cylindrical nuclear distributions dima ; nonflow ; mueller . The results are significantly different for these unrealistic approximations. In particular, $`v_2`$ is increased, where $`v_2^{\text{cylindrical}}>v_2^{\text{sphere}}>v_2^{\text{Woods-Saxon}}`$.

Fig. 6 shows the calculations for a hard-sphere nuclear distribution in the top panels and for a cylindrical nuclear distribution in the bottom panels. In both cases, all three absorption scenarios miss the centrality dependence of the normalized inclusive yield. In contrast to the data, the suppression sets in at rather peripheral collisions and remain approximately constant with centrality.

On the other hand, cylindrical and spherical profiles apparently result in much better agreement with $`v_2`$ data. The reason is that both cylindrical and hard-sphere collision profiles have sharp surfaces with a large eccentricity, leading to a larger $`v_2`$ v2max . In contrast, a Woods-Saxon collision profile has a diffuse surface. While it may be conceivable that the density profile of the matter produced in the collision deviates from the convolution of two Woods-Saxon nuclear distributions, it is hard to imagine that the probability for hard scattering deviates from a Woods-Saxon density distribution significantly.

### IV.3 Energy and System Size Dependence

If jet suppression is really dominated by final state energy loss, it should decrease if the energy density or the volume of the medium is reduced. In addition to varying the impact parameter, both volume and density can be reduced by varying the mass number of the colliding nuclei. Alternatively the density may also be changed by varying the beam energy $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$.

The jet absorption model can provide a simple baseline prediction for both the beam energy and system size dependence of the suppression, if we assume that the absorption strength $`\kappa `$ is the same as in $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$=200 GeV Au + Au collisions. We limit the discussion to the calculation presented in section II.

The system size dependence can be evaluated without further assumptions. In Fig. 7 the nuclear modification factor $`R_{AA}`$ for central collisions of smaller systems (see Table. 2) at $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$=200 GeV is compared to the calculated centrality dependence for Au + Au collisions (see Fig. 3). The agreement of the absolute values and the $`N_{\text{part}}`$ dependence of the $`R_{AA}`$ and $`D_{AA}`$ is remarkable. This implies that to the first order the volume is proportional to $`N_{\text{part}}`$ and that the participant densities profiles are very similar. This similarity is illustrated in Fig. 8 by comparing the integral distribution $`I_1`$ experienced by the generated partons in central collisions for various collision systems with that for centrality selected Au \+ Au collisions with similar $`N_{\text{part}}`$. Since the jet correlation strength also depends on the volume and average density, the calculated $`D_{AA}`$ is also similar for light systems and corresponding Au + Au collisions. In contrast, the anisotropy calculated for central collisions of smaller nuclei is consistent with zero as expected.

To guide our estimate of the beam energy dependence we assume that the matter density scales like the Bjorken energy density. For an average mix of quark and gluon jets which we do not vary with $`\sqrt{s}`$, we fix the absorption coefficient $`\kappa `$ to be the same as in $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200`$ GeV. In this estimation the energy density increases by a factor of 2 from SPS ($`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ = 17 GeV) to RHIC ($`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ = 200 GeV) energies. Interpolating between these values and scaling down the density in our calculation accordingly, we find that the high $`p_T`$ hadron suppression is still a factor $``$3 for lower energy RHIC run at $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ = 62.4 GeV.

Our estimation would also predict a factor of 2 suppression at SPS energies, which is not observed experimentally. However, data at the SPS SPS  are limited to $`p_T`$ below 4 GeV/$`c`$, a region where other mechanism like $`p_T`$ broadening and hydrodynamic flow complicate the interpretation of particle production in heavy ion collisions. We noted that the predictive power of our approach is limited, because we did not take into account the $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}`$ dependence of the quark (gluon)jet fraction, the hard-scattering cross section and the system lifetime, which could be important.

## V Conclusion

We have shown that the experimentally observed centrality dependence of the suppression of the hadron yield $`R_{AA}`$ and the suppression of back-to-back correlation $`D_{AA}`$ can be quantitatively described by jet absorption in an opaque medium when a realistic nuclear geometry is included. In our model, the centrality dependence of $`R_{AA}`$ and of the $`D_{AA}`$ are rather insensitive to the details of the medium density profile. $`R_{AA}`$ is also insensitive to the absorption patterns. Both $`R_{AA}`$ and $`D_{AA}`$ do not distinguish between central collisions of small systems and centrality selected Au + Au collisions with similar $`N_{\text{part}}`$. Our interpretation is that $`R_{AA}`$ and $`D_{AA}`$ depend mostly on volume and average density of the opaque medium. In the limit of very opaque matter, $`R_{AA}`$ probably will not reveal further insight into the details of the absorption pattern or alternatively of the energy loss and the density profile, unless data at much higher $`p_T`$ become available.

We find that observables like $`D_{AA}`$ and $`v_2`$ are more sensitive to the absorption patterns. Our model does not describe $`v_2`$ quantitatively unless an unrealistic nuclear density profile is used. This might indicate that the actual diffuseness of the opaque medium is smaller than expected from the density profile obtained by convoluting two Woods-Saxon nuclear distributions xnwang3 . It is also conceivable that the real suppression is larger, and that the observed suppression is reduced by “soft“ particles from dynamic mechanisms different from jet fragmentation, such as hydrodynamics hydro  plus viscosity correction derek , quark coalescence coalence , and quark/diquark pick up shuryak2 . In this case, both the “soft“ particles and a stronger suppression would lead to a larger $`v_2`$.

Acknowledgments: We greatly appreciate the fruitful discussions with P. Kolb, E. Shuryak, and J.C. Solana. This work was supported by the Department of Energy, Office of Science, and Nuclear Physics Division under Grant No. DE-FG02-96ER40988.


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# Addressing atoms in optical lattices with Bessel beams

## Abstract

A method of synthesizing localized optical fields with zeroes on a periodic lattice is analyzed. The applicability to addressing atoms trapped in optical lattices with low crosstalk is discussed.

There is much current interest in using atoms trapped in optical lattices for quantum logic devicesref.qulattice1 ; ref.qulattice3 . One of the challenges in implementing this scheme is posed by the need to address individual atoms with near resonant light. Current estimates of error limits for scalable quantum computing require primitive logic operations with errors as low asref.steane ; ref.preskill  $`O(10^510^6).`$ The corresponding limitation on optical crosstalk when addressing one atom in a lattice can only be quantified in the context of a particular choice of quantum gate. In atomic schemes error rates for operations that are dependent on single photon processes tend to scale with the intensity. This implies that the intensity leakage of a logical control or state readout beam at a site adjacent to a site being addressed should not exceed $`O(10^5).`$ In this letter I describe a novel approach to image formation that allows sites in an optical lattice to be addressed with minimal crosstalk.

In order to emphasize the difficulty of achieving low crosstalk in optical lattices consider the following simple scaling relationships. We have a 1- or 2-D lattice lying in the $`xy`$ plane that is defined by counterpropagating beams at wavelength $`\lambda _f.`$ Individual atoms are separated by a minimum distance of $`d=\lambda _f/2`$ and we wish to address them with near-resonant light of wavelength $`\lambda .`$ The most obvious approach to doing so involves focusing a beam propagating perpendicular to the plane of the lattice (along $`\widehat{z}`$) to a small spot. Assuming a Gaussian beam profile the intensity distribution is $`I(\rho ,z)=I_0\mathrm{exp}(2\rho ^2/w^2)`$ where $`\rho ^2=x^2+y^2,`$ $`w^2(z)=w_0^2(1+z^2/z_R^2)`$, $`w_0`$ is the beam waist at $`z=0,`$ and $`z_R=\pi w_0^2/\lambda .`$ Expressing the ratio of the intensity at a neighboring site to the on-site intensity as $`ϵ`$ implies a beam waist $`w_0=\sqrt{1/(2\mathrm{ln}ϵ)}\lambda _f.`$ For $`ϵ=10^5`$ this evaluates to $`\stackrel{~}{w}_0=w_0/\lambda _f=0.21.`$

We can quantify the corresponding requirement on the ratio of trapping and addressing beam wavelengths in terms of the performance of high numerical aperture lenses. We assume a lens system with aperture diameter $`D`$ is used to focus the addressing light. If the ratio of the lens aperture to the Gaussian waist at the aperture is given by $`p=D/w(z_{\mathrm{lens}})`$ then a focal plane waist of $`w_0`$ implies $`Dpw_0z_{\mathrm{lens}}/z_R.`$ A reasonable minimum requirement on $`p`$ to avoid rings surrounding the focal plane image is that the fraction of the optical power blocked by the aperture should not exceed the desired intensity ratio $`ϵ`$ by more than a few times. Using an optimistic value of $`p=3`$ gives approximately 1% transmission loss at the lens and a numerical aperture of

$$NA=\frac{\left(\frac{3}{2\pi \stackrel{~}{w}_0}\frac{\lambda }{\lambda _f}\right)}{\left[1+\left(\frac{3}{2\pi \stackrel{~}{w}_0}\frac{\lambda }{\lambda _f}\right)^2\right]^{1/2}}.$$
(1)
The variation of the lens NA with $`\stackrel{~}{w}_0`$ is shown in Fig. 1. Available microscope objectives, as well as high resolution optical lithography lens systems, tend to have numerical apertures not more than $`0.8`$ unless oil immersion is used which is not compatible with atomic imaging inside vacuum chambers. This implies that the lattice light wavelength $`\lambda _f`$ must be several times longer than the addressing wavelength $`\lambda `$ in order to address single atoms with negligible leakage to neighboring sites. Thus a lattice of Rb atoms which can be manipulated with light near resonant with the D2 line at $`\lambda =0.78\mu \mathrm{m}`$ will not be individually resolvable in the context of scalable quantum logic unless $`\lambda _f1.5\mu \mathrm{m}.`$

Various solutions to the addressability problem are under study. The most direct solution is to make $`\lambda _f\lambda `$. Arrays of widely spaced traps that use many diffractively generated beamsref.ertmer  instead of lattices also fall into this category of solution. Unfortunately this is not compatible with loading from a Bose Einstein condensate via the Mott transitionref.mott , although other loading schemes may still be usedref.sw ; ref.weiss . Another possibility is to keep $`\lambda \lambda _f`$ but load the lattice so that only every few lattice sites are occupied, or change the angle between the lattice beams after loading so that a longer periodicity is obtainedref.zoller ; ref.porto .

Here we analyze an alternative approach to single atom addressing in optical lattices with $`\lambda \lambda _f.`$ The idea is to accept the fact that the light cannot be localized sufficiently well, but tailor the beam profile so that the field has zeroes at neighboring lattice sites. The basic geometry is sketched in Fig. 2. $`N`$ beams, each with a phase controlled by a spatial light modulator pixel, propagate in the $`xy`$ plane and are aligned to converge on the origin at $`x=y=0.`$ The beams necessary for creating the optical lattice can in principle be combined with the imaging beams using dichroic mirrors. Each converging plane wave is polarized along $`\widehat{z}`$ with amplitude $`A_j\mathrm{exp}[i(𝐤_j𝝆\omega t+\chi _j)]+c.c.,`$ where $`𝐤_j=k(\mathrm{cos}\varphi _j\widehat{x}+\mathrm{sin}\varphi _j\widehat{y}),`$ $`k=2\pi /\lambda ,`$ $`\varphi _j`$ is the azimuthal angle of wave $`j,`$ and $`A_j,\chi _j`$ are adjustable amplitudes and phases. As shown in the figure this can be achieved using a single one-dimensional modulator with $`N`$ pixels and a system of mirrors and lenses. In the limit when $`N\mathrm{}`$ and the beam amplitudes and phases are all equal the field amplitude generated on axis is just the zero order Bessel beam $`J_0(k\rho ).`$

When the field is synthesized from a finite number $`N`$ of plane waves it is quasiperiodic in space, and rings of secondary intrerference maxima occur as can be seen in Fig. 2. The diameter of the secondary rings can be estimated from $`\mathrm{\Delta }kd_{\mathrm{ring}}2\pi .`$ Using $`\mathrm{\Delta }k=2k/(N/2)`$ gives $`d_{\mathrm{ring}}N\lambda /4`$, while the actual diameter found numerically is some 25% larger. Recalling the shift theorem of Fourier analysis it is straightforward to scan the spot location over a distance of up to $`d_{\mathrm{ring}}`$ by adding appropriate phase offsets to the incident beams, as is shown in Fig. 2. It is possible in this way to address hundreds of atoms using a multipixel modulator, without mechanical motion of the optical system. This approach to synthesis and scanning of localized optical fields also finds application in atomic lithographyref.patent .

A Bessel beam written in this way with $`\lambda =0.78\mu \mathrm{m}`$ has a central lobe with $`1/e^2`$ intensity radius of $`0.22\mu \mathrm{m}.`$ However the closely spaced secondary maxima of the Bessel function give crosstalk on nearby lattice sites. We describe now a method of synthesizing a beam with zeroes at regularly spaced sites of a one-dimensional lattice. An arbitrary solution of the two-dimensional Helmholtz equation can be written as a Fourier-Bessel series

$$A(\rho ,\theta )=J_0(k\rho )+\underset{n=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}a_nJ_n(k\rho )\mathrm{exp}[in\theta ]$$
(2)
with the $`a_n`$ complex coefficients to be determined. We have set the zero order coefficient to unity corresponding to a normalized field with unit amplitude at the origin. Any field of the form (2) can be synthesized with an amplitude and phase modulator in the geometry of Fig. 2. To make this explicit we note that the Fourier transform of (2) is

$`\stackrel{~}{A}(q,\varphi )`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑\rho \rho {\displaystyle _0^{2\pi }}𝑑\theta A(\rho ,\theta )\mathrm{exp}[i\rho q\mathrm{cos}(\theta \varphi )]`$ (3)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2\pi }{k}}\delta (qk)\left(1+{\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}}a_ni^n\mathrm{exp}[in\varphi ]\right).`$
Thus a ring of converging plane waves with wavenumber $`k`$ and complex amplitudes given by the term in parentheses in (3) provides the desired field. The role of the lenses shown in Fig. 2 is to tilt the wave passing through each spatial light modulator pixel towards the center of the image region, but the lenses do not tightly focus each wave. Outside of the central spot destructive interference leads to a low background light level. From the point of view of Fourier optics focusing of a beam results from interference of the constituent plane wave components, taking into account relative phase shifts due to propagation. The usefulness of the approach to image synthesis presented here is that we can directly control the amplitudes and phases of each of the plane wave components.

A field consisting of a finite number of terms in (2) that is useful for addressing a one-dimensional lattice along $`\widehat{x}`$ will have $`A(\rho ,0)=A(\rho ,\pi )`$ which implies that $`a_n=0`$ for $`n`$ odd. Requiring that $`A`$ vanish at the $`M`$ lattice points specified by $`\rho _m=m\lambda _f/2,`$ $`\theta _m=0`$, for $`m=1\mathrm{}M`$ and limiting the sum in (2) to $`M`$ terms gives $`M`$ linearly independent equations $`J_0(k\rho _m)+_{n=1}^Na_{2n}J_{2n}(k\rho _m)=0.`$ These equations are easily solved for the coefficients $`a_{2n}.`$ The coefficients decrease rapidly with Bessel order provided $`\lambda _f`$ is not too much less than $`\lambda .`$ The series coefficients, and maximum intensity crosstalk at any site not being addressed are listed in Table 1. We see that $`M=6`$ is sufficient to ensure a crosstalk of a few times $`10^5.`$ In an actual implementation there are several limiting factors to consider including the number of spatial light modulator pixels, and the amplitude and phase resolution of each one. The last row in Table 1 shows the crosstalk is up to several times higher than the theoretical value if we assume the field is synthesized from 256 beams equally spaced azimuthally, with 14 bit resolution in amplitude and phase modulation for each beam. Additional calculations with $`\lambda _f=1.0\mu \mathrm{m}`$ give crosstalk levels roughly 10 times lower than the example in Table 1.

In summary we have described a novel method of addressing atoms in periodic 1-D lattices with low crosstalk. The extension of this approach to a 2-D lattice is complicated by the fact that a 2-D lattice has angle dependent interatomic spacings. The Fourier-Bessel expansion (2) can still be used, but the coefficients tend to grow rapidly with $`n.`$ Generalizations that are suitable for a 2-D geometry are currently under investigation.

This work was supported by the U. S. Army Research Office under contract DAAD19-02-1-0083, NSF, and the A. P. Sloan Foundation.