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# Composite-fermion crystallites in quantum dots

## Abstract

The correlations in the ground state of interacting electrons in a two-dimensional quantum dot in a high magnetic field are known to undergo a qualitative change from liquid-like to crystal-like as the total angular momentum becomes large. We show that the composite-fermion theory provides an excellent account of the states in both regimes. The quantum mechanical formation of composite fermions with a large number of attached vortices automatically generates omposite fermion crystallites in finite quantum dots.

The system of interacting electrons confined to a two dimensional quantum dot and exposed to a strong magnetic field has been a subject of intense theoretical study for over two decades Yoshioka ; Girvin ; Dev ; Yang ; Tapash ; Xie ; Hawrylak ; Kawamura ; Kamilla ; Seki ; Manninen ; Landman ; Ruan ; Maksym , both because such quantum dots have been realized and studied in the laboratory Expt1 ; Expt2 ; Expt3 , and because of the possible relevance of its physics to the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) Tsui . For systems with small numbers of particles, exact diagonalization can be performed for parabolic quantum dots in the limit when the cyclotron energy is large compared to the confinement potential, which shows that the ground state energy as a function of the angular momentum ($`L`$) has a rather rich structure. In particular, downward cusps appear at certain values of $`L`$, which are consequently especially favorable. An understanding of the correlations in the quantum dot state that underlie this physics is one of the central questions for this system. One would also like to know how this ties into our understanding of the FQHE, obtained in the thermodynamic limit without confinement.

The approach based on the formation of composite fermions has been demonstrated to be successful in a range of $`L`$ values Kawamura ; Kamilla . Specifically, a mean-field type description, in which the composite fermions are taken as non-interacting particles at an effective angular momentum $`L^{}`$, with their mass or the cyclotron energy treated as a phenomenological parameter, predicts cusps in the energy at certain magic angular momenta, which are in agreement with the actual cusp positions in exact diagonalization studies Kawamura . However, discrepancies appear at large $`L`$ Seki ; Landman ; here, the actual cusps occur at regular intervals in $`L`$, which has been interpreted in terms of classical crystal-like states Ruan . At large $`L`$, the repulsive interaction thus appears to stabilize a (rotating) crystal rather than a liquid, which is believed to signal a breakdown of the composite-fermion (CF) description. That would not be unexpected, because large angular momenta correspond to small filling factors (to the extent the filling factor is a meaningful quantity in a finite quantum dot), and it is known, for infinite two-dimensional systems, that the CF liquid gives way to a Wigner crystal at sufficiently small fillings.

To understand the nature of the breakdown of the composite fermion description, a matter of great interest also in the context of the FQHE, we have undertaken an extensive study of finite systems at large angular momenta. Our investigations, however, have led to a surprising conclusion: Even though the naive mean-field interpretation in terms of free composite fermions becomes invalid at large $`L`$, the microscopic composite fermion theory, defined through wave functions, continues to give a very good description down to the largest $`L`$ studied to date. It provides an accurate approximation for the ground state wave function and the ground state energy at every single $`L`$ in the wide range studied, and correctly reproduces all cusps in plot of the ground state energy vs. $`L`$. Taken together, these results constitute a detailed verification for the validity of the composite fermion theory for quantum dots even at very low fillings.

This may appear to be at odds with the classical crystal-like correlations found in exact diagonalization studies Seki ; Maksym . While both composite fermions and the crystal are generated by the repulsive interaction between electrons, the feeling has been that one excludes the other. A notable aspect of our work is the unexpected finding that not only is there no logical inconsistency between the simultaneous formations of composite fermions and crystal-like structures at low fillings, but that the state is very well described as a crystallite of composite fermions.

The Hamiltonian of interest is

$$H=\underset{j}{}\frac{1}{2m_b}\left(𝒑_j+\frac{e}{c}𝑨_j\right)^2+\underset{j}{}\frac{m_b}{2}\omega _0^2r_j^2+\underset{j<k}{}\frac{e^2}{ϵr_{jk}}$$
(1)
where $`m_b`$ is the band mass of the electron, $`\omega _0`$ is a measure of the strength of the confinement, $`ϵ`$ is the dielectric constant of the host semiconductor, and $`r_{jk}=|𝒓_j𝒓_k|`$. We will specialize to the case of very large magnetic fields, when $`\omega _c=eB/m_bc>>\omega _0`$. Only the lowest Landau level (LL) is relevant in this limit. In that limit, at each angular momentum the eigenenergy neatly separates into a confinement part and an interaction part:

$$E(L)=E_c(L)+V(L)$$
(2)
where $`E_c(L)=(\mathrm{}/2)[\mathrm{\Omega }\omega _c]L`$, relative to the lowest LL, with $`\mathrm{\Omega }^2=\omega _c^2+4\omega _0^2`$, and $`V(L)`$ is the interaction energy of electrons without confinement, but with the magnetic length replaced by an effective magnetic length given by $`\mathrm{}\sqrt{\mathrm{}/m_b\mathrm{\Omega }}`$. In the following, we will only consider $`V`$ as a function of the angular momentum $`L`$; it must be remembered, however, that the confinement part must eventually be added to determine the global ground state. The exact ground state in each $`L`$ sector is obtained by either matrix diagonalization or the Lanczos method. The largest system we have studied has a Fock space dimension of 509,267.

In the CF theory Dev ; Kawamura ; Jain , the interacting state of electrons in the lowest LL at angular momentum $`L`$ is mapped into the non-interacting electron state at $`L^{}`$, where

$$L=L^{}+pN(N1),$$
(3)
$`N`$ is the number of electrons, and $`p`$ is an integer. The wave functions are related as

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_\alpha ^L=𝒫\underset{j<k}{}(z_jz_k)^{2p}\mathrm{\Phi }_\alpha ^L^{}.$$
(4)
Here $`\mathrm{\Phi }_\alpha ^L^{}`$ are the wave functions for non-interacting electrons at $`L^{}`$ (which in general occupy several Landau levels), $`\alpha =1,2,\mathrm{},D^{}`$ labels the different states, $`z_j=x_jiy_j`$ denotes the position of the $`j`$th electron, $`𝒫`$ indicates projection into the lowest LL, $`\mathrm{\Psi }_\alpha `$ are basis functions for interacting electrons at $`L`$, and $`D^{}`$ is the dimension of the CF basis. We will restrict $`\mathrm{\Phi }_\alpha `$ to states with the lowest kinetic energy at $`L^{}`$, and choose $`p`$ so as to have the smallest dimension for the basis. The composite fermions carrying $`2p`$ vortices are labeled 2pCF’s. At certain values of $`L`$, the above prescription produces only one state ($`D^{}=1`$), which is the CF theory’s answer for the ground state. In the notation of Ref. Kawamura , this is a compact state, denoted by $`(N_0,N_1,\mathrm{})`$, with $`N_j`$ composite fermions compactly occupying the innermost angular momentum orbitals of the $`j`$th CF level. At other values of $`L`$, when there are many CF basis states ($`D^{}>1`$), we diagonalize the Coulomb Hamiltonian in the CF basis to obtain the ground state, using methods described earlier Kamilla ; Mandal . For any $`N`$, there are many values of $`L`$ where the CF theory gives a unique answer, but in general, $`D^{}`$ increases with $`N`$.

We have carried out exact diagonalization for $`N8`$. It is possible to to go to arbitrarily large values of $`L`$ within the CF theory, but available computer memory has restricted our exact diagonalization study to $`L135,117`$ and 111 for $`N=6`$, 7 and 8, respectively. Figure 1 shows the comparison between the CF theory and the exact energy as a function of $`L`$ for $`N=6`$ particles, demonstrating that the CF theory predicts every energy accurately and obtains all cusps faithfully Comment . The comparisons for other values of $`N`$ are similar.

We next come to the connection between our approach and the crystalline correlations found in previous studies. Such correlations are not manifest in the density, which is rotationally symmetric for the ground state with a definite angular momentum, so one must compute the pair correlation function

$$g(𝒓)\underset{j=3}{\overset{N}{}}d^2𝒓_j|\mathrm{\Psi }(𝒓,𝑹,𝒓_3,\mathrm{},𝒓_N)|^2$$
(5)
which is the probability of finding a particle at $`𝒓`$ while holding one particle fixed at $`𝑹`$. We first compute the density as a function of the distance from the center, and fix $`𝑹`$ somewhere on the maximum density ring. As an example, Fig. 2 (upper panel) shows the exact pair correlation function for 6 particles at $`L=95`$, which clearly illustrates crystallite formation. The CF theory gives a unique state here, $`(4,2)`$, which has the wave function (with $`N=6`$ and $`2p=6`$)

$$\mathrm{\Psi }=𝒫A\left[z_1^{}z_2z_2^{}\underset{i=3}{\overset{N}{}}z_i^{i3}\right]\underset{j<k}{}(z_jz_k)^{2p}e^{_{l=1}^N|z_l|^2/4}$$
(6)
where $`A`$ denotes an antisymmetric Slater determinant. The projection is accomplished by the method outlined in the literature Kamilla . The energy of this wave function is $`1.95535(15)e^2/ϵ\mathrm{}`$, which compares well with the exact energy $`1.95061e^2/ϵ\mathrm{}`$. The overlap with the exact ground state is 0.902. The pair correlation function for this wave function is also shown in Fig. 2 (lower plot). It is remarkable that the single wave function from the CF theory provides a good qualitative and quantitative description of the actual ground state wave function in Fig. 2 which is a linear combination of 69,624 basis functions. We have studied other “cusp states” and found similarly good agreement.

The composite fermion wave function at any angular momentum $`L`$ is obtained from non-interacting electron wave function at an effective angular momentum $`L^{}`$ by multiplication by an appropriate Jastrow factor, in exactly the same way as wave functions are written for bulk fractional quantum Hall states. It is crucial to note that no physics of any kind of crystal is put into these wave functions by hand at any stage. For example, referring to Fig. 2, the parent electron wave function at $`L^{}=5`$, namely $`A[\mathrm{}]`$ in Eq. (6), has no crystalline correlations in it. It describes a simple non-interacting system with single particle orbitals $`\{0,0\}`$, $`\{0,1\}`$, $`\{0,2\}`$, $`\{0,3\}`$, $`\{1,1\}`$, and $`\{1,0\}`$ occupied, where $`\{n,m\}`$ denotes the angular momentum $`m`$ orbital in the $`n`$th LL. (The allowed values are $`n=0,1,\mathrm{}`$, and $`m=n,n+1,\mathrm{}`$.) However, when the uncorrelated wave function at $`L^{}`$ is multiplied by an appropriate Jastrow factor to convert electrons into composite fermions, the resulting wave function describes a correlated electron liquid for a certain range of $`L`$ values, but for sufficiently large angular momenta, it produces a state with crystalline correlation; in other words, the formation of composite fermions automatically causes the formation of a crystallite at large $`L`$. It is stressed that the same class of wave functions describes both the liquid and the crystal in quantum dots in different parameter regimes. The emergence of such classical crystal-like structures in the intrinsically quantum mechanical state of composite fermions is striking.

To investigate the evolution with the number of attached vortices, we show in Fig. 3 the pair correlation function for $`N=19`$ composite fermions in the state $`(17,2)`$ (with wave function given in Eq. 6) for three flavors of composite fermions, with $`2p=2`$, 10, and 20. The crystal becomes better defined with increasing $`2p`$. In this case, we do not have exact results to compare with (the dimension of the Fock space is astronomically large; even for the smallest system in Fig. 3, namely 19 particles at $`L=477`$, it is estimated to be $`10^{14}`$), but the structure at large $`L`$ is consistent with classical considerations that predict a three-ring structure with 1, 6 and 12 electrons located on inner, middle and outer rings, respectively classical . Interestingly, when we hold a particle in the middle ring fixed, the hexagonal correlations of the middle ring become prominent while the outer ring becomes more or less uniform. That is consistent with earlier studies that show that the radial correlations between different rings are weaker than the angular correlations within a ring, producing, for example, two different melting transitions melting .

A recent article by Yannouleas and Landman Landman  has asserted that the CF theory fails to produce the cusp positions for large $`L`$, especially beyond $`L>75`$ (for $`N=6`$). That assertion is not borne out by our results, which demonstrate that the CF theory, when taken beyond the most naive mean field picture, predicts each cusp correctly at least for angular momenta up to $`L=135`$. Ref. Landman,  has studied an alternative trial wave function based on an analogy to the classical crystal ground state in a quantum dot. A thorough comparison of the CF theory and the approach of Ref. Landman,  is not possible because the latter obtains wave functions and energies only for certain special values of $`L`$. For $`N=6`$, Ref. Landman,  explicitly quotes energies from their approach for seven values of $`L`$ in the range $`75L135`$. For these seven angular momenta, the CF theory gives lower energy in every case except at $`L=135`$. In future, it would be interesting to compare the two methods for a larger range of $`L`$ and $`N`$ to ascertain their respective regimes of validity.

One may ask what implications our results have for the nature of the bulk FQHE state at small fillings. While the finiteness of the systems does not allow us to draw a firm conclusion regarding whether the thermodynamic state at some filling is a liquid or a crystal, the results do indicate that the CF state possesses a substantial short-range crystalline order at small $`\nu `$. This raises the interesting issue of whether the actual Wigner crystal at low fillings is a crystal of electrons or of composite fermions Fertig .

The composite fermion description of correlated electron states in quantum dots at high magnetic fields has several appealing features: It gives a unified theory, applicable to angular momenta spanning both the liquid and the crystal phases; it produces microscopic wave functions also for those angular momenta where no classically stable crystal is available; it obtains the correct crystal shape and the ring structure without an explicit consideration of the classical solution; and finally, through CF theory, the understanding of the quantum dot physics dovetails nicely with that of the FQHE. Before ending, we note that the accuracy of the CF wave functions can be improved straightforwardly and systematically by enlarging the basis at $`L^{}`$ slightly Peterson ; the goal in this work was to demonstrate that the zeroth order theory itself works very well.

Partial support by the National Science Foundation under grant no. DMR-0240458 is gratefully acknowledged.


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# A large X-ray flare from the Herbig Ae star V892 Tau

## 1 Introduction

Understanding the genesis and early evolution of intermediate mass stars is a fundamental problem in studies of star formation. Owing to the differences in stellar and circumstellar physics, as well as in time scales, the evolution of intermediate pre-main-sequence stars is qualitatively different from that of lower- and higher-mass stars. The past 10 years or so have witnessed an increased interest in the subject, and a key issue is the nature and evolution of Herbig Ae/Be stars. These pre-main-sequence stars, with masses ranging between about 2 and 10 $`M_{\mathrm{}}`$, are the more massive counterparts of T Tauri stars. They share with lower mass T Tauri stars peculiarities such as infrared excess emission, conspicuous (optical and UV) line emission and irregular photometric variability (see Waters & Waelkens 1998 for a review).

According to classical models (Iben 1965), pre-main-sequence stars with masses in excess of 2 $`\mathrm{M}_{\mathrm{}}`$ are expected to follow fully radiative tracks once the quasi-static contraction has ended. The detection of Herbig Ae/Be stars in X-rays (Zinnecker & Preibisch 1994; Damiani et al. 1994) was therefore somewhat unexpected. Main sequence stars of the same class (from later B to later A stars) do not possess either a strong stellar wind nor a corona (as no magnetic dynamo mechanism is available). In contrast Herbig Ae/Be stars appear to possess a strong stellar wind (Skinner et al. 1993; Bouret et al. 1997) and a magnetic dynamo associated with an outer convection zone has been invoked to explain the periodic variation of the emission lines (Praderie et al. 1986) as well as the stellar wind itself (Finkenzeller & Mundt 1984).

Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994) proposed that the observed X-ray luminosity is linked to the stars’ strong stellar winds, possibly originating in shocks due to wind instabilities and/or in the collision between the fast wind and the remnant circumstellar material. Damiani et al. (1994) also favored a stellar wind origin for the X-ray emission from Herbig Be stars. Nevertheless a magnetically heated corona could also be at the origin of the observed X-ray emission (Zinnecker & Preibisch 1994).

The presence of winds and the possibility of magnetic activity make these objects interesting targets for X-ray studies. The unambiguous detection of flaring activity in any Herbig Ae/Be star would be significant as it would provide indirect but strong evidence for the presence of a magnetically confined corona and thus of an operational dynamo mechanism.

So far there is only one reported observation of flaring activity in an Herbig Be star: Hamaguchi et al. (2000) performed ASCA observations of the Herbig Be star MCW 297, and reported the detection of a large flare during which the X-ray luminosity of the source increased by a factor of 5, with the plasma temperature increasing from 2.7 keV during the quiescent phase to 6.7 keV at flare maximum. The interpretation however is affected by some ambiguity due to the large ASCA point spread function (PSF). Testi et al. (1998) found about 20 infrared sources in the ASCA error circle around MWC 297, the majority of which are likely to be low-mass protostars. The peak X-ray luminosity of $`5\times 10^{32}`$ erg s-1 reported by Hamaguchi et al. (2000) would correspond to a very large – but still possible – flare for a typical low-mass active T Tauri. For example Tsuboi et al. (1998) have reported ASCA observations of a large flare from the Weak-lined T Tauri star (WTTS) V773 Tau, in which the peak flare luminosity was at least $`10^{33}`$ erg s-1. The MWC 297 event therefore would not be exceptional for a low mass pre-main-sequence star. Hamaguchi et al. (2002b) have recently re-observed MWC 297 with *Chandra*, finding the source hundred times less luminous in X-rays than estimated from ASCA observation, and with no evidence for variability, thus casting some doubts on the original interpretation.

In this article we report the observation of a large X-ray flare from the Herbig Ae star V892 Tau. We have used publicly available XMM-*Newton* and *Chandra* data to monitor the X-ray activity of V892 Tau and during one of the two XMM-*Newton* exposures a large flare is observed. While the apparent companion of V892 Tau, V892 Tau NE, is unresolved by the XMM-*Newton* PSF, as discussed later, the evidence that the observed flare is coming from the Herbig Ae star is compelling.

The present paper is organized as follow: after a brief introduction of the properties of V892 Tau below, the observations are described in Sect. 2. The spectral and timing analysis of the data are presented in Sect. 3 and the results are discussed in Sec. 4.

### 1.1 The Herbig Ae star V892 Tau

V892 Tau – also known as Elias 1 – is a young stellar object located in the Taurus dark cloud complex, and is supposed to be the source of the illumination for the faint nebula IC 359. The apparent magnitude of V892 Tau is $`R=13.14`$ (Strom & Strom 1994) and its spectral classification varies from B9 (Strom & Strom 1994) and A0 (Elias 1978; Finkenzeller & Mundt 1984) to A6 (Cohen & Kuhi 1979, Berrilli et al. 1992, The et al. 1994). Estimates for the visual extinction also vary from $`A_V8`$ (Elias 1978) and $`A_V=8.85`$ (Strom & Strom 1994, derived from a simultaneous estimate of the spectral type and of the apparent color, $`RI=1.71`$) to $`A_V3.9`$ (Zinnecker & Preibisch 1994). The star is usually placed at a distance of 140 pc because of its association with the Taurus dark clouds (Elias 1978). The bolometric luminosity of V892 Tau is $`L38L_{\mathrm{}}`$ (Berrilli et al. 1992) and the source is variable in the near-infrared (Elias 1978).

Through near-infrared speckle interferometry Kataza & Maihara (1991) resolved V892 Tau into an unresolved core and a sub-arcsec structure elongated in the east-west direction. They interpret the light of the elongated structure as being reflected within an edge-on circumstellar disk of moderate optical depth. Newer near-infrared speckle interferometry observations were performed by Haas et al. (1997), who favor a scenario in which the diffuse component is due to scattering in bipolar lobes with a polar axis oriented east-west.

V892 Tau appears to be a binary system (Leinert et al. 1997). The apparent stellar companion, hereafter referred to as V892 Tau NE, lies $`4.1`$ arcsec to the northeast, at position angle $`22^{}`$111In the convention adopted by Skinner et al. (1993), position angle $`0^{}`$ is north and position angle $`90^{}`$ is east. (Skinner et al. 1993). The available measurements allow a tentative classification of V892 Tau NE as a WTTS with spectral type M2 reddened by 8–12 mag of visual extinction (Leinert et al. 1997). The study by Leinert et al. (1997), based on speckle interferometry, was carried out with the explicit purpose of detecting binaries among Herbig Ae/Be stars. Leinert et al. (1997) achieved a resolution of $`0.1`$ arcsec, that at a distance of 140 pc correspond to 14 AU, and they do not detect other stars in the vicinity of V892 Tau. They conclude that in the near-infrared V892 Tau is basically a wide binary system.

## 2 Observations

The X-ray observations discussed in this paper were obtained with the XMM-*Newton* and the *Chandra* observatories. The XMM-*Newton* observations of V892 Tau consists of two deep (74.4 and 45.1 ks nominal) consecutive exposures, the first starting on March 11 2001 at 12:40:22 UT and the second one starting on March 12 2001 at 10:23:10 UT. All three EPIC cameras were active at the time of the observations, in full-frame mode with the medium filters. The Principal Investigator for these observations is F. Walter and the observation target is the triple WTTS system V410 Tau. The observations are publicly available from the XMM-*Newton* archive.

The raw XMM-*Newton* data have been processed by us with the standard SAS V5.4.1 pipeline system, concentrating, for the spectral and timing analysis, on the EPIC-pn camera. In each of the two XMM-*Newton* exposures the background is affected by a large proton flares of more than 10 ks of duration. We have retained only time intervals in which the count rate for the whole frame of photons above 5 keV was below a certain threshold (3.3 cts/s in the present case). This operation omits roughly 30% of the observing time, but effectively reduces the background level by a factor of $`4`$. Source and background photons were extracted using a set of scripts purposely developed at Palermo Observatory.

Source and background regions were defined interactively in the ds9 display software, with the background extracted from regions on the same CCD chip and at the same off-axis angle as for the source region. Response matrices (“rmf and arf files”) appropriate for the position and size of the source extraction regions were computed. The spectral analysis has been performed using the XSPEC package, after rebinning the source spectra to a minimum of 20 source counts per (variable width) spectral bin.

The *Chandra* ACIS observation of V892 Tau was taken starting on March 7 2002 at 6:15:28 UT (18.0 ks nominal). The Principal Investigator for these observations is P. Predehl and also in this case the observation target is V410 Tau222There are other two *Chandra* exposures of V410 Tau available in the public archive (of 15 and 11 ks respectively). In these observations however V892 Tau is at an extreme off-axis angle, and we have therefore not analysed them.. The data were retrieved from the public data archive, with no re-processing done on the archival data. Source and background regions were defined in ds9, and light curves and spectra were extracted from the cleaned photon list using CIAO V. 2.2.1 threads, which were also used for the generation of the relative response matrices. Spectral analysis was performed in xspec in the same way as for the XMM-*Newton* spectra.

Fig. 1 shows the images of the V892 Tau system in the *Chandra* ACIS camera and XMM-*Newton* EPIC-pn camera (before and after the large flare) as well as the Palomar Digital Sky Survey image of the field. The 4 images are on the same sky coordinate scale. The source at the centre of the images is the V892 Tau system. V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE are clearly resolved in the *Chandra* observations. The XMM-*Newton* point spread function has a full width at half maximum of $`15`$ arcsec and therefore cannot resolve the system. The source at $`38`$ arcsec to the SE of the V892 Tau system is \[BHS98\] MHO 11, a T Tauri star (Briceño et al. 1998), first identified in ROSAT data by Strom & Strom (1994). The bright source in the North-East corner is Hubble 4, a well known T Tauri.

In Table 1 we report the coordinates of V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE as derived from the radio (VLA) observation of Skinner et al. (1993), to be compared with the coordinates of the sources in the XMM-*Newton* and *Chandra* data. The source coordinates from the EPIC-pn data correspond to the peak of a gaussian distribution fitted to the source image, the source coordinates for the *Chandra* data simply correspond to the brightest pixel in the source image. The agreement between the sources’ positions in the *Chandra* image and as determined from VLA observations is excellent (within 0.4 arcsec). The source coordinates derived from the XMM-*Newton* observations before the flare have a 2.4 arcsec offset from V892 Tau (well within the uncertainty expected for the determination of positions of EPIC X-ray sources) and a 6 arcsec offset from V892 Tau NE. After the flare the position offsets become 3.1 arcsec and 6.8 arcsec from V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE respectively.

## 3 Spectral and timing analysis of V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE

### 3.1 *Chandra* observation

The light curves of V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE during the $``$ 18 ks *Chandra* observation of March 2003 are shown in Fig. 2. In the *Chandra* data, The Herbig Ae star V892 Tau is clearly resolved from the less luminous companion, the WTTS V892 Tau NE.

During the *Chandra* observation V892 Tau shows significant variability, with its X-ray luminosity varying by a factor of 2 in less than 1 ks. The rise in the source luminosity is impulsive (the source doubles its luminosity in less than 1 ks) and it is followed by a slow decay. A proper time resolved spectral analysis of the rise phase is not possible with the signal to noise ratio of this data set. We have inspected the light curves of the source in a soft band ($`0.0`$$`1.7`$ keV) and in a hard band($`1.7`$$`8`$ keV) and see evidence for a hardening of the spectrum during the rise phase. The decay time $`\tau 1`$ hr is typical of X-ray stellar flaring events.

The bottom panel of Fig. 2 shows the light curve of V892 Tau NE. The source is weak, on average 8 to 10 times less luminous than V892 Tau. Within the uncertainty of the large error–bars the source does not appear significantly variable. The probability of constancy of V892 Tau NE according to the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (which measures the maximum deviation of the integral photon arrival times from a constant source model) is 21%.

The ACIS spectra of V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE are shown in Fig. 3. As summarised in Table 3 the spectrum of V892 Tau is well fitted by an absorbed 1-T plasma model with $`N(H)=0.83\pm 0.08\times 10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ and temperature $`kT=2.10\pm 0.19`$ keV. The metallicity of the plasma is not well constrained by the data. The spectral data for V892 Tau NE have poor signal to noise ratio, nevertheless a fit with an absorbed 1-T plasma model provide a useful estimate of the absorbing column density and the plasma temperature. We derive a value of $`N(H)=1.20\pm 0.18\times 10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$, which is similar to the value derived for V892 Tau and therefore consistent with the hypothesis that V892 Tau NE is a physical companion of V892 Tau. The derived best-fit value of $`kT=1.04\pm 0.17`$ keV for the plasma temperature of V892 Tau NE is instead significantly different from the value derived for V892 Tau. The model dependent fluxes (as derived from the best-fit models) are $`7.1\times 10^{13}`$erg cm-2 s-1 in the band $`0.55`$$`7.50`$ keV, and $`5.7\times 10^{14}`$erg cm-2 s-1, in the band $`0.67`$$`7.50`$ keV, respectively for V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE.

### 3.2 XMM-*Newton* observations

The light curve of the V892 Tau system derived from the two consecutive XMM-*Newton* exposures are shown in Fig. 4. All the gaps in the light curve except the one around 64 ks are due to the filtering process that we have applied to the raw data in order to remove the effect of solar proton flares. In particular roughly 10 ks at the beginning of the first exposure have been removed. The gap around 64 ks is due to the time difference between the end of the first exposure and the start of the second (one hour).

During the first $`80`$ ks the light curve of the V892 Tau-V892 Tau NE system presents significant variability with a time scale and amplitude similar to the one observed for V892 Tau in the *Chandra* data. During the last 30 ks the light curve of the system undergoes a dramatic variation, in what appears to be a large flare. The source counts increases by a factor of $`8`$ in less than 10 ks. The source flux then remains at around the maximum level until the end of the XMM-*Newton* exposure.

We have performed the spectral analysis of the two XMM-*Newton* exposures separately and we summarise the results into two separate tables: Table 2 for the first exposure and Table 3 for the second exposure. The reason for this is that while for the first exposure two temperature plasma models are necessary to obtain acceptable fits to the spectra for the second exposure one-temperature plasma models provide adequate fits to the spectral data.

The spectrum of the V892 Tau system during the first exposure of 74 ks, corresponding to an effective integration time of $`64`$ ks (after the proton flare filtering process), is shown in Fig. 5, together with the best fit absorbed 2 temperature plasma model. The best fit values for the model parameters are summarised in Table 2 together with the reduced $`\chi ^2`$ of the fit and its null hypothesis probability, $`P`$. A model with an absorbing column density of $`N(\mathrm{H})=0.92\times 10^{22}`$ cm-2, plasma temperatures $`kT_1=1.02`$ keV and $`kT_2=2.82`$ keV and a metal abundance $`Z=0.21`$ provides a good fit to the integrated spectrum. An absorbed one temperature plasma model (as used for the *Chandra* data, which however have lower statistics) does not provide an acceptable description of the spectrum. Nevertheless a two temperature plasma model with a metal abundance and two plasma temperatures frozen at the values above ($`Z=0.21`$, $`kT_1=1.02`$ keV and $`kT_2=2.82`$) provides a good fit to the *Chandra* data ($`P=0.72`$) by letting the two emission measures and the absorbing column density vary – see Table 2. The fitted values for the two emission measures are $`EM_1=(4.3\pm 1.6)\times 10^{53}\mathrm{cm}^3`$ and $`EM_2=(2.2\pm 0.4)\times 10^{53}\mathrm{cm}^3`$, consistent with the values derived from the XMM-*Newton* spectrum. The relative model flux level is $`7.3\times 10^{13}`$erg cm-2 s-1 (in the $`0.55`$$`7.50`$ keV band). The value for the absorbing column density derived in this way from the *Chandra* data, $`N(\mathrm{H})=(1.24\pm 0.09)\times 10^{22}`$ cm-2 is higher than the value derived from XMM-*Newton* (and a model with the value derived from XMM-*Newton* does not provide an acceptable description of the data). We note though that a systematically higher value for the absorbing column density derived from *Chandra* data is consistent with the known presence of (likely carbon-based) contamination on the ACIS chips. This causes additional low-energy absorption (up to 50% near the C edge) not accounted for in the current response matrices (Plucinsky et al. 2003).

Given the source variability during these $`64`$ ks of observation, we have investigated the presence of significant spectral variation. We have subdivided the data into three intervals (the first 30 ks, the following 18 ks and the final 16 ks), chosen to ensure similar statistics in the resulting spectra. As the initial part of the observation is rather heavily contaminated by high background, a higher fraction of it was discarded, and therefore the first interval is significantly longer. The three spectra were modeled with an absorbed two temperature plasma model. The fitted values of the model parameters are summarised in Table 2. As it can be seen by inspecting the table, the short term variability observed in the system V892 Tau during this first XMM-*Newton* observation does not appear to be associated with significant spectral changes.

A time resolved spectral analysis was also performed for the second XMM-*Newton* observation of V892 Tau system, when the large flare took place. The data were subdivided into three intervals: a first 14 ks interval while the source is quiescent, a second 8 ks interval while the source counts are rising and the last 10 ks, while the source is at its luminosity maximum333The segment lengths do not add up to 45 ks, because of the gaps in the data due to the filtering out of the solar proton flares.. The three spectra are shown in Fig. 6, and their best-fit parameters are listed in Table 3. As explained at the beginning of this section an absorbed one-temperature plasma model provides an acceptable description for all the three spectra derived from this exposure, so we did not attempted fits with two-temperature plasma models (which were necessary to obtain acceptable fits of the spectra derived from the first XMM-*Newton* exposure). In addition, the approach to flare modelling that we present in Sect. 4.2.1 relies on single temperature paramaterization of the X-ray spectrum. Nevertheless, for the spectrum derived from the first 14 ks interval of this exposure (corresponding to the quiescent phase), we verified that an absorbed two temperature plasma model with a metal abundance and two plasma temperatures frozen at the values derived from the first XMM-*Newton* exposure ($`Z=0.21`$, $`kT_1=1.02`$ keV and $`kT_2=2.82`$) indeed fits the spectrum ($`P=0.08`$). The value for the absorbing column density derived in this way is $`N(\mathrm{H})=(0.83\pm 0.08)\times 10^{22}`$ cm-2, somewhat higher than the value derived with the one-temperature plasma fit ($`N(\mathrm{H})=(0.65\pm 0.06)\times 10^{22}`$ cm-2, second line of Table 3), and in better agreement with the value derived from the first XMM-*Newton* exposure. This confirms the lack of significant spectral variation in the V892 Tau system during the quiescent phase.

As can be seen from Table 3, during the flare the only significant spectral variation occurs in the plasma temperature, while the fitted values for absorbing column density and plasma metallicity remain essentially unchanged. The plasma temperature increases from $`kT=1.53`$ keV before the flare to $`kT=8.11`$ during the rising phase and remains around that value afterwards. The model dependent flux density of the source, in the energy band $`0.35`$$`7.50`$ keV, goes from $`6.7\times 10^{13}`$ erg cm-2 s-1 before the flare to $`1.0\times 10^{11}`$ erg cm-2 s-1 during the flare maximum. The peak X-ray luminosity for the flare is $`L_\mathrm{X}=2.4\times 10^{31}`$erg s-1, high but not exceptionally so for stellar X-ray flares.

## 4 Discussion

During the 18 ks *Chandra* observation, V892 Tau (which is well resolved from the apparent companion) presents significant variability, with its X-ray flux varying by a factor of 2 in less than 1 ks. This type of variability has never been reported before for a Herbig Ae star. Undoubtedly, though, it is the large variation of luminosity of the V892 Tau system (the large flare) observed with XMM-*Newton* that is most remarkable. The steep impulsive rise of the source counts by a factor of 10 together with the impulsive rise of the plasma temperature (from 1.5 to 8.1 keV) are all consistent with the interpretation of the observed variation in terms of a large coronal flare.

As already mentioned, V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE are unresolved by the XMM-*Newton* PSF, nevertheless the evidence that the origin of the observed flare is the Herbig Ae star is compelling. First, as summarised in Table 1, the XMM-*Newton* position, before and during the flare, of the source associated with system the V892 Tau is between 2.4 and 3.1 arcsec from the radio position of the main star V892 Tau, while is between 6 and 6.8 arcsec off the position of V892 Tau NE. The absolute measurement accuracy of the XMM-*Newton* pointing is 4 arcsec (XMM-*Newton* Users’ Handbook), so the offset of the source in the EPIC-pn image from the radio coordinates of V892 Tau is well within 1 $`\sigma `$ of the pointing accuracy. This is fully consistent with V892 Tau being the dominant source of X-ray emission throughout the XMM-*Newton* observation, as it is the case during the *Chandra* observation, where V892 Tau is roughly 10 times more luminous than V892 Tau NE.

Second, the XMM-*Newton* position of the source associated with the system V892 Tau before and during the flare is constant within 0.7 arcsec444The 0.7 arcsec shift of position of the source before and during the flare is to the south, while V892 Tau NE is to the north-north east of V892 Tau. Therefore, although not significant given the $`1`$ arcsec accuracy of XMM-*Newton* relative pointing error, the position shift is consistent with V892 Tau becoming even stronger in respect with V892 Tau NE., while the angular separation of V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE is 4.1 arcsec. At the same time (as shown in the previous section) the spectral characteristic of the EPIC-pn data on the V892 Tau system while quiescent are in good agreement with the characteristics derived from the spectral data on V892 Tau from *Chandra* but significantly different from the ones derived from the *Chandra* spectral data on V892 Tau NE. These two facts strongly indicate that the XMM-*Newton* data are, for both the quiescent emission and the flare, fully dominated by the emission of V892 Tau. Had the flare been associated with V892 Tau NE, a shift of the X-ray source position during the flare would have been observed.

Finally, if one wanted to explain the XMM-*Newton* light curves as mostly determined by V892 Tau NE, disregarding the evidence coming from the pointing and spectral information, one would have to require that the source which does not appear significantly variable in the *Chandra* observation becomes from ten (before the flare) to a hundred times (during the flare) brighter during XMM-*Newton* observation. This is unlikely.

Given the facts above, we conclude that the XMM-*Newton* light curve shown in Fig. 4 and the EPIC-pn spectra shown in Fig. 6 and Fig. 5 are determined by the activity of the Herbig Ae star V892 Tau and minimally influenced by the presence of V892 Tau NE. Consequently, below we discuss the XMM-*Newton* data as originating from V892 Tau and do not further comment on the unresolved presence of V892 Tau NE.

### 4.1 Quiescent emission

By “quiescent” here we mean the time when V892 Tau is not undergoing the large flare, even though during this phase we do observe smaller flare-like events (both in *Chandra* and XMM-*Newton* data).

The *Chandra* spectrum and the XMM-*Newton* spectra of V892 Tau while the source is quiescent can all be well described by an absorbed two temperature plasma model with $`N(\mathrm{H})0.9\times 10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ $`kT_1=1.0`$ keV, $`kT_2=2.8`$ keV and a relative metal abundance of $`\mathrm{Z}=0.2\mathrm{Z}_{\mathrm{}}`$. As discussed above, for the *Chandra* data a slightly higher value of $`N(\mathrm{H})`$ is required in order to fit the spectrum, consistent with the known contamination of the ACIS chips. Here therefore we only refer to the value for $`N(\mathrm{H})`$ derived from the XMM-*Newton* data.

The X-ray emission from V892 Tau has been studied previously by Strom & Strom (1994) and Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994). These two works use the same ROSAT observation but derive from it different model parameters. Strom & Strom (1994) fit the spectral data with an absorbed two temperature plasma model with $`N(\mathrm{H})1.3\pm 0.6\times 10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$, $`kT_1=0.55`$, $`kT_2=1.20`$ and estimate an X-ray luminosity $`L_\mathrm{X}=1.0\times 10^{31}`$ erg s-1 (in the 0.2–2.4 keV band). Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994) model the spectra of V892 Tau with an absorbed 1 temperature plasma with $`N(\mathrm{H})=(4.8\pm 1.1)\times 10^{21}\mathrm{cm}^2`$, $`kT=2.3\pm 0.4`$ keV and estimate $`L_\mathrm{X}=(1.9\pm 0.8)\times 10^{30}`$ erg s-1 (a factor of $`5`$ lower than the estimate of Strom & Strom 1994).

We derive $`N(\mathrm{H})0.9\times 10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$, compatible to the estimate of Strom & Strom (1994). This value for the absorbing column density corresponds to a visual extinction555using a conversion factor $`N(\mathrm{H})/A_V=1.9\times 10^{21}`$ atoms cm-2 mag-1 (see e.g. Cox 2000). of $`A_V4.7`$, which is close to the value estimated by Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994) from the $`BV`$ value given in Herbig & Bell (1988) and a factor of $`2`$ lower than derived by Elias (1978) and Strom & Strom (1994)666Strom & Strom (1994) estimate $`A_V`$ from optical observation. This may explain why their value for the absorbing column density is close to our estimate while their estimate for $`A_V`$ is a factor of 2 higher.. We note that a lower value of visual extinction is consistent with the star spectral type being A6 rather than B9.

The two temperatures for the two component plasma model that we derive here are significantly higher than the values given by Strom & Strom (1994); this is not unexpected given the much softer (and narrower) bandpass of the ROSAT PSPC instrument used by Strom & Strom (1994). The temperature derived from our 1 plasma component fit to the *Chandra* data ($`kT=2.1`$ keV) is however consistent with plasma temperature estimated by Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994). The values we derived for the two plasma temperatures in V892 Tau are somewhat higher than the typical values derived for the X-ray emission from low mass PMS in Taurus: in an analysis of the spectral characteristic of 9 T Tauri stars in L1551 we found typically $`kT_10.3`$ and $`kT_21.2`$ (Favata et al. 2003). On the other hand the value for the plasma metallicity $`Z=0.2`$ for V892 Tau is typical of the value we derived in the same study for the 4 Weak Lined T Tauri stars in the sample.

The intrinsic luminosity we estimate for V892 Tau in its quiescent state is $`L_\mathrm{X}=1.6\times 10^{30}`$ erg s-1, in good agreement with the value given by Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994) and a factor of $`6`$ lower than derived by Strom & Strom (1994). This indicate that Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994) are probably correct when they suggest that the reason for the discrepancy between their values and the one derived by Strom & Strom (1994) is the fact that Strom & Strom may have erroneously included the nearby source \[BHS98\] MHO 11 in the source circle of V892 Tau.

A wind-related origin of the X-ray emission has been proposed for Herbig Ae/Be stars by Zinnecker & Preibisch (1994) and Damiani et al. (1994). This scenario, however, seems an unlikely explanation for the origin of the X-ray emission on V892 Tau in its quiescent phase.

As described in Sect. 3, during this phase, V892 Tau presents significant short term variability, with its X-ray flux varying by a factor of 2 in less than 1 ks. The impulsive rise in flux appears to be associated with an hardening of the spectrum in the *Chandra* data. This type of variability is similar to the one observed in lower-mass pre-main-sequence stars, where the X-ray emission is of coronal origin, while being substantially different from the 20–30% X-ray flux variations observed in OB stars (Collura et al. 1989; Cassinelli et al. 1994) where the emission mechanism is wind-related.

In addition, from the luminosity of V892 Tau estimated to be around $`38L_{\mathrm{}}`$ (Berrilli et al. 1992), its ratio of X-ray luminosity to the total luminosity while quiescent is $`L_\mathrm{X}/L_{\mathrm{bol}}1\times 10^5`$. This is two orders of magnitudes greater than the typical ratios found for OB stars. On the other hand a value of $`L_\mathrm{X}/L_{\mathrm{bol}}10^5`$ is not uncommon for low mass stars in which the X-ray emission mechanism is coronal.

The possibility of a wind related origin of the X-ray emission from V892 Tau in its quiescent phase appears therefore unlikely. This is in agreement with the conclusions reached in the two statistical studies of the properties of Herbig Ae/Be stars of Preibisch & Zinnecker (1996) and Hamaguchi et al. (2002a). These studies indicate that the X-ray emission from Herbig Ae/Be stars is generally associated with higher plasma temperature and higher X-ray to bolometric luminosity ratios than typically observed for the X-ray emission from main sequence OB stars.

A wind scenario, finally, cannot account for the observed flare event of V892 Tau.

### 4.2 Flare event

During the flare event the X-ray luminosity of V892 Tau increases by a factor of $`15`$, from $`L_\mathrm{X}=1.6\times 10^{30}`$ erg s-1 to $`L_\mathrm{X}=2.4\times 10^{31}`$ erg s-1, while the temperature of the plasma increases from $`kT=1.5`$ keV to $`kT=8.1`$ keV. The source luminosity increases over a relatively long time of $`10`$ ks, and hovers close to the luminosity maximum for at least another 10 ks thereafter – the end of the observation does not unfortunately allow to study the decay phase. As demonstrated by Reale et al. (2002) flares of this type cannot take place in the freely expanding plasmoids of a stellar wind. The observed slow increase of X-ray luminosity at the beginning of the flare event requires the presence of a confining magnetic field.

In order to gain some quantitative insight on the event and given the similarities of the derived light curve with the ones of other stellar flares we have analyzed the event through scaling obtained from detailed hydrodynamic models of flaring plasma confined in a closed coronal loops, as in solar flares.

#### 4.2.1 Flaring region characteristics

It is customary to derive information about the size of the flaring loops from the flare evolution, i.e. the light curve. It has been shown that the decay time of the light curve is linked to the plasma cooling times, which, in turn, depends on the length of the loop which confines the plasma (e.g. Reale 2002 and references therein): the slower the decay, the longer the loop, unless a significant residual heating sustains the decay and makes the decay-time/cooling-time dependence less tight.

The XMM-*Newton* observation of the flare on V892 Tau does not cover the decay phase and therefore diagnostics using the characteristics decay times are not feasible. For this particular flare, however, we are able to infer some information on the size of the flaring region from the observed rise phase.

The evolution of the flaring plasma confined in a loop is well-known from extensive hydrodynamic loop modeling (e.g. Peres et al. 1982): a strong heating pulse is triggered in an initially quiescent coronal loop and makes the temperature increase by up to several tens of MK along the whole loop in a few seconds, due to the high plasma thermal conduction. The dense chromosphere at the loop footpoints is heated violently and expands upwards with a strong evaporation front. The rising plasma fills up the loop, very dynamically first and then more gradually, approaching a new hydrostatic equilibrium at a very high pressure. The loop X-ray emission increases mostly following the increase of emission measure, and forms the rise phase of the flare.

Although the evolution in the rise phase is very dynamic and non-linear, we can nevertheless derive an approximate time scaling. From the equation of energy conservation of the confined plasma (e.g. Eq.(3) in Serio et al. 1991) it can be seen that, after the very initial seconds, dominated by the plasma kinetics, the evolution in the bulk of the rise phase can be approximately described as a linear increase of the plasma internal energy density driven by the (constant) energy input rate per unit volume:

$$\frac{dϵ}{dt}E_H$$
(1)
The pressure increases linearly as well, with a rate $`p^{}2/3E_H`$. The linear trend goes on until other energetic terms, and in particular the plasma radiative losses, become important in the energy balance. Then the pressure increase slows down to approach asymptotically the equilibrium condition described by the loop scaling laws (Rosner et al. 1978) for a loop with heating volume rate $`E_H`$. A constantly linear pressure increase with a rate $`p^{}`$ would imply that the loop reaches the equilibrium pressure in a time $`\tau _pp_0/p^{}=3/2p_0/E_H`$.

Detailed hydrodynamic simulations of the flaring loop rising phase have been performed on purpose for the present work. We simulated the evolution of the plasma confined in a coronal loop brought to flare conditions by a strong impulsive heating, as done in previous extensive modeling of solar and stellar coronal flare (Peres et al. 1982, 1987; Reale et al. 1988; Reale & Peres 1995; Betta et al. 1997, 2001). The assumption specific for this work is that of a constant flare heating lasting long enough to let the loop reach equilibrium conditions. The simulations show that the pressure linear increase rate is $`20`$% slower than $`p^{}`$. If we also include the slowing of the pressure increase at later times, we obtain that the time taken to reach $`90`$% of the equilibrium pressure is twice $`\tau _p`$, i.e. $`\delta t_p3p_0/E_H`$. Serio et al. (1991) have shown that $`\tau _S=p_0/E_H120L_9/\sqrt{T_7}`$ is the loop thermodynamic decay time, where $`L_9`$ is the loop half-length in units of $`10^9`$ cm and $`T_7`$ is the plasma maximum temperature in units of $`10^7`$ K. Therefore, we end up with an expression $`\delta t_p3\tau _S`$ which links the time taken by the loop to approach the flare equilibrium condition to the loop thermodynamic decay time.

We note that in this flare the rise phase is relatively long ($`8`$ ks), and the flaring loop may therefore approach equilibrium condition. So, if we set $`\delta t_p`$ equal to the rise duration time of $`8\times 10^3`$ s, we obtain an estimate for $`L_9`$, once $`T_7`$ is known. In this case $`T_718`$777Briggs & Pye (2003) give the empirical expression $`T_{\mathrm{max}}=0.184T_{\mathrm{obs}}^{1.13}`$ linking the temperature obtained from spectral fitting of EPIC data ($`T_{\mathrm{obs}}`$) to the loop maximum temperature ($`T_{\mathrm{max}}`$), so that we obtain $`L_9100`$.

This estimate for the size of the flaring region has been obtained under a few assumptions which deserve some comments. First, we have considered a flare occurring in a single loop. This may not hold true for such an intense and long-lasting flare, which may perhaps be described more properly as a two-ribbon flare, consisting of progressively reconnecting higher and higher loops. Nevertheless, it often occurs in solar two-ribbon flares that the rise phase mostly involves a dominant loop structure, and then gradually extends to others (e.g. Aschwanden & Alexander 2001). We may associate the estimated length to such dominant structure.

Another implicit non-trivial assumption is that of a heating pulse constantly high during the rise phase. Indeed, a gradually increasing heating function may drive the observed gradual rise of the light curve, invalidating the estimations made above. However, in such a case we should observe also a gradual increase of the temperature, while the indications are for a sudden jump of the temperature to the flare value, which is more typical of a heating pulse. We may be therefore quite confident that the total loop length is $`2\times 10^{11}`$ cm.

If we assume a loop aspect $`R/L0.1`$, where $`R`$ is the radius of the loop cross-section, assumed circular and constant along the loop, we obtain a total loop volume $`V6\times 10^{31}`$ cm3; a maximum emission measure of $`2.6\times 10^{54}`$ cm-3 then implies a maximum average loop plasma density of $`2\times 10^{11}`$ cm-3 and a maximum pressure of the order of $`10^4`$ dyne cm-2. This value is compatible with the equilibrium pressure obtained from loop scaling laws (Rosner et al. 1978) and consistent with the hypothesis of the loop at maximum X-ray luminosity being close to equilibrium conditions. In order to confine a plasma at such a pressure, a magnetic field of more than $`500`$ Gauss is required. The origin of such a field in stars that are thought to be fully or nearly-fully radiative is puzzling.

#### 4.2.2 What is the origin of the magnetic field?

In low-mass stars the presence of a significant convection zone supports the dynamo mechanism that can generate the confining magnetic fields at the origin of the X-ray flare events, but according to classical models, pre-main-sequence star with masses in excess of 2 $`M_{\mathrm{}}`$ are expected to follow fully radiative tracks once the quasi-static contraction has ended.

Palla & Stahler (1990) have made the suggestion that the surface activity and winds observed in Harbig Ae/Be may be related to the presence of an outer convection zone. In their interpretation, this convection zone results from the subsurface shell burning of residual deuterium which was accreted during the protostar phase. Nevertheless Palla & Stahler (1993) reconsider their hypothesis, and explain that according to their models the retreat of the proto-star outer convection zone does last a substantial fraction of the pre-main-sequence lifetime of an intermediate mass star. During this retreat, however, the effective temperature remains relatively low, so that the star would not be observed with an A or B spectral type. They conclude that the presence in Herbig Ae/Be stars of surface activity and strong winds is not linked to an outer convection zone, since their model shows that such convection always vanishes with the rising effective temperature.

Recently Siess et al. (2000) have presented calculations of pre-main-sequence evolutionary tracks for low- and intermediate-mass stars. These models predict the existence of a thin convective envelope in young AB stars. In their review, Favata & Micela (2003) suggest that this thin convective envelope, of roughly $`2\times 10^3`$ times the stellar radius, could be at the origin of a low-coronal activity (at the level of the observed minimum for solar type stars) in Altair (A7V) and thus explain the source X-ray luminosity of $`L_\mathrm{X}=3\times 10^{27}`$erg s-1.

According to the same models a star with mass 1.9 $`M_{\mathrm{}}`$, the same metallicity of the Sun and an age of 10 million years, would have a spectral type A6, a luminosity of 12 $`L_{\mathrm{}}`$, not too far from the one of V892 Tau, and a convective envelope of a fraction of 0.0018 its radius. Since the model predicts a stellar radius of $`1.2\times 10^{11}`$ cm, the size of the convective region would be $`2.2\times 10^8`$ cm ($``$ 0.3% $`R_{\mathrm{}}`$). It is not clear whether such a thin convective envelope, that may be sufficient to generate the low coronal activity invoked to explain the 3 to 4 order of magnitude fainter X-ray emission of a main sequence A star, can sustain the dynamo action necessary to explain the strong X-ray activity of V892 Tau. Indeed, from our flare model we derive a flare loop length of $`2\times 10^{11}`$ cm. This is comparable to the stellar radius and corresponds to a size of $`500`$ times the thin convective envelope.

An alternative mechanism to sustain the dynamo activity in these predominantly radiative stars has been proposed by Tout & Pringle (1995). They argue that dynamo activity can be sustained in AB stars for a substantial fraction of their pre-main-sequence life time by tapping the initial stellar differential rotation – or shear energy.

## 5 Conclusions

We have analysed the light curves and spectral data of the system V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE in a *Chandra* 18 ks exposure and 2 consecutive XMM-*Newton* exposures of 74 and 45 ks (nominal). In the *Chandra* data, the Herbig Ae star V892 Tau is well resolved from the low mass later type apparent companion V892 Tau NE. During the *Chandra* observations V892 Tau shows significant variability, with its X-ray flux varying by a factor of 2 in less than 1 ks. This type of variability is reminiscent of the type of flaring variability observed in lower-mass pre-main-sequence star and has never been reported before for a Herbig Ae star.

During the second XMM-*Newton* exposure of the system V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE a large flare event takes place. The source luminosity impulsively increases by a factor of 15, from $`1.6\times 10^{30}`$ erg s-1 to $`2.4\times 10^{31}`$ erg s-1, while the temperature of the plasma increases from $`kT=1.5`$ keV to $`kT=8.1`$ keV.

V892 Tau and V892 Tau NE are unresolved by the XMM-*Newton* PSF, nevertheless the combined XMM-*Newton* and *Chandra* data set provide strong evidence that the origin of the observed flare is the Herbig Ae star.

We have modeled the flare event and find that a magnetic field of 500 Gauss in intensity is necessary to confine the plasma which reaches a temperature in excess of 100 MK. The generally accepted mechanism that can sustain confining magnetic fields of this intensity is a dynamo action. Therefore under the assumption that surface convection is a necessary ingredient for a dynamo, our findings imply the presence of a convective envelope in the Herbig Ae star V892 Tau.

Recent models by Siess et al. (2000) indicate that a pre-main-sequence A6 star similar to V892 Tau has a very thin convection zone, extending to a depth of only 0.2% of the stellar radius. Whether this thin convective envelope is sufficient to sustain the dynamo action required to explain the vigorous X-ray activity of this Herbig Ae star remains to be assessed.

###### Acknowledgements.

This paper is based on observations obtained with XMM-*Newton*, an ESA science mission with instruments and contributions directly funded by ESA Member States and the USA (NASA). GM and FR acknowledges support by Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and by Ministero della Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica.


text:
# Online Pattern Recognition for the ALICE High Level Trigger

## I Introduction

The ALICE experiment  at the upcoming Large Hadron Collider at CERN will investigate PbPb collisions at a center of mass energy of about 5.5 TeV per nucleon pair and pp collisions at 14 TeV. Its main tracking detector, the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), is read out by 557568 analog-to-digital channels (ADCs), producing a data size of about 75 MByte per event for central PbPb collisions and around 0.5 MByte for pp collisions at the highest assumed multiplicities .

The event rate is limited by the bandwidth of the permanent storage system. Without any further reduction or compression the ALICE TPC detector can only take central PbPb events up to 20 Hz and min. bias111A minimum bias trigger selects events with as little as possible bias in respect to the nuclear cross section. pp events at a few 100 Hz. Significantly higher rates are possible by either selecting interesting (sub)events, or compressing data efficiently by modeling techniques. Both requires pattern recognition to be performed online. In order to process the detector information at 10-25 GByte/sec, a massive parallel computing system is needed, the High Level Trigger (HLT) system.

### I-A Functionality

The HLT system is intended to reduce the data rate produced by the detectors as far as possible to have reasonable taping costs. The key component of the system is the ability to process the raw data performing track pattern recognition in real time. Based on the extracted information, clusters and tracks, data reduction can be done in different ways:

* Trigger: Generation and application of a software trigger capable of selecting interesting events from the input data stream.
* Select: Reduction in the size of the event data by selecting sub-events or region of interest.
* Compression: Reduction in the size of the event data by compression techniques.

As such the HLT system will enable the ALICE TPC detector to run at a rate up to 200 Hz for heavy ion collisions, and up to 1 kHz for pp collisions. In order to increment the statistical significance of rare processes, dedicated triggers can select candidate events or sub-events. By analyzing tracking information from the different detectors and (pre-)triggers online, selective or partial readout of the relevant detectors can be performed thus reducing the event rate.

The tasks of such a trigger are selections based upon the online reconstructed track parameters of the particles, e.g. to select events containing e+e- candidates coming from quarkonium decay or to select events containing high energy jets made out of collimated beams of high $`p_T`$ particles . In the case of low multiplicity events such as for pp collisions, the online reconstruction can be used to remove pile-up (superimposed) events from the trigger event.

### I-B Architecture

The HLT system receives data from the front-end electronics. A farm of clustered SMP-nodes ($``$500 to 1000 nodes), based on off-the-shelf PCs and connected with a high bandwidth, low latency network provide the necessary computing power. The hierarchy of the farm has to be adapted to both the parallelism in the data flow and to the complexity of the pattern recognition.

Fig. 1 shows a sketch of the architecture of the system. The TPC detector consists of 36 sectors, each sector being divided into 6 sub-sectors. The data from each sub-sector are transferred via an optical fiber from the detector front-end into 216 custom designed *read-out receiver cards* (RORCs). Each receiver node is interfaced to a RORC using its internal PCI bus. In addition to the different communication interfaces, the RORCs provide a FPGA co-processor for data intensive tasks of the pattern recognition and enough external memory to store several dozen event fractions. A hierarchical network interconnects all the receiver nodes.

Each sector is processed in parallel, results are then merged in a higher level. The first layer of nodes receives the data from the detector and performs the pre-processing task, i.e. cluster and track seeding on the sub-sector level. The next two levels of nodes exploit the local neighborhood: track segment reconstruction on sector level. Finally all local results are collected from the sectors or from different detectors and combined on a global level: track segment merging and final track fitting.

The farm is designed to be completely fault tolerant avoiding all single points of failure, except for the unique detector links. A generic communication framework has been developed based on the publisher-subscriber principle, which one allows to construct any hierarchy of communication processing elements .

## II Online Pattern Recognition

The main task of the HLT system is to reconstruct the complete event information online. Concerning the TPC and the other tracking devices, the particles should ideally follow helical trajectories due to the solenoidal magnetic field of the L3 magnet, in which these detectors are embedded. Thus, we mathematically describe a track by a helix with 5(+1) parameters222To describe an arbitrary helix in 3 dimensions, one needs 7 continuous parameters and a handedness switch. For the special case of the ALICE geometry there are then 5 independent parameters plus the handedness switch.. A TPC track is composed out of clusters. The pattern recognition task for the HLT system is to process the raw data in order to find clusters and to assign them to tracks thereby determining the helix track parameters using different fitting strategies.

For HLT tracking, we distinguish two different approaches: the *sequential feature extraction* and the *iterative feature extraction*.

The sequential method, corresponding to the conventional way of event reconstruction, first calculates the cluster centroids with a *Cluster Finder* and then uses a *Track Follower* on these space points to determine the track parameters. This approach is applicable for lower occupancy like pp and low multiplicity PbPb collisions. However, at larger multiplicities expected for PbPb at LHC, clusters start to overlap and deconvolution becomes necessary in order to achieve the desired tracking efficiencies.

For that reason, the iterative method first searches for possible track candidates using a suitable defined *Track Candidate Finder* and then assigns clusters to tracks using a *Cluster Evaluator* possibly deconvoluting overlapping clusters shared by different tracks.

For both methods, a helix fit on the assigned clusters finally determines the track parameters.

In order to reduce data shipping and communicaton overhead within the HLT, as much as possible of the *local* pattern recognition will be done on the RORC. We therefore intend to run the *Cluster Finder* or the *Track Candidate Finder* directly on the FPGA co-processor of the receiver nodes while reading out the data over the fiber. In both cases the results, cluster centroids or track candidate parameters, will be sent from the RORC to the memory of the host over the PCI bus.

### II-A Sequential Tracking Approach

The classical approach of pattern recognition in the TPC is divided into two sequential steps: Cluster finding and track finding. In the first step the Cluster Finder reconstructs the cluster centroids, which are interpreted as the three dimensional space points produced by the traversing particles. The list of space points is then passed to the Track Follower, which combines the clusters to form track segments. A similar reconstruction chain has successfully been used in the STAR L3 trigger , and thus has been adapted to the ALICE HLT framework.

#### II-A1 The Cluster Finder

The input to the cluster finder is a list of above threshold timebin sequences for each pad. The algorithm builds the clusters by matching sequences on neighboring pads. In order to speed up the execution time every calculation is performed on-the-fly; sequence centroid calculation, sequence matching and deconvolution. Hence the loop over sequences is done only once. Only two lists of sequences are stored at every time: the current pad and the previous pad(s). For every new sequence the centroid position in the time direction is calculated by the ADC weighted mean. The mean is then added to a current pad list, and compared to the sequences in the previous. If a match is found, the mean position in both pad and time is calculated and the cluster list is updated. Every time a match is not found, the sequence is regarded as a new cluster.

In the case of overlapping clusters, a crude deconvolution scheme can be performed333The deconvolution can be switched on/off by a flag of the program. In the time direction, overlapping sequences are identified by local minima of the charge values within a sequence. These sequences are separated by cutting at the position of the minimum in the time direction. The same approach is being used for the pad direction, where a cluster is cut if there is a local minimum of the pad charge values.

The algorithm is inherently local, as each padrow can processed independently. This is one of the main reasons to use a circuit for the parallel computation of the space points on the FPGA of the RORC .

#### II-A2 The Track Follower

The tracking algorithm is based on conformal mapping. A space point (x,y) is transformed in the following way:

$$x^{}=\frac{xx_t}{r^2}$$

$$y^{}=\frac{yy_t}{r^2}$$

$$r^2=(xx_t)^2+(yy_t)^2,$$
(1)
where the reference point $`(x_t,y_t)`$ is a point on the trajectory of the track. If the track is assumed to originate from the interaction point, the reference point is replaced by the vertex coordinates. The transformation has the property of transforming the circular trajectories of the tracks into straight lines. Since then fitting straight lines is easier and much faster than fitting circles (if we neglect the changes in the weights of the points induced by conformal mapping), the effect of the transformation is to speed up the track fitting procedure.

The track finding algorithm consists of a follow-your-nose algorithm, where the tracks are built by including space points close to the fit . The tracks are initiated by building track segments, and the search is starting at the outermost padrows. The track segments are formed by linking space points, which are close in space. When a certain number of space points have been linked together, the points are fitted to straight lines in conformal space. These tracks are then extended by searching for further clusters, which are close to the fit.

#### II-A3 Track Merging

Tracking can be done either locally on every sub-sector, on the sector level or on the complete TPC. In the first two scenarios, the tracks have to be merged across the detector boundaries. A simple and fast track merging procedure has been implemented for the TPC. The algorithm basically tries to match tracks which cross the detector boundaries and whose difference in the helix parameters are below a certain threshold. After the tracks have been merged, a final track fit is performed in real space.

#### II-A4 Tracking Performance

The tracking performance has been studied and compared with the offline TPC reconstruction chain. In the evaluation the following quantities has been defined:

* Generated good track – A track which crosses at least 40% of all padrows. In addition, it is required that half of the innermost 10% of the clusters are correctly assigned.
* Found good track – A track for which the number of assigned clusters is at least 40% of the total number of padrows. In addition, the track should not have more than 10% wrongly assigned clusters.
* Found fake track – A track which has sufficient amount of clusters assigned, but more than 10% wrongly assigned clusters.

The tracking efficiency is the ratio of the number of found good tracks to the number of generated good tracks. For comparison, the identical definitions have been used both for offline and HLT.

Fig. 2 shows the comparison of the integral efficiency of the HLT and offline reconstruction chains for different charged particle multiplicities for a magnetic field of B=$`0.4`$T. We see that up to dN/dy of 2000 the HLT efficiency is more than $`90`$%, but for higher multiplicities the HLT code becomes too inefficient to be used for physics evaluation. In this regime other approaches have to be applied.

#### II-A5 Timing Performance

The TPC analysis in HLT is divided into a hierarchy of processing steps from cluster finding, track finding, track merging to track fitting.

Fig. 3 shows the foreseen processing hierarchy for the sequential approach. Cluster finding is done in parallel on each Front-End Processor (FEP), whereas track finding and track fitting is done sequentially on the sector level processors. The final TPC tracks are obtained on the event processors, where the tracks are being merged across the sector boundaries and a final track fit is performed (compare to Fig. 1).

Fig. 4 shows the required computing time measured on a standard reference PC444800 MHz Twin Pentium III, ServerWorks Chipset, 256 kB L3 cache corresponding to the different processing steps for different particle multiplicities. The error bars denote the standard deviation of processing time for the given event ensemble. For particle multiplicity of dN/dy=4000, about 24 seconds are required to process a complete event, or 4800 CPUs are required to date for the TPC alone at an event rate of 200 Hz555The estimate ignores any communication and synchronization overhead in order to operate the HLT system..

Table I compares the CPU time needed to reconstruct a TPC event of $`dN/dy=4000`$ for HLT and offline. In both cases, loading the data into memory was not included in the measurements666For offline, in addition 28 seconds are needed for data loading., in order to purely compare the two algorithms. For the overall performance of the HLT system, however, other factors as the transparent publisher-subscriber interface and network latencies become more important to allow an overall throughput with the expected rates.

### II-B Iterative Tracking Approach

For large particle multiplicities clusters in the TPC start to overlap, and deconvolution becomes necessary in order to achieve the desired tracking efficiencies. The cluster shape is highly dependent on the track parameters, and in particular on the track crossing angles with the padrow and drift time. In order to properly deconvolute the overlapping clusters, knowledge of the track parameters that produced the clusters are necessary. For that purpose the Hough transform is suited, as it can be applied directly on the raw ADC data thus providing an estimate of the track parameters. Once the track parameters are known, the clusters can be fit to the known shape, and the cluster centroid can be correctly reconstructed. The cluster deconvolution is geometrically local, and thus trivially parallel, and can be performed in parallel on the raw data.

#### II-B1 Hough Transform

The Hough transform is a standard tool in image analysis that allows recognition of global patterns in an image space by recognition of local patterns (ideally a point) in a transformed parameter space. The basic idea is to find curves that can be parametrized in a suitable parameter space. In its original form one determines a curve in parameter space for a signal corresponding to all possible tracks with a given parametric form to which it could possibly belong . All such curves belonging to the different signals are drawn in parameter space. That space is then discretized and entries are stored in a histogram. If the peaks in the histogram exceeds a given threshold, the corresponding parameters are found.

As mentioned above, in ALICE the local track model is a helix. In order to simplify the transformation, the detector is divided into subvolumes in pseudo-rapidity. If one restricts the analysis to tracks originating from the vertex, the circular track in the $`\eta `$-volume is characterized by two parameters: the emission angle with the beam axis, $`\psi `$ and the curvature $`\kappa `$. The transformation is performed from (R,$`\varphi `$)-space to ($`\psi `$,$`\kappa `$)-space using the following equations:

$`R`$ $`=`$ $`\sqrt{x^2+y^2}`$
$`\varphi `$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{arctan}({\displaystyle \frac{y}{x}})`$
$`\kappa `$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2}{R}}\mathrm{sin}(\varphi \psi )`$
Each ADC value above a certain threshold transforms into a sinusoidal line extending over the whole $`\psi `$-range of the parameter space. All the corresponding bins in the histogram are incremented with the corresponding ADC value. The superposition of these point transformations produces a maximum at the circle parameters of the track. The track recognition is now done by searching for local maxima in the parameter space.

Fig. 5 shows the tracking efficiency for the Hough transform applied on a full multiplicity event and a magnetic field of 0.2T. An overall efficiency above 90% was achieved. The tracking efficiency was taken as the number of verified track candidates divided with the number of generated tracks within the TPC acceptance. The list of verified track candidates was obtained by taking the list of found local maxima and laying a road in the raw data corresponding to the track parameters of the peak. If enough clusters were found along the road, the track candidate was considered a track, if not the track candidate was disregarded.

However, one of the problems encountered with the Hough transform algorithm is the number of fake tracks coming from spurious peaks in the parameter space. Before the tracks are verified by looking into the raw data, the number of fake tracks is currently above 100%. This problem has to be solved in order for the tracks found by the Hough transform to be used as an efficient input for the cluster fitting and deconvoluting procedure777That is also reason, why the efficiency does not drop for very low $`p_T`$ tracks like the offline tracker in Fig. 7. Strictly speaking, the efficiency shown in Fig. 5 merely represents the quality of the track candidates after the fakes have been removed..

#### II-B2 Timing performance

Fig. 6 shows a timing measurement of the Hough based algorithm for different particle multiplicities. The Hough transformation is computed in parallel locally on each receiving node, whereas the other steps (histogram adding, maxima finding and merging tracks across $`\eta `$-slices) are done sequentially on the sector level. The histograms from the different sub-sectors are added in order to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the peaks. For particle multiplicities of dN/dy=8000, the four steps require about 700 seconds per event corresponding to 140,000 CPUs for a 200 Hz event processing rate. It should be noted that the algorithm was already optimized but some additional optimizations are still believed to be possible. However, present studies indicate that one should not expect to gain more than a factor of 2 without using hardware specifics of a given processor architecture.

The advantage of the Hough transform is that it has a very high degree of locality and parallelism, allowing for the efficient use of FPGA co-processors. Given the hierarchy of the TPC data analysis, it is obvious that both the Hough transformation and the cluster deconvolution can be performed in the receiver nodes. The Hough transformation is particular I/O-bound as it create large histograms that have to be searched for maxima, which scales poorly with modern processor architectures and is ideally suited for FPGA co-processors. Currently different ways of implementing the above outlined Hough transform in hardware are being investigated.

## III Data modeling and Data compression

One of the mains goals of the HLT is to compress data efficiently with a minimal loss of physics information.

In general two modes of data compression can be considered:

* Binary lossless data compression, allowing bit-by-bit reconstruction of the original data set.
* Binary lossy data compression, not allowing bit-by-bit reconstruction of the original data, while retaining however all relevant physical information.

Methods such as Run-length encoding (RLE), Huffman and LZW are considered lossless compression, while thresholding and hit finding operations are considered lossy techniques that could lead to a loss of small clusters or tail of clusters. It should be noted that data compression techniques in this context should be considered lossless from a physics point of view. Many of the state of the art compression techniques were studied on simulated TPC data and presented in detail in . They all result in compression factors of close to 2. However, the most effective data compression can be done by cluster and track modeling, as will be outlined in the following.

### III-A Cluster and track modeling

From a data compression point of the view, the aim of the track finding is not to extract physics information, but to build a data model, which will be used to collect clusters and to code cluster information efficiently. Therefore, the pattern recognition algorithms are optimized differently, or even different methods can be used compared to the normal tracking.

The tracking analysis comprises of two main steps: Cluster reconstruction and track finding. Depending on the occupancy, the space points can be determined by a simple cluster finding or require more complex cluster deconvolution functionality in areas of high occupancy (see II-A and II-B). In the latter case a minimum track model may be required in order to properly decode the digitized charge clouds into their correct space points.

In any case the analysis process is two-fold: clustering and tracking. Optionally the first step can be performed online while leaving the tracking to offline, and thereby only recording the space points. Given the high resolution of space points on one hand, and the size of the chamber on the other, would result in rather large encoding sizes for these clusters. However, taking a preliminary zeroth order tracking into account, the space points can be encoded with respect to their distance to such tracklets, leaving only small numbers which can be encoded very efficiently. The quality of the tracklet itself, with the helix parameters that would also be recorded, is only secondary as the tracking is repeated offline with the original cluster positions.

### III-B Data compression scheme

The input to the compression algorithm is a lists of tracks and their corresponding clusters. For every assigned cluster, the cluster centroid deviation from the track model is calculated in both pad and time direction. Its size is quantized with respect to the given detector resolution888The quantization steps have been set to 0.5 mm for the pad direction and 0.8 mm for the time direction, which is compatible with the intrinsic detector resolution., and represented by a fixed number of bits. In addition the total charge of the cluster is stored. Since the cluster shape itself can be parametrized as a function of track parameters and detector specific parameters, the cluster widths in pad and time are not stored for every cluster. During the decompression step, the cluster centroids are restored, and the cluster shape is calculated based on the track parameters. In tables II and III, the track and cluster parameters are listed together with their respective size being used in the compression. Instead of assigning only found clusters and their padrow numbers to a track, we store for every padrow a cluster structure with a minimum size of one bit, indicating whether the cluster is “present” or not.

The compression scheme has been applied to a simulated PbPb event with a multiplicity of $`dN/dy=1000`$. The input tracks used for the compression are tracks reconstructed with the sequential tracking approach. The remaining clusters, or the clusters which were not assigned to any tracks during the track finding step, were disregarded and not stored for further analysis999The remaining clusters mainly originate from very low $`p_T`$ tracks such as $`\delta `$-electrons, which could not be reconstructed by the track finder. Their uncompressed raw data amounts to a relative size of about 20%.. A relative size of 11% for the compressed data with respect to the original set is obtained.

In order to evaluate the impact on the physics observables, the compressed data is decompressed and the restored cluster are processed by the offline reconstruction chain. In Fig. 7 the offline tracking efficiency before and after applying the compression is compared as a function of $`p_T`$. A total loss of about 2% in efficiency is observed. Fig. 8 shows for the same events the $`p_T`$ resolution as a function of $`p_T`$ before and after the compression is applied. The observed improvement of the $`p_T`$ resolution is connected to way the errors of the cluster are calculated. For the case of the standard offline reconstruction chain the errors are calculated using the cluster information itself, whereas for the compression scheme they are calculated using the track parameters.

Keeping the potential gain of statistics by the increased event rate written to tape in mind, one has to weight the tradeoff between the impact on the physics observables and the cost for the data storage. For occupancy events of more than 20% (corresponding to $`dN/dy>2000`$), clusters start to overlap and has to be properly deconvoluted in order to effectively compress the data.

In this scenario, the Hough transform or another effective iterative tracking procedure would serve as an input for the cluster fitting/deconvolution algorithm. With a high online tracking performance, track and cluster modeling, together with noise removal, can reduce the data size by a factor of 10.

## IV Conclusion

Focusing on the TPC, the sequential approach, which consists of cluster finding followed by track finding, is applicable for pp and low multiplicity PbPb data up to dN/dy of 2000 to 3000 with more than 90% efficiency. The timing results indicate that the desired frequency of 1KHz for pp and 200 Hz for PbPb can be achieved. For higher multiplicities of dN/dy $``$ 4000 the iterative approach using the Circle Hough transform for primary track candidate finding shows promising efficiencies of around 90% but with high computational costs.

By compressing the data using data modeling techniques, the results for low multiplicity events show that one can compress data of up to 10% relative to the original data sizes with a small loss of the tracking efficiency of about 2%, but slightly improved $`p_T`$ resolution.


text:
# What X-rays tell us about dark matter halos

## 1. Introduction

It is well known that dark matter halos are not spherical as predicted by current theories of structure formation (V. Springel, this volume, for a review). The shape of halos depends on the nature of dark matter and cosmological parameters in theory, and can be measured through a wide range of observations from the kinematics of satellites and debris in galaxies to the hot gas distribution of galaxy clusters. In this talk, I will first present an accurate model for the shape of dark halos in Cold Dark Matter (CDM) dominated models, and then discuss its implications for and confrontations with observed shapes of galactic and cluster halos.

## 2. Modeling the non-spherical density profiles of dark matter halos

We use two sets of state-of-the art simulations for the current purpose. The first is a set of cosmological N-body simulations with $`N=512^3`$ particles in a $`100h^1`$Mpc box (Jing & Suto 2002), and the other is a set of high-resolution halo simulation runs (Jing & Suto 2000).

To model the shape of dark matter halos, we first find the iso-density surfaces. This begins with a computation for the local density at each particle’s position. We adopt the smoothing kernel widely employed in the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH, Hernquist & Katz 1989). Thirty two nearest neighbor particles are used to compute the local density. The left panel of Figure 1 shows a typical example of the halo isodensity surfaces. This plot clearly suggests that the isodensity surfaces can be approximated as triaxial ellipsoids.

The isodensity ellipsoids at different radii are well aligned, and the axial ratios of the ellipsoids are nearly constant. These facts suggest that the internal density distribution within a halo can be approximated by a sequence of the concentric ellipsoids of a constant axis ratio. To show this to be an improved description over the conventional spherical description, we compute the quadrupole of the particle distribution within a spherical shell ($`Q_s`$) or an ellipsoidal shell ($`Q_e`$). If the spherical (triaxial) model is exact, $`Q_s`$ $`(Q_e)`$ vanishes, thus a more accurate halo density profile should yield a smaller quadrupole. The ratio of these two quantities is plotted in the right panel of Figure 1. It clearly shows that the triaxial model works much better than the conventional spherical model.

We found that the matter density within the isodensity surfaces changes with the major axis $`R`$ in a way similar to that of the spherical model. The density profile can be approximately described by the NFW-like profiles, though the concentration parameter is different from the spherical model. In Jing & Suto (2002), we have given a recipe, based on our analysis of the simulations, for predicting the triaxial density profile for a halo in a general CDM cosmogony if the halo mass and halo shape (i.e. the axial ratios) are known.

The mass distribution of CDM halos is well described by the Press-Schechter formula (or its modified form) for theories of formation. Thus, in order to predict the density profiles for a sample of CDM halos, we need to quantify the distribution function $`p(a/c,b/c)`$ of the axial ratios $`a/c`$ and $`b/c`$ at a given mass, where $`a`$, $`b`$, and $`c`$ are the minor, middle, and major axes respectively. The function can be written as

$`p(a/c,b/c)d(a/c)d(b/c)`$ $`=`$ $`p(a/c)d(a/c)p(b/c|a/c)d(b/c)`$ (1)
$`=`$ $`p(a/c)d(a/c)p(a/b|a/c)d(a/b).`$ (2)
The probability function $`p(a/c)`$ and the conditional probability $`p(a/b|a/c)`$ have been measured for halos in our SCDM and $`\lambda `$CDM simulations at different epochs. An example is given in Figure 2. Jing & Suto (2002) have found accurate universal functions to describe these two probability functions. The shapes depend both on the halo mass (through the ratio of the halo mass to the non-linear mass $`M_{}`$) and on the cosmological parameters, and the distribution of the shapes is very broad. This means that in order to test the shape prediction of CDM models definitely, one generally needs a large sample of objects, e.g. galaxies or clusters of galaxies. As a reference, it would be interesting to have a look at typical values of halo shapes. For the concordance $`\lambda `$CDM model of a fluctuation amplitude $`\sigma _8=0.9`$, the typical values of the axial ratios $`a/c`$ and $`b/c`$ are 0.7 and 0.8 for Milky Way halos and 0.45 and 0.65 for clusters of galaxies. The galactic halos at redshift $`z=0.5`$ are expected to have $`a/c=0.5`$ and $`b/c=0.7`$, much more eccentric than their counterpart at $`z=0`$.

## 3. Comparison with the observations

From the kinematics within galaxies or from the X-ray observations of clusters, one may measure the potential of their dark halos. For the triaxial model in the last section, Lee & Suto (2003) presented a calculation for the distribution of iso-potential surfaces. Using the eccentricity $`e=(1a^2/c^2)^{1/2}`$, the ratio of the halo potential eccentricity to the halo density eccentricity at radius $`r`$ is a function of $`r/R_0`$ (Lee & Suto 2003; the left panel of Figure 3), where $`R_0`$ is a scale radius of the major axis in the generalized NFW form (Jing & Suto 2002). The potential becomes rounder at an outer radius, because the halo mass is concentrated in the central region. For a galactic halo of Milky Way mass, the axial ratio $`a/c`$ of the potential is 0.85 at the central region and is larger than 0.9 at the virial radius. These values are well consistent with the potential shape measured for the Milky Way (Sackett, P., Sellwood, J., this volume).

X-ray morphology of clusters can be computed from the potential under the hydrostatic equilibrium assumption, or can be measured directly from hydro/N-body simulations. Flores et al. (in preparation) have carried out a comparison of the cluster ellipticity between the concordance $`\lambda `$CDM model and an Einstein X-ray cluster sample. The distribution of the model clusters is completely consistent with that of the observed clusters, though larger samples both of simulation clusters and of observed clusters are badly needed for an accurate assessment. Flores et al. also noted that the shape distribution found in their work is well consistent with Jing & Suto (2002). In a recent work of Plionis (2002), a significant evolution is found of the cluster X-ray shapes, as higher-redshift clusters are more elongated than the local clusters. Floor et al. (2003) found it difficult to explain this ellipticity evolution within the concordance $`\lambda `$CDM model. I would like to point out, however, the comparison between the model and the observation carried out by Floor et al. might not be proper, because they used individual cluster simulations in their study. The “clusters” they identified at high redshift must be smaller than the clusters at $`z=0`$, while in the observation of Plionis (2002) clusters at high redshift are much more massive than those at $`z=0`$. With the triaxial model of Jing & Suto (2002), it is not difficult to explain the redshift dependence of the cluster ellipticity found by Plionis (2002), at least qualitatively, because the high redshift clusters in the observation are more massive.

It is promising to probe the halo shapes directly with the weak lensing effect. The weak lensing measures the projected mass distribution (Schneider, P., this volume; Gavazzi et al. 2003). We have measured the shapes for the projected halo mass distribution in the simulations. The right panel of Figure 3 shows the distribution of the projected ellipticity for galactic halos (mass about $`10^{12}M_{}`$) in our simulations. The halos have a mean ellipticity $`ϵ=0.31`$ or axial ratio $`a/b=0.72`$ at redshift $`z=0`$, and $`ϵ=0.42`$ or $`a/b=0.64`$ at $`z=1`$. Recently, Hoekstra et al. (2003) have tentatively measured the shape of galactic halos through weak galaxy-galaxy lensing, and found $`a/b=0.66`$ for galactic halos at $`z0.5`$. Their results are in good agreement with our theoretical predictions, though it is important to note that they used a weighting procedure to measure the halo shapes that must be properly modeled in future comparisons between the observation and the theoretical predictions.

In addition, we have compared the shape distribution of rich clusters in the Standard Cold Dark Matter (SCDM; $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=1`$ and $`\lambda _0=0`$) and in the concordance CDM ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0.3`$ and $`\lambda _0=0.7`$), and found their difference is not dramatic. One needs a large sample of local massive clusters (say a few thousand) to distinguish these two models definitely. This conclusion is in good agreement with an early study of Jing et al. (1995) on this subject.

## 4. Conclusions

We have presented a triaxial modeling of the dark matter halo density profiles on the basis of the combined analysis of the high-resolution halo simulations (12 halos with $`N10^6`$ particles within their virial radius) and the large cosmological simulations (5 realizations with $`N=512^3`$ particles in a $`100h^1`$Mpc boxsize). In particular, we found that the universal density profile discovered by NFW in the spherical model can be also generalized to our triaxial model description. Our triaxial density profile is specified by the concentration parameter $`c_e`$ and the scaling radius $`R_0`$ (or the virial radius $`R_e`$ in the triaxial modeling) as well as the axis ratios $`a/c`$ and $`a/b`$.

We have obtained accurate fitting formulae for those parameters which are of practical importance in exploring the theoretical and observational consequences of our triaxial model. Because the page limit of the proceedings, we could not have typed in these formulae. We refer the interested reader to the journal paper of Jing & Suto (2002) for the fitting formulae. As Springel summarized in his talk (this volume), the shape distribution of dark halos is now well determined in CDM models.

The model predictions are compared with various observations of halo shapes around galaxies or clusters of galaxies. While a good agreement is found between the concordance model prediction and the available observations, a large sample of galactic and cluster halos is needed to definitely test the prediction of the concordance model or to distinguish among theories of different dark matter, because the shape distribution of halos are generally very broad. It is also important to point out that iso-potential surfaces are much rounder than the iso-density surfaces, especially at halo outer part $`rr_{vir}`$.

### Acknowledgments.

I would like to thank the collaborator Yasushi Suto for his important contribution to the work, and Joel Primack for communicating their result on the shape distribution of x-ray clusters before publication. The work was supported in part by by NKBRSF (G19990754) and by National Science Foiundation of China.

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