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# Best mean-field for condensates

## Abstract

The Gross-Pitaevskii equation assumes that all (identical) bosons of a condensate reside in a single one-particle function. Here, we raise the question whether it always provides the best mean-field ansatz for condensates, leading to the lowest mean-field ground state energy. To this end, we derive a mean-field approach allowing for bosons to reside in several different one-particle functions. The number of bosons in each of these functions is a variational parameter minimizing the energy. The energy and one-particle functions at these optimal numbers can be determined directly. A numerical example is presented demonstrating that the mean-field energy of trapped bosons can be below that provided by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Implications are discussed.

Non-linear Schrödinger equations are widely used in many areas of physics and chemistry. In fact, the mean-field equation of any many-body system is a non-linear Schrödinger equation. Usually, however, one speaks of the non-linear Schrödinger equation if this equation takes on a particular form. This equation is used to describe many phenomena like solitons , optical pulses in fibres , Bose-condensed photons  and others. Motivated by famous experiments , extensive use of this equation has been made in resent years to describe dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensates . In the context of such condensates this equation is also referred to as Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation .

The non-linear Schrödinger equation can be derived as the mean-field equation of a system of N identical bosons which interact via a $`\delta `$-function potential $`W(\stackrel{}{r}_1\stackrel{}{r}_2)=\lambda _0\delta (\stackrel{}{r}_1\stackrel{}{r}_2)`$, where $`\stackrel{}{r}_i`$ is the position of the i-th particle. It is equivalent to the GP equation if we identify the appearing non-linear parameter with the s-wave scattering length of the particles . At zero temperature all bosons can occupy the same spatial one-particle function (orbital) if their mutual interaction is neglected. The mean-field description of the interacting system is obtained by assuming the ground state wave function $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ to be a product of identical spatial orbitals $`\phi `$: $`\mathrm{\Psi }(\stackrel{}{r}_1,\stackrel{}{r}_2,\mathrm{},\stackrel{}{r}_N)=\phi (\stackrel{}{r}_1)\phi (\stackrel{}{r}_2)\mathrm{}\phi (\stackrel{}{r}_N)`$. The energy $`E<\mathrm{\Psi }|\widehat{H}|\mathrm{\Psi }>`$ defined as the expectation value of the widely used  Hamiltonian $`\widehat{H}=h+W`$, reads

$$E_{GP}=N\{\phi ^{}h\phi 𝑑\stackrel{}{r}+\frac{\lambda }{2}|\phi |^4𝑑\stackrel{}{r}\},\lambda =\lambda _0(N1)$$
(1)
where $`h(\stackrel{}{r})=\widehat{T}+\widehat{V}(\stackrel{}{r})`$ is the unperturbed one-particle Hamiltonian consisting of the kinetic operator $`\widehat{T}`$ and the external potential $`\widehat{V}(\stackrel{}{r})`$. By minimizing this energy one readily obtains the GP equation for the optimal orbital $`\phi `$:

$$\{h(\stackrel{}{r})+\lambda |\phi (\stackrel{}{r})|^2\}\phi (\stackrel{}{r})=\mu _{GP}\phi (\stackrel{}{r})$$
(2)
Solution of this eigenvalue equation determines this $`\phi `$ and $`\mu _{GP}`$ which is called the chemical potential .

The GP equation and energy are very appealing and have been successful in explaining experimental observations. We raise the question, however, whether the GP approach always provides the best mean-field description of the system. We shall demonstrate below that other mean-fields may provide a lower energy than (1) does, at least in some cases. The general wave function of N non-interacting bosons is a product $`\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r}_1)\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r}_2)\mathrm{}\phi _N(\stackrel{}{r}_N)`$ of orbitals which can all be different. Since the bosons are identical, this product must, of course, be symmetrized and several bosons may occupy the same spatial orbital. We may put $`n_1`$ bosons in orbital $`\phi _1`$, $`n_2`$ in orbital $`\phi _2`$ and so on. By definition the most general mean-field energy is $`E=<\mathrm{\Psi }|\widehat{H}|\mathrm{\Psi }>`$ where $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ is the above symmetrized product. For transparency of presentation we confine ourselves in the following to two orbitals $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ with particle occupations $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$, respectively, where $`n_1+n_2=N`$. The extension to more orbitals is trivial. The energy now reads

$`E=n_1h_{11}+n_2h_{22}+\lambda _0{\displaystyle \frac{n_1(n_11)}{2}}{\displaystyle |\phi _1|^4𝑑\stackrel{}{r}}+`$
$`\lambda _0{\displaystyle \frac{n_2(n_21)}{2}}{\displaystyle |\phi _2|^4𝑑\stackrel{}{r}}+2\lambda _0n_1n_2{\displaystyle |\phi _1|^2|\phi _2|^2𝑑\stackrel{}{r}}`$ (3)
where $`h_{ii}=\phi _i^{}h\phi _i𝑑\stackrel{}{r}`$ is the usual one-particle energy. Minimizing this energy with respect to $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ under the constraints that they are orthogonal, $`<\phi _1|\phi _2>=0`$, and normalized to unity, $`<\phi _i|\phi _i>=1`$, we obtain the following equations

$`\{h(\stackrel{}{r})+\lambda _0(n_11)|\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})|^2+2\lambda _0n_2|\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})|^2\}\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})=`$
$`=\mu _{11}\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})+\mu _{12}\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})`$
$`\{h(\stackrel{}{r})+\lambda _0(n_21)|\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})|^2+2\lambda _0n_1|\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})|^2\}\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})=`$
$`=\mu _{22}\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})+\mu _{21}\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})`$ (4)
for the optimal orbitals. These equations should not be confused with those for condensates made of two types of bosons. The $`\mu _{ij}`$ are the Lagrange parameters due to the above mentioned constraints. Of course, the energy E and the orbitals $`\phi _1`$,$`\phi _2`$ depend on the particle occupation $`n_1`$. Consequently, we may treat $`n_1`$ as a variational parameter and search for its optimal value which minimizes the energy. We shall return to this central point below.

Here, we briefly make contact with the problem of fragmentation often discussed in the literature, see refs.  and references therein. A condensate is fragmented if its reduced one-body density matrix has two or more macroscopic eigenvalues. Until now no fragmentation has been found for confined condensates, i.e., for condensates in an external potential. Moreover, it has been shown that fragmentation cannot take place in a harmonic external potentials . Our ansatz discussed above in eqs.(3,4) can describe fragmentation on the mean-field level. If the particle occupations $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$ minimizing the energy are both macroscopic for large N, fragmentation takes place.

Let us analyze eqs.(3,4). Using eq.(1) it follows that the energy needed to remove a particle without changing the orbital $`\phi `$ is, within the GP mean-field, given by $`E_{GP}(N)E_{GP}(N1)=\mu _{GP}`$. Analogously, we can compute the energy needed to remove a particle from the orbital $`\phi _1`$ and that from the orbital $`\phi _2`$ in the framework of the present mean-field. Using eqs.(3,4) and remembering that $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ are orthogonal, we readily find: $`\mu _{11}=E(n_1,n_2)E(n_11,n_2)`$ and $`\mu _{22}=E(n_1,n_2)E(n_1,n_21)`$. In other words, $`\mu _{11}`$ and $`\mu _{22}`$ can be viewed as chemical potentials of the $`\{\phi _1\}`$\- and $`\{\phi _2\}`$-particle manifolds, respectively.

Another interesting property of (3,4) is that, unless $`n_1=n_2=N/2`$, these equations are not invariant to rotations (unitary transformations) of the pair $`(\phi _1,\phi _2)`$. This is due to the fact that $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ appear a different number of times in the wave function in contrast to the situation for identical fermions where the mean-field equations (Hartree-Fock) are indeed invariant to rotations . As an important consequence the off-diagonal Lagrange parameters $`\mu _{12}`$ and $`\mu _{21}`$ can not, in general, be removed from eq.(4) by an unitary transformation. Finally we mention that $`n_1\mu _{12}=n_2\mu _{21}`$.

The factor $`2\lambda _0n_1n_2`$ appearing in the energy (3) and the corresponding term in (4) deserve attention. If the bosons residing in $`\phi _1`$ would be distinguishable from those living in $`\phi _2`$, this factor will reduce to $`\lambda _0n_1n_2`$. The remaining factor $`\lambda _0n_1n_2`$ appears because of the exchange interaction between the two manifolds of identical bosons. Concentrating on many bosons, i.e. $`n_1,n_21`$, equations (3,4) become more transparent. Then we may introduce the orbitals $`\varphi _1=(n_1/N)^{1/2}\phi _1`$ and $`\varphi _2=(n_2/N)^{1/2}\phi _2`$ which are, of course orthogonal, but now normalized to $`n_1/N`$ and $`n_2/N`$, i.e., to the fraction of particles residing in $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$, respectively. The energy (3) can now be expressed as

$`E`$ $`=`$ $`E_{cl}+E_{ex}`$
$`E_{cl}`$ $`=`$ $`\overline{h}_{11}+\overline{h}_{22}+{\displaystyle \frac{\lambda }{2}}{\displaystyle \rho ^2(\stackrel{}{r})𝑑\stackrel{}{r}}`$ (5)
$`E_{ex}`$ $`=`$ $`\lambda {\displaystyle |\varphi _1|^2|\varphi _2|^2𝑑\stackrel{}{r}}`$
where $`\overline{h}_{ii}`$ is defined as $`h_{ii}`$ in (3), but with the orbitals $`\varphi _i`$ and
$`\rho =\left[n_1|\phi _1|^2+n_2|\phi _2|^2\right]/N=|\varphi _1|^2+|\varphi _2|^2`$
is the density per particle. It is easy to see that the ’classical’ energy $`E_{cl}`$ is invariant to unitary transformation of the pair $`(\varphi _1,\varphi _2)`$ while the exchange energy $`E_{ex}`$ is not. It is the latter energy which makes the situation interesting. Without the exchange energy also the equations for the optimal orbitals, eq.(4), would be invariant to unitary transformations.

In the following we demonstrate that the mean-field energy (3) can be superior to the GP energy (1). Our example consists of an one-dimensional attractive condensate $`(\lambda _0<0)`$ in an external symmetric double-well potential. We choose as potential $`(a|x_0|)`$

$$V(x)=c+\frac{1}{2}\omega x^2\omega a\left[x^2x_0^2+a^2\right]^{1/2}$$
(6)
where the bottoms of the well are at $`x=\pm x_0`$. The parameter $`a`$ is chosen such that $`V(\pm x_0)=0`$. The corresponding kinetic energy reads $`\widehat{T}=\frac{\omega }{2}\frac{^2}{x^2}`$ implying that $`x`$ is a dimensionless coordinate. Since the potential is symmetric, the ground state of $`h`$ is a gerade function and the first excited state is an ungerade function of $`x`$. We, therefore, consider in our mean-field $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ to be gerade and ungerade functions of $`x`$, respectively. As can be seen from eq.(4) one finds $`\mu _{12}=\mu _{21}=0`$ because $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ possess different spatial symmetries. The equations for the optimal orbitals have been evaluated numerically, by solving the resulting eigenvalue equations self-consistently using DVR  and finite-difference  methods. Both methods have led to identical results.

Using the same numerical procedures we have also solved the GP equation (2) and determined $`\phi `$. Having found the optimal orbitals, we have computed the mean-field energies $`E`$ and $`E_{GP}`$. Figure 1 shows the difference of the energies per particle $`(EE_{GP})/N`$ as a function of the fractional occupation $`n_1/N`$ for several values of the coupling constant $`\lambda =\lambda _0N`$ (note that $`N1`$). At $`n_1/N=1`$ the energy E, of course, coincides with the GP energy $`E_{GP}`$ for all values of $`\lambda `$. For $`\lambda =0.5`$ the energy $`E`$ grows as $`n_1/N`$ is decreased. This is also true for $`\lambda =0.5`$, but the growth of $`E`$ is less pronounced. Until about $`\lambda 1.0`$, $`E>E_{GP}`$ implying that the GP mean field is the best mean field and no particle occupy $`\phi _2`$. At $`\lambda 1.0`$ the scenario changes as the energy $`E`$ drops below $`E_{GP}`$ as a function of the fractional occupation $`n_1/N`$ for a given value of $`\lambda `$. The optimal mean field is obtained at the minimum of the curve $`E=E(n_1/N)`$. This minimum is about $`n_1/N=3/4`$ for $`\lambda =1.5`$ and approaches $`n_1/N=1/2`$ continuously as $`\lambda `$ is further decreased to $`\lambda =4.0`$. The energy gain per particle due to the present mean field is substantial; for the same potential the energy difference between the ground and first excited states of $`h=T+V`$ is $`0.18`$ and the height of the barrier separating the two wells is $`1.0`$.

The results are better understood by inspecting fig.2 which shows the density per particle $`\rho (x)`$ for $`\lambda =2.5`$ and $`n_1/N=0.6`$. As can be seen in fig.1, this value of $`n_1/N`$ corresponds to the minimum of the energy for $`\lambda =2.5`$. The GP density per particle $`|\phi (x)|^2`$ is also shown in fig.2 for comparison. It is eye catching that much of $`|\phi (x)|^2`$ has moved from the center of the potential $`x0.0`$ to its wells as an impact of the present mean field. Furthermore, the two peaks of the density have narrowed. The density $`\rho (x)`$ has substantially localized in comparison to the GP density. Since the condensate is attractive $`(\lambda <0)`$, localization is well-known to lead to a lowering of the energy . What is surprising is that localization beyond the symmetry preserved GP density can be achieved in the framework of a mean-field approach without breaking the symmetry and without the necessity to go beyond the mean-field world. We remark that the system should have more than two bosons to achieve this localization: because of the different spatial symmetries of $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$, their product is not gerade as the ground state is expected to be. If more bosons are present, an even number of them can reside in $`\phi _2`$.

The energy $`E`$ has been discussed above as a function of $`n_1`$. The particle occupation $`n_1`$ is a variational parameter and we may ask whether the minimum of $`E=E(n_1)`$ can be determined directly without computing first the energy as a function of $`n_1`$ and subsequently searching for the minimum. The answer is positive. We define a new function

$$\tau (n_1,n_2)=E(n_1,n_2)+\nu (n_1+n_2N)$$
(7)
of $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$ and the constraint $`n_1+n_2=N`$ is represented by the Lagrange parameter $`\nu `$. At its extrema $`\tau /n_1=\tau /n_2=0`$, leading to two relations, one of which fixes $`\nu `$ and other gives rise to the equality $`E/n_1=E/n_2`$. Taking the derivative of $`E`$ in (3) with respect to $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$ for $`n_1,n_21`$ recovers the expressions for $`\mu _{11}`$ and $`\mu _{22}`$ determined from (4), i.e., $`\mu _{ii}=E/n_i,i=1,2`$. Consequently we find that the two quantities $`\mu _{11}`$ and $`\mu _{22}`$ are equal at the extremum of $`E`$:

$$\mu _{11}=\mu _{22}\mu $$
(8)
This is a relevant finding for understanding the concept of a condensate and, furthermore, allows us to transform the basic eqs.(4) at the optimal occupation $`n_1`$ as discussed in the following.

We now introduce the new orbitals

$`\psi _1(\stackrel{}{r})`$ $`=`$ $`({\displaystyle \frac{n_1}{N}})^{1/2}\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})+({\displaystyle \frac{n_2}{N}})^{1/2}\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})`$
$`\psi _2(\stackrel{}{r})`$ $`=`$ $`({\displaystyle \frac{n_2}{N}})^{1/2}\phi _2(\stackrel{}{r})({\displaystyle \frac{n_1}{N}})^{1/2}\phi _1(\stackrel{}{r})`$ (9)
and express (4) by them. Confining ourselves to the minimum of $`E`$ and using the basic relation (8), the resulting equations for $`\psi _1`$ and $`\psi _2`$ simplify considerably:

$`\{h(\stackrel{}{r})+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{4}}\lambda |\psi _1|^2+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{4}}\lambda |\psi _2|^2\}\psi _1`$ $`=`$ $`(\mu +\overline{\mu })\psi _1`$
$`\{h(\stackrel{}{r})+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{4}}\lambda |\psi _2|^2+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{4}}\lambda |\psi _1|^2\}\psi _2`$ $`=`$ $`(\mu \overline{\mu })\psi _2.`$ (10)
The equations (4) for the orbitals $`\phi _1`$ and $`\phi _2`$ are, in general, not eigenvalue equations. The corresponding equations for $`\psi _1`$ and $`\psi _2`$ at the optimum occupation $`n_1`$ are eigenvalue equations. The eigenvalues are $`(\mu +\overline{\mu })`$ and $`(\mu \overline{\mu })`$, where $`\mu `$ is the condensate’s chemical potential (see (8)) and $`\overline{\mu }(n_1/n_2)^{1/2}\mu _{12}=(n_2/n_1)^{1/2}\mu _{21}`$.

At first sight it is intriguing to see that the new eqs.(10) do not exhibit the optimal $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$. Nevertheless, these occupations can be deduced from these equations. To this end it is relevant to notice that (9) is not a unitary transformation. Indeed, $`\psi _1`$ and $`\psi _2`$ are normalized to unity, $`<\psi _1|\psi _1>=<\psi _2|\psi _2>=1`$, but they are not orthogonal. Their scalar product is

$$<\psi _1|\psi _2>=\frac{n_2n_1}{N}$$
(11)
and determines the optimal occupations. One can solve the two eigenvalue equations (10) self-consistently and compute the optimal $`n_1`$ and $`n_2`$ from the final result. We have tested this procedure for several numerical examples including the above discussed double-well case. One directly obtains the minima of the energy curves shown in fig.1. A practical hint: numerical stability is enhanced if at each iteration step use is made of the relationship (9) between $`\psi _1`$ and $`\psi _2`$.

Let us conclude. By expressing the wave functions as a symmetrized product of single-particle functions (orbitals), equations for the mean-field energy and the optimal orbitals are derived. Several bosons can reside in each of these orbitals $`\phi _i`$ and it is a basic property of the present approach that these occupation numbers $`n_i`$ are variational parameters which can be used to minimize the energy. An explicit numerical example is presented demonstrating that the mean-field energy using two orbitals can be lower than the GP energy. Since in the absence of interaction between the particles, all particles reside in a single orbital to form the ground state of the condensate, it is clear that the present approach reproduces the GP result for weak interactions. Beyond some critical interaction strength $`\lambda =\lambda _0N`$ obtained, for instance, by increasing the number $`N`$ of particles in the condensate, the mean-field energy can drop below the GP one. This critical value depends strongly on the external potential. By varying the shape and parameters of this potential one can lower or raise the interesting range of $`\lambda `$ substantially.

In our simple example it has been shown that the mean-field energy can drop below the GP energy for a continuous range of the occupation $`n_i`$. The system then consists of two (or more) subsystems each possessing its own chemical potential. This may contradict the picture one usually has of a condensate. It is, therefore, very interesting to note that these, in general different, chemical potentials become identical at the optimal occupations $`n_i`$ which minimize the energy $`E(\{n_i\})`$ restoring thereby the picture of a condensate. This finding leads to another highlight of this work: self-consistent eigenvalue equations for the optimal orbitals at the optimal occupations could be derived.

It should be kept in mind that the occupation numbers $`n_i`$ are variational parameters in the present mean-field and, therefore, the solution of eq.(10) will tell us via eq.(11) which the optimal occupation numbers are. In those cases where one finds that $`n_1/N=1`$, then all bosons reside in a single orbital, our ansatz reproduces the GP result and the GP mean field is thus the best mean field. The GP mean field is an excellent ansatz reflecting our physical expectation that in the ground state all bosons would like to occupy the same orbital in order to minimize the energy. It is, therefore, surprising that there exist counter examples at all. Here, we have shown that an attractive condensate in an one-dimensional symmetric double-well potential provides such a counter example. This finding is not restricted to the specific shape of the external symmetric double-well potential used here. Other counter examples can be expected. For instance, an attractive condensate in an one-dimensional symmetric multi-well potential. Here, however, as many orbitals must be included in the mean-field ansatz as there are wells. That macroscopic condensation can be described by one-dimensional equations has been discussed in the literature, see, e.g.  and references therein. Clearly, it would be very interesting to study condensates in higher dimensions. Of course, the same equations as derived here hold also in this case, but their full numerical evaluation is more involved and such a study is left to the future. We note that in the present numerical example it is the symmetry of the problem which fails the GP mean field. In other examples the reason that GP is not the best mean field may be of different origin. We suspect, however, that if one finds $`n_1/N`$ to deviate from 1, it is a helpful warning that one might have to go beyond the mean-field approach as such in order to describe the underlying physics properly.

Being non-linear equations, eqs. (4) and (10) may have several solutions. We have encountered examples where the lowest-energy solution is characterized by $`n_1/N=1`$, but other low-lying solutions exist with $`n_1/N`$ deviating from 1. The first solution, of course, corresponds to the system’s ground state. In the latter solutions the bosons reside in two orbitals and their existence could be an indication for collective excited self-consistent states of the condensate. We remind that according to eq. (8) there exists only a single value of the chemical potential for each of these excited states making them attractive to further investigations.

Finally, we would like to mention very briefly that (a) time-dependent mean-field equations corresponding to the stationary equations discussed here are straightforwardly derived, and (b) the present mean-field equations provide an excellent starting point of investigating condensates beyond the mean-field approach.

Helpful discussions with Dieter Meyer and Ofir Alon are gratefully acknowledged.


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# How to search a social network

## 1 Introduction

Many tasks, ranging from collaboration within and between organizations, pursuit of hobbies, or forming romantic relationships, depend on finding the right people to partner with. Sometimes it is advantageous to seek an introduction through one’s contacts, who could recommend one to the desired target. Finding such paths through a network of acquaintances is something people naturally do, for example, when looking for a job. How people are able to this, while using only local information about the network, is a question we address by analyzing real-world social networks. This analysis examines whether social networks are structured in a way to allow effective local search. In answering this question we have obtained insights that may be applicable to new commercial services, such as LinkedIn, Friendster, and Spoke111 http://www.linkedin.com/, http://www.friendster.com, http://www.spokesoftware.com, that have recently sprung up to help people network.

Social networking services gather information on users’ social contacts, construct a large interconnected social network, and reveal to users how they are connected to others in the network. The premise of these businesses is that individuals might be only a few steps removed from a desirable business or social partner, but not realize it. The services allow their users to get to know one’s friends of friends and hence expand their own social circle. On a smaller scale, the Club Nexus online community, which we describe later on in this paper, sought to help students at Stanford University organize activities and find others with common interests through their social network.

Although the online social networking trend may be fairly recent, the observation that any two people in the world are most likely linked by a short chain of acquaintances, known as the “small world” phenomenon, is not. It has been the focus of much research over the last forty years (Killworth and Bernard, 1978, 1979; Lundberg, 1975; Milgram, 1967; Travers and Milgram, 1969). In the 1960’s and 70’s, participants in small world experiments successfully found paths connecting individuals from Nebraska to Boston and from Los Angeles to New York . In 2002, 60,000 individuals were able to repeat the experiment using email chains with an average of $`4.1`$ links to bridge continents (Dodds et al., 2003).

The existence of short paths, which is the essence of the small world phenomenon, is not particularly surprising in and of itself. This is due to the exponential growth in people as a function of distance in the case of random acquaintance networks. If we take the average number of acquaintances to be about $`c=1000`$ (Pool and Kochen (1978) estimated in 1978 that the number lies between 500 and 1,500), one would have $`c^2`$ or million “friends of friends” and $`c^3`$ or one billion “friends-of-friends-of-friends”. This means that it would take only 2 intermediaries to reach a number of people on the order of the population of the entire United States. Even with more recent estimates of personal network sizes of around 300 (McCarty et al., 2001), it would take fewer than 3 intermediaries to reach anyone in the country. In fact, the shortest paths may be contracted even further by the presence of a few well connected individuals. Newman (2003) has shown that because one is more likely to know highly connected individuals as opposed to poorly connected ones, ego centered networks can achieve sizes significantly larger than, for example, $`c^2`$ at distance two.

The above approximations assumed that the network is random. That is, the overlap in one’s friends and one’s friends of friends is negligible. In reality, social networks are far from random. Most of one’s contacts are formed through one’s place of residence and profession, forming tightly knit cliques (Killworth and Bernard, 1978, 1979). This means that many of one’s friends of friends already belong to the set of one’s own friends. Still, as was shown by Watts and Strogatz (1998) it takes only a few “random” links between people of different professions or location to create short paths in a social network and make the world “small”.

Although the existence of short paths is not surprising, it is another question altogether how people are able to select among hundreds of acquaintances the correct person to form the next link in the chain. Participants in small world experiments select a contact overwhelmingly on geographic proximity and similarity of profession to the target (Killworth and Bernard, 1978; Bernard et al., 1982). Recently, mathematical models have been proposed to explain why these simple strategies work for forming short paths. The models propose that social networks need to have a structure such that an individual who is closer, for example, geographically or professionally, has, with some probability, a shorter network distance to the target. By successively choosing individuals whose attributes are ”closer” to the target’s attributes, one can rapidly navigate the social network to form a chain to the target.

The hierarchical network model of Watts et al. (2002) assumes that individuals belong to groups that are embedded hierarchically into larger groups. The term group refers to any collection of individuals with which some well-defined set of social characteristics is associated. For example, an individual might belong to a research lab, that is in turn part of an academic department, that is part of a university. The probability that two individuals have a social tie to one another is proportional to $`e^{\alpha h}`$, where $`h`$ is the height of their lowest common branching point in the hierarchy, and $`\alpha `$ is the decay parameter. The decay in linking probability means that two people in the same research laboratory are more likely to know one another than two people from the same department but different research labs.

Watts et al. applied, on artificial networks, a simple greedy search strategy that selects the next step in the chain to be the neighbor of the current node who is closest to the target in an attribute such as profession or geography. Each node in the chain has a fixed probability, called the attrition rate, of not passing the message further. The results of numerical experiments on these artificially constructed networks showed that for a range of network parameters, the constructed networks are “searchable”, meaning that a minimum fraction of search paths find their target before attrition terminates them.

Kleinberg (2000, 2001) posed a related question: how social networks need to be structured in order for a simple greedy strategy to find near optimal paths through the network. Unlike the study of Watts. et al., there is no attrition - all chains run until completion, but need to scale as the actual shortest path in the network does. In the case of a small world network, the average shortest path scales as $`\mathrm{ln}(N)`$, where $`N`$ is the number of nodes.

Kleinberg proved that a simple greedy strategy based on geography could achieve chain lengths bounded by $`(\mathrm{ln}N)^2`$ if the probability of two individuals linking is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. That is, a person would be four times as likely to know someone living a block away than someone two city blocks away. However, Kleinberg also proved that if the probabilities of acquaintance do not follow this relationship, nodes would not be able to use a simple greedy strategy to find the target in polylogarithmic time. Kleinberg also derived results for individuals belonging to hierarchically nested groups. If the probability of two people linking to one another is inversely proportional to the size of the smallest group that they both belong to, then greedy search can be used to find short paths in polylogarithmic time.

The models of both Watts et al. and Kleinberg show that the probability of acquaintance needs to be related to the proximity between individuals’ attributes in order for simple search strategies using only local information to be effective. We will tie these models to the small world and reverse small world experiments by simulating on real world networks the strategies people have reported using and comparing the success of these strategies with the degree to which the networks conform to a theoretically searchable structure. Note that we are not examining here what small world participants actually do, as this has been the subject of extensive work (Killworth and Bernard, 1978, 1979; Lundberg, 1975; Milgram, 1967; Travers and Milgram, 1969; Dodds et al., 2003). Rather, we are taking the strategies that participants have reported using, and are testing, in two experiments, when these strategies really can be used successfully and why. The first experiment, described in Section 2 is performed on a network where social relationships were inferred from email exchanges and represent a fairly complete picture of the communication network. The second, described in section 3 is a search on a network extracted from a social networking website, containing partial information about the true network. We also discuss how the differences between networks constructed through email analysis and the website impact search performance.

## 2 Search in an Email Network

We first analyzed the email logs at HP Labs to test the assumptions of the theoretical models regarding the structure of social networks and the success of simple search strategies. We took the email network to be fairly representative of the underlying communication network. A recent study in the UK (Smith et al., 2003) found that email was used to communicate with 80% of one’s social network for the 25-35 age group (60% for the 50-60 age group). We expect the percentages to be significantly higher at HP Labs where email is fairly indispensable. Although individuals have many ways of communicating, including face-to-face, over the phone and through instant messaging, it is unlikely that they communicate without exchanging any email at all. Email is used to forward information such as documents, URLs, and other people’s email messages, as well as to schedule face-to-face and phone meetings. Sometimes, email will be used in tandem with another communication medium such as voicemail, for example, when an important email is followed up by a voicemail to make sure that the email is read (Tyler and Tang, 2003).

We derived a social network from the email logs by defining a social contact to be someone with whom an individual had exchanged at least 6 emails both ways over the period of approximately 3 months. Mass emails that are sent to more than 10 individuals at once were removed. By introducing these thresholds, we sought to minimize the likelihood of including one sided communication, such as general announcements, or a very brief email exchange, where individuals do not get to know one another. The relatively low threshold of 6 emails still captured weak ties between people in different departments with little overlap in their social contacts. Weak links have been shown to play a role job searches and information diffusion (Granovetter, 1973). What we will show is that these weak ties also play an important role in small world search. In balance with strong ties that exist within departments and close physical proximity, they provide a social network structure favorable to search.

Imposing a communication threshold yielded a network of 430 individuals with a median number of 10 acquaintances and a mean of 12.9. The degree distribution, shown in Figure 1, is highly skewed with an exponential tail. The shape of the distribution matches that of the estimated network sizes from scale-up and summation methods of McCarty et al. (2001). The smaller average number of contacts reflects the restricted setting of a small organization. The resulting network, consisting of regular email patterns between HP Labs employees, had 3.1 links separating any two individuals on average, and a median of 3.

In the simulated search experiments, we considered three different properties of the nodes: degree, position in the organizational hierarchy, and physical location. In this simple algorithm, each individual can use knowledge only of their own email contacts, but not their contacts’ contacts, to forward the message. In order to avoid passing the message to the same person more than once, the participants append their names to the message as they receive it, just as was done in the original experiment by Milgram. We tested three corresponding strategies, at each step passing the message to the contact who is

* best connected
* closest to the target in the organizational hierarchy
* located in closest physical proximity to the target

The first strategy is a high-degree seeking strategy and selects the individual who is more likely to know the target by virtue of the fact that he/she knows so many people. It has been shown (Adamic et al., 2001), that high degree seeking strategies are effective in networks with a power-law degree distribution with an exponent $`\gamma `$ close to 2. In a power-law network, the probability of having $`k`$ contacts is $`p(k)k^\gamma `$. This is precisely the degree distribution of the unfiltered HP Labs email network, where all communication, including unidirectional and infrequent correspondence, is taken into account (Wu et al., 2004). The power-law distribution in the raw network arises because there are many external senders emailing just a few individuals inside the organization, and there are also some individuals inside the organization sending out announcements to many people and hence having a very high degree.

Once we limit ourselves to emails within HP Labs and impose a threshold to identify only reciprocal and repeated social contacts, fewer individuals have a high degree. As we showed above, the filtered network does not have a power-law degree distribution, but rather an exponential tail, similar to a Poisson distribution. Adamic et al. (2001) showed that a search strategy attempting to use high degree nodes in a Poisson network performs poorly.

Simulation confirmed that the high degree seeking search strategy was unsuitable for the filtered HP email network. The median number of steps required to find a randomly chosen target from a random starting point was 16, compared to the three steps in the average shortest path. Even worse, the average number of steps was 43. This discrepancy between the mean and median is a reflection of the skewness of the distribution: the high degree individuals and their contacts are easy to find, but others who do not have many links and do not have high degree neighbors are difficult to locate using this strategy. The unsuitability of the high degree degree strategy is also intuited by participants in small world experiments. Bernard et al. (1982) found that contacts were chosen because they “knew a lot of people” only 7 percent of the time. Similarly, Dodds et al. (2003) found that individuals in successful chains were far less likely than those in incomplete chains to choose recipients based on their degree (1.6 versus 8.2%).

The second strategy consists of passing the message to the contact closest to the target in the organizational hierarchy. In our simulation individuals are allowed full knowledge of the organizational hierarchy (in actuality, employees can reference an online organizational chart). However, the communication network that they are trying to navigate is hidden to them beyond their immediate contacts. Figure 2 illustrates such a search, labeling nodes by their hierarchical distance (h-distance) from the target. At each step in the chain the message is passed to someone closer in the organizational hierarchy to the target. Note that the message does not need to travel all the way to the top of the organizational hierarchy and instead takes advantage of a shortcut created by individuals in different research groups communicating with one another. The $`h`$-distance, used to navigate the network, is computed as follows: individuals have $`h`$-distance one to their manager and to everyone they share a manager with. Distances are then recursively assigned, so that each individual has $`h`$-distance 2 to their first neighbor’s neighbors, and $`h`$-distance 3 to their second neighbor’s neighbors, etc.

The search strategy relies on the observation, illustrated in Figures 3 and 4, that individuals closer together in the organizational hierarchy are more likely to email one another.

The relationship found between separation in the hierarchy and probability of correspondence, shown in Figure 4, is well within the searchable regime identified in the model of Watts et al. (2002). However, the probability of linking as a function of the size $`g`$ of the smallest organizational group that both individuals belong to, shown in Figure 5, is a slightly different ($`pg^{3/4}`$) from the optimal $`g^1`$(Kleinberg, 2001). This means that far-flung collaborations occur slightly more often than would be optimal for the particular task of searching, at the expense of short range contacts. The tendency for communication to occur across the organization was also revealed in an analysis utilizing spectroscopy methods on the same email network (Tyler et al., 2003). While collaborations mostly occurred within the same organizational unit, they also occasionally bridged different parts of the organization or broke up a single organizational unit into noninteracting subgroups.

Given the close correspondence between the assumptions of the models regarding group structure and the email network, we expected greedy strategies using the organizational hierarchy to work fairly well. Indeed, this was confirmed in our simulations. The median number of steps was only 4, close to the median shortest path of 3. The mean was 5 steps, slightly higher than the median because of the presence of a four hard to find individuals who had only a single link. Excluding these 4 individuals as targets resulted in a mean of 4.5 steps. This result indicates that not only are people typically easy to find, but nearly everybody can be found in a reasonable number of steps.

The last experiment we performed on the HP email network used the target’s physical location. Individuals’ locations are given by their building, the floor of the building, and the nearest building post (for example “H15”) to their cubicle. Figure 6 shows the email correspondence mapped onto the physical layout of the buildings. The general tendency of individuals in close physical proximity to correspond holds: over 87% percent of the 4000 email links are between individuals on the same floor.

We approximate the distance between two cubicles by the “street” distance between their posts with building separations and stairway lengths factored in. The relationship between linking probability and distance $`r`$, shown in Figure 7, is $`1/r`$, different than the optimum $`1/r^2`$ relationship Kleinberg derived for two dimensional space. To be fair, the number of potential contacts at a given distance, shown in the inset of Figure 7, does not increase as $`r^2`$ (as is assumed in Kleinberg’s analysis) because of the limiting geometry of the buildings. Still, the $`1/r`$ relationship most likely points to a mild shortage of short-range links. This is the same inverse relationship found by Allen (1995) between researchers physical separation within an R&D lab and the probability that they communicate at least one a week about technical and scientific matters. We further find that cubicle distance is correlated, but not completely ($`\rho =0.35`$), with individuals’ separation in the organizational hierarchy. A possible explanation is that the cost of moving individuals from one cubicle to another when re-organizations occur or new individuals join, may outweigh the benefit of placing everyone in the same organizational unit in one location. The availability of other communication media, such as email, telephone, and instant messaging, reduces the frequency with which individuals need to interact face to face, and hence the need to have nearby cubicles.

The shortage of short range links hinders search because one might get physically quite close to the target, but still need a number of steps to find an individual who interacts with them. Correspondingly, our simulations showed that geography could be used to find most individuals, but was slower, taking a median number of 6 steps, and a mean of 12. The fact that the strategy using geography trails behind a strategy using the target’s professional position, is in agreement with Milgram’s original findings. Travers and Milgram (1969) divided completed chains between those that reached the target through his professional contacts and those that reached him through his hometown. On average those that relied on geography took 1.5 steps longer to reach the target, a difference found to be statistically significant. The interpretation by Travers and Milgram was the following: “Chains which converge on the target principally by using geographic information reach his hometown or the surrounding areas readily, but once there often circulate before entering the target’s circle of acquaintances.”

Table 1 summarizes the results of searches using each of the three strategies. It shows that both searches using information about the target outperform a search relying solely on the degree of one’s contacts. It also shows the advantage, consistent with Milgram’s original experiment, of using the target’s professional position as opposed to their geographic location to pass a message through one’s contacts.

The simulated experiments on the email network verify the models proposed by Watts et al. (2002) and Kleinberg (2000) to explain why individuals are able to successfully complete chains in small world experiments using only local information. When individuals belong to groups based on a hierarchy and are more likely to interact with individuals within the same small group, then one can safely adopt a greedy strategy - pass the message onto the individual most like the target, and they will be more likely to know the target or someone closer to them. At the same time it is important to note that there are slightly fewer short range contacts both in physical and hierarchical space, than the optimal proportions found by Kleinberg (2000, 2001).

Our email study is a first step, validating these models on a small scale. It gives a concrete way of observing how the small world chains can be constructed. It is quite likely that similar relationships between acquaintance and proximity (geographical or professional) hold true in general, and therefore that small world experiments succeed on a grander scale for the very same reasons.

## 3 Searching a network of Friends

The email data we analyzed above provides a fairly complete view of interpersonal communication within an organization and can be extracted automatically. In this section we are interested in exploring a different kind of network, one constructed from ties reported by the individuals themselves in the setting of an online social networking site. We obtained friendship network data from a community website, Club Nexus (Adamic et al., 2003), that allowed Stanford students to explicitly list their friends. Over 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students joined Club Nexus and listed their friends as part of the registration process. The online community provided rich profiles for each of its users, including their year in school, major, residence, gender, personalities, hobbies and interests. The richness of the profiles allowed for detailed social network analysis, including identifying activities and preferences influencing the formation of friendship (Adamic et al., 2003).

Club Nexus differed in several respects from the HP Labs email network, and these differences made it difficult to apply a simple greedy search strategy to the network. It reflected only a subset of each persons contacts - those that they would consider friends. Rather than being able to observe email interactions, as we had with the HP Labs data set, we had to rely on the users themselves to list social ties on the site. Upon registering, users were presented with a “buddy list” screen where they could add their friends to their buddy list. The text at the top of the page read: “Your Buddy List forms the backbone of the Club Nexus system. From your list of friends, the system will construct your social network - a required step to enjoy any usage of Club Nexus”. Users could add a buddy either by supplying the buddy’s first and last name and email address, or by searching for them by first or last name in the database of all Stanford students. Each person added to the buddy list would then be sent an email asking to reciprocate the connection by adding the user to their buddy list and to set up an account on Club Nexus if they had not done so already. A link that was not reciprocated was deleted from the system, leaving only bidirectional links that might have been initiated by either of the two individuals.

The open-ended request for information on one’s social network produced buddy lists varying widely in size. Approximately 209 users specified no friends, and a further 238 listed only 1 friend. On the other end of the distribution, some users had a ’buddy’ list containing dozens of friends, resulting in an average degree of $`8.2`$. This is in part a reflection of the fact that some users have more friends than others, but also that some are more eager to list their friends names, or list more than just their closest friends, on a website. The full distribution is shown in Figure 8. Since so many users listed few or no friends on the website, the Club Nexus social network represents only a subset of the actual friendships between the students. The Club Nexus network also differs from the personal networks typically utilized by subjects in small world experiments, in that most users’ links, in addition to being restricted to just a subset of their friends, typically do not include acquaintances.

Given this incomplete network, we tested whether information about the target could still be used successfully guide a small-world search. We considered information such as dorm, year, major, sports, and hobbies of the target in guiding the search, but these criteria were weak clues compared to information such as position in the organizational hierarchy and cubicle location that we had for the HP Labs email network. The clues were weak for several reasons. The first was due to the lack of acquaintanceship links. For example, two students living in the same dorm have only about a $`5\%`$ probability of being Nexus ‘buddies’, even though one could assume that the individuals at the very least know each other by sight. The second difficulty is that closeness in attributes such as geographical location, does not necessarily correspond to probability of there being a link, as is required by Kleinberg’s model. In the Club Nexus data, two people living in different dorms have only a $`0.3\%`$ chance of being buddies, regardless of how far apart these residences are. Hence a simple greedy geographical search, fairly successful in the case of the HP Labs email network, would not be able to home in on a residence geographically on the Stanford campus.

Finally, it was difficult to construct a hierarchy for each attribute as required by the model of Dodds et al. (2003). Attributes such as sports or movie genre preferences were difficult to compare except as exact, binary matches. For example, it is not clear how similar a swimmer is to a baseball or football player. For two attributes, department and year in school, we were able to place attributes in two tier hierarchies. We looked not only if users belong to the same department but also whether their departments belong to the same school. For example, two students might be in the School of Engineering, but one might be a chemical engineer while the other is a mechanical engineer. We considered whether students were undergraduates or graduates, followed by what year they were in. We also took into consideration whether students were in the same year, or a year apart. Figure 9 shows how likely two individuals are to be registered as friends on Club Nexus as a function of the number of years in school separating them. For both undergraduates and graduates, two people in the same year have approximately a 1% chance of being Nexus ‘buddies’, a probability so small as to not be sufficient on its own to direct the search toward the target.

Our most successful strategy utilizing the user profiles compared 5 attributes simultaneously for the target and a person one is considering passing the message to. The possible combinations of attributes were:

* both undergraduate, both graduate, or one of each
* same year, a year apart, or more than a year apart
* both male, both female, or one of each
* same or different residences
* same or different major/department and school

We then calculated the probability that two people know each other (or have a friend in common) based on all possible combinations of these variables. The simulation assumes that individuals would be able to judge, for example, the relative likelihood of someone in the same year knowing the target, as opposed to someone in a different year, but in the same dorm. Including additional attributes, such as the number of shared interests in sports or other activities, did not improve the search times further. We experimented with recursively removing low degree or high degree individuals from the network. As can be seen from Table 2, removing low degree nodes contracts the average shortest path, and makes search shorter as well. On the other hand, removing very high degree nodes hurts search by removing connectors that help in completing paths.

We also compared our results to a simple high-degree strategy. For example, if we keep nodes having 3 or more connections, this leaves us with 1761 users, with median degree of 6, and average degree of 11. Our strategy requires a median of 20 steps and a mean of 53 compared to a high degree strategy on the same network that takes a median number of 39 steps, and 137 on average.

Using information about the target outperforms a high-degree strategy, but the twenty steps required on average are still a far cry from the six degrees found in real-world small world experiments. The network is still just barely searchable, according to the definition provided by Watts et al. (2002). Assigning an attrition rate of $`r=0.25`$, meaning that at every step there is a 25% chance that an individual will not pass the message on, 5% of the messages reach their target, in an average of $`4.8`$ steps.

What we see is that a simple greedy search is not particularly effective, especially once one is already confined to a small geographical space, such as a university campus. Further, the contacts that are available to the simulation, most of them being close friends of the individual, are just a small fraction of the complete social network. This is in contrast to the observation made by Granovetter (1973), that it is the “weak ties” that play a disproportionately important role in bridging different portions of a social network. In the recent small world study, Dodds et al. (2003) found relationships described as “casual” and “not close” to be more frequently used in successful chains. In the reverse small world experiment performed by Killworth and Bernard (1978), participants chose on average about 210 different acquaintances to pass the message to various hypothetical targets. This indicates that individuals must be selecting from a large arsenal of acquaintances, something the Club Nexus data set does not provide.

We also speculate that individuals participating in small world experiments are able to navigate geographical and professional space by using knowledge not only of a substantial portion of their immediate social networks, but also by using more sophisticated strategies that look more than just one step ahead. Bernard et al. (1982) found that many of the participants in a reverse small world experiment were thinking two steps ahead, by selecting individuals who were not associated with the target by any characteristics of their own but through an association with an intermediate individual. This is also supported by the work of Friedkin (1983) on horizons of observability that showed that individuals can be aware of others who are two steps removed in the network. He found that the probability that individuals who do not directly interact are aware of each other increases with the number of paths of length two which connect them in the network.

This is an important consideration for those constructing social software websites. Users only allowed to communicate with close, local neighbors will be at a disadvantage to those with access to information about their casual acquaintances and second degree neighbors. It is therefore important for the website to expose additional information or to suggest contacts based on a global view.

## 4 Conclusion

In recent years it has become much simpler to harvest large social networks due to the growing rise in popularity of electronic communication media such as email, instant messaging and online communities. By taking advantage of the availability of large social networks, our small world experiment ties together recent theoretical results of social network structure that is conducive to search and the strategies used in previous small world experiments. The first small world experiments were only able to trace narrow chains through a social network and to record individuals strategies. Reverse small world experiments delved deeper into individuals strategies and isolated individuals’ social networks, but again could not expose the full underlying social network. Our experiment bridged recent theory on social network structure and small world experiments by taking entire observed social networks and applying the strategies that small world experiment participants report using. We then correlated the success of the search strategies with the structure of the underlying social network.

We simulated small world search in two scenarios. The first was within an organization, where a substantial portion of regular correspondence is captured through email. The second was an online community at a university where members of the community volunteer information about themselves and who their friends are. We constructed networks from both communities and simulated a straightforward greedy search on the network - each node passes the message to a neighbor who is most like the target.

In the case of the email network, the strategies were successful - messages reached most individuals in a small number of steps, and using information about the target outperformed simply choosing the highest degree neighbor. This was due in large part to the agreement with theoretical predictions by Watts et al. and Kleinberg about optimal linking probabilities relative to separation in physical space or in the organizational hierarchy. It may be the case that social ties in general are somewhat less structured than acquaintanceships within a small organization such as HP Labs. This could make it more difficult to orient the search, but is probably compensated by a wider range of connections available to participants in world-wide small world experiments.

In the case of the online community, strategies using information about the target were less successful, but still outperformed a simplistic high degree search. The limited success of greedy search is not surprising given that most available dimensions that could be searched on were binary, with targets either sharing an attribute or not. The dimensions could not be organized into a hierarchy that would allow a search to home in on its target. Geography was also almost a binary variable, since the probability of students being friends was on average independent on the separation between their dorms (unless they happened to live in the same one). Perhaps most importantly, non-participation or missing data biased the results by hiding connections that could be used in the search. Individual’s social networks (those that include all of one’s friends, family, and acquaintances) are in general broader than either the HP Labs or Club Nexus personal networks because they include individuals met through school, work, neighborhood, and other interests.

For the developers of social software it is important to understand how different data collection techniques (automated, implicit versus manual, explicit) impact the resulting social network and how these networks relate to the real world. Where the data is incomplete or reflects non-hierarchical structure, tools that support social search should assist users by either providing a broader view of their local community or directly assisting users through a global analysis of the network data.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Orkut Buyukkokten for the Club Nexus data and Joshua Tyler for helping to map physical distances at HP Labs. We would also like to thank Kevin Lai, Rajan Lukose and Bernardo Huberman for their helpful comments and suggestions.


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# Spatially resolved spectrum of the Vela PWN

## 1. Introduction

Observations of the Vela and Crab pulsar-wind nebulae (PWNe) with the Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed the complex structure and dynamics of relativistic outflows from pulsars (e.g., Hester et al. 2002; Pavlov et al. 2003). The innermost brightest parts of these PWNe exhibit approximately axially-symmetric morphologies, with extended jet-like structures stretched along the symmetry axis (Helfand et al. 2001; Pavlov et al. 2001).

To better understand the properties of the shocked pulsar wind, it is important to investigate the correlation between the spectral and spatial structures of the PWN. For instance, XMM observations of the Crab PWN (with $`5^{\prime \prime }`$ resolution) have shown that the spatial dependence of the spectral slope is not isotropic, being well correlated with the PWN structure: e.g., the hardest emission comes from the inner torus region (Willingale et al. 2001). The Chandra resolution and proximity of the Vela pulsar ($`d300`$ pc; Dodson et al. 2003a) make it possible to obtain an even better quality spectral map of the Vela PWN, provided that a sufficient number of counts is collected.

Here we present the spectral map of the Vela PWN obtained from deep observations with the Chandra ACIS detector. We also investigate the large-scale morphology of the Vela PWN in X-rays and compare it with that of the radio PWN (Dodson et al. 2003b).

## 2. X-rays: PWN spatial and spectral structure

The large-scale X-ray structure of the Vela PWN is shown in the summed images composed of eight ACIS and three HRC observations (left and right panels of Fig. 1111see http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/green/IAU2003/ for the color images , respectively; see Pavlov et al. 2003 for technical details of image reduction). The brightness scale in the images is adjusted to emphasize a fainter, more diffused emission (the inner PWN features are shown by contours in the left panel of Fig. 1; see also Fig. 3). This faint emission is clearly asymmetric: most of it is located south-west (SW) of the symmetry axis that is approximately co-aligned with the direction of the pulsar’s proper motion (left panel in Fig. 1). Such asymmetry, as well as persistent bending of the northeastern jet to SW, suggest the presence of large-scale ($`>1`$ pc) density/pressure gradients or a wind (invisible in X-rays) blowing in the SW direction in the ambient SNR medium. Another region of even fainter emission is seen at the bottom of the image shown in the right panel of Figure 1. This emission could be produced by the pulsar wind at the time when the pulsar was located close to its birth place. If true, this places an upper limit of $`2(t_{\mathrm{age}}/11,000\mathrm{yrs})^{2/3}(E/1\mathrm{keV})^{1/3}`$ $`\mu `$G on the magnetic field in the region. Alternatively, the emission could be due to a background SNR filament. To obtain the spectrum and resolve this issue, a deep exposure of this region with ACIS is needed.

To investigate the PWN spectral properties, we produced a photon index map of a $`4.^{}2\times 4.^{}2`$ region (white box in the left panel of Fig. 1) from the merged ACIS event list with the aid of CIAO software222Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations — see http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/, v.2.3. Although extracting the spectra from the merged event list is generally not recommended333 http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao2.3/threads/combine/, we believe that in this case the uncertainties introduced by doing so are minimal since the PWN was imaged at the same location on the ACIS S3 chip in all 8 observations, and a properly averaged444 http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao2.3/threads/wresp\_multiple\_sources/index.html#warf ARF was used. After some experimenting, we adopted $`2.^{\prime \prime }5`$ and $`10^{\prime \prime }`$ bins to be used for spectral extraction, depending on the distance from the pulsar. This provides roughly comparable signal-to-noise ratios for the bright inner PWN and much fainter outer PWN.

Most noticeable features in the spectral map (Fig. 2, left panel) are the shell of soft emission surrounding the inner PWN (which includes the arcs and the inner jets with hard spectra; Fig. 2, right panel) and the relatively hard spectrum of the diffuse emission SW of the pulsar (which is harder, on average, than that of the shell located closer to the pulsar). The harder spectrum can be explained if the bent outer jet (see Fig. 1), whose spectrum is also hard (photon index $`\mathrm{\Gamma }1.3`$), supplies particles to the region SW of the pulsar on a timescale shorter than the synchrotron cooling time $`t_{\mathrm{syn}}39(B/100\mu \mathrm{G})^{3/2}(E/1\mathrm{keV})^{1/2}`$ years. The energy losses for the particles carried with the equatorial outflow can be larger than for the jet’s particles, e.g., due to additional expansion losses which are less important for the well-collimated jet. Emission produced by the particles associated with the equatorial outflow can give rise to the soft shell if the particles move outwards sufficiently slow and have enough time to cool.

## 3. Connection between the radio and X-rays

In the recently obtained radio images of the Vela PWN the emission mostly comes from two lobes of different sizes and brightnesses (Dodson et al. 2003b). Overlaying the X-ray contours on top of the radio image, we find that the outer contours (corresponding to lower X-ray brightness) are well correlated with the shape of the radio PWN (Fig. 3). This suggests that the X-ray and radio emitting electrons are carried with the same outflow which is mostly confined to a low-latitude (equatorial) region. In terms of relative brightness, the radio emission is brighter further away from the pulsar while the X-ray emission is the brightest close to the pulsar. Such a picture can be explained by the synchrotron and expansion losses which particles suffer as they travel away from the pulsar.

To conclude, the multiwavelength data continue to provide clues to understanding the complicated PWN topology and elucidate the dynamics of the relativistic pulsar winds and their interaction with the SNR medium.

### Acknowledgments.

Support for this work was provided by NASA through grant NAG5-10865 and Chandra Award GO2-3091X.

## References

Dodson, R., et al. Legge, D., Reynolds, J. E., et al. 2003a, ApJ, 569, 1137

Dodson, R., Lewis, D., McConnell, D., et al. 2003b, MNRAS, 343, 116

Helfand, D. J., Gotthelf, E. V., & Halpern, J. P. 2001, ApJ, 556, 380

Hester, J. J., Mori, K., Burrows D., et al. 2002, ApJ, 577, 49

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# Effective temperatures and radii of planet-hosting stars from IR photometry

## 1 Introduction

The characterization of the properties of planet-hosting stars has been an active field of study. Soon after the discovery of the first candidates, claims were made that stars with planets displayed on average higher metal contents (Gonzalez G97 (1997)) than other solar neighbourhood stars. A number of subsequent independent studies with increasingly large stellar samples have mostly confirmed the initial claims (e.g. Santos et al. SIM03 (2003)). An important point to be made is that the determination of chemical abundances, mostly carried out through detailed analysis of spectroscopic data, is quite challenging (see Gonzalez G03 (2003) for a complete review). As it has been shown for late-type stars (i.e. FGK planet hosts), a strong degeneracy affecting the determination of metal abundances is the correlation with effective temperature. Straightforward estimations show that a systematic error of +100 K in $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ (i.e. 1.5–2% at the temperatures of FGK stars) results in metal abundances being systematically overestimated by +0.06 dex ($``$15%). Most studies of stellar atmospheric parameters carry out multiple fits to derive chemical compositions and effective temperatures from the spectra. Although the aforementioned correlation would not alter the conclusions of relative studies including both planet-hosting and non-planet hosting stars, the metal richness of the stars would be systematically biased when compared to the Sun. Another point worth making is the use by present spectroscopic studies of solar line oscillator strengths for all late-type stars (e.g. Gonzalez & Laws GL00 (2000)). This might introduce systematic errors for temperatures below and above that of the Sun that thus far have not been addressed in detail.

The potential problems with spectroscopic analyses discussed above make a completely independent temperature determination, for example using photometry, very valuable. The absence of systematic effects when comparing photometric and spectroscopic temperatures would strengthen the case for the metal richness of planet-bearing stars and support the use of solar oscillator strengths over the relevant spectral type range. However, the determination of photometric temperatures for cool stars (below 7000 K) is not straightforward because most photometric systems are not designed for such low temperatures. For example, although some efforts have been made to extend the temperature range covered by Strömgren calibrations down to late-type stars (Olsen O84 (1984)), most of the work is still in a preliminary stage. Here we present a new approach, namely the determination of effective temperatures from infrared (IR) photometry. The underlying idea is similar to the Infra-Red Flux Method (IRFM), proposed and implemented by Blackwell & Shallis (BS77 (1977)), Blackwell et al. (BPS80 (1980)) and later Alonso et al. (AAM96 (1996)).

In this paper we briefly discuss the proposed approach and compare our results with spectroscopic temperature determinations. In addition, the analysis also yields an robust and accurate determination of the stellar radius, provided the distance is known. With the release of the 2MASS All Sky Catalog111http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass, which contains IR photometry covering the entire sky, the proposed method has a wide applicability, thus permitting accurate (a few percent) and effortless determinations of temperatures and radii (important for transits) of planet-hosting stars.

## 2 The stellar sample

Planet searching projects are currently so efficient that the number of planet-hosting stars increases on a weekly basis. Our starting sample was complete as of July 2003 and comprised 94 stars with planets, which makes up a statistically significant number for our comparisons. The original list was cross-matched with the 2MASS All Sky Catalog with a 100% success rate. In a next step, we excluded those stars with poor-quality photometry in all of the three 2MASS bands, generally because of strong saturation.222The 2MASS team managed to extract good quality photometry from the wings of mildly saturated stars, which led to a significant increase in dynamic range (see Cutri et al. CSV03 (2003)). In general, good photometry was obtained for stars with $`K>4`$ mag. As a criterion, we rejected stars with errors in the $`K`$ band (the band with best quality for bright stars) greater than 0.05 mag. In addition, two stars were excluded for different reasons: HD 113020, classified as spectral type M4, because its temperature is expected to be below 4000 K and beyond the studied temperature range; and OGLE-TR56, the farthest known planet-hosting star at 1.5 kpc, because of concerns with the extinction correction. The final working sample is therefore composed of 81 planet-bearing stars, which are listed in Table 1.

The 2MASS photometry was complemented with $`V`$ standard measurements (together with their uncertainties) obtained from GCPD (Mermilliod et al. MMH97 (1997)). Also from GCPD we compiled Strömgren photometry and carried out an estimation of the reddening correction. All stars were found to fall right on the standard relationships as defined by Crawford (C75 (1975)) and Olsen (O84 (1984), O88 (1988)), i.e. zero reddening as expected from their nearby distances within 100 pc.

## 3 Determination of temperatures and radii

The use of IR photometry for determining effective temperatures was initially proposed by Blackwell & Shallis (BS77 (1977)). Their so-called IRFM uses the ratio between the bolometric flux of the star and the monochromatic at a given wavelength in the IR, both measured at the Earth, as the observable quantity. This ratio is compared with a theoretical estimate derived from atmosphere models, allowing the determination of the effective temperature. The method we have developed follows a somewhat different approach, namely, a fit of the stellar spectral energy distribution from the optical ($`V`$) to the IR ($`JHK`$) with synthetic photometry computed from atmosphere models. This wavelength range ensures enough sensitivity to temperature, while being essentially immune to intrinsic variations (mostly due to chromospheric activity) that would strongly affect bluer passbands. Also importantly, the spectral energy distribution in the optical/IR for cool stars is mostly insensitive to the (often unknown) values of $`\mathrm{log}g`$ and $`[Fe/H]`$. In contrast to the IRFM, our method does not require the use of a bolometric flux calibration, thus reducing the risk of uncontrolled systematic errors, and permits the determination of individual uncertainties. The algorithm will be discussed in detail by Masana (M04 (2004)) but we briefly outline the procedure here.

A critical pre-requisite to compare stellar and model fluxes is a well-characterized photometric system and an accurate flux calibration. Fortunately, the recent work by Cohen et al. (2003a , 2003b ) provides a set of consistent absolute flux calibrations in both the optical (Landolt system) and IR (2MASS). To compute synthetic magnitudes we employ the dense grid of Kurucz atmosphere models333http://kurucz.harvard.edu/grids.html, although tests with other models (discussed below) reveal negligible differences. The synthetic $`VJHK`$ photometry was calculated for each of the grid points as a function of $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$, $`[Fe/H]`$, and $`\mathrm{log}g`$. We restricted our calculations to the temperature interval between 4000 and 8000 K. The upper limit is defined by the increasing dependence of the results on $`\mathrm{log}g`$ and the lower limit is set by the decreasing performance of the models because of molecular bands.

The algorithm itself is based on the minimisation of a $`\chi ^2`$ function defined from the difference between the observed and synthetic $`VJHK`$ magnitudes. The two adjustable parameters are $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ and a magnitude zeropoint (ZP), while $`\mathrm{log}g`$ and $`[Fe/H]`$ are fixed input data (recall that interstellar absorption for our stars is negligible). The ZP is the difference between the synthetic (star’s surface) and the observed magnitude (Earth surface), and it is directly related to the semi-angular diameter ($`\theta =10^{0.2\mathrm{ZP}}`$). The input values of $`[Fe/H]`$ were taken from the spectroscopic determinations and $`\mathrm{log}g`$ was roughly estimated from stellar models (in the $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$$`L`$ plane) after one iteration. Convergence towards the minimum value of the reduced $`\chi ^2`$ was very fast and reached values close to unity.

Perhaps the greatest advantage of our method is that it yields the individual uncertainties of both $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ and $`\theta `$, calculated from the covariance matrix, provided the involved errors are realistically estimated. For the present sample, the error sources considered are: 1) Observed magnitude errors, with an minimum 0.015 mag error in $`V`$ (usually computed from the average of a few measurement and thus prone to error underestimation); 2) Zero point uncertainties in the flux calibration (1.5-1.7%) from Cohen et al. (2003a , 2003b ); 3) Conservative error bars of 0.1 dex in $`[Fe/H]`$ and 0.2 dex in $`\mathrm{log}g`$ dex444Our method is essentially insensitive to the adopted value of $`[Fe/H]`$ and $`\mathrm{log}g`$. Thus, uncertainties up to 0.3 dex in $`[Fe/H]`$ and 0.5 dex in $`\mathrm{log}g`$ introduce uncertainties in $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ below 0.5%.; 4) No error was attributed to the model fluxes. We ran a number of comparison with other (less dense) atmosphere model grids such as those by Castelli et al. (CGK97 (1997)) and the NextGen models by Hauschildt et al. HAB99 (1999)). Our tests were extremely satisfactory and yielded average temperature differences below 15 K ($``$0.3%) in all cases. Thus, systematic errors introduced by atmosphere models are likely to be negligible.

The procedure described above yields two basic parameters: The best-fitting effective temperature and semi-angular diameter (i.e. radius/distance). With a known distance, the latter can be transformed into a true radius measurement. The results for our stellar sample are listed in Table 1. The relative accuracy of the results is 0.5–1.3% in effective temperature and 0.9–2.4% in semi-angular diameter. Since the planet-hosting stars in the sample are generally nearby, their Hipparcos distances are very accurate. This results in relative uncertainties in the individual radii in the range of 1.3–4.7% for 90% of the stars.

## 4 Discussion

With the temperatures from IR photometry in hand, we carried out a comparison with spectroscopic determinations to assess their mutual agreement. We considered two comprehensive and independent spectroscopic analyses, following, however, similar approaches: The Swiss group (Santos et al. SIM01 (2001), SIM03 (2003)) and the US group (Gonzalez G97 (1997), G98 (1998), G99 (1999); Gonzalez & Laws GL00 (2000); Gonzalez et al. GLT01 (2001); Feltzing & Gonzalez FG01 (2001); Laws et al. LGW03 (2003)). A cross-match of the IR and spectroscopic samples yields a total of 69 stars in common with the Swiss group and 49 with the US group. The resulting comparisons are illustrated in Fig. 1, where the observational data are plotted with their error bars. As can be seen, the agreement among the three temperature determinations is very remarkable. The mean difference between the IR-based and the Swiss group temperatures is $`<T_{\mathrm{eff}}^{}{}_{\mathrm{IR}}{}^{}T_{\mathrm{eff}}^{}{}_{\mathrm{SW}}{}^{}>=4.2\pm 51.4`$ K, with no hint of any systematic trends neither as a function of temperature, metallicity or surface gravity. The difference with the US group yields a value of $`<T_{\mathrm{eff}}^{}{}_{\mathrm{IR}}{}^{}T_{\mathrm{eff}}^{}{}_{\mathrm{US}}{}^{}>=+20.5\pm 65.9`$ K, with a low significance trend of larger IR temperatures at the low $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ end and smaller IR temperatures at the high $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ end. No systematic trends are seen as a function of metallicity or surface gravity. Interestingly, in both cases the scatter of the differences is entirely consistent with the quoted error bars, which indicates that our procedure yields realistic uncertainties.

A valuable independent test of our analysis can be carried out by comparing the semi-angular diameters with observational determinations. Unfortunately, this is not possible at this point because all the stars with available empirical angular diameter measurements are very bright (see Alonso et al. AAM94 (1994) for a compilation) and do not have accurate 2MASS photometry. Luckily, there is one star in our sample with an accurate empirical radius measurement and this is HD 209458, which undergoes planetary transits. Generally it is very difficult to disentangle the stellar and the planetary radii effects when analyzing transit light curves. However, Brown et al. (BCG01 (2001)) were able to determine both the stellar radius and the planetary radius simultaneously from a high precision transit light curve of HD 209458 obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their empirically-determined radius is $`1.146\pm 0.050`$ R, which can be compared with our estimate of $`1.145\pm 0.049`$ R from the fit to the star’s optical/IR energy distribution. The agreement is excellent (owing the almost null difference to small number statistics) and the error bars of both measurements are alike.

These important results indicate that our temperature and radius determination method is robust and with a very similar accuracy to the one possibly achievable with the best available spectroscopy and photometry today.

For completeness, the effective temperatures in Table 1 were also compared with those computed from photometric calibrations. A detailed discussion is left for a forthcoming publication, but we shall briefly review here some of the most relevant results. Our tests focused on the Strömgren calibrations of Olsen (O84 (1984)) and the IRFM as implemented by Alonso et al. (AAM96 (1996)). The comparisons show that the $`(by)`$ calibration of Olsen (O84 (1984)) yields effective temperatures that are systematically lower than those resulting from our method, with the mean difference being 168$`\pm `$103 K. Interestingly, a marked trend was found when plotting the differences as a function of metallicity. It seems that the origin of the discrepancies can be ascribed to the stellar sample used to derive the Strömgren calibrations, since only one third of Olsen’s reference stars have super-solar metallicities. In contrast, the comparison with the temperatures derived from the IRFM calibration of Alonso et al. (AAM96 (1996)) reveals no systematic trends but they are on average 76$`\pm `$42 K smaller than our determinations. Given the similarity of both methods and input data, the discrepancy can tentatively be attributed to the photometric transformations employed or to the bolometric flux calibration used by Alonso et al. (AAM96 (1996)).

## 5 Conclusions

The conclusions of our study are twofold. First, we have compared the effective temperature determinations for planet-bearing stars from two completely independent approaches with similar accuracies, namely detailed spectroscopic analysis and IR photometry. The results indicate an excellent agreement in the entire temperature range, which confidently rules out the possibility of systematic effects in spectroscopic metallicity determinations and supports the use of solar line oscillator strengths. Second, the method presented, consisting in a fit to the observed $`VJHK`$ magnitudes using synthetic magnitudes, has proved its reliability, yielding accurate ($``$1%) and cost-effective temperatures. As a bonus, the analysis also provides determinations of the semi-angular diameters and, eventually, the stellar radii. The resulting radius accuracy of a few percent (for nearby stars) could be extremely useful to break the strong degeneracy between the radii of the planet and the star when analysing transit light curves.

###### Acknowledgements.

I. R. and E. M. acknowledge support from the Spanish MCyT through grant AyA2000-0937. This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.


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# Cloning of orthogonal mixed states entails irreversibility

## Abstract

Orthogonal pure states can be cloned as well as deleted. However if there is an initial disorder in the system, that is for orthogonal mixed states, one cannot perform deletion. And cloning, in such cases, necessarily produces an irreversibility, in the form of leakage of information into the environment.

Nonorthogonal states cannot be cloned WZ . And orthogonal states can be cloned. However we will show that if there is an initial disorder in the system, one necessarily produces “irreversibility”, even when cloning orthogonal states.

Consider two arbitrary mixed orthogonal states. For definiteness, we take them to be of rank two each. This restriction does not change the generality of the statements that are made below. Suppose therefore that the two orthogonal mixed states are

$$\begin{array}{ccc}\varrho _0=p|00\left|+q\right|22|,\hfill & & \\ \varrho _1=r|11\left|+s\right|33|,\hfill & & \end{array}$$
(1)
where of course $`p`$, $`q`$, $`r`$, $`s`$ are nonnegative numbers such that $`p+q=1`$, and $`r+s=1`$, and $`|0`$, $`|1`$, $`|2`$, $`|3`$ are a set of mutually orthonormal states.

Consider now the task of cloning the two states, $`\varrho _0`$ and $`\varrho _1`$, if any one is given. So we want to create $`\varrho _i\varrho _i`$ from $`\varrho _i`$ coupled with a blank state (that is, a state that has no information about $`i`$, $`i=0,1`$). There is a trivial way to do that. One simply makes a measurement onto the (rank-two) projection operators

$$\begin{array}{ccc}P_0=|00|+|22|,\hfill & & \\ P_1=|11|+|33|.\hfill & & \end{array}$$

If $`P_0`$ clicks, then the conclusion is that the given state was $`\varrho _0`$. Otherwise, the state was $`\varrho _1`$. After finding out what the state is, one can just prepare the required extra copy of the state that is indicated by the measurement. Note that one may deliberately perform the finer measurement onto the orthonormal basis consisting of the states $`|0`$, $`|1`$, $`|2`$, $`|3`$. That would destroy the information about the mixing probabilities ($`p`$, $`q`$, and $`r`$, $`s`$) in the states $`\varrho _0`$ and $`\varrho _1`$. But we assume that these mixing probabilities are known. So if, for example, $`|2`$ clicks in such a finer measurement, the conclusion is that the given state was $`\varrho _0`$. One can then prepare two copies of $`\varrho _0`$.

However, for the case when $`q=s=0`$, that is when $`\varrho _0`$ and $`\varrho _1`$ are pure, and are respectively $`|00|`$ and $`|11|`$, there is another way to clone. It is by using a gate that takes

$$\begin{array}{ccc}|0_S|0_B|0_S|0_B,\hfill & & \\ |1_S|0_B|1_S|1_B.\hfill & & \end{array}$$
(2)
This could for example be the CNOT gate, which additionally takes

$$\begin{array}{ccc}|0|1|0|1,\hfill & & \\ |1|1|1|0.\hfill & & \end{array}$$

To see the cloning of the states, consider the states marked by $`S`$ in eq. (2) as the original copy, and those marked by $`B`$ as the blank copy. One then obtains the two copies of the original on the right-hand-side of eq. (2).

Note an important difference in the two ways of cloning. In the first method, a measurement step is involved. This measurement, results in making the process “open”. After the whole process of cloning has been completed, there is information about the system (precisely, the result of the measurement) left in the environment. Let us call this method of cloning orthogonal states as “open cloning”.

Now contrast this method of cloning with the second method of cloning orthogonal *pure* states, by using CNOT-type gates. In this case, after the cloning process has been completed, there is no information about the system that is left in the environment. Let us call this method of cloning orthogonal *pure* states as “closed cloning”.

Open cloning is thus an irreversible process. It leads to production of some “garbage” in the environment. Closed cloning, on the other hand, is a “clean” process. There is no left out garbage in this case. We will show that cloning of orthogonal mixed states will always produce garbage. Such states cannot be cloned by closed cloning.

Consider the state $`\varrho _i`$ ($`i=0,1`$). We want to produce two copies of $`\varrho _i`$. That is, we want to produce $`\varrho _i\varrho _i`$. At the input, we take a blank copy $`\varrho _b`$ (along with $`\varrho _i`$). Therefore our input is $`\varrho _i\varrho _b`$, $`i=0,1`$. And we want $`\varrho _i\varrho _i`$ at the output. If we do not want the information about $`i`$ to get leaked into the environment, this evolution must be done unitarily. Clearly, this cannot be done. To see this, just note that unitary evolution preserves the spectrum. But $`\varrho _i\varrho _b`$ cannot have the same spectrum as $`\varrho _i\varrho _i`$ for both $`i=0`$ *and* $`1`$. Therefore cloning of two orthogonal mixed states is not possible in a closed system. To implement this cloning, one is bound to do a measurement, so that the cloning is an open cloning.

Let us now consider the deleting process. In deleting Pati , one requires to have $`\varrho _i\varrho _b`$ at the output, when $`\varrho _i\varrho _i`$ is fed at the input. And we know that deleting must necessarily be considered in a closed system (see Jozsa ; amader-cloning  in this regard). So the same reasoning as above, renders such deleting impossible by a unitary evolution. Thus we have that deleting of orthogonal mixed states is not possible.

In the case of orthogonal pure states ($`|0`$ and $`|1`$), one can clone (as in eq. (2)), and by the inverse operation, one can delete. To see this, note that the inverse operation takes

$$\begin{array}{ccc}|0|0|0|0,\hfill & & \\ |1|1|1|0.\hfill & & \end{array}$$

However in the case of orthogonal mixed states, considered in this paper, one cannot delete, while cloning is possible if one considers an open system. Therefore for orthogonal *mixed* states, cloning and deleting are not inverse processes of each other.


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# The CDF MiniPlug Calorimeters at the Tevatron

## 1 INTRODUCTION

The CDF diffractive physics program relies on two MiniPlug (MP) calorimeters, which can detect both charged and neutral particles, to measure the event energy flow in the very forward rapidity region on opposite sides of the interaction point. The performance of a MP prototype is published in , while the final detector assembly and the results from a cosmic ray test are reported in .

## 2 DETECTOR

The MPs consist of alternating layers of lead plates and liquid scintillator read out by WaveLength Shifting (WLS) fibers (Fig. 1). The fibers are perpendicular to the lead plates and parallel to the proton/antiproton beams, and are read out by Multi-Channel PhotoMultiplier Tubes (MCPMTs). The 16-channel Hamamatsu R5900 MCPMTs have a quartz window which improves the radiation hardness. Each MP is housed in a cylindrical steel vessel 26′′ in diameter and has a 5′′ hole concentric with the vessel to accommodate the beam pipe. The depth of a MP is 32 radiation lengths and 1.3 interaction lengths. The short hadronic depth limits the lateral spread of the showers. The MPs have a novel towerless geometry with no dead regions, due to the lack of internal boundaries, and towers are formed by combining the desired number of fibers. The centroid of the tower pulse height provides the position of the shower initiating particle.

The tower design is based on an hexagon geometry. Holes in the lead plate are conceptually grouped in hexagons, each with six holes. The six fibers inserted in the holes of a hexagon are grouped together and are viewed by one MCPMT channel.

A seventh fiber, which is clear and carries the light from a calibration LED, is also read out by each MCPMT pixel to allow a periodical monitoring of the MCPMT response. The MCPMT outputs are added to form 84 calorimeter towers per MP, organized in four concentric rings around the beam pipe. The entire MCPMT can also be read out through the last dynode output to provide trigger information. Each MP has a total of 18 trigger towers, arranged in three rings.

## 3 CALIBRATION AND RUN II DATA

Cosmic ray muons were used to test one 60o wedge of the east MP. The cosmic ray trigger fired on a 2-fold coincidence of scintillation counter paddles located on top and at the bottom of the MP vessel, placed with towers pointing upward. The single photoelectron response was measured using a randomly gated signal from a $`{}_{}{}^{60}Co`$ source. The response to a minimum ionizing particle was found to be above 100 photoelectrons, exceeding the design specifications.

Although a precise energy calibration is not crucial to the analysis of diffractive processes, an attempt was made to estimate the energy of jets and particles using colliding beam data from Run II. For each tower, the ADC count distribution of a sample of minimum bias events can be fitted well by a falling exponential curve (Fig. 2, top). A Monte Carlo simulation was then used to calibrate the pseudorapidity dependence of the tower-by-tower response. Due to pile-up effects at larger rapidity regions, a luminosity dependence of the ADC count distribution slope is observed (Fig. 2, bottom). A linear fit describes well the data, with the slope decreasing with increasing values of instantaneous luminosity. The particle multiplicity is measured by counting clusters of towers with energy above noise (Fig. 3).

The MPs are presently an integral part of the CDF detector, collecting good quality data for further exploring the realm of diffractive physics.