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# Boosting the Differences : A Fast Bayesian Classifier Neural Network

## 1 Introduction

Machine learning has been one of the most active areas of research in recent times. A significant boost to this was the introduction of the backpropagation algorithm by Rumelhart . Another class of learning algorithms based on the Bayesian theory also became popular in the search for better learning algorithms. Standard Bayesian networks involves a lot of computational labour so that they are used only in highly demanding situations. In many practical problems, a simplified version of the Bayesian classifiers known as the ’naive’ Bayesian (NB) classifier  performs equally well. The basis of the Bayesian classifier is that identical examples will cluster together in an $`n`$ dimensional attribute space (parameter space or feature space) and that it may be efficiently classified presuming that the attributes are independent for a given class of the example. If we consider a discrete space $`\mathrm{}^n`$ to represent an example, the resolution with which the attributes should be mapped to identify the clusters is determined on the basis of the separability of the classes. If the attributes have narrow margins, a high resolution is required. For example, a particular color might be unique to an object. Then the resolution is not very significant in classifying the object. Obviously, the likelihood for overlapping attribute values will be distributed among the classes. Assuming that the resolution is reasonably chosen, for each class we generate a table of the likelihoods for each discrete attribute value. If the attribute values are continuous, we construct bins of uniform width to hold them. This is equivalent to digitizing the data with some suitable step size. The independence of attribute values require that the product of the corresponding values of the likelihoods of the attributes be an extremum for the respective class of the example.

However, one major drawback of the NB classifier is that it is not able to learn the classical XOR problem. In fact, it fails on any problem that does not support the independence of the attribute values. In this connection, Elkan  showed that the introduction of noise can improve the ability of naive Bayesian classifiers when dealing with XOR kind of problems. He further argued that addition of noise has the effect that the ’true concept resembles a disjunction of conjunctions with noise’. Here we introduce a slightly different approach. We apply certain empirical rules on the attributes during the training process and use this information to do the classification later. A simple boosting algorithm is then used to amplify the difference produced by these rules to improve the classification accuracy. Some examples from the UCI repository data sets for machine learning are used to benchmark the proposed algorithm with other known methods for classification.

## 2 Naive Bayesian learning

A convincing formalism on how the degrees of belief should vary on the basis of evidence is obtained from Bayesian theory. If $`P(U_iH)`$ represent the likelihood by which the evidence (feature value ) $`U_i`$ occurs in the hypothesis (class) $`H`$, which itself has a probability of occurrence $`P(H)`$, then Bayes’ rule states the posterior probability, or the degree of belief with which this evidence $`U_i`$ would propose the occurrence of the hypothesis $`H`$ as:

$$P(HU_i)=\frac{P(U_iH)P(H)}{_iP(U_iH)P(H)}$$

Assume that we have a dataset with N training examples represented as $`S=\{x_1,x_2,\mathrm{}\mathrm{}x_N\}`$. Each of these examples $`x_n`$ is represented by a set of $`M`$ independent attribute values. Thus we represent $`x`$ as :

$$xU_1U_2\mathrm{}\mathrm{}.U_M$$

where $``$ denotes the logical AND operation. This has the analogy to the statement that Rose is an object with red color AND soft petals AND striking smell. We further assume that the training set is complete with $`K`$ different known discrete classes. A statistical analysis should assign a maximal value of the conditional probability $`P(C_kU)`$ for the actual class $`C_k`$ of the example. By Bayes’ rule this probability may be computed as :

$$P(C_kU)=\frac{P(UC_k)P(C_k)}{_KP(UC_k)P(C_k)}$$

$`P(C_k)`$ is also known as the background probability. Since the attributes are associated to the example vector by a logical AND condition, $`P(UC_k)`$ is given by the product of the probabilities due to individual attributes. Thus,

$$P(UC_k)=\underset{m}{}P(U_mC_k)$$

Following the axioms of set theory, one can compute $`P(U_mC_k)`$ as $`P(U_mC_k)`$. This is nothing but the ratio of the total count of the attribute value $`U_m`$ in class $`C_k`$ to the number of examples in the entire training set. Thus naive Bayesian classifiers complete a training cycle much faster than perceptrons or feed-forward neural networks. Elkan reports a time of less than a minute to learn a data set of 40,000 examples each with 25 attribute values on a ’modern workstation’.

## 3 Boosting

Boosting is an iterative process by which the network upweights misclassified examples in a training set until it is correctly classified. The Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost) algorithm of Freund and Schapire  attempts the same thing. In this paper, we present a rather simple algorithm for boosting. The structure of our network is identical to AdaBoost in that it also modifies a weight function. Instead of computing the error in the classification as the total error produced in the training set, we take each misclassified example and apply a correction to its weight based on its own error. Also, instead of upweighting an example, our network upweights the weight associated to the probability $`P(U_mC_k)`$ of each attribute of the example. Thus the modified weight will affect all the examples that have the same attribute value even if its other attributes are different. During the training cycle, there is a competitive update of attribute weights to reduce the error produced by each example. It is expected that at the end of the training epoch the weights associated to the probability function of each attribute will stabilize to some value that produces the minimum error in the entire training set. Identical feature values compete with each other and the differences get boosted up. Thus the classification becomes more and more dependent on the differences rather than on similarities. This is analogous to the way in which the human brain differentiates between almost similar objects by sight, like for example, rotten tomatoes from a pile of good ones.

Let us consider a misclassified example in which $`P_k`$ represent the computed probability for the actual class $`k`$ and $`P_k^{}`$ that for the wrongly represented class. Our aim is to push the computed probability $`P_k`$ to some value greater than $`P_k^{}`$. In our network, this is done by modifying the weight associated to each $`P(U_mC_k)`$ of the misclassified item by the negative gradient of the error, i.e. $`\mathrm{\Delta }W_m=\alpha \left[1\frac{P_k}{P_k^{}}\right]`$. Here $`\alpha `$ is a constant which determines the rate at which the weight changes. The process is repeated until all items are classified correctly or a predefined number of rounds completes.

## 4 The classifier network.

Assuming that the occurrences of the classes are equally probable, we start with a flat prior distribution of the classes ,i.e. $`P(C_k)=\frac{1}{N}`$. This might appear unrealistic, since this is almost certain to be unequal in most practical cases. The justification is that since $`P(C_K)`$ is also a weighting function, we expect this difference also to be taken care of by the connection weights during the boosting process. The advantage on the otherhand is that it avoids any assumptions on the training set regarding the prior estimation. Now, the network presented in this paper may be divided into three units. The first unit computes the Bayes’ probability for each of the training examples. If there are $`M`$ number of attributes with values ranging from $`m_{min}`$ to $`m_{max}`$ and belonging to one of the $`K`$ discrete classes, we first construct a grid of equal sized bins for each $`k`$ with columns representing the attributes and rows their values. Thus a training example $`S_i`$ belonging to a class $`k`$ and having one of its attributes $`l`$ with a value $`m`$ will fall into the bin $`B_{klm}`$ for which the Euclidean distance between the center of the bin and the attribute value is a minimum. The number of bins in each row should cover the range of the attributes from $`m_{min}`$ to $`m_{max}`$. It is observed that there exist an optimum number of bins that produce the maximum classification efficiency for a given problem. For the time being, it is computed by trial and error. Once this is set, the training process is simply to distribute the examples in the training sets into their respective bins. After this, the number of attributes in each bin $`i`$ for each class $`k`$ is counted and this gives the probability $`P(U_mC_k)`$ of the attribute $`m`$ with value $`U_mi`$ for the given $`C_k=k`$. The basic difference of this new formalism with that of the popular gradient descent backpropagation algorithm and similar Neural Networks is that, here the distance function is the distance between the probabilities, rather than the feature magnitudes. Thus the new formalism can isolate overlapping regions of the feature space more efficiently than standard algorithms.

As mentioned earlier, this learning fails when the data set represent an XOR like feature. To overcome this, associated to each row of bins of the attribute values we put a tag that holds the minimum and maximum values of the other attributes in the data example. This tag acts as a level threshold window function. In our example, if an attribute value in the example happens to be outside the range specified in the tag, then the computed $`P(U_mC_k)`$ of that attribute is reduced to one-forth of its actual value (gain of 0.25). Applying such a simple window enabled the network to handle the XOR kind of problems such as the monk’s problem efficiently.

The second unit in the network is the gradient descent boosting algorithm. To do this, each of the probability components $`P(U_mC_k)`$ is amplified by a connection weight before computing $`P(UC_k)`$. Initially all the weights are set to unity. For a correctly classified example, $`P(UC_k)`$ will be a maximum for the class specified in the training set. For the misclassified items, we increment its weight by a fraction $`\mathrm{\Delta }W_m`$. For the experiments cited here, the value of $`\alpha `$ was taken as 2.0. The training set is read repeatedly for a few rounds and in each round the connection weights of the misclassified items are incremented by $`\mathrm{\Delta }W_m=\alpha \left[1\frac{P_k}{P_k^{}}\right]`$ as explained in section 3, until the item is classified correctly.

The third unit computes $`P(C_kU)`$ as :

$$P(C_kU)=\frac{_mP(U_mC_k)W_m}{_K_mP(U_mC_k)W_m}$$

If this is a maximum for the class given in the training set, the network is said to have learned correctly. The wrongly classified items are re-submitted to the boosting algorithm in the second unit.

## 5 Experimental results

For the experimental verification of the network model, we selected four well known databases from the UCI repository. The first three examples are realistic data on breast cancer, hypothyroid and diabetes patients, while the fourth one is a set of three artificial datasets generated by Sebastian Thrun in 1991 for benchmarking many popular learning algorithms. Each dataset illustrates some characteristic feature of the naive Bayesian classifier proposed in this paper.

### 5.1 Wisconsin breast cancer databases

The Wisconsin breast cancer database represents a reasonably complex problem with 9 continuous input attributes and two possible output classes. This data set was donated by Dr. William H. Wolberg of the University of Wisconsin Hospitals. The dataset consists of 683 instances and we divided it into a training set of 341 examples and a test set of 342 examples each. The problem is to find if the evidences indicates a Benign or Malignant neoplasm. Wolberg  used 369 instances of the data (available at that point in time) for classification and found that two pairs of parallel hyperplanes are consistent with 50% of the data. Accuracy on remaining 50% of dataset was 93.5%. It is also reported that three pairs of parallel hyperplanes were found to be consistent with 67% of data and the accuracy on remaining 33% was 95.9%

The input attributes are:

| Attribute | Type |
| --- | --- |
| Clump Thickness | continuous |
| Uniformity of Cell Size | continuous |
| Uniformity of Cell Shape | continuous |
| Marginal Adhesion | continuous |
| Single Epithelial Cell Size | continuous |
| Bare Nuclei | continuous |
| Bland Chromatin | continuous |
| Normal Nucleoli | continuous |
| Mitoses | continuous |

Taha and Ghosh used all the 683 instances to test a hybrid symbolic-connectionist system . Using a Full Rule Extraction algorithm, they report a recognition rate of 97.77%. The proposed network using 7 bins for each attribute converged in 87 iterations to produce a classification accuracy of 97.95 % on the independent test set. Only seven out of 342 examples were misclassified.

### 5.2 Thyroid databases

The thyroid database was donated by Randolf Werner in 1992. It consists of 3772 learning examples and 3428 testing examples readily usable as ANN training and test sets. In the repository, these datasets are named : pub/machine-learning-databases/thyroid-disease/ann\*. Each example has 21 attributes, 15 of which are binary and 6 are continuous. The problem is to determine whether a patient referred to the clinic is hypothyroid. The output from the network is expected to be one of the three possible classes, namely: (i) normal (not hypothyroid), (ii) hyperfunction and (iii) subnormal function. In the dataset, 92 percent of the patients are not hyperthyroid and thus any reasonably good classifier should have above 92% correct predictions. Schiffmann et al.,  used this dataset to benchmark 15 different algorithms. Fourteen of the networks had a fixed topology of 3 layers with 21 input nodes, 10 hidden nodes and 3 output nodes. The network was fully interconnected. The other network used was a cascade correlation network with 10 and 20 units each. Using a SPARC2 CPU, the reported training time on the dataset varied from 12 to 24 hours. On the otherhand, using an ordinary Celeron 300MHz Linux PC, our network using 9 bins each for the continuous attributes and 2 bins each for the binary attributes took less than 10 minutes to attain a classification accuracy better than the best results reported by Schiffmann et al . We summarize their best results along with ours in table I.

| Algorithm | Training Set | Test set |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Backprop | 99.13 | 97.58 |
| Backprop(batch mode) | 92.63 | 92.85 |
| Backprop(batch mode)+ Eaton and Oliver | 92.47 | 92.71 |
| Backprop+Darken and Moody | 99.20 | 97.90 |
| J. Schmidhuber | 98.36 | 97.23 |
| R.Salomon | 94.64 | 94.14 |
| Chan and Fallside | 94.67 | 94.17 |
| Polak-Ribiere+line search | 94.70 | 94.17 |
| Conj. gradient + line search | 94.57 | 93.84 |
| Silva and Almeida | 99.60 | 98.45 |
| SuperSAB | 99.55 | 98.42 |
| Delta-Bar-Delta | 99.20 | 98.02 |
| RPROP | 99.58 | 98.02 |
| Quickprop | 99.60 | 98.25 |
| Cascade correlation 10 units | 99.84 | 98.42 |
| Cascade correlation 20 units | 100 | 98.48 |
| Our network | 99.06 | 98.60 |

Table I : A comparison of the efficiency of the proposed classifier with other networks on the UCI Thyroid database.

### 5.3 Pima Indians Diabetes Database

The Pima Indian diabetes database, donated by Vincent Sigillito, is a collection of medical diagnostic reports of 768 examples from a population living near Phoenix, Arizona, USA. The paper dealing with this data base  uses an adaptive learning routine that generates and executes digital analogs of perceptron-like devices, called ADAP. They used 576 training instances and obtained a classification of 76 % on the remaining 192 instances. The samples consist of examples with 8 attribute values and one of the two possible outcomes, namely whether the patient is “tested positive for diabetes" (indicated by output one) or not (indicated by two). The database now available in the repository is a refined version by George John in October 1994 and it has 512 examples in the training set and 256 examples in the test set. The attribute vectors of these examples are:.

| Attribute | Type |
| --- | --- |
| Number of times pregnant | continuous |
| Plasma glucose concentration | continuous |
| Diastolic blood pressure (mm Hg) | continuous |
| Triceps skin fold thickness (mm) | continuous |
| 2-Hour serum insulin (mu U/ml) | continuous |
| Body mass index \[weight in kg/(height in m)2\] | continuous |
| Diabetes pedigree function | continuous |
| Age (years) | continuous |

We use this dataset to illustrate the effect of the topology (in terms of the number of bins per attribute) on the generalization ability of the proposed network. With a twelve fold cross-validation and special pre-processing, the test result reported for the data by George John is 77.7 using the LogDisc algorithm. Table II summarizes the generalization obtained on our network for the same dataset without any pre-processing. The first column indicates the number of bins used for each attribute and is followed by the classification success percentage for the training and test sets.

| Sl. No. | No. of bins for each attribute | Training data | Test data |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | 5-5-5-5-14-5- 5-5 | 82.42 % | 72.66 % |
| 2 | 5-5-5-5-5-30-5-5 | 82.42 % | 72.66 % |
| 3 | 5-5-5-5-14-30-5-5 | 84.57 % | 75.00 % |
| 4 | 8-5-5-5-14-30-5-5 | 83.79 % | 76.17 % |
| 5 | 8-5-5-5-14-30-5-6 | 84.77 % | 76.95 % |

Table II : The table illustrates how the optimization of the bins may be done for the proposed network on parallel architecture.

As it can be seen, the optimal topology is (8-5-5-5-14-30-5-6) giving a classification accuracy of 76.95%. It may also be noted that the process of optimization of bin number obeys additive property. Thus when attributes five and six uses 14 and 30 bins each, the resulting accuracy is 75 % which is about 2.5 % above that produced by them individually. This means that the optimization of the topology of the network may be automated in parallel on a virtual machine to make the best possible network for a task. Since naive Bayesian networks also support parallel computation of attribute values, this network is well suited for parallel architecture producing high throughput. Future research shall explore this possibility in detail.

### 5.4 Monks’ problems

In 1991 Sebastian Thrun composed these datasets for benchmarking many known learning algorithms. These datasets were generated using propositional formulas over six attributes. The formulas used for each dataset are: (1) $`A_1=A_2=a_{51}`$ (2) exactly two of $`A_1`$through $`A_6`$ have their first value, and (3) \[$`A_5=a_{53}`$ and $`A_4=a_{41}`$\] or \[$`A_5a_{54}`$ and $`A_2a_{23}`$\]. In addition to this, the third dataset was added with 5% classification noise also. All the three data sets have an XOR flavor by design. Using a naive Bayesian classifier with AdaBoost algorithm, Elkan reports that the classifier succeeded only on the third dataset. This is qualitatively explained  as caused by the inherent inability of boosting algorithms to boost a dataset unless the intermediate hypothesis, including the first, has a probability greater than 50 %. In XOR kind of problems, this is exactly 50% and no boosting is possible. With the addition of noise this situation changes and the boosting algorithm takes advantage of it to produce better classification.

In the proposed network, we used a threshold window function tagged to each possible attribute value of the training data. The purpose of this function is to bring in some difference in the computed probability values of the naive Bayesian classifier that may be used by the boosting algorithm to differentiate the classes. A uniform size of 4 bins were used to represent each attribute. We summarize the results in table III. The number of examples in the data are shown in brackets and the other numbers shown are the number of correctl‘y classified examples in class 1 and class 2 respectively.

| Dataset | Our Network |
| --- | --- |
| Monk’s training set 1 (124) | 62, 62 : 100 % |
| Monk’s test set 1 (432) | 214, 205 : 96.99 % |
| Monk’s training set 2 (169) | 17, 95 : 66.27 % |
| Monk’s test set 2 (432) | 38, 252 : 67.23 % |
| Monk’s training set 3 (122) | 57, 61 : 96.72 % |
| Monk’s test set 3 (432) | 205, 204 : 94.68 % |

Table III : The network attempts to learn the monks’ problem and illustrate a case were the naive Bayesian model for classification fails. However, with noise and with partial independence of attributes, our network obtained good classification efficiency.

It may be noted that the success rate in the second dataset is poor compared to the other two. Also, note that the definition of this dataset is antithetical to the assumptions of naive Bayesian networks on the clustering of classes in feature space. This is a clear example where naive Bayesian ideas does not work. While the success in the first dataset illustrate the power of the proposed algorithm, it is not clear if noise has any effect on the third dataset. Further studies are required to explore such possibilities.

## 6 Conclusion

Bayes’ rule on how the degree of belief should change on the basis of evidences is one of the most popular formalism for brain modeling. In most implementations, the degree of belief is computed in terms of the degree of agreement to some known criteria. However, this has the disadvantage that some of the minor differences might be left unnoticed by the classifier. We thus device a classifier that pays more attention to differences rather than similarities in identifying the classes from a dataset. In the training epoch, the network identifies the apparent differences and magnify them to separate out classes. We applied the classifier on many practical problems and found that this makes sense. To illustrate some of the features of the network, we discuss four examples from the UCI repository. The highlights of the features of the network are:

1. In all the examples the classification accuracy in both training and testing sets are comparable. This means that the network has successfully picked up the right classification information avoiding any possible overfitting of data.

2. Unlike back propagation or its variant, the network converges to the same accuracy irrespective of initial conditions.

3. The training time is less compared to other networks and the accuracy is better.

4. The network topology may be automatically optimized using parallel computation and the network is well suited for parallel architecture offering high throughput.

We also point out two areas for future research. One is the implementation of the network on a parallel virtual machine (PVM) and the second is the effect of noise on the classifier accuracy.


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# Nucleation of bended vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates in elongated traps.

## Abstract

We study the generation of vortices in rotating axially elongated magneto-optical traps, a situation which has been realized in a recent experiment (K. W. Madison, F. Chevy, W. Wohlleben, J. Dalibard, Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 806 (2000)). We predict that at a critical frequency the condensate experiences a symmetry breaking and changes from a convex cloud to a state with one bended vortex. We also discuss several effects which enlarge the critical frequency with respect to other geometries of the trap: these are, (i) the failure of the Thomas-Fermi approximation on the transverse degrees of freedom of the condensate, (ii) the enhancement of the transverse asymmetry of the trap by means of rotation and (iii) the yet unobserved bending of the vortex lines.

Since the creation of the first Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) using ultracold dilute gases  and the success in describing them using simple but accurate mean field theories, it has been a goal of the field to produce and understand the Physics behind vortices in these condensates.

Vortices, or vortex-lines we should rather say, constitute the most relevant topological defect that one finds in Physics. They basically consist on a twist of the phase of a wave function around an open line and they are typically associated to a rotation of a fluid whatever the fluid is made of (real fluids, optical fluids, quantum fluids, …) . Furthermore, vortices are one of the means by which quantum systems may acquire angular momentum and thus react to some perturbations of the environment. They have already been predicted, observed and studied in the superfluid phase of 4He and are indeed known to be the key to some important processes inside these systems, such as dissipation, moments of inertia and breakdown of superfluidity. This is why extensive research on vortex generation, stability and dynamics has been conducted in the field of BEC in the last years .

In a recent experiment performed by a group from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS)  vortices are created by rotating an elongated trap slightly deformed in the trasverse dimensions. This rotation is performed at a constant angular speed, $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, which is the key parameter for the appearance of one or more vortices. Many interesting phenomena have been observed in these experiments, but we are concerned with some of them which are controversial: (i) the first vortex nucleates at a critical rotation speed or *critical frequency*, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$, larger than the estimate of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1^{TF}=\frac{5\mathrm{}}{2mR_{}^2}\mathrm{ln}\frac{0.671R_{}}{\xi }`$ , (ii) vortex cores seem partially filled and (iii) after the nucleation of the first vortex the angular momentum seems to depend continuously on the rotation speed.

In this letter we consider these effects within the framework of a mean field theory for dilute gaseous condensates in rotating traps. In addition to an explanation of the experimental features we find the surprising fact that above $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ a symmetry breaking changes the ground state (GS) into a bended vortex \[Fig. 1\]. We will discuss this phenomenon later.

*The model.-* For most of the current experiments it is an accurate approximation to use a zero temperature many-body theory of the condensate. In that limit the whole condensate is described by a single wavefunction $`\psi (𝐫,t)`$ ruled out by a Gross-Pitaevskii equation (GPE).

In the ENS experiment the trap is initially harmonic with axial symmetry, but then a laser is applied which deforms it and makes it rotate with uniform angular speed $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$. By using the mobile reference frame which rotates with the trap, we can describe this experiment using a modified GPE which reads

$$i\frac{\psi }{t}=\left[\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{}+V_0(𝐫)+g\left|\psi \right|^2\mathrm{\Omega }L_z\right]\psi .$$
(1)
Here the ENS trapping potential is given by

$$V_0(𝐫)=\frac{1}{2}\omega _{}^2(1\epsilon )x^2+\frac{1}{2}\omega _{}^2(1+\epsilon )y^2+\frac{1}{2}\omega _z^2z^2.$$
(2)
and $`L_z=i\left(x_yy_x\right)`$ is a linear operator which represents the angular momentum along the z-axis.

In Eq. (1) we have already applied a convenient adimensionalization which uses the harmonic oscillator length, $`a_{}=\sqrt{\mathrm{}/m_{Rb}\omega _{}}`$ and period, $`\tau =\omega _{}^1.`$ Using these units the nonlinear parameter becomes $`g=a_\text{S}/a_{}`$, where $`a_\text{S}5.5\text{nm}`$ is the scattering length for 87Rb, which is the gas used in Ref. . Following the experiment we will take $`\omega _z=2\pi \times 11.6\text{Hz}`$ and $`\omega _{}=2\pi \times 232\text{Hz}`$. Through the paper we will also use a fixed value of $`Ng=1000`$ which corresponds to a few times $`10^5`$ atoms. For the small transverse deformation of the trap we have used $`\epsilon =0.03,0.06,0.09`$ ($`\epsilon =0.03`$ is the closest one to the actual experiment).

The norm, $`N[\psi ]=\left|\psi \right|^2𝑑𝐫,`$ which can be interpreted as the number of bosons in the condensate is a conserved quantity as well as the energy

$$E[\psi ]=\overline{\psi }\left[\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{}+V_0\left(𝐫\right)+\frac{g}{2}\left|\psi \right|^2\mathrm{\Omega }L_z\right]\psi 𝑑𝐫.$$
(3)
Each stationary solution of the GPE of the form $`\psi _\mu (𝐫,t)=e^{i\mu t}\varphi (𝐫),`$ is a critical point of the energy subject to the constraint of the norm, $`\frac{E}{\psi }|_N[\psi _\mu ]=0`$.

*Ground states.-* It is physically plausible to assume that the ENS experiment actually produces condensates which are close to the *absolute minimum of the energy* subject to some constraints. In practice, this means that any theoretical effort to reproduce the experimental results must be based on a method to find these *ground states* of Eq. (3) for given norm and rotation speed. To achieve this goal and to be able to make quantitative predictions we have worked numerically with the energy functional \[Eq. (3)\], using a method known as Sobolev gradients. This method is a preconditioned descent technique which allows to get accurate approximations to the ground state where other minimization procedures fail. We have applied this method over a Fourier basis with $`32\times 32\times 64`$ modes, which is enough to obtain accurate estimates of macroscopic values, such as the angular momentum and the lowest critical frequencies. Nevertheless, the most controversial results have been confirmed on a grid with $`64\times 64\times 128`$ modes.

Our simulations are summarized in Figs. 1 and 2. The first striking prediction is that vortex lines are nucleated with a deformed shape, like a tight string which is pulled from the middle as rotation is increased \[Fig. 1\]. The second important result \[Fig. 2(b),(d)\] is that even for a weak trap anisotropy, $`\epsilon =0.1`$ \[Fig. 2(d)\] a transverse section of the condensate shows a very deformed cloud: the rotating condensate amplifies the small transverse deformation which is used to transfer angular momentum to the condensate.

Furthermore, Fig. 2 reveals that our numerical simulations confirm several other features already found in the experiment. First, the critical frequency for the nucleation of a vortex $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ is larger than what it is expected in the spherically symmetric trap. According to Fig. 2(a) in our simulations (see parameters above) the condensate remains in a vortexless state until $`\mathrm{\Omega }=0.7(1)\times \omega _{}/2\pi ,`$ that is, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1162`$ Hz, which is close to the value of 147 Hz obtained experimentally , but far from the Thomas-Fermi estimate for radially symmetric clouds.

The second remarkable feature is that, at $`\mathrm{\Omega }=\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ the angular momentum per particle $`L_z/N`$ jumps to a value which is smaller than 1 and which grows continuously until a second vortex is nucleated \[Fig. 2(a)\].

Thus, the numerical simulations are in good agreement with the experience and both contradict previous ideas: (i) the nucleation frequency is much larger than expected in Thomas-Fermi theories, and (ii) the angular momentum has a continuous, nonlinear dependence on $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$. To obtain more insight on the physical reasons for this behaviors we will analyze several simplified situations.

*Critical frequencies for axially symmetric traps .-* Let us first consider the case of an axially symmetric trap. For these traps it is usually thought that at a certain $`\mathrm{\Omega }=\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ the system experiences a transition from a vortexless state to a *symmetric* state with one vortex. Both states do also exist in the nonrotating case and have energies $`E_0`$ and $`E_1>E_0`$, respectively. This leads to the usual estimate of the critical frequency $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1E_1E_0`$.

Taking the previous idea for granted and to learn how the elongation of the trap affects the nucleation of the first vortex, we have searched the vortexless state and the state with one vortex in different axially symmetric traps ($`\epsilon =0`$), computing $`\{E_0,E_1,\mathrm{\Omega }_1\}`$. The result of these calculations is shown in Fig. 3(a) for different elongations. There we see that the critical angular speed of a cigar shape trap is larger than that of spherically symmetric and pancake traps. The explanation is simple: in an elongated trap, $`\omega _z\omega _{}`$, the system expands preferably along the axial dimension in order to accommodate more bosons and counteract the interaction energy. As $`\omega _z`$ is made smaller this tendency becomes more evident, since the transverse shape no longer satisfies the Thomas-Fermi approximation in which the second order derivatives are negligible. Instead, the transverse shape of the cloud is closer to a harmonic oscillator wavefunction, and as such the energy required to introduce a single vortex, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$, becomes larger than in the spherically symmetric case. In other words, the more elongated the trap is, the more dilute the condensate seems on the XY plane, the closer $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ becomes to its linear limit $`\omega _{}`$, and the faster the condensate must spin to accept a vortex. This effect, which can be characterized as a dynamical separation of longitudinal and transverse degrees of freedom , manifests in a departure of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ from any Thomas-Fermi based results, which correspond to a regime ruled by the transverse self-interaction of the condensate.

*Bended vortices in axially symmetric traps.-* An important feature of elongated traps is that they require very little energy to produce longitudinal excitations of the condensate . This makes feasible for small perturbations to induce longitudinal modes and distortions of the vortex lines . Thus our next step is to perform a linear stability analysis of the straight vortex line which we have already found.

We are looking for a quadratic expansion of the energy of a perturbed vortex. Since the vortex $`\psi _{vort}`$ is a stationary state, this energy must read, up to second order perturbations

$$E(\psi _{vort}+ϵ\delta )E_1\mathrm{\Omega }+ϵ^2\underset{i}{}\left(\lambda _{i,m}m\mathrm{\Omega }\right)|c_{i,m}|^2$$
(4)
Here, $`\lambda _{i,m}`$ are the different eigenvalues which arise from linearizing the GPE \[Eq. (1)\] around $`\psi _{vort}`$, $`m`$ are their vorticities with respect to $`\psi _{vort}`$ (See ), and $`c_{i,m}`$ is the weight of the $`|i,m`$ mode in the expansion of $`\delta (𝐫)`$. By finding the lowest negative eigenvalue, $`\lambda _{i,1}<0`$, we know that at a rotation speed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{meta}=|\lambda _{i,1}|`$ the energy (4) becomes positive for all perturbations and the vortex is locally stable or *metastable*.

These calculations are summarized in Fig. 3(b). There we plot all eigenvalues $`\lambda _{i,1}`$ and find that there is a number of them such that $`\lambda >(E_1E_0)`$. This result suggests that there exists a range of speeds $`\mathrm{\Omega }(\mathrm{\Omega }_1=E_1E_0,\mathrm{\Omega }_m)`$ in which the system nucleates a vortex, but that vortex does not have a symmetric shape. Instead, the stability analysis points out that this vortex is bended by its ends, forming a curved vortex line \[Fig. 3(e)\]. Although this is a perturbative prediction arising from the linear stability analysis, these solutions are consistent to what we formerly obtained by minimizing the full Hamiltonian and which was explained above \[Fig. 1\].

The existence of a ground state with such a bended shape is one of the main predictions of the paper, since it presents a symmetry breaking due solely to rotation. In some sense the symmetry is broken twice: First because a phase asymmetric structure, the vortex, appears, and a second time because the vortex bends in some specific direction. We have also observed that as the frequency is increased from $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ the vortex bending becomes less and less evident (And $`L_z`$ approaches $`N`$). However, when the threshold $`\mathrm{\Omega }_2`$ for the nucleation of two vortices is reached the bending becomes again very important.

The existence of bending in the vortex lines may be checked in the experiment and is probably related to the experimental observation that vortex lines appear to be partially filled when viewed from above.

*Role of transverse asymmetries.-* In Ref.  the trap is distorted over the transverse directions to induce some mechanical response of the condensate, an effect which must be taken into account.

As it was already shown  any initial asymmetry of a condensate is strongly emphasized by the rotation of the trap, an effect that may be estimated analytically in the linear and Thomas-Fermi limits. These estimates lead to a value of the angular momentum for a vortexless condensate and a different one for a condensate with a single, centered, unit-charge vortex line. The main difference with respect to the symmetric case is that a vortexless state may acquire some angular momentum and that the nucleation of a vortex line gives an increase of the total angular momentum which is inversely proportional to the asymmetry factor, $`\epsilon `$. From a practical point of view this means that the system may “decide” to wait for a larger rotation speed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1>\mathrm{\Omega }_{1,sym}`$ before nucleating a vortex. Actually what happens is that $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1/\mathrm{min}(\omega _x,\omega _y)`$ increases with respect to $`\epsilon `$, but $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1/\omega _{}`$ decreases \[Fig. 2\].

Although it is clear that the effect of transverse asymmetries is to provide a larger critical frequency than expected it is not possible to use any analytic estimate of the critical speeds because of the elongation of the trap and its transverse deformation. Furthermore, due to the bending of the vortex lines it is not possible to work with the corrections from  to get a reliable estimate of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$.

*Discussion and conclusions.-* We have used the GPE to study theoretically the nucleation of vortices in an elongated trap similar to that of the ENS experiment . We have found several mechanisms which lead to an increase of the angular speed which is required to create those vortices and have found the remarkable feature that vortex lines are bended by their ends. This provides some kind of symmetry breaking bifurcation in the case of a single vortex . Recalling previous experience with liquid helium, we suspect that this bending has some important consequences, and that it might be responsible for the breakdown of superfluidity in BEC by a mechanism which consists in several vortex lines joining together and forming a turbulent pattern.

Using only the special geometry of the experiment we have obtained a value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1=0.7(0)\omega _{}`$ which is close but above the experimental value. However, this means that the experiment implies a systematic negative shift both in $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1`$ and in the angular speed at which the superfluid escapes, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c`$. In the experiment $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c2\pi \times 210`$ Hz, while the theory predicts $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c=\omega _{}(1\epsilon )`$. If we trust the value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c`$ from the experiments $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c`$ and make $`\omega _{}=2\pi \times 210`$ Hz, our prediction is $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1=2\pi \times 147`$ Hz, which coincides exactly which the experimental measures .

The fact that simple mean field theories are still valid when vortices enter into the dynamics, and that we may still expect quantitative predictions based on this simple models is interesting and has been shown in many other phenomena . The striking result that the combined effect of asymmetry and nonlinearity may lead to the phenomenology here studied is another example of the richness of behaviors that one may expect from these nonlinear Quantum mesoscopic systems.

This work has been partially supported by CICYT under grant PB96-0534.


text:
# Triple approach to determination of the c-axis penetration depth in BSCCO crystals

## I Introduction

Study of anisotropy of the magnetic field penetration depth as a function of temperature in high-$`T_c`$ superconductors (HTS) advance considerably our understanding of pairing mechanism in these materials. It is known (see, e.g., Ref.  and references therein) that in-plane penetration depth $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _{ab}(T)T`$ in the range $`T<T_c/3`$ in high-quality HTS samples at the optimal level of doping, and this observation can be interpreted the most simply in the $`d`$-wave model of the high-frequency response of HTS. Measurements of out-of-plane or $`c`$-axis penetration depth $`\lambda _c(T)`$ are quoted less frequently than those of $`\lambda _{ab}(T)`$. Most of such data published so far were derived from microwave measurements of the surface impedance of HTS crystals . There is no consensus about $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ at low temperatures. Even in high-quality YBCO crystals, which are the most studied objects, one can find both linear, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)T`$ , and quadratic dependences  in the range $`T<T_c/3`$. In BSCCO materials, the shape of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ depends on the level of oxygen doping: in samples with maximal $`T_c90`$ K $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)T`$ at low temperatures ; at higher oxygen contents (overdoped samples) $`T_c`$ is lower and the linear function $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ transforms to a quadratic one . The common feature of all microwave experiments is that the change in the ratio $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)/\lambda _c(0)`$ is smaller than in $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _{ab}(T)/\lambda _{ab}(0)`$ because in all HTS $`\lambda _c(0)\lambda _{ab}(0)`$. Another possibility to determine $`c`$-axis penetration depth is the measurements of the first penetration field of Josephson vortices. In quasi-2D systems, their penetration may be impeded by a surface barrier, the value of which is inversely proportional to $`\lambda _c(T)`$ . The quantitative estimates of $`\lambda _c(T)`$ deduced from the surface barrier data were however disputed . Furthermore, $`\lambda _c(T)`$ is also inversely proportional to the plasma frequency  which is usually assigned to Josephson plasma resonance frequency modified by the field-dependent interlayer phase coherence . However, this interpretation is still controversial . Therefore, independent measurements of $`\lambda _c(T)`$ are of interest. To date, all the above mentioned properties have been studied separately. It is the aim of this paper to apply together three different techniques to the determination of the absolute value of $`\lambda _c(T)`$ in order to obtain unambiguous results: (i) ac-susceptibility measurements of BSCCO crystals have allowed us to determine the temperature variation $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$; ii) cavity perturbation technique and electrodynamic analysis of the surface impedance anisotropy is used to determine both the variations and absolute values of $`\lambda _c(T)`$ and $`\lambda _{ab}(T)`$; (iii) the first penetration field of Josephson vortices is measured and shown to be related to $`\lambda _c(T)`$.

## II Electrodynamic basis of the measurements

The electrodynamics of layered anisotropic HTS is characterized by the components $`\sigma _{ab}`$ and $`\sigma _c`$ of the conductivity tensor. In the normal state, ac field penetrates in the direction of the $`c`$-axis through the skin depth $`\delta _{ab}=\sqrt{2/\omega \mu _0\sigma _{ab}}`$ and in the CuO2 plane through $`\delta _c=\sqrt{2/\omega \mu _0\sigma _c}`$. In the superconducting state all parameters $`\delta _{ab}`$, $`\delta _c`$, $`\sigma _{ab}=\sigma _{ab}^{}i\sigma _{ab}^{\prime \prime }`$, and $`\sigma _c=\sigma _c^{}i\sigma _c^{\prime \prime }`$ are complex. In the temperature range $`T<T_c`$, if $`\sigma ^{}\sigma ^{\prime \prime }`$, the field penetration depths are given by the formulas $`\lambda _{ab}=\sqrt{1/\omega \mu _0\sigma _{ab}^{\prime \prime }}`$, $`\lambda _c=\sqrt{1/\omega \mu _0\sigma _c^{\prime \prime }}`$. In the close neighborhood of $`T_c`$, if $`\sigma ^{}>\sigma ^{\prime \prime }`$, the decay of magnetic field in the superconductor is characterized by the functions $`\mathrm{Re}(\delta _{\mathrm{ab}})`$ and $`\mathrm{Re}(\delta _\mathrm{c})`$, which turn to $`\delta _{ab}`$ and $`\delta _c`$ at $`TT_c`$, respectively.

In this paper we present the results of high-frequency measurements of anisotropy of two BSCCO single crystals with various levels of oxygen doping. The first sample (#1), characterized by a lower critical temperature, $`T_c84`$ K (slightly overdoped), has dimensions $`a\times b\times c0.8\times 1.8\times 0.03`$ mm3. The second (#2, $`a\times b\times c1.5\times 1.5\times 0.1`$ mm3) is almost optimally doped ($`T_c90`$ K).

For determination of both $`\lambda _{ab}(T)`$ and $`\lambda _c(T)`$ components of the penetration depth we measured the temperature dependences of the Q-factor and the frequency shift $`\delta f`$ of the resonant circuit for different sample alignments with respect to the ac magnetic field $`𝐇_\omega `$: in the transverse (T) orientation, $`𝐇_\omega 𝐜`$, when the screening current flows in the $`ab`$-plane of the crystal and in the longitudinal (L) orientation, $`𝐇_\omega 𝐜`$, with currents running in the directions of both CuO2 planes and the $`c`$-axis (insets to Fig. 1). In the first case the values of Q(T) and $`\delta f(T)`$ are directly connected with in-plane penetration depth $`\lambda _{ab}(T)`$ at $`T<T_c`$ and skin depth $`\delta _{ab}(T)`$ at $`TT_c`$ . Both lengths are smaller than the thickness of the crystal. In the second L-orientation at $`T<0.9T_c`$ the penetration depth is still smaller than characteristic sample dimensions. But at $`T>0.9T_\mathrm{c}`$ the lengths $`\lambda _c`$ and $`\delta _c`$ are comparable to the width of the crystal. In order to analyze our measurements in both superconducting and normal states, we used formulae for field distributions in an anisotropic long strip ($`ba,c`$) in the L-orientation. These formulae neglect the effect of $`ac`$-faces of the crystal, if $`𝐇_\omega `$ is parallel to the $`b`$-edge of the crystal (inset on the right of Fig. 1), but take into account the size effect. At an arbitrary temperature, the measured quantities are expressed in terms of the complex parameter $`\mu `$ introduced in Ref. , which is controlled by the components $`\sigma _{ab}(T)`$ and $`\sigma _c(T)`$ of the conductivity tensor through the penetration depths $`\delta _{ab}`$ and $`\delta _c`$ :

$`\mu ={\displaystyle \frac{8}{\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle \underset{n}{}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{n^2}}\left\{{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{tan}(\alpha _n)}{\alpha _n}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{tan}(\beta _n)}{\beta _n}}\right\},`$ (1)
$`\alpha _n^2={\displaystyle \frac{a^2}{\delta _c^2}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{i}{2}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\pi ^2}{4}}{\displaystyle \frac{\delta _{ab}^2}{c^2}}n^2\right),\beta _n^2={\displaystyle \frac{c^2}{\delta _{ab}^2}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{i}{2}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\pi ^2}{4}}{\displaystyle \frac{\delta _c^2}{a^2}}n^2\right),`$ (2)
where the sum is performed over odd integers $`n>0`$. In the superconducting state, if $`\sigma ^{}\sigma ^{\prime \prime }`$, the parameter $`\mu `$ is real:

$`\mu ={\displaystyle \frac{8}{\pi ^2}}{\displaystyle \underset{n}{}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{n^2}}\left\{{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{tanh}(\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_n)}{\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_n}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{tanh}(\stackrel{~}{\beta }_n)}{\stackrel{~}{\beta }_n}}\right\},`$ (3)
$`\stackrel{~}{\alpha }_n^2={\displaystyle \frac{a^2}{\lambda _c^2}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{1}{4}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\pi ^2}{4}}{\displaystyle \frac{\lambda _{ab}^2}{c^2}}n^2\right),\stackrel{~}{\beta }_n^2={\displaystyle \frac{c^2}{\lambda _{ab}^2}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{1}{4}}+{\displaystyle \frac{\pi ^2}{4}}{\displaystyle \frac{\lambda _c^2}{a^2}}n^2\right).`$ (4)
## III ac-susceptibility measurements

The first approach to determination of the $`c`$-axis penetration depth $`\lambda _c(T)`$ in BSCCO single crystals is based on measuring the ac-susceptibility $`\chi =\chi ^{}i\chi ^{\prime \prime }`$ at a frequency of $`100`$ kHz. The imaginary part $`\chi ^{\prime \prime }`$ of $`\chi `$ is proportional to the energy dissipation in the sample and the real part $`\chi ^{}`$ is proportional to the shielding of magnetic field. Ac-susceptibility is characterized by the components of the conductivity tensor and, hence, allows to determine the penetration depth $`\lambda `$. Experimentally it is possible if the penetration depth is comparable to the sample dimension. So the ac-susceptibility measurements are usually adapted to the superconducting powders whose grain size is comparable to $`\lambda `$. However, since $`\lambda _c(0)`$ in BSCCO single crystals is relatively large, we managed to determine $`\lambda _c(T)`$ from the temperature dependences of $`\chi ^{}(T)`$.

As an example, figure 1 shows the temperature dependences $`\chi ^{}(T)/|\chi ^{}(0)|`$ in sample #2 for three different sample alignments with respect to the ac magnetic field: in the T-orientation, $`𝐇_\omega 𝐜`$, (full circles); in the L-orientation, $`𝐇_\omega 𝐜`$, ($`𝐇_\omega `$ is parallel to the $`b`$-edge of the crystal, up triangles); in the L-orientation, whose difference from the previous configuration is that the sample is turned around the $`c`$-axis through $`90^{}`$ (down triangles). Fig. 1 clearly shows that at $`T<T_c`$ $`\chi _{ab}^{}(T)`$ is notably smaller in the T-orientation than $`\chi _{ab+c}^{}(T)`$ in the L-orientation (the subscripts of $`\chi ^{}`$ denote the direction of the screening current). The coincidence of $`\chi _{ab+c}^{}(T)`$ curves at $`𝐇_\omega 𝐜`$ and the small width of the superconducting transition at $`𝐇_\omega 𝐜`$ ($`\mathrm{\Delta }T_c<1`$ K) indicate that the quality of the tested sample #2 is fairly high.

In the superconducting state at $`T<0.9T_c`$ we find that $`\lambda _{ab}c`$ and $`\lambda _ca`$. In this case, we derive from Eq. (2) a simple relation between the real parts of $`\mu `$ and $`\chi `$:

$$\mu ^{}=1+\chi ^{}=\frac{2\lambda _c}{a}+\frac{2\lambda _{ab}}{c}.$$
(5)
Figure 2 shows measurements of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ in sample #1 (squares) and sample #2 (circles) at $`T<0.9T_c`$. The open symbols plot low-frequency measurements obtained from $`\chi ^{}(T)`$ in accordance with Eq. (3), the full symbols plot microwave measurements (see the next section). Agreement between these measurements is fairly good, but in fitting together experimental data from sample #2 (upper curve) we had to divide by a factor of 1.8 all $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ derived from measurements of ac-susceptibility using Eq. (3). The cause of the difference between $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ measured in sample #2 at different frequencies is not quite clear .

The curves of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ at $`T<0.5T_c`$ plotted in Fig. 2 are almost linear: $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)T`$. The inset to Fig. 2 shows the low-temperature section of the curve of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ in sample #2. Its slope is 0.3 $`\mu `$m/K and equals that from Ref. . Note that changes in $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ are smaller in the oxygen-overdoped sample #1 than in sample #2.

We also estimated $`\lambda _c(0)`$ on the base of absolute measurements of the susceptibility $`\chi _c^{}(0)`$ and we obtained $`\lambda _c(0)70`$ $`\mu `$m for sample #1 and $`\lambda _c(0)210`$ $`\mu `$m for sample #2.

## IV cavity perturbation technique

The second technique of determination $`\lambda _c(T)`$ is measuring the difference $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)`$ ($`\mathrm{\Delta }f`$) between reciprocal Q’s (resonant frequency shifts) of a cavity with a sample inside and the empty cavity as functions of temperature at a frequency $`f=9.4`$ GHz. These parameters are related to the surface impedance $`Z_s=R_s+iX_s`$ components through the geometrical factor $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{s}`$ of the sample: $`R_s=\mathrm{\Gamma }_s\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)`$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }X_s=2\mathrm{\Gamma }_s\mathrm{\Delta }f/f`$ . The penetration depth is $`\lambda (T)=X_s(T)/\omega \mu _0`$ at $`T<T_c`$. In order to determine the absolute value of $`X_s=2\mathrm{\Gamma }_s\delta f/f`$, where $`\delta f`$ is the frequency shift relative to that which would be measured for a sample with perfect screening and no penetration of the microwave fields, one needs the constant parameter $`f_0=\mathrm{\Delta }f(T)\delta f(T)`$. In HTS this constant can be derived from microwave measurements in the normal state.

In the T-orientation $`f_0`$ can be derived from the condition that the real and imaginary parts of the impedance should be equal above $`T_c`$ (normal skin-effect) . Given $`f_0`$, we can calculate the conductivity $`\sigma _{ab}(T)=\sigma _{ab}^{}i\sigma _{ab}^{\prime \prime }=i\omega \mu _0/Z_s^2(T)`$ at all $`T`$. The temperature dependences of $`\sigma _{ab}^{}(T)`$ (open squares) and $`\sigma _{ab}^{\prime \prime }(T)`$ (open circles) are shown in Fig. 3a and Fig. 3b for crystals #1 and #2 respectively. Note that $`\sigma _{ab}^{}(T)`$ in Fig. 3b does not have a broad peak at low temperatures, typical for $`\sigma _{ab}^{}(T)`$ in high-quality HTS. The reason for that is the rather large value of the residual surface resistance: $`R_{\mathrm{res}}R_s(T0)0.5`$ m$`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ in the $`ab`$-plane of the sample #2 , $`R_{\mathrm{res}}`$ was four times less in the sample #1.

In the L-orientation of a crystal shaped as a long strip the quantities $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)`$ and $`\delta f`$ are expressed in terms of the complex function $`\mu =\mu ^{}i\mu ^{\prime \prime }`$ from Eq. (1) or $`\chi =(1+\mu )`$:

$$\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)2i\delta f/f=i\gamma \mu v/V,$$
(6)
where $`v`$ and $`V=58`$ cm3 are the volumes of the sample and cavity respectively, $`\gamma =10.6`$ is a constant of our cavity . In the superconducting state at $`T<0.9T_c`$ the expression for $`\mu `$ is given by Eq. (3). The curves of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ in sample #1 (full squares) and sample #2 (full circles), measured by cavity perturbation technique and obtained using Eqs. (3), (4), are shown in Fig. 2.

We can estimate $`\lambda _c(0)`$ by comparing of $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }f=\delta ff_0`$ measurements taken in the T- and L-orientations to numerical calculations by Eqs. (1) and (4), which take account of the size effect in the high-frequency response of an anisotropic crystal. The procedure of comparison for sample #1 and #2 is illustrated by Fig. 4a and Fig. 4b respectively. Unlike the case of the T-orientation, the measured temperature dependence of $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)`$ in the L-orientation deviates from $`(2\mathrm{\Delta }f/f)`$ owing to the size effect. Using the measurements of $`\sigma _{ab}(T)`$ at $`T>T_c`$ in the T-orientation (Fig. 3), alongside the data on $`\mathrm{\Delta }(1/Q)`$ in the L-orientation (open squares in Fig. 4), from Eqs. (1) and (4) we obtain the curves of $`\rho _c(T)=1/\sigma _c(T)`$ shown in the right-hand insets to Fig. 4a and Fig. 4b for crystals #1 and #2. Further, using the functions $`\sigma _c(T)`$ and $`\sigma _{ab}(T)`$, we calculate $`(2\delta f/f)`$ versus temperature for $`T>T_c`$, which are plotted by the solid lines in Fig. 4. These lines are approximately parallel to the experimental curves of $`2\mathrm{\Delta }f/f`$ in the L-orientation (open circles in Fig. 4). The difference $`2(\delta f\mathrm{\Delta }f)/f`$ yields the additive constant $`f_0`$. Given $`f_0`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }f(T)`$ measured in the range $`T<T_c`$, we also obtain $`\delta f(T)`$ in the superconducting state in the L-orientation. As a result, with due account of $`\lambda _{ab}(T)=\sqrt{1/\omega \mu _0\sigma _{ab}^{\prime \prime }(T)}`$ (insets to Fig. 3), we derive from Eqs. (4) and (3) $`\lambda _c(0)`$, which equals approximately $`\lambda _c(0)50`$ $`\mu `$m in sample #1 and 150 $`\mu `$m in sample #2. These results are in reasonable agreement with our ac-susceptibility measurements if we take into consideration the fact that the accuracy of $`\lambda _c`$ measurements is rather poor and the error can be up to 30%. The temperature dependences of $`\sigma _c^{\prime \prime }(T)`$ for both BSCCO single crystals are shown in Fig. 5.

## V microwave absorption measurements in a static magnetic field: surface barrier and influence of defects

An alternative technique for the determination of $`\lambda _c(0)`$ is based on the measurements of the magnetic field $`H_J(T)`$ at which Josephson vortices penetrate into the sample.

In the experiment the microwave absorption measured in the L-orientation as a function of the static magnetic field (0-30 Oe) parallel to the CuO2 layers exhibits a notable increase at the field $`H_J(T)`$ . Figure 6 displays the change of microwave dissipation, starting from zero field

(within $`\pm 0.1\mathrm{Oe}`$) measured in sample #1 for various orientations of the applied field close to the $`ab`$-plane ($`0^{}`$ and $`2^{}`$) and in a low-field range: $`0H25\mathrm{Oe}`$, at three typical temperatures ($`T=78\mathrm{K},65\mathrm{K},50\mathrm{K}`$). After each field sweep, the sample was warmed through $`T_c`$ and then cooled again in zero field, in order to avoid any possible vortex pinning when studying the penetration starting from zero field. The dissipation of Josephson vortices is characterized by the fact that it does not depend on the angle (Fig. 6), as long as these vortices remain locked. As the field increases, an onset in the dissipation occurs at a temperature-dependent field $`H_J(T)`$, which we associate to Josephson vortices entering the sample. As in Ref. , we choose to define $`H_J(T)`$ as the field value where the microwave absorption exceeds the experimental accuracy. The field thus determined is plotted in Fig. 7. The error bars take into account both the noise and the estimated drift of the signal with time.

The magnitude of $`H_J(T)`$ is too large to be associated with the first thermodynamic critical field $`H_{c1}(T)`$ for Josephson vortices :

$$H_{c1}(T)=\frac{\varphi _0}{4\pi \lambda _{ab}(T)\lambda _c(T)}[\mathrm{ln}\lambda _{ab}(T)/d+1.12],$$
(7)
where $`\varphi _0`$ is the flux quantum and $`d`$ is the interlayer distance ($`15\mathrm{\AA }`$ in BSCCO). Indeed, in Fig. 7 the triangles demonstrate an upper bound for $`H_{c1}(T)`$. Here, we take $`2100`$ Å as a lower bound for $`\lambda _{ab}(0)`$ , and $`10\mu `$m for $`\lambda _c(0)`$ . We use the temperature dependence for $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _{ab}(T)`$ from $`\sigma _{ab}^{\prime \prime }(T)=1/[\omega \mu _0\lambda _{ab}^2(T)]`$ shown in the inset of Fig. 3a, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ (squares in Fig. 2). It is clearly seen that neither the absolute value (too small compared to the experimental data) nor the temperature dependence (quasi-linear) agrees with the $`H_J(T)`$ data.

It is therefore quite natural to assume that a Bean-Livingston surface barrier  impedes magnetic flux penetration into the sample and yields a higher entry field $`H_{\mathrm{SB}}(T)`$. This assumption is also supported by the irreversible behavior of the dissipation upon flux exit . In anisotropic superconductors in the quasi-2D regime, which holds in BSCCO up to temperatures very close to $`T_c`$, the field $`H_{\mathrm{SB}}(T)`$ was shown to be related only to the c-axis penetration length through  :

$$H_{\mathrm{SB}}(T)=\frac{\varphi _0}{4\pi \lambda _c(T)d}.$$
(8)
The surface barrier might thus account for the observed value of the penetration field. Also, since $`H_{\mathrm{SB}}(T)`$ grows as $`1/\lambda _c`$(T) (instead of $`1/\lambda _{ab}\lambda _c(T)`$), it is expected that the temperature dependence could show a better agreement. So we derive from the $`H_J(T)`$ data an effective penetration depth $`\lambda _J(T)=\varphi _0/[4\pi H_J(T)d]`$ on the analogy of Eq. (6). The data are shown in Fig. 8 (full squares). We then try to determine $`\lambda _c(0)=\lambda _J(T)\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ so as to fit $`\lambda _J(T)`$ using the measured by ac-susceptibility and cavity perturbation technique $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ (full circles in Fig. 8 extend the lower curve in Fig. 2 to higher temperatures). We find that both sets of data, namely $`\lambda _J(T)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$, cannot be reconciled for any value we may assume for $`\lambda _c(0)`$ in the entire temperature range. Therefore, the interpretation cannot be so simple.

More detailed quantitative investigation and calculations of the penetration field in the presence of edge or surface defects, have led us to the conclusion that $`H_J(T)`$ is eventually controlled by such surface irregularities .

We have carried out several checks (cleaving sample, cutting deep and wide grooves at the $`ab`$-plane, rotation crystal along it’s $`c`$-axis) and established that large defects, greater or comparable with the penetration depth, within the $`ab`$-planes or at the edges of the crystal do not destroy the surface barrier (no significant change in the onset field of the microwave absorption was observed). However, if the dimensions of the surface irregularities are smaller than $`\lambda `$ then their presence can strongly influence the screening current distribution. Indeed, the entrance field is deduced from the balance between the vortex attraction to the surface and the pushing force exerted by the screening current at the minimum distance $`\xi `$ (the vortex core size) . Near a small scratch the current density can be many times larger than near the flat surface. This may substantially increase the force pushing vortices inside the superconductor and then decrease the surface barrier and the entrance field. As shown in Ref. , in the specific case of a thin groove with the depth $`bd`$ at the surface, the penetration field $`H_J(T)=H_{\mathrm{SB}}(T)/\beta `$, where parameter $`\beta =(b/d)^{1/2}>1`$. Based on this estimation, we have attempted to fit our data on

$$\lambda _J(T)=\frac{\varphi _0\beta }{4\pi H_{\mathrm{SB}}(T)d}=\beta \left[\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)+\lambda _c(0)\right],$$
(9)
using two adjustable parameters $`\beta `$ and $`\lambda _c(0)`$ (see Fig. 8). We have obtained the best fit at $`\beta =6`$ (or $`b500`$ Å) and $`\lambda _c(0)=(35\pm 15)`$ $`\mu `$m in Eq. (7), which is in agreement with our measurements by the first two methods. We also show in Fig. 8 smaller and larger values for $`\lambda _c(0)`$. They allow us to set the uncertainty about our determination of the penetration depth. We can also fit the data in the presence of a slit at the edge of the crystal . The depth of the edge slit should be of the order of $`10\mu `$m, which is still small with respect to $`\lambda _c(0)`$. The key result in this latter case is that it yields the same absolute value for $`\lambda _c(0)`$.

## VI conclusion

In conclusion, we have used three high-frequency techniques in studying anisotropic properties of BSCCO single crystals. The results obtained by different techniques are in reasonable agreement. We have observed almost linear dependences $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)T`$ at low temperatures. We have also determined the absolute value of $`\lambda _c(0)`$, which is a factor of three higher in the optimally doped BSCCO sample than in the overdoped crystal. The ratio between the slopes of curves of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ in the range $`TT_c`$ is the same. These facts could be put down to dependences of $`\lambda _c(0)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\lambda _c(T)`$ on the oxygen content in these samples. At the same time, the set of our experiments suggest very strongly the influence of defects in the samples, which relates the first penetration field $`H_J(T)`$ of Josephson vortices to the $`c`$-axis penetration depth. In order to draw ultimate conclusions concerning the nature of the transport properties along the $`c`$-axis in BSCCO single crystals, studies of more samples with various oxygen contents are needed.

## VII Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique \- Russian Academy of Sciences cooperation program 4985, and by CREST and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture (Japan). The work at ISSP was also supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 00-02-04021) and Scientific Council on Superconductivity (project 96060).


text:
# 1 Introduction

## 1  Introduction

In this talk I shall be reporting on the properties of antikaons in matter with applications to kaonic atoms, the renormalization of the $`f_0(980)`$ and $`a_0(980)`$ scalar meson resonances in nuclei and the $`\varphi `$ decay in nuclei. The starting point is the $`\overline{K}N`$ interaction which we study using a coupled channel unitary method by means of chiral Lagrangians. The medium modifications are included in the $`\overline{K}N`$ amplitude and an integration is done over the Fermi sea of occupied nucleons. This selfenergy is then used in the Klein Gordon equation to find out bound states of the kaons in nuclei, which appear in two families, the atomic states and deeply bound nuclear states. The same selfenergy is used in the chiral unitary coupled channel approach which leads to the $`f_0(980)`$ and $`a_0(980)`$ resonances in order to investigate the modification of these resonances in nuclei. Finally, the decay modes of the $`\varphi `$ in nuclei and its total width are studied.

## 2 The properties of the $`\overline{K}`$ in the nuclear medium

In this section we address the properties of the $`\overline{K}`$ in the nuclear medium which have been studied in . The work is based on the elementary $`\overline{K}N`$ interaction which was obtained in  using a coupled channel unitary approach with chiral Lagrangians.

The lowest order chiral Lagrangian, coupling the octet of pseudoscalar mesons to the octet of $`1/2^+`$ baryons, is

$`L_1^{(B)}=`$ $`\overline{B}i\gamma ^\mu _\mu BM_B\overline{B}B`$ (1)
$`+`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}D\overline{B}\gamma ^\mu \gamma _5\{u_\mu ,B\}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}F\overline{B}\gamma ^\mu \gamma _5[u_\mu ,B],`$
where the symbol $``$ denotes the trace of SU(3) matrices. Expressions for the different magnitudes can be found in .

The coupled channel formalism requires to evaluate the transition amplitudes between the different channels that can be built from the meson and baryon octets. For $`K^{}p`$ scattering there are 10 such channels, namely $`K^{}p`$, $`\overline{K}^0n`$, $`\pi ^0\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, $`\pi ^0\mathrm{\Sigma }^0`$, $`\pi ^+\mathrm{\Sigma }^{}`$, $`\pi ^{}\mathrm{\Sigma }^+`$, $`\eta \mathrm{\Lambda }`$, $`\eta \mathrm{\Sigma }^0`$, $`K^+\mathrm{\Xi }^{}`$ and $`K^0\mathrm{\Xi }^0`$. In the case of $`K^{}n`$ scattering the coupled channels are: $`K^{}n`$, $`\pi ^0\mathrm{\Sigma }^{}`$, $`\pi ^{}\mathrm{\Sigma }^0`$, $`\pi ^{}\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, $`\eta \mathrm{\Sigma }^{}`$ and $`K^0\mathrm{\Xi }^{}`$.

At low energies the transition amplitudes can be written as

$$V_{ij}=C_{ij}\frac{1}{4f^2}(k_j^0+k_i^0),$$
(2)
where $`k_{i,j}^0`$ are the energies of the mesons and the explicit values of the coefficients $`C_{ij}`$ can be found in Ref. . The coupled-channel Bethe Salpeter equation with the kernel (potential) $`V_{ij}`$ was used in  in order to obtain the elastic and transition matrix elements in the $`K^{}N`$ reactions. The diagrammatic expression of this series can be seen in fig. 1.

The Bethe Salpeter equations in the center of mass frame read

$$T_{ij}=V_{ij}+V_{il}G_lT_{lj},$$
(3)
where the indices $`i,l,j`$ run over all possible channels and $`G_l`$ stands for the loop function of a meson and a baryon propagators. Although in the former equation the last term on the right hand side involves in principle the off shell dependence of the amplitudes, it was shown in  that the amplitudes factorize on shell in the integral, the off shell part being absorbed into a renormalization of the coupling constant $`f_\pi `$.

As shown in  the results obtained lead to quite good agreement with experimental data for cross sections of the different reactions and the mass distribution of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1405)`$ resonance which is seen in the invariant mass distribution of $`\pi \mathrm{\Sigma }`$ produced in some reactions.

One may wonder why the lowest order Lagrangian gives already good results while in principle there should be important contributions from the next to leading order Lagrangians. This was also the case for the meson meson interaction in the s-wave, as shown in . The reason can be seen in  where a more general treatment of the problem was done in all channels of the meson meson interaction. This method is the inverse amplitude method (IAM) in coupled channels which uses the $`L^2`$ and $`L^4`$ chiral Lagrangians, imposes unitarity exactly and makes a chiral expansion of the real part of the inverse of the T matrix. The order $`O(p^4)`$ contribution to the T matrix $`T_4`$ contains the loop function with two matrices at order $`O(p^2)`$, $`T_2`$, and the loop function of two mesons, plus the polynomial contribution $`T_4^P`$ which comes from the $`L^4`$ chiral Lagrangian. The loop function is divergent and must be regularized, with either dimensional regularization, cut off, etc. The total $`T_4`$ contribution sums these two pieces and is independent of the cut off. This means that we can make a trade off with the cut off and the $`T_4^P`$ contribution such as to minimize the contribution of the latter. If then this contribution can be neglected, the IAM method leads to the Bethe Salpeter equation with $`T_2`$ playing the role of the potential. This is possible for the s-wave, both in meson meson and in the $`\overline{K}N`$ interaction, but can not be used for p-waves where explicit resonances , or alternatively the $`L^4`$ Lagrangians must be considered .

In order to evaluate the $`\overline{K}`$ selfenergy, one needs first to include the medium modifications in the $`\overline{K}N`$ amplitude, $`T_{\mathrm{eff}}^\alpha `$ ($`\alpha =\overline{K}p,\overline{K}n`$), and then perform the integral over the nucleons in the Fermi sea:

$$\mathrm{\Pi }_{\overline{K}}^s(q^0,\stackrel{}{q},\rho )=2\frac{d^3p}{(2\pi )^3}n(\stackrel{}{p})\left[T_{\mathrm{eff}}^{\overline{K}p}(P^0,\stackrel{}{P},\rho )+T_{\mathrm{eff}}^{\overline{K}n}(P^0,\stackrel{}{P},\rho )\right],$$
(4)
The values $`(q^0,\stackrel{}{q})`$ stand now for the energy and momentum of the $`\overline{K}`$ in the lab frame, $`P^0=q^0+\epsilon _N(\stackrel{}{p})`$, $`\stackrel{}{P}=\stackrel{}{q}+\stackrel{}{p}`$ and $`\rho `$ is the nuclear matter density.

We also include a p-wave contribution to the $`\overline{K}`$ self-energy coming from the coupling of the $`\overline{K}`$ meson to hyperon-nucleon hole ($`YN^1`$) excitations, with $`Y=\mathrm{\Lambda },\mathrm{\Sigma },\mathrm{\Sigma }^{}(1385)`$. The vertices $`MBB^{}`$ are easily derived from the $`D`$ and $`F`$ terms of Eq. (1). The explicit expressions can be seen in . At this point it is interesting to recall three different approaches to the question of the $`\overline{K}`$ selfenergy in the nuclear medium. The first interesting realization was the one in , where the Pauli blocking in the intermediate nucleon states in fig.1 induced as a results a shift of the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(1405)`$ resonance to higher energies and a subsequent attractive $`\overline{K}`$ selfenergy. The work of  introduced a novel an interesting aspect, the selfconsistency. Pauli blocking required a higher energy to produce the resonance, but having a smaller kaon mass led to an opposite effect, and as a consequence the position of the resonance was brought back to the free position. Yet, a moderate attraction on the kaons still resulted, but weaker than anticipated from the former work. The work of  introduces some novelties. It incorporates the selfconsistent treatment of the kaons done in  and in addition it also includes the selfenergy of the pions, which are let to excite ph and $`\mathrm{\Delta }h`$ components. It also includes the mean field potentials of the baryons.

The obvious consequence of the work of  is that the spectral function of the kaons gets much wider than in the two former approaches because one is including new decay channels for the $`\overline{K}`$ in nuclei. This can be seen in fig. 2. The work of  leads to an attractive potential around nuclear matter density and for kaons close to threshold of about 40 MeV and a width of about 100 MeV.

## 3  Kaonic atoms

In the work of  the kaon selfenergy discussed above has been used for the case of kaonic atoms, where there are abundant data to test the theoretical predictions. One uses the Klein Gordon equation and obtains two families of states. One family corresponds to the atomic states, some of which are those already measured, and which have energies around or below 1 MeV and widths of about a few hundred KeV or smaller. The other family corresponds to states which are nuclear deeply bound states, with energies of 10 or more MeV and widths around 100 MeV.

In fig. 3 we can see the results obtained for shifts and widths for a large set of nuclei around the periodic table. The agreement with data is sufficiently good to endorse the fairness of the theoretical potential. A best fit with a strength of the potential slightly modified around the theoretical values can lead to even better agreement as shown in  and serves to quantify the level of accuracy of the theoretical potential, which is set there at the level of 20-30 per cent as an average. The curious thing is that there are good fits to the data using potentials with a strength at $`\rho =\rho _0`$ of the order of 200 MeV . As shown in , the results obtained there and those obtained using the potential of  are in excellent agreement for the atomic states. The differences in the two potentials appear in the deeply bound nuclear states. The deep potential provides extra states bound by about 200 MeV, while the potential of  binds states at most by 40 MeV. This remarkable finding can be interpreted as saying that the extra bound states, forcing the atomic states to be orthogonal to them, introduces extra nodes in the wave function and pushes the atomic states more to the surface of the nucleus, acting effectively as a repulsion which counterbalances the extra attraction of the potential. This observation also tells that pure fits to the $`K^{}`$ atoms are not sufficient to determine the strength of the $`K^{}`$ nucleus potential. Other solutions with even more attraction at $`\rho =\rho _0`$ are in principle possible, provided they introduce new states of the deeply bound nuclear family. On the other hand, the work of  also tells us that at least an attraction as the one provided by the theoretical potential is needed.

## 4  Scalar mesons

Having the selfenergy of the kaons under control one can tackle new problems where the kaon interaction with the medium is a necessary ingredient. One of such cases is the modification of the $`f_0(980)`$ and $`a_0(980)`$ resonances in the nuclear medium. As shown in  and  one can obtain a good description of the scalar resonances within the context of the chiral unitary approach. In particular, in  it is possible to generate them using the lowest order Lagrangian and the Bethe Salpeter equation, as also done for the $`\overline{K}N`$ interaction in section 2. Here the coupled channels are $`K\overline{K}`$ and $`\pi \pi `$ for the I=0 channel, where the $`f_0`$ resonance appears, and $`K\overline{K}`$ and $`\pi \eta `$ in the I=1 channel where the $`a_0`$ resonance appears. In this case we must introduce in the Bethe Salpeter equation the proper selfenergies of pions, kaons and eta, and in addition one has to include also vertex corrections which cancel the off shell part of the vertices .

The explicit calculations are done in  and we show the results in figs. 4 and 5 for different densities.

For the case of I=1 we have shown the modulus squared of the $`\eta \pi `$ amplitude, since this is what would appear in the reaction where one looks at the invariant mass of the $`\eta \pi `$ system in the final state. What we observe in the figures is that for the case of the $`a_0`$ resonance the shape becomes gradually wider as the density increases and at densities of around $`\rho _0`$ the resonance is already washed away in the medium. The case of the $`f_0`$ resonance, which is already narrower to begin with, is more hopeful, since even at $`\rho _0`$ one still can see the resonance shape, however, the width passes from a free value around 40 MeV to about more than 150 MeV. How to observe these changes might not be so easy. In the talk of  it was shown that using pions or protons as probes it was rather difficult . Using photoproduction of two pions, and $`\pi \eta `$ photoproduction, might give better chances . Other possibilities would come from radiative decay of the $`\varphi `$ in nuclei where recent experiments show a clean $`f_0`$ and $`a_0`$ peak , which incidentally can be very well described within the approach followed here to generate the resonances  and a similar one where a separable meson meson potential is used rather than the amplitudes provided by the chiral Lagrangians .

## 5  $`\varphi `$ decay in nuclei

Finally let us say a few words about the $`\varphi `$ decay in nuclei. The work reported here  follows closely the lines of , however, it uses the updated $`\overline{K}`$ selfenergies of . In the present case the $`\varphi `$ decays primarily in $`K\overline{K}`$, but these kaons can now interact with the medium as discussed previously. For the selfenergy of the $`K`$, since the $`KN`$ interaction is not too strong and there are no resonances, the $`t\rho `$ approximation is sufficient.

In fig. 6 we show the results for the $`\varphi `$ width at $`\rho =\rho _0`$ as a function of the mass of the $`\varphi `$, separating the contribution from the different channels. What we observe is that the consideration of the s-wave $`\overline{K}`$-selfenergy is responsible for a sizeable increase of the width in the medium, but the p-wave is also relevant, particularly the $`\mathrm{\Lambda }h`$ excitation and the $`\mathrm{\Sigma }^{}h`$ excitation. It is also interesting to note that the vertex corrections  (Yh loops attached to the $`\varphi `$ decay vertex) are now present and do not cancel off shell contributions like in the case of the scalar mesons. Their contribution is also shown in the figure and has about the same strength as the other p-wave contributions. The total width of the $`\varphi `$ that we obtain is about 22 MeV at $`\rho =\rho _0`$, about a factor two smaller than the one obtained in , yet, the important message is the nearly one order of magnitude increase of the width with respect to the free one. We are hopeful that in the near future one can measure the width of the $`\varphi `$ in the medium, from heavy ion reactions or particle nucleus interactions, although it will require careful analyses as shown in  for the case of $`K\overline{K}`$ production in heavy ion collisions, where consideration of the possibility that the observed kaons come from $`\varphi `$ decay outside the nucleus leads to nuclear $`\varphi `$ widths considerably larger than the directly observed ones.

## 6  Summary

In summary we have reported here on recent work which involves the propagation of kaons in the nuclear medium. All them together provide a test of consistency of the theoretical ideas and results previously developed and reported here. If we gain confidence in those theoretical methods one can proceed to higher densities and investigate the possibility of kaon condensates in neutron stars . The weak strength of our $`\overline{K}`$ potential would make however the phenomenon highly unlikely.

On the other hand, we can also extract some conclusions concerning the general chiral framework: 1) The chiral Lagrangians have much information in store. 2) Chiral perturbation theory allows one to extract some of this information. 3) The chiral unitary approach allows one to extract much more information. 4) These unitary methods combined with the use of standard many body techniques are opening the door to the investigation of new nuclear problems in a more accurate and systematic way, giving rise to a new field which could be rightly called ”Chiral Nuclear Physics”. As chiral theory becomes gradually a more accepted tool to deal with strong interactions at intermediate energies, chiral nuclear physics is bound to follow analogously in the interpretation of old and new phenomena in nuclei.

## Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by DGICYT contract numbers PB98-1247 and PB96-0753, and by the EEC-TMR Program under contract No. CT98-0169.