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# High-energy magnon dispersion and multi-magnon continuum in the two-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet

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## Abstract

We use quantum Monte Carlo simulations and numerical analytic continuation to study high-energy spin excitations in the two-dimensional $`S=1/2`$ Heisenberg antiferromagnet at low temperature. We present results for both the transverse $`(x)`$ and longitudinal $`(z)`$ dynamic spin structure factor $`S_{x,z}(𝐪,\omega )`$ at $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$ and $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. Linear spin-wave theory predicts no dispersion on the line connecting these momenta. Our calculations show that in fact the magnon energy at $`(\pi ,0)`$ is 10% lower than at $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. We also discuss the transverse and longitudinal multi-magnon continua and their relevance to neutron scattering experiments.

\]

It is now well established that the spin-wave theory of the two-dimensional Heisenberg model  correctly describes the low-energy dynamics of layered antiferromagnets such as La2CuO4 . Several methods have been used to calculate the quantum renormalization factor $`Z`$ of the spin wave velocity, $`c=Zc_0`$, with the result $`Z1.18`$ for $`S=1/2`$. Early neutron scattering experiments were consistent with this renormalization over the entire Brilloin zone . However, recently more accurate measurements have shown clear deviations at high energies in La2CuO4  and other materials . In particular, spin-wave theory predicts no dispersion on the magnetic zone boundary, i.e., along the line of momenta $`𝐪=(\pi x,x)`$, whereas the experimental data show a significant variation in the excitation energy. This could be caused by interactions other than the nearest-neighbor super-exchange $`J`$ normally used to model the materials . The deviations could also be at least partially due to a failure of low-order spin-wave theory to account for the high-energy dynamics of the Heisenberg model. A series expansion calculation  indeed indicates a momentum dependent renormalization factor, with the magnon energy at $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$ approximately $`7`$% lower than at $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. This, however, is opposite to the trend found experimentally for La2CuO4 .

Another important issue, that has not yet been confronted experimentally, is the multi-magnon continuum expected to be present in the dynamic structure factor $`S(𝐪,\omega )`$ above the single-magnon mode. The neutron scattering cross-section has been analyzed assuming only a delta-function representing the spin waves with dispersion $`\omega _𝐪`$ . The resolution of present experiments is not sufficient for detecting the presence of additional spectral weight, much less to determine its distribution. Theoretical calculations have so far also not been successful in accurately determining the full dynamic structure factor. In order to provide guidance for improved fitting procedures it is imperative to obtain quantitative estimates of the multi-magnon spectral features, in particular considering that experiments may soon become sufficiently accurate for detecting the continuum. Within spin-wave theory, correctly accounting for the interactions that give rise to the continuum is extremely complicated and has led to contradictory results . Numerical calculations of $`S(𝐪,\omega )`$ are challenging because large lattices have to be used to converge to the thermodynamic limit, and the extraction of real-time dynamics from quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) data is difficult. Such calculations have therefore so far only given limited insights . The series work  suggests a significant continuum but gives no information on its shape.

Here we address the issues of high-energy magnon dispersion and multi-magnon continuum using QMC calculations in a way that explicitly separates the transverse and longitudinal components of the dynamic structure factor. This allows us to more accurately determine both the magnon energy and the continuum part of the spectrum. We consider the Heisenberg model on a square lattice, defined in standard notation by the Hamiltonian

$$H=J\underset{i,j}{}𝐒_i𝐒_j.$$
(1)
The coupling $`J1500`$ K in typical planar cuprates. On an infinite lattice the spin-rotational symmetry of this model is spontaneously broken at $`T=0`$ and long-range order develops along an axis that we take as the $`z`$-direction. The two-point correlations then have different longitudinal ($`z`$) and transverse $`(x,y)`$ components. In a finite system the symmetry is not broken and all correlation functions are equal to the same rotational average. We want to access separately the transverse dynamic structure factor, which contains the single-magnon mode as well as a continuum, and the longitudinal component comprising only a multi-magnon continuum. To this end, we explicitly break the symmetry by applying a staggered magnetic field;

$$HHh\underset{i}{}(1)^{x_i+y_i}S_i^z.$$
(2)
We adjust the field strength $`h`$ so that the induced staggered magnetization equals the known value in the thermodynamic limit; $`m=|S_i^z|=0.307`$ . In the limit of large system sizes $`h0`$ (at $`T=0`$) and the correlation functions become equal to their values in a system with spontaneously broken symmetry.

In real layered cuprates there is a small inter-layer coupling and some degree of anisotropy, resulting in a finite-$`T`$ transition to an ordered state, in La2CuO4 at $`T_\mathrm{N}300`$ K. We here consider a low temperature, $`\beta =J/T=32`$, corresponding to approximately $`50`$ K, where the staggered magnetization in real materials is very close to the saturated $`T=0`$ value. Our staggered field $`h`$ can then also be viewed as a mean-field treatment of the inter-layer coupling .

Working with lattices with $`N=L\times L`$ spins and periodic boundary conditions, we have used the stochastic series expansion method  to calculate the imaginary-time dependent spin-spin correlation function

$$G_\alpha (𝐪,\tau )=S^\alpha (𝐪,\tau )S^\alpha (𝐪,0),$$
(3)
where $`\alpha =x,z`$ and

$$S^a(𝐪,\tau )=\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\underset{i}{}\mathrm{e}^{𝐪𝐫_i}\mathrm{e}^{\tau H}S_i^\alpha \mathrm{e}^{\tau H}.$$
(4)
The correlation function is related to the dynamic structure factor according to

$$G_\alpha (𝐪,\tau )=\frac{1}{\pi }_{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}𝑑\omega S_\alpha (𝐪,\omega )\mathrm{e}^{\tau \omega },$$
(5)
which in principle can be inverted to yield the real-frequency dynamics from the correlation function computed in the simulations. With simulation data affected by statistical fluctuations there are well known difficulties in carrying out this analytic continuation in practice, and one can only expect limited frequency resolution using, e.g., the maximum entropy method . Here we will instead assume reasonable functional forms for the transverse ($`x`$) and longitudinal ($`z`$) dynamic structure factors, with parameters that are adjusted to satisfy the equality (5). With the QMC method used, derivatives of $`G_\alpha (𝐪,\tau )`$ can also be directly calculated  and impose additional constraints on $`S_\alpha (𝐪,\omega )`$; from Eq. (5)

$$G_\alpha ^{(n)}(𝐪,\tau )=\frac{(1)^n}{\pi }_{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}𝑑\omega S_\alpha (𝐪,\omega )\omega ^n\mathrm{e}^{\tau \omega }.$$
(6)
We use the first $`(n=1)`$ and $`(n=2)`$ second derivatives, which at $`\tau =0`$ correspond to the first two frequency moments of the spectrum. We also use the sum rule

$$\chi _\alpha (𝐪)=\frac{2}{\pi }_{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}\frac{d\omega }{\omega }S_\alpha (𝐪,\omega ),$$
(7)
where $`\chi _\alpha (𝐪)`$ is the static susceptibility

$$\chi _\alpha (𝐪)=_0^\beta 𝑑\tau G_\alpha (𝐪,\tau ).$$
(8)
The spectrum also obeys the bosonic relation $`S_\alpha (𝐪,\omega )=\mathrm{e}^{\beta \omega }S_\alpha (𝐪,\omega )`$.

For the model forms of the transverse and longitudinal structure factors we take simple functions that reflect the expected gross spectral features. The transverse component should include a delta-function at an energy $`\omega _𝐪`$, representing the magnon, and a continuum that does not extend below $`\omega _𝐪`$ (temperature broadening of the high-energy magnons should be insignificant at $`\beta =32`$). The longitudinal component is entirely in the continuum and can also not extend below $`\omega _𝐪`$. Both continua must decay to zero rapidly as $`\omega \mathrm{}`$, to ensure convergence of all frequency moments. We use

$`S_x(𝐪,\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`A_1(𝐪)\delta (\omega \omega _q)+A_2(𝐪)f_x(𝐪,\omega ),`$ (9)
$`S_z(𝐪,\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`B(𝐪)f_z(𝐪,\omega ),`$ (10)
where the continua $`f_{x,z}(𝐪,\omega )`$ are given by

$`f_x(𝐪,\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`r_x\mathrm{e}^{(\omega \nu )^2/2\sigma ^2},(0\mathrm{for}\omega <\omega _q),`$ (11)
$`f_z(𝐪,\omega )`$ $`=`$ $`r_z(\omega \omega _q)^p\mathrm{e}^{a(\omega \omega _q)^b},(0\mathrm{for}\omega <\omega _q),`$ (12)
where $`r_x`$ and $`r_z`$ are factors normalizing the frequency integrals to unity. For clarity, we have suppressed the dependence of the parameters $`\nu ,\sigma ,p,a`$, and $`b`$ on $`𝐪`$. The static structure factors (the integrated spectral weights) are given by

$`S_x(𝐪)`$ $`=`$ $`S^x(𝐪)S^x(𝐪)=A_1(𝐪)+A_2(𝐪),`$ (13)
$`S_z(𝐪)`$ $`=`$ $`S^z(𝐪)S^z(𝐪)=B(𝐪).`$ (14)
In scattering experiments with unpolarized neutrons, a rotational average of the transverse and longitudinal dynamic structure factors is measured. The rotationally averaged static structure factor $`S(𝐪)=2S_x(𝐪)+S_z(𝐪)=2A_1+2A_2+B`$.

The values we find for the “self-consistent” staggered field (demanding $`m=0.3070`$ to an accuracy of better than $`0.00005`$) are $`h/J=0.10652`$ for $`L=4`$, $`0.022575`$ for $`L=8`$, $`0.005450`$ for $`L=16`$, and $`0.001615`$ for $`L=32`$. With the QMC algorithm  implemented in the $`z`$-basis, and with the field also in the $`z`$-direction, the longitudinal correlations can be easily calculated. In order to compute the transverse correlations it is more efficient to apply the field in the $`x`$-direction, so that the measurements can be carried out with diagonal operators . Hence, we perform two independent simulations for each lattice size.

Fig. 1 shows our results for the ratio of the longitudinal and transverse spectral weights versus the momentum, along a standard path in the Brilloin zone. At $`𝐪=(\pi ,\pi )`$ the ratio diverges (in the thermodynamic limit), reflecting the divergence of $`S_z(\pi ,\pi )`$ due to the long-range order. For $`𝐪(0,0)`$ and $`𝐪(\pi ,\pi )`$ it approaches zero and hence the magnon completely exhausts the total spectral weight in these limits (other treatments have shown that the magnon exhausts the low-energy transverse spectral weight ). The ratio is the largest at $`𝐪=(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$ where it is above $`0.7`$ — it is between $`0.6`$ and $`0.7`$ over much of the Brilloin zone. Hence, in unpolarized neutron scattering experiments, $`3035`$% of the cross-section at the zone boundary is due to the longitudinal continuum.

Next we study the full dynamic structure factor, focusing on the zone-boundary momenta $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$ and $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. The analytic continuation using fits to the functions (9) and (10) was carried out using QMC imaginary-time data with a spacing $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau =0.5`$ up to $`\tau =4`$ (the data become too noisy for higher $`\tau `$). For $`L=4`$, we have compared with exact diagonalization results and find that the magnon energy is very accurately reproduced (better than 0.5%) but the weight in the magnon is underestimated by about $`5\%`$ because the form of the continuum, Eq. (11), is not appropriate for a very small system where only a small number of significant delta-functions represent the continuum. Our results for larger systems should have smaller systematic errors.

Fig. 2 shows the size dependence of the magnon weight and energy (the scatter of the data gives an indication of the statistical errors). The $`L=4`$ data is from exact diagonalization; in this case the two momenta are degenerate due to equivalence of this lattice and a $`2^4`$ hyper-cube. Rough extrapolations in $`1/L`$ give the infinite-size energy $`\omega _𝐪/J2.15`$ for $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$ and $`2.39`$ for $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. The relative weight of the magnon in $`S_x(𝐪,\omega )`$ is $`60`$% at $`(\pi ,0)`$ and $`85`$% at $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. Within linear spin-wave theory, including the quantum-renormalization $`Z=1.18`$, the energy $`\omega _q/J=2.36`$ for both momenta. Hence, the results show that the interactions neglected in spin-wave theory have strong effects at $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$, lowereing the energy by almost $`10`$% and transferring $``$ 40% of the magnon weight into the continuum. At $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$ the excitation energy is instead slightly increased by the interactions and a much smaller fraction of the weight is in the continuum.

Fig. 3 shows the magnon as well as the transverse and longitudinal continua for $`L=32`$. The rotationally averaged structure factor measured in neutron scattering experiments with unpolarized neutrons is also shown. The exponent $`p`$ in the longitudinal continuum, Eq. (12), is small and positive, $`p0.05`$, giving a spectral weight concentrated close to the magnon. The longitudinal continuum is significantly narrower at $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$ than at $`(\pi ,0)`$. For both momenta, the transverse continuum is broad and centered further above the magnon. All these spectral features are consistently present for system sizes $`L8`$. As seen in the insets of Fig. 3, for $`L=32`$ only $`45`$% of the rotationally averaged spectral weight is in the magnon mode at $`(\pi ,0)`$, increasing to $`65`$% at $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$. The magnon weight decreases only slightly for even larger systems, as can be inferred from Fig. 2.

In previous work using QMC and analytic continuation , the magnon energy was extracted as the first moment of the rotationally averaged relaxation function, $`F(𝐪,\omega )S(𝐪,\omega )/\omega `$. Using this procedure, we find the moment $`2.53`$ at $`(\pi ,0)`$ and $`2.58`$ at $`(\pi /2,\pi /2)`$, i.e., both significantly above the actual magnon energies (the first moment of $`S(𝐪,\omega )`$ is higher yet; approximately $`2.66`$ for both momenta). This is clearly due to the large spectral weight in the continuum. There is potentially a similar problem in the analysis of neutron scattering data. Since the present-day energy resolution is such that a non-negligible part of the continuum that we have found here would be included in an experimental fit to a single resolution-broadened peak, the extracted magnon energy may be too high. This effect would be particularly important at and close to $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$, where our results show that less than $`50`$% of the total weight is in the magnon peak and the continuum is relatively broad.

Experimental results do appear to show the presence of some weight consistent with a continuum above the resolutioned broadened magnon peak , but the statistics is not sufficient for extracting its size and shape. Our calculations should be useful for analyzing future experiments with higher resolution. Such experiments will be very important for determining the significance of other interactions in the antiferromagnetic cuprates beyond the nearest-neighbor exchange $`J`$. The significant effects of magnon interactions that we have found at $`𝐪=(\pi ,0)`$ may also have important consequences for the broadening of the Raman spectrum  and the momentum space anisotropy of the photoemission spectrum .

We would like to thank G. Aeppli, L. Balents, G. Sawatzky, and D. Scalapino for stimulating discussions. This research was supported by the NSF under grants No. DMR-97-12765 and DMR-99-86948. The work was started at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, under support of NSF grant No. PHY-94-07194. Most of the numerical calculations were carried out on the SGI Origin2000 system the NCSA.


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# The information interpretation of quantum mechanics

## Information and the quantum

In the following we take the position that information is the most fundamental concept in understanding the quantum. This approach has been recently investigated by Zeilinger and Brukner  and Summhammer . It can be traced back to Schrödinger’s “catalogue of expectation values” , many coffee-house conversations here in Vienna  as well as to the writings of Brillouin , Gabor  and the late Landauer , among others (e.g., ).

In standard treatments, the quantum evolution is presented in a twofold manner. (i) Inbetween measurements, there is a unitary and thus reversible one-to-one evolution. (ii) The measurement itself is modeled irreversibly, many-to-one, which is associated with the “wave function collapse” or “reduction of the state vector.”

In what follows we suggest to extend the unitary evolution also to the measurement process. Thereby, we assume a uniform reversible one-to-one quantum evolution which is not interrupted by measurements causing many-to-one reductions.

This amounts to suggesting that the concept of irreversible measurement (ii) is no deep principle but originates in the practical inability to reconstruct a particular quantum state. Reconstruction may widely vary with technological capabilities which often boil down to financial commitments.

Information, in particular information encoded into a quantum system, is conserved, irrespective of whether or not a “measurement” has taken place.

## Measurement apparatus as interface

In what follows, the measurement apparatus is modeled by an interface between the observer and the observed subsystem. An interface is introduced as a theoretical entity forming the common boundary between two parts of a system, as well as a means of information exchange between those parts. By convention, one part of the of the system is called “observer” and the other part “object.” Both the observer and the object are embedded into one and the same system. The interface should be thought of as merely an intermediate construction, a “scaffolding,” capable of providing the necessary conceptual means.

One could quite justifyable ask (and this question has indeed been asked by Professor Bryce deWitt), “where exactly is the interface in a concrete experiment, such as a spin state measurement in a Stern-Gerlach apparatus?”

We take the position here that the location of the interface very much depends on the physical proposition which is tested and on the conventions assumed. Let us consider, for example, a statement like “the electron spin in the $`z`$-direction is up.”

In the case of a Stern-Gerlach device, one could locate the interface at the apparatus itself. Then, the information passing through the interface is identified with the way the particle took.

One could also locate the interface at two detectors at the end of the beam paths. In this case, the “meaningful” informaton (with respect to the question asked) penetrating through the interface corresponds to which one of the two detectors (assumed lossless) clicks (cf. Fig. 1).

The interface could also be situated at the computer interface card registering this click, or at an experimenter who presumably monitors the event (cf. Wigner’s friend ), or at the persons of the research group to whom the experimenter reports, to their scientific peers, and so on.

It should be kept in mind that the proposition considered may be only a (minor) part of the information communicated via the interface, and that in a uniform one-to-one environment, all information would be needed for reconstruction. As a consequence, it is certainly not sufficient to reconstruct the state of the electron.

The object may also not be prepared to accept the question asked. In such a case, one may speculate that the interface acts as a “translator” between the observer and the object. This may indeed be the reason of an intrinsic irreducible randomness of certain outcomes. The quantum system as a whole behaves deterministically; i.e., according to the unitary evolution of the quantum state.

Since there is no material or real substrate which could be uniquely identified with the interface, in principle it could be associated with or located at anything which is affected by the state of the object. The only difference is the reconstructibility of the object’s previous state (cf. below): the “more macroscopic” (i.e., many-to-one) the interface is, the more difficult it becomes to reconstruct the original state of the object.

## Reconstruction and information flow density

A direct consequence of the conservation of information is the possibility to define continuity equations. In analogy to magnetostatics or thermodynamics we may represent the information flow by a vector which gives the amount of information passing per unit area and per unit time through a surface element at right angles to the flow. We call this the information flow density $`𝐣`$. The amount of information flowing across a small area $`\mathrm{\Delta }A`$ in a unit time is

$$𝐣𝐧\mathrm{\Delta }A,$$

where $`𝐧`$ is the unit vector normal to $`\mathrm{\Delta }A`$. The information flow density is related to the average flow velocity $`v`$ of information. In particular, the information flow density associated with an elementary object of velocity $`v`$ per unit time is given by $`𝐣=\rho v`$ bits per second, where $`\rho `$ stands for the information density (measured in bits/$`m^3`$). For $`N`$ elementary objects per unit volume carrying one bit each,

$$𝐣=Nvi.$$

Here, $`i`$ denotes the elementary quantity of information measured in bit units. The information flow $`I`$ is the total amount of information passing per unit time through any surface $`A`$; i.e.,

$$I=_A𝐣𝐧𝑑A.$$

We have assumed that the cut is on a closed surface $`𝒜_c`$ surrounding the object. The conservation law of information requires the following continuity equation to be valid:

$$_{𝒜_c}𝐣𝐧𝑑A=\frac{d}{dt}(\mathrm{Information}\mathrm{inside})$$

or, by defining an information density $`\rho `$ and applying Gauss’ law,

$$𝐣=\frac{d\rho }{dt}.$$

To give a quantitative account of the present ability to reconstruct the quantum wave function of single photons, we analyze the “quantum eraser” paper by Herzog, Kwiat, Weinfurter and Zeilinger . The authors report an extension of their apparatus of $`x=0.13`$ m, which amounts to an information passing through a sphere of radius $`x`$ of

$$I_{\mathrm{qe}}=4\pi x^2c\rho =6\times 10^7\mathrm{bits}/\mathrm{second}.$$

Here, $`𝐣=c\rho `$ ($`c`$ stands for the velocity of light in vacuum) with $`\rho =1\text{bit/m}^3`$ has been assumed. At this rate the reconstruction of the photon wave function has been conceivable.

We propose to consider $`I`$ as a measure for wave function reconstruction. In general, $`I`$ will be astronomically high because of the astronomical numbers of elementary objects involved. Yet, the associated diffusion velocity $`v`$ may be considerably lower than $`c`$.

### Effective many-to-one-ness

In this final part of the communication we mention reasons why most measurements appear to be irreversible. In such cases, we claim, that either (i) information flows off too fast, i.e., $`I`$ is too large, or (ii) the interface is not total such that information “leaks” to regions outside of the observer’s control; or (iii) the macroscopic level of description effectively maps many different microscopic states onto a single macroscopic state.

The question of why on the macroscopic scale systems tend to behave irreversibly while the microphysical laws are reversible is not entirely new and has, in the context of statistical mechanics, already been discussed intensively by Boltzmann . In the case (iii), the interface effectively introduces “classicality” in the following sense. The observer seeks an answer to a particular question or proposition. This proposition is often only a part of the information the object is communicating. In disregarding these other aspects, the experimenter induces irreversibility into the particular description level.

In summary we have put forward here the suggestion that irreversibility in quantum measurements is no primary concept. It is postulated that, at least in principle, every quantum measurement could be “undone.”


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# Predictability of the energy cascade in 2D turbulence

## Acknowledgments

We are grateful to A. Celani, M. Cencini and A. Vulpiani for useful discussions. Support from INFM “PRA TURBO”, is gratefully acknowledged. Numerical simulations were partially performed at CINECA within the project ”Fully developed two-dimensional turbulence”.


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# Halo Dark Matter and Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays

## Abstract

The decay of very heavy metastable relics of the Early Universe can produce ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) in the halo of our own Galaxy. On distance scales of the order of the halo size, energy losses are negligible—no Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff is expected. In this letter we show that, as a consequence of the hierarchical build up of the halo, this scenario predicts the existence of small scale anisotropies in the arrival directions of UHECRs. We also suggest some consequences of this scenario which will be testable with upcoming experiments, as Auger.

Heavy particles ($`m_X10^{12}10^{14}`$ GeV) can be produced in the Early Universe in different ways  and their lifetime can be finite though very long compared to the present age of the universe. The decay of these particles results in the production of UHECRs, as widely discussed in the literature . If the relics cluster in galactic halos, as is expected, this can explain the cosmic ray observations above $`5\times 10^{19}`$ eV. These particles may represent an appreciable fraction of the cold dark matter in the universe . Can this class of models explain the details of the present data, including the spectrum, composition and anisotropy of the arrival directions? We will briefly review the status of the first two points, already discussed in the relevant literature and we will instead concentrate on the last point, paying particular attention to anisotropies one expects on small scales.

The decay of heavy relics results usually in the production of a quark-antiquark pair which rapidly hadronizes, generating two jets with approximately $`95\%`$ of the energy in pions, and $`5\%`$ in baryons. The decay of the pions results in the observed high energy particles, mainly in the form of gamma rays, and in the generation of ultra-high energy neutrinos. The spectrum of the gamma photons is relatively flat ($`E^{1.5}`$) reflecting the behaviour of the fragmentation function for the quarks. Therefore two main signatures of this model are: i) a flat energy spectrum; ii) composition dominated by gamma rays rather than by protons. Moreover, as in all top-down models, heavy elements are expected to be completely absent. Unfortunately present data on the composition is extremely poor and it is impossible to rule out or confirm the presence of gamma photons in the UHECR events.

In  the issue of the anisotropy was first addressed. The anisotropy results from the asymmetric position of the Earth in the Galaxy, so that the flux of UHECRs coming from the direction of the galactic center should be appreciably larger than the flux from the anticenter direction. In  this issue was considered more quantitatively, taking into account the exposure of the present experiments. All authors concur that the present data is consistent with the predictions of the relic model for practically all reasonable values of the model parameters.

Recently an interesting pattern has arisen from the analysis of the events with energy larger than $`4\times 10^{19}`$ eV: in  the sample with this energy cut comprises 47 events, whose overall distribution in space does not show appreciable deviation from isotropy. However, 3 doublets and one triplet were identified within an angular scale of $`2.5^o`$, comparable with the angular resolution of the experiment. A complete analysis, including the whole set of UHECR events above $`4\times 10^{19}`$ eV from the existing experiments was performed in . This extended sample comprises 92 events and shows 12 doublets and two triplets (each triplet is also counted as three doublets) within an angle of $`3^o`$. The chance probability of having more than this number of doublets was estimated to be $`1.5\%`$. Although it is probably too soon to rule out the possibility that these multiplets are just a random fluctuation, it is instructive to think about the possibility that their presence contains some physical information about the sources of UHECRs. Clearly the most straightforward possibility is that the multiplets correspond to some local overdensity in the spatial distribution of the sources. Most of the top-down models for UHECRs (e.g. strings, necklaces, vortons, etc.) cannot naturally explain the multiplets.

In the following we will discuss how the multiplets can be interpreted in the context of the super-heavy dark matter (SHDM) model.

The existence of dark matter in galactic halos is all but established, and the main points are well understood in terms of hierarchical structure formation scenarios. High resolution N-body simulations, e.g., , suggest the following: i) the density of dark matter particles in galaxy size halos is peaked in the center; the density cusp scales as $`r^\gamma `$ with $`\gamma 11.5`$ on distances $`r`$ which are much smaller than a core radius, which is of the order of several kpc in size; ii) outside the core, the slope of the profile steepens; it scales as $`r^3`$ at large distances; iii) the profile is not completely smooth; some of the dark matter is in small clumps. To model the first two of these findings we adopt a dark matter density distribution in the form suggested by numerical simulations :

$$n_H(r)=n^0\frac{(r/r_c)^1}{\left[1+\frac{r}{r_c}\right]^2}$$
(1)
where $`r_c`$ is the core size and $`n^0`$ is a normalization parameter. These two parameters can be set by requiring that the halo contains a given total mass ($`M_H`$) and that the velocity dispersion at some distance from the center is known (in the case of the Galaxy, the velocity dispersion is $`200`$ km/s in the vicinity of our solar system.). Alternative fits to the simulated dark matter halos and a discussion of whether or not simulated halos appear to be consistent with observations are provided in .

In addition to the smooth dark matter distribution, represented by eq. (1), N-body simulations also show that there is a clumped component which contains $`1020\%`$ of the total mass. The presence of these clumps are a natural consequence of the way in which gravity assembles dense virialized halos such as our galaxy today from the initially smooth density fluctuation field which was present when the cosmic microwave background (CMB) decoupled from the baryons. Simulations suggest that most of the mass which makes up a galactic halo was assembled by merging smaller clumps together at about $`z3`$. Much of the mass initially in a small clump which falls onto and orbits within the larger halo after that time gets tidally stripped from it. The amount of mass which is lost from any given clump increases as the distance of closest approach to the galactic halo center decreases; the mass is stripped away, from the outside in, as the clump falls towards the center. We will call the size of a clump, after its outsides have been stripped away, the tidal radius of the clump. Dynamical friction makes the clumps gradually spiral in towards the halo center.

This has three main consequences. Firstly, the range of clump masses in the halo at the present time is different from that which fell in. Secondly, halos of a fixed mass do not all have the same tidal radius. Thirdly, the spatial distribution of the clumps in the halo is not the same as that of the dark matter. We found that a good fit to the joint distribution in clump mass and position in the simulations of  is

$$n_{cl}(r,m)=n_{cl}^0\left(\frac{m}{M_H}\right)^\alpha \left[1+\left(\frac{r}{r_c^{cl}}\right)^2\right]^{3/2},$$
(2)
where $`n_{cl}^0`$ is a normalization constant, $`r_c^{cl}`$ is the core of the clumps distribution, and $`\alpha `$ describes the relative numbers of massive to less massive clumps. The simulations suggest that $`\alpha 1.9`$ . The constraints on the core size are weaker—we will study the range where $`r_c^{cl}`$ is between 3 and 30 percent of $`R_H`$. In , a halo with $`M_H2\times 10^{12}M_{}`$ contains about $`500`$ clumps with mass larger than $`10^8M_{}`$. This sets the normalization constant in eq. (2).

Clumps in the parent NFW halo are truncated at their tidal radii. The tidal radius of a clump depends on the clump mass, the density profile within the clump, and on how closely to the halo center it may have been. We assume that clumps of all mass are isothermal spheres (even though they are not truly isothermal,  suggest this is reasonably accurate): $`\rho _{cl}(r_{cl})1/r_{cl}^2`$, where $`r_{cl}`$ is the radial coordinate measured from the center of the clump. The tidal radius of a clump ($`R_{cl}`$) at a distance $`r`$ from the center of the parent halo is determined by requiring that the density in the clump at distance $`R_{cl}`$ from its center equals the local density of the NFW halo at the distance $`r`$. This means that

$$R_{cl}=\left(\frac{m}{4\pi n^0x_c}\right)^{1/3}x^{1/3}\left[1+\frac{x}{x_c}\right]^{2/3},$$
(3)
where $`x_c=r_c/R_H`$, $`x=r/R_H`$ and $`R_H`$ is the virial radius of the halo, of order $`300`$ kpc. The average overdensity within $`R_H`$ is about 200 .

As shown in , the total (energy integrated) flux of UHECRs per unit solid angle from a smooth distribution of dark matter particles in the halo is:

$$\frac{d\mathrm{\Phi }}{d\mathrm{\Omega }}_0^{R_{max}}𝑑Rn_H(r(R)),$$
(4)
where $`R`$ is the distance from the detector, and $`r`$ is the distance from the galactic center (so $`R`$ and $`r`$ are related by trigonometrical relations accounting for the off-center position of the Earth in the Galaxy). The upper limit, $`R_{max}`$, depends on the line of sight.

The existence of a clumped component changes the flux in eq. (4) only in that $`n_H`$ should be replaced with the total dark matter density, the sum of the smooth and the clumped components. It is intuitively obvious that clumped regions will give an excess of events from certain directions, as was first pointed out in .

To see how important the clumped contribution is, we used two different ways of simulating the observed number of events. The first approach consisted of calculating the flux per unit solid angle \[eq. (4)\] along different lines of sight directly, taking into account the smooth plus clumped contributions to the total density profile \[eqs. 1 and 2\]. Once a smooth flux map distribution had been obtained, the UHECR events were generated from this distribution. In the second approach, the events were generated in two steps. First, a random subset of the dark matter distribution, which is supposed to represent the subset of particles which decayed, was generated. The second step was to draw particles from this distribution, and then weight by the probability that the event would actually have been detected—so a chosen particle generates an event with probability $`1/r^2`$, where $`r`$ is the distance between the particle and the detector. In both codes, the detector was assumed to be at the position of the Earth in the Galaxy, and a cut on the directions of arrival was introduced to account for the exposure of the AGASA experiment (taken here as an example).

Fig. 1 shows as an example one of the generated flux maps: the map represents the ratio of the total flux including the contribution from clumps, to the flux obtained by using a smooth NFW profile. The various free parameters were $`r_c=8`$ kpc, $`r_c^{cl}=10`$ kpc, and the mass distribution was truncated at a clump mass of $`1\%`$ of the mass of the NFW halo. This sort of plot emphasizes the clump contribution. (To avoid confusion many of the smallest scale fluctuations, which arise from the many low mass clumps, have not been shown.)

To calculate the small scale anisotropies, we generated $`10^4`$ mock samples, each of 92 observed events, and counted the number of doublets and triplets for angular scales of 3, 4, and 5 degrees. Our codes can also be used to check the corresponding numbers for the case of isotropic arrival directions (as in ). Two sets of values of the cores for the NFW and the clumped component were adopted, one in which $`r_c=8`$ kpc and $`r_c^{cl}=10`$ kpc (case 1) and the other with $`r_c=r_c^{cl}=20`$ kpc (case 2). The observed numbers of doublets within 3, 4, and 5 degrees for an isotropic distribution of arrival directions are given in  and are 12, 14 and 20 respectively. The number of doublets that we obtain in case 1 are 8, 14, and 21 within 3, 4, and 5 degrees respectively. The probability that the number of doublets equals or exceeds that observed is $`12\%`$, $`47\%`$ and $`57\%`$ respectively. This should be compared with the $`1.5\%`$, $`13.4\%`$ and $`15.9\%`$ quoted in  for an isotropic distribution of arrival directions.

We repeated the same calculation for the case 2. The corresponding averages and probabilities of exceeding the observed number of doublets within 3, 4 and 5 degree scales are 6.6, 12, and 18, and $`4.5\%`$, $`29\%`$ and $`36\%`$ respectively.

In both cases 1 and 2, the number of doublets on angular scales of 4 and 5 degrees is consistent with the observed values; presumably the discrepancy at 3 degrees is random chance.

We have also studied the occurence of triplets. There is some ambiguity as to how a triplet is best defined; we have chosen to define triplets as configurations in which all three pairs would have been classified as doublets. (This means, for example, that a co-linear configuration of two doublets is not necessarily a triplet.) With this definition, the average number of triplets in case one is 0.5, 1.5 and 3, with the probability of having more than the observed triplets (2, 2, 3 respectively) equal to 4%, 16% and 35%. For case 2, the correspondent numbers are 0.4, 1, and 2.5 triplets and $`2\%`$, $`8\%`$ and $`20\%`$ for the probabilities to have more triplets than observed.

What is responsible for the multiplet-events in the SHDM model? If we study the case in which all the halo mass is in the smooth NFW component, then the number of doublets typically drops by one or two. This suggests that the anisotropy due to our position in an NFW halo can result in a number of multiplets of events which is considerably larger than if the arrivals were from an isotropic background. The number of multiplets from the clumped component is mainly affected by the presence of large nearby clumps, whose number depends on the high mass cutoff imposed in the mass function of clumps. A maximum mass of $`1\%`$ of the halo mass implies a total mass in the clumps of $`1015\%`$ of $`M_H`$, consistent with the results of the simulations . Larger cutoffs imply larger mass fractions, which are harder to reconcile with the N-body simulations.

Future experiments will definitely represent the real test for these sorts of models. Therefore it is useful to propose tests to be performed in the next years, in particular with the upcoming Auger experiment . In the following we investigate what a full sky experiment would observe if UHECRs were produced by the decay of super-heavy halo dark matter. As discussed in  a powerful statistical tool that will be available with a full sky experiment is the angular power spectrum, as a function of $`l`$:

$$C(l)=\frac{1}{2l+1}\underset{m=l}{\overset{l}{}}a_{lm}^2,$$
(5)
where the coefficients $`a_{lm}`$ are defined as

$$a_{lm}=\frac{1}{N_{ev}}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N_{ev}}{}}Y_{lm}(\theta ,\varphi ),$$
(6)
and we assumed, for simplicity, that the exposure is flat over all the sky. Here $`N_{ev}`$ is the number of events and $`Y_{lm}`$ are the real valued spherical harmonics, calculated in the direction determined by the two angles $`\theta `$ and $`\varphi `$ of the event.

We simulated 5000 events over all the sky and computed the power spectrum in two cases: 1) purely NFW profile (no clumps); 2) full dark matter halo, (NFW plus a clumped component). The parameters were chosen as in case 1 above. The calculation was done for one specific realization of clumps in the halo, since we are only interested here in the general features which may appear in the power spectrum (the same realization shown in Fig. 1).

The solid line (crosses) in Fig. 2 is the power spectrum corresponding to the smooth profile case (no clumps), while the dashed line (diamonds) is the power spectrum for the full dark matter profile (including clumps). In both spectra the dipole anisotropy is evident. This anisotropy is due to the asymmetric position of the Earth in the galaxy; it arises from the fact that the flux from the direction of the galactic center far exceeds (by an order of magnitude) that from the antigalactic center. As shown in  the present observations are not inconsistent with this predicted dipole anisotropy. Although not evident in this realization, there are cases in which the power spectrum (of the smooth plus clumped models) has some features (bumps). These are generally correlated with the presence of a nearby clump of dark matter which gives a substantial contribution to the flux on a specific angular scale.

Contrary to the dipole enhancement, which is generic, the amplitude and frequency of the other bumps completely depends on the specific substructure distribution of the Milky Way’s halo in which we happen to live. It is, therefore, difficult to quantify the likelihood of detecting these smaller bumps in the power spectrum of a future experiment. However, if such structures in the power spectrum are detected, then they are easily understood in the scenario discussed in this letter.

In addition to features in the angular power spectrum (dipole and bumps) analyses of the composition of events will be precious in constraining or confirming the scenario of SHDM in the halo; as discussed above, this should be dominated by gamma rays. For this reason, the halo magnetic field does not affect our conclusions. (If the proton and gamma ray fractions in UHECRs generated by SHDM are comparable , then the magnetic field might induce deflections on scales of a degree or so. Since we considered slightly larger scales, our conclusions are unlikely to change dramatically even in this case.)

The study of the composition, together with an improved measure of the spectrum of UHECRs, should nail down the nature of the “real” sources of UHECRs and confirm or rule out the SHDM model.

Aknowledgments This work was supported by the DOE and the NASA grant NAG 5-7092 at Fermilab.

Figure Caption

Fig. 1 Map of the ratio of the local flux of UHECRs obtained from a realistic dark matter distribution in the halo (NFW plus clumps) and the pure NFW case, for a specific realization of clumps in the halo.

Fig. 2 Flux power spectrum for the NFW case (solid line with crosses) and the NFW plus clumped case (dashed line with diamonds). The same realization of clumps as in Fig. 1 has been used.


text:
# Fluid and plastic flow dynamics of the critical state for a strongly pinned 2D superconductor

## 1 Introduction

Flux pinning in type II superconductors is a well documented example for the general problem of an elastic periodic medium interacting with disorder. The study of the dynamics of the pinned flux line lattice, under the action of an external current or by the virtue of a time varying external magnetic field, is one way to apprehend the problem of flux line pinning. Well known examples are transport I-V characteristics and magnetization relaxation experiments. Such experiments are usually interpreted using simple models, assuming a uniform critical current density and a single, current dependent, activation energy at non zero temperature. However, numerical simulationsjensen90 ; nori96 ; reichhardt96 ; dominguez99 , experimentsmatsuda96 ; marchevsky97  and theorygiam96 ; led98 , have shown that a driven flux lattice can be a rather complex object, remarkably different from the simple pictures used in the interpretation of the experiments. In particular, the pinning of a two-dimensional flux lattice by strong pinning centers lends itself easily to numerical simulations and has been the subject of several studies. Such a system is also a good approximation for highly anisotropic superconductors irradiated by heavy ions, such as the high Tc oxides, which are now well documented. In this paper, we present numerical simulations of this strong pinning situation, at non zero temperature and for conditions similar to those encountered in experimental magnetization experiments.

## 2 Simulation

We simulate a slab submitted on one side to an external magnetic field, applied parallel to its boundary, while, on the opposite side, the external magnetic field is assumed to be zero (vortices are removed as they cross this boundary). Periodic conditions are used, so that the effect of the finite dimensions is limited. Flux lines are assumed rigid rods. This correctly modelizes a layered superconductor with decoupled layers in the critical state, for which the local magnetic induction decreases from the applied field value on the external sides to a lower value at the center of the sample (Fig. 1).

Strong pinning centers are randomly distributed in the sample. The density of the pinning sites is $`n=B_\mathrm{\Phi }/\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$, with $`\mathrm{\Phi }_0`$ the flux quantum and $`B_\mathrm{\Phi }`$ the ’matching field’ for which an equilibrium flux line lattice shows the same density of flux lines. A region of width $`\lambda `$ from the side where vortices are introduced is kept free of pinning sites, in order to allow for the initial formation of a regular hexagonal lattice in this region. The pinning sites are assumed normal cylinders parallel to the applied field, with radius $`c_0`$. The situation where, at low temperature, the vortex core radius $`\xi (T)`$ is smaller than $`c_0`$ and pinning is due essentially to the reduction of the core energy when the line sits on the pin is considered. The force exerted by a pin at a distance $`r`$ to the line is given by:

$$f_p(r)=\{\begin{array}{c}\sigma \epsilon _or/r_0\xi \text{for}rr_0,\hfill \\ 0\text{for}r>r_0.\hfill \end{array}$$
(1)
where $`\epsilon _0=\left(\mathrm{\Phi }_0/4\pi \lambda \right)^2`$ is the line energy, $`r_0=c_0+\xi /2`$ and $`\sigma 1`$.

The force per unit length exerted by a vortex at a distance $`r`$ to the line is:

$$f_{vv}(r)=\left(\mathrm{\Phi }_0^2/8\pi ^2\lambda ^3\right)K_1\left(r/\lambda \right)$$
(2)
where $`K_1`$ is a Bessel function. This is a good approximation strictly only in the case of vortex lines (rods) and for 2D vortices a logarithmic interaction should be used. In the present case, the more rapid decrease of the Bessel function allows us to cut the interaction between vortices at a distance $`5\lambda `$ and save computation time.

The external magnetic field $`B_0`$ is simulated by an extra force $`f_{B_0}`$ acting on each vortex, perpendicular to the external side of the sample. The force acting on a vortex at a distance $`x`$ from the boundary is the one imposed by a semi-infinite vortex lattice at a distance $`a_0+x`$, where $`a_0=\left(\mathrm{\Phi }_0/B\right)^{1/2}`$ is the flux lattice spacing at the equilibrium.

The finite temperature is simulated in a way similar to the one described in ref. brass89  by adding a stochastic velocity to the particles:

$$𝐯_𝐓=\left(2k_BT\tau /3\mathrm{\Delta }^2\right)^{1/2}\left(\begin{array}{c}\gamma _x\\ \gamma _y\end{array}\right)\mathrm{\Theta }(\mathrm{\Delta }t/\tau q)$$
(3)
where $`1/\tau `$ is the average frequency for the thermal perturbation, $`\gamma _{x,y}`$ are random numbers from a Gaussian distribution of width 1, $`q`$ is a random number from a uniform distribution between 0 and 1, and $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$ is the Heaviside function. We have used a single set of parameters $`\tau `$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ for all temperatures with $`\tau \mathrm{\Delta }t`$. The accuracy for the temperature simulated in this way was checked by computing the life time of a single vortex in a potential well similar to the ones defined above. The life time as a function of the well depth was found to match accurately the one given by the Arrhenius-Kramers relation for an overdamped particle, in the range of temperature studied here. In this overdamped regime, results are independent of the viscosity when expressed in the time unit $`t/\eta `$, the escape frequency being inversely proportional to $`\eta `$.

Finally, the displacement $`\mathrm{\Delta }𝐫_𝐢`$ of vortex $`i`$ during time step $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ is computed according to the diffusive equation:

$`\eta \mathrm{\Delta }𝐫_𝐢/\mathrm{\Delta }t=`$
$`{\displaystyle \underset{ji}{}}𝐟_{\mathrm{𝐯𝐯}}(r_{ij})+{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}𝐟_𝐩(r_{ij})+𝐟_{𝐁_\mathrm{𝟎}}(x_i/a_0)+\eta 𝐯_𝐓`$ (4)
where the first sum is over all vortices at a distance less than $`5\lambda `$ and the second one is over all pins ($`\eta `$ is the viscosity per unit length). The time step is chosen so that the vortex displacement during one step is always much smaller than the pinning characteristic length, $`r_0`$. At non zero temperature, vortices tend to creep through the sample from the boundary submitted to the external field, where vortices are fed whenever the magnetic pressure is strong enough to allow for their penetration, to the one with zero applied field. As a consequence, a steady thermally activated flux flow is set after some time, characterized by a linear flux density profile and a steady vortex current density, $``$, that flows through the sample.

## 3 Results

In the rest, we use the following material parameters, appropriate for a high temperature superconductor: $`\lambda =1400`$Å, $`\xi =18`$Å, $`c_0=35`$Å and $`\sigma =0.1`$. The samples held typically 5000 pinning sites and 1000 vortices in the steady state. The matching field, $`B_\mathrm{\Phi }=5000G`$ and the external field, $`B_0=2500G`$, were the same for all the simulations.

In a way similar to what is done in the analysis of real relaxation experiments, we use a one-dimensional model with a single activation energy to analyze the vortex current densitybeek92 . According to this widely used model, vortices thermally hop over barriers disposed along a 1-D axis with height $`U(j)`$ (where $`j=(4\pi )^1B/x`$ is the current density) and the vortex current density is $`=jB\varphi _0\eta ^1\mathrm{exp}(U(j)/k_BT)`$. This model clearly misses some of the fundamental features of the real experiments. As pointed in ref. beek92 , it is valid only in the case of almost uniform vortex and current densities, when physical quantities may be replaced by their average over several vortex spacing. In particular, it assumes that the screening current flows in our case along straight lines perpendicular to the vortex flow. As can be seen in Fig. 3A, this is not so and the current tends to flow along some curved, branched paths that reveal the highly inhomogeneous stresses in the pinned flux lattice. There has been attempts to account for the spatial heterogeneity of the real systems, using a distribution of activation energiesgriessen91 ; hoekstra99 . However, the method assumes parallel, independent relaxation channels, which is still a very crude assumption. As for real magnetization experiments analysis, we obtain the average screening current density from the total magnetization of the sample. In order to investigate different flux gradient profiles, different sample geometries were used with the length of the cylinder between $`20\lambda `$ and $`100\lambda `$ and diameters between $`10\lambda `$ and $`300\lambda `$. The experiments probed different $`T`$ and $`j`$ values, which are located on a smooth ($`T`$, $`j`$) trajectory shown in Fig.2. This is similar to relaxation rate measurements in superconductors, for which both the temperature and the screening current are varied - the latter parameter being implicitly determined by the temperature and the time window explored in these experiments.

The activation energy obtained from the simulations is shown in Fig. 2, where energy is normalized to the single vortex pinning site energy, $`U_0=\sigma \epsilon _0r_0/\xi `$, and critical current density to the single vortex critical current, $`j_0=\sigma \epsilon _0/\xi \varphi _0`$. It is shown as a 3D plot, as the computation of the energy with one of these two parameters fixed would imply prohibitive computation time as temperature or current decreases. The same limitation is also encountered in real relaxation experiments, although in this case the temperature variations are usually disregarded and the data plotted as $`U(j)`$. The reason for this is that Maley’s proceduremaley90  allows to show that, in most cases, the activation energy obtained from relaxation experiments is temperature-independent. We notice, however, that this is no longer true at low temperature, which has been attributed to the occurrence of the quantum tunneling regimemonier98 .

A clear upturn can be seen in Fig. 2, where the activation energy increases strongly with decreasing current below $`j/j_00.05`$, $`k_BT/\mathrm{\Delta }0.25`$. This upturn corresponds to the crossover between a plastic to a fluid flow regime for flux motion. This can be seen, first, from a direct observation of the vortices trajectories: in the plastic regime, there exists a time scale at which some vortices move over distances larger than $`a_0`$, while others remain immobile on that scale and constitute some kind of ’pinned islands’ (Ref.nori96 ). It is important to stress that these islands depin at a larger time scale for non zero temperature, so that only a dynamical definition of these domains may be given in our case. No such characteristic time may be found in the fluid flow regime where, depending on the time scale considered, nearly all or none of the vortices move over this distance (Fig. 3A,B). A more quantitative argument in favor of two clearly distinct regimes is given by the examination of the diffusion of a vortex trajectory, transverse to the average flux flow (Fig. 4 and 5). In the fluid flow regime, the transverse displacement on the scale of the equilibrium flux lattice parameter, $`\delta =a_0^1[y(0)y(a_0)]^2^{1/2}`$ where the average is performed along the vortex trajectory, is significantly smaller than 1, whereas it increases with decreasing temperature and increasing current density up to a value $`0.60.65`$ in the plastic regime (Fig. 5). This limiting value may be understood by considering that the most disordered trajectory allowed in the flux lattice is the one where a vortex hops randomly from one interstitial site to a neighbor site. A consequence of disorder in the plastic regime is that the examination of the flux pattern hardly reveals the orientation of the average flux flow (Fig. 3C, making abstraction of the region close to the zero field boundary of the sample, where side effect is visible), as compared to the fluid flow regime (Fig. 3B). As can be seen in Fig. 5, the increase of the transverse displacement along the $`(T,j)`$ trajectory shown in Fig. 2 is rather abrupt, suggesting that the trajectory might cross a transition line rather than a crossover line. If this is so, an order parameter may be elaborated from $`\delta `$, after subtraction of the high temperature baseline and adequate normalization, which is unity in the ordered regime and tends towards zero in the opposite limit, thus delimiting two distinct, nonequilibrium, phases. The static topological orders of the two phases which would be defined in this way do not show significant differences: both lack long range order, either crystal-like or smectic-like. To that respect, they both look like a liquid, as demonstrated by the inspection of the density autocorrelation function (Fig. 6). It is difficult, however, to unambiguously put into evidence the existence of a second-order nonequilibrium phase transition in our case.

Up to now, we have reported only upon a single point of the crossover line in the $`(T,j)`$ plane. A close examination of Fig. 3 provides some indication about the general behavior of this line. Indeed, it can be seen that both samples B and C do not exhibit a strictly homogeneous regime and that the region close to their bottom boundary tends to be in the fluid flow regime. This is because, due to edge effects, the average screening current density tends to be larger in this region. As a consequence, we may now propose a schematic phase diagram for flux motion, where we have added the disorder strength as a third dimension. These observations are not easily compared to the theoretical expectations for driven lattices (led98  and refs therein). First, models investigate the case of a weak random potential, which is not adequate here, unless the matching field greatly exceeds the applied magnetic field and $`\sigma 1`$. Then, the two dimensional, non zero temperature case for the random potential is far less documented than the three dimensional oneled98 . We may simply notice that the measured activation energy at the crossover is close to the plastic energy barrier (i.e. the barrier experienced by a moving interstitial defect) $`U_{pl}\epsilon _0/2\sqrt{3}\pi 0.4U_0`$ (Fig. 2)blatter94  and that it is likely that this condition holds all along the crossover line. Indeed, energy barriers larger than $`U_{pl}`$ cannot be allowed by decoupled vortex flow channels and larger barriers can be sustained only by the coupling of these channels in the fluid flow regime. Finally, we would like to compare with real relaxation experiments. The main difficulty in realizing the situation described by our simulations comes from the presence, in real crystals, of naturally grown point defects. Indeed, as-grown crystals invariably exhibit at low temperature high critical current. In the highly anisotropic Bi2212 material, screening current as large as $`10^{10}Am^2`$ is observed at low temperature. The introduction of strong pinning centers, such as columnar defects, does however induce a sizeable increase of flux line pinning at low temperature (almost one order of magnitude for the critical current density at 4.2 K in Ref.moshchalkov94 , at a dose $`B_\varphi =20kG`$). From this, it may be concluded that natural defects are weak or dilute enough, so as to be overcome by the introduction of extra columnar defects, and that irradiated crystals might provide a situation close to the one described here. An expected signature for the crossover is a weaker temperature dependence of the (relaxed) screening current in the fluid flow regime - as compared to the plastic one - due to the increase of the energy barrier in this regime. A sharp change is indeed observed in the temperature dependence of the relaxed screening current, for both as-grown and irradiated samples, although this has been interpreted as the signature of the crossover between small and large bundles regime in the first case, and depinning from the defects in the second onemoshchalkov94 . We believe that a decisive test should be the measurement of the energy barriers at this point and the comparison with the one for the plastic mechanism.

## 4 Conclusion

We have studied the crossover between the fluid flow and the plastic regimes of the critical state dynamics for a two dimensional flux lattice, with strong pinning sites corresponding to a matching field twice the applied field. Following a smooth trajectory in the $`(T,j)`$ diagram, we find that the transverse displacement of the vortex trajectory rises abruptly as this trajectory crosses the crossover line. There, the apparent activation energy for flux motion is close to the plastic energy barrier and increases strongly in the fluid flow regime. We point out strong similarities between these results and the sharp crossover observed in the temperature dependence of the screening current density for as-grown and irradiated Bi2212.


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# A proper motion study of the globular cluster M10

## 1 Introduction

Globular clusters are important tracers of the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Milky Way. Since the orbits of globular clusters may have kept their characteristics from the early times of the formation of the Milky Way, we may extract from their kinematics some clues for the understanding of the origin of the Milky Way. However so far for only some 40 globular clusters absolute proper motions exist (Dinescu et al. 1999), which partly are of low quality (e.g. Dauphole et al. 1996). Nevertheless on the basis of a sample of 26 globular clusters Dauphole et al. (1996) found an indication of a metallicity gradient among the halo clusters and a mean rotation of about +40 km s-1 for the complete globular cluster sample. Additional data especial for southern clusters were determined by Dinescu et al. (1999 and references herein).

The results of the Hipparcos mission offer new possibilities for the determination of absolute proper motions of globular clusters and other objects of interest for galactic kinematics. Since previous studies have used mainly extragalactic objects as proper motion zero points, the use of Hipparcos reference stars offers a unique possibility for the determination of absolute proper motions at low galactic latitutes without suitable extragalactic background objects. Geffert et al. (1997) have determined absolute proper motions of 10 globular clusters with respect to Hipparcos. These were combined with data of 5 other clusters and the kinematics of this sample was studied by Brosche et al. (1997) and Odenkirchen et al. (1997). A complete discussion of these data together with additional proper motions was given recently in Dinescu et al. (1999).

M10 is a globular cluster located very near to the direction to the galactic center ($`l=15^{}`$, $`b=23^{}`$), but at a distance of only 4.3 kpc from the Sun. Due to its metallicity of $`[\text{Fe/H}]=1.52`$dex (Harris 1996) it belongs to the halo group of clusters according to Zinn’s (1985) classification. The preliminary kinematical data of M10 (Geffert et al. 1997) indicate a disk like motion, the most disk like motion found in the group of globular clusters, whose proper motions were determined using Hipparcos (Odenkirchen et al. 1997). However, this preliminary proper motion has the problem that only three to four Hipparcos stars could be used for the reduction of the plates. This made the previous solution very uncertain. Here we have included new photographic material (from Shanghai) and recent CCD observations to get a new determination of the absolute proper motion of M10. Moreover, we use in addition to the Hipparcos catalogue the ACT catalogue (Urban et al. 1998). The ACT catalogue, due to its denser coverage of the sky, allows the use of more reference stars for the determination of the absolute proper motions.

## 2 Observations and the reduction

Table 1 lists the photographic plates used in this work, while Table 2 indicates the observational data of the CCD frames. The plates were taken either with the ($`D=0.3`$m, $`f=5.1`$m) double refractor of Bonn, now located at Hoher List observatory, or with the ($`D=0.4`$m, $`f=7`$m) refractor of Shanghai. The CCD frames were taken with the WWFPP camera (Reif et al. 1994) at the 1.23 m telescope at Calar Alto and with a similar camera (HoLiCam) at Hoher List observatory. The use of the complete material allows a nearly uniform coverage of the epoch difference of 92 years. The limiting magnitude of the plates is of the order of $`V=15.5`$mag, while the corresponding one of the CCD frames ranges from $`V=16`$ to 19 mag. The refractor plates of Bonn were mainly scanned at the PDS 2020GM of University of Münster. The plates R1874 and R1875 with lower limiting magnitude have been measured at the ASCORECORD of Hoher List observatory. On these plates only 80 stars for each plate were measured. Stars were extracted and rectangular coordinates $`x`$ and $`y`$ were determined from the PDS measurements using standard procedures (e.g. Tucholke 1994). The first epoch plates of the Bonn refractor contained scratches and reseau lines, which led to problems for a significant number of the stars. Therefore for some of these stars no rectangular coordinates could be obtained. The plates from Shanghai were scanned at the PDS 1010MS of the Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of sciences (see also Wang et al. 1999).

The determination of the rectangular coordinates $`x`$, $`y`$ of the stars on the CCD frames was performed for the observations from Hoher List by standard CCD reduction techniques (DAOPHOT, IRAF) routines. Magnitudes, $`x`$ and $`y`$ positions were determined via PSF fit. The observations from Calar Alto were reduced earlier (Geffert et al. 1994) by the IMEX routine of the IRAF program package.

The astrometric reduction was performed by a central overlap algorithm. Due to the small field of the CCD frames we had to use only the plates in the first step of the reduction. A catalogue of positions and proper motions of 450 stars was established in this first step. In the following steps of the reduction the CCD frames were included. While for the plates only quadratic polynomials of the rectangular coordinates had to be taken into account, third order polynomials were necessary for the reduction of the CCD frames. The third order polynomials for the reduction of the CCD frames had to be used due to the distortion of the optics of the focal reducer of the WWFPP camera (Geffert et al. 1994). From the different position and time pairs we determined for each star for a certain epoch the mean position and the proper motion using least squares technique. All stars with proper motion errors larger than 4 mas/yr were omitted. The final catalogue contains 532 positions and proper motions of stars in the region of M10. The median of the internal errors was about $`\pm 1`$mas/yr. From a plot of the proper motions versus magnitude no magnitude equation was found in our data.

We have performed two independent reductions of the M10 data with reference stars from Hipparcos (ESA 1997) and the ACT catalogue (Urban et al. 1998). Although the Hipparcos stars proper motions are more accurate, they seemed to be of only limited usefulness for our work, since the majority of the plates contained only four Hipparcos stars, while about 17 stars could be used from the ACT catalogue. Therefore we consider both solutions as equivalent. Table 3 (the complete table is available in electronic form) gives the catalogue of our positions and proper motions for the complete field with respect to the ACT catalogue. The limiting magnitude of this catalogue is about $`V=15.5`$mag, which corresponds to the limiting magnitude of the first epoch plates. The size of the field is approximately $`75\times \mathrm{\hspace{0.33em}75}\mathrm{arcmin}^2`$ centered on M10. We chose the ACT solution for the catalogue in Table 3. The proper motions may be transfered to the Hipparcos system by adding $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _\alpha \mathrm{cos}\delta =1.5`$mas/yr and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mu _\delta =+0.1`$mas/yr to the proper motions from Table 3. For the determination of the membership we will also use the solution based on the ACT catalogue, while for the determination of the absolute proper motion of M10 we will take the mean of both solutions.

## 3 On the astrometric accuracy of the Hoher List CCD frames

CCDs have been used in astrometry since several years, e.g. for the determination of parallaxes, double stars and for meridian circle observations (see references in Geffert 1998). However most of these observations are based on CCD observations with fields of $`(10\mathrm{})^2`$ and smaller. Since our study uses CCD observations of fields with a size at least 20′$`\times `$20′ it seems necessary to evaluate the accuracy, which may be obtained with such telescope detector combinations. While the CCD frames of Calar Alto were already tested in an earlier study (Geffert et al. 1994), we will concentrate here on the Hoher List observations.

In a first step we have compared positions of stars from pairs of CCD frames. The positions of one frame were transformed by an affine transformation to a second frame and the rms of the differences were calculated for each coordinate. Under the assumption that both frames contribute with equal weight to the differences, we have calculated from the rms the mean uncertainty of one position on one frame. These are given in Table 4 for several CCD pairs with nearly identical limiting magnitudes. In this comparison we included all stars which were detected on the CCD frames.

In a second test we consider only the stars which contribute to the final catalogue of our investigation. These are stars at the brighter end of the magnitude distribution. Reducing the plates with one catalogue (ACT or Hipparcos) leads to positions of the stars of each plate/CCD frame in a common system. The position and proper motion of each star in our final solution described in Sect. 2 are determined by a fit to the positions and epochs of the different plates/CCD frames for each star. The mean position and proper motion of each star is then used to update the positions of each star for the epoch of the individual plates/CCD frames. For each plate the mean and rms of the positional differences from the initial positions are determined. The rms will give an indication of the accuracy of each individual plate/CCD frame. Table 5 summarizes for the Hoher List frames the mean and standard deviations for each frame.

Table 5 shows a slight difference in the $`B`$ and $`V`$ frames of the order of a few mas. Nevertheless the systematic deviations between the $`B`$ and $`V`$ frames are small. The positional accuracy of each star is of the order of one tenth of a pixel. This value is a little bit larger with respect to other studies (e.g. Geffert 1998). The reason may be the crowding in the region of M10. In general, the accuracy of one single frame is of the order of the accuracy of one refractor plate, which justfies the use of CCD frames for the second epoch observation.

## 4 Separation of cluster and field stars

Figure 1 gives the vector-point-plot diagram of all our proper motions indicating the concentration of the cluster stars. For the separation of cluster and field stars we have concentrated our investigation on stars up to the limiting radius of 14$`\mathrm{}`$ (Webbink 1988) around the cluster centre. 284 stars remained in the data sample. For these stars a bivariate Gaussian fitting to the proper motions was performed using the method of Sanders (1971). Table 6 gives the result of the analysis. The cluster standard deviations are larger than the internal errors of the proper motion. This difference is clearly not an indication of a possible detection of internal motions of stars in the cluster. More likely these differences are caused by crowding effects and undetected systematic errors of the different telescopes used in this investigation.

M10 is a globular cluster with three slow variable stars (Clement et al. 1985) and several UV bright stars (Zinn et al. 1972; Harris et al. 1983). Our sample contains only the variable stars V2 and V3 (see references in Clement et al. 1985). The other special stars are located in crowded regions, below the limiting magnitude, or exhibit too large proper motion errors. Both variable stars V2, V3 have according to our investigation a membership probability of 97%. This confirms the earlier suggestion (Clement et al. 1985) that these stars are of W-Virginis type, although V3 has a very unusual period of 7.8 days.

## 5 The space motion of M10

The first absolute proper motion of M10 based on the Hipparcos system was given in Geffert et al. (1997), which was later used in Odenkirchen et al. (1997) and Dinescu et al. (1999). However, as mentioned in Odenkirchen et al. (1997), the result of M10 was only preliminary due to the small number of Hipparcos stars used for the reduction of the plates. The use of additional plates from Shanghai has led to a significant lower proper motion in declination. However, even for this sample of plates the solution is only moderately stable: Omitting one reference star leads to an absolute proper motion of M10, which differs from the original solution by about more than the mean uncertainties of the absolute proper motions. Fortunately, this is not the case for the denser ACT catalogue. In summary, the use of the ACT catalogue resulted in a more stable solution, while the use of Hipparcos stars provided the more direct link to an extragalactic reference frame. The catalogues based on the ACT catalogue (Urban et al. 1998) and on the Hipparcos catalogue (ESA 1997) contributed therefore with equal weight to the final absolute proper motion of the globular cluster M10. We obtained a mean absolute proper motion of $`\mu _\alpha \mathrm{cos}\delta =5.5\pm 1.2`$mas/yr and $`\mu _\delta =6.2\pm 1.2`$mas/yr. Together with the distance from the Sun of 4.3 kpc and a radial velocity of $`+76`$ km s-1 (Harris 1996) we have calculated the velocity components in a system of galactic standard at rest ($`U`$,$`V`$,$`W`$), peri– and apogalactic distances $`R_\mathrm{p}`$, $`R_\mathrm{a}`$, eccentricity $`e`$ and the $`z`$-component of the angular momentum of the orbit using a simple logarithmic galactic mass model (see e.g. Dauphole et al. 1996). These data are shown in Table 7. Figure 2 gives the orbit of M10 integrated over 10 Gyr backwards according to the method of Allen & Santillán (1991) using the programme of Odenkirchen et al. (1997).

## 6 Discussion

Our results demonstrate the importance of the new astrometric catalogues (Hipparcos, ACT) for the determination of absolute proper motions of objects located in the galactic plane. For these objects no extragalactic link of the proper motion system is available due to the absense of suitable objects. We show that the differences between the solutions based on the ACT catalogue and the corresponding one based on the Hipparcos catalogue are small. Although this result has to be checked using data of other fields, it would offer a range of applications for the ACT catalogue because of its larger number of stars. Moreover, even reaching only moderate accuracy on the wide field CCD frames with respect to small field CCD observations, our results indicate that these observations may supersede the photographic plates in near future.

The new data of M10 show an eccentricity of the orbit of 0.41, which would place the cluster now in the range of eccentricities from 0.4 to 0.8 found for the majority of the globular clusters (Odenkirchen et al. 1997). The rotational velocity changed to $`\mathrm{\Theta }=+111\pm 17`$ km s-1 with respect to the $`+144`$ km s-1 found in Odenkirchen et al. (1997). According to its moderate eccentricity and rotational velocity, M10 belongs rather to the halo class of objects. This is in line with its metallicity. However, the $`z`$-distance from the galactic plane does not exceed 3 kpc, which would be more characteristic for a thick disk object.

As noted already in Dinescu et al. (1999) recent age determinations (Hurley et al. 1989; Richer et al. 1996; Chaboyer et al. 1996; Buonano et al. 1998) agree that M10 is an old halo cluster. Together with NGC 6626, NGC 6752 (Dinescu et al. 1999) and M71, which has according to Geffert & Maintz (2000) a much higher age, M10 establishes a group of high age globular clusters with orbits of a disk or thick disk character. This result would imply that at the time when the oldest globular clusters were born, the Milky Way had already a gas distribution with a disk component, where the gas enabled the formation of clusters. On the other hand the recent age determination by Rosenberg et al. (1999) places M10 in the middle of the age distribution of globular clusters.

Piotto & Zoccali (1999) have found an unusual steep luminosity function of M10 in comparison with other clusters. Our data indicate that this luminosity function was generated more likely by internal dynamics of the cluster than by the motion in the Galaxy. If the luminosity function would be affected by the crossing of the cluster through the galactic plane, one would rather expect a more flat luminosity function for M10 due to the evaporation of faint stars as it was found recently for the globular cluster NGC 6712 (De Marchi et al. 1999).

###### Acknowledgements.

We are indebted to H.-J. Tucholke (Bonn) for measuring some of the refractor plates. It is a pleasure to thank K.S. de Boer (Bonn) for helpful discussions. This research has made use of the Simbad database (see Wenger et al. 2000), operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France.


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# 1 Introduction

## 1 Introduction

Statistical mechanics predicts macroscopic laws exhibiting ordering and regularities in the behavior of systems made by a large number of components. Schrödinger, however, points out that such ”regularities only in the average” of statistical origin are not enough to explain the high stability and the high degree of ordering of living matter. Pretending to explain the biological stability in terms of the regularities of statistical origin would be the ”classical physicist’s expectation”, that ”far from being trivial, is wrong” . Schrödinger makes the distinction between ordering generated by the ”statistical mechanisms” and ordering generated by ”dynamical” quantum (necessarily quantum!) interactions among the atoms and the molecules. Such a distinction between the ”two ways of producing orderliness” is of crucial relevance in the study of living matter and of brain. In such a line of thought has to be framed the quantum model of brain originally proposed by Ricciardi and Umezawa in 1967  and further developed by Stuart, Takahashi and Umezawa  (see also ). To a similar framework also belongs the dynamical model for living matter based on the boson condensation mechanism, proposed by H. Fröhlich  in the middle of the 1960s. The Fröhlich model was further developed in the 1980s thus leading to the quantum field theory (QFT) approach to living matter .

In the 1960s, the theory of the dynamical generation of macroscopic ordered states in many body physics was developed and experimentally tested in the observations on superconductors, ferromagnets, superfluids, crystals. Such a theory is based on the key mechanism of the spontaneous breakdown of symmetry in QFT by which long range correlations (the Nambu-Goldstone (NG) boson modes) are dynamically generated . On the other hand, it was already experimentally well established, since Lashley’s and Pribram’s  pioneering work, that many functional activities of the brain involve extended assembly of neurons. On this basis, Pribram introduced concepts of Quantum Optics, such as holography, in brain modeling . In the brain, information is indeed observed to be spatially uniform. While the activity of the single neuron is experimentally observed in form of discrete and stochastic pulse trains and point processes, the “macroscopic” activity of large assembly of neurons appears to be spatially coherent and highly structured in phase and amplitude . The quantum model of brain is firmly founded on such an experimental evidence. The model is in fact primarily aimed to the description of non-locality of brain functions, especially of memory storing and recalling. The mathematical formalism in which the model is formulated is the one of QFT. The motivation for using such a formalism is explained by Umezawa in one of his last papers : ”In any material in condensed matter physics any particular information is carried by certain ordered pattern maintained by certain long range correlation mediated by massless quanta. It looked to me that this is the only way to memorize some information; memory is a printed pattern of order supported by long range correlations…If I could know what kind of correlation, I would be able to write down the Hamiltonian, bringing the brain science to the level of condensed matter physics.” In the model the ”dynamical variables” are not the neurons and the other cells (Stuart, Takahashi and Umezawa have observed , with a pleasant sense of humor, that ”it is difficult to consider neurons as quantum objects”), but they are identified  with those of the electrical dipole vibrational field of the water molecules  and of other biomolecules present in the brain structures, and with the ones of the associated NG modes, named the dipole wave quanta (dwq) . The model exhibits interesting features related with the rôle of microtubules in the brain activity  and its extension to dissipative dynamics  allows a huge memory capacity. The dissipative quantum model has been investigated  also in relation with the modeling of neural networks exhibiting long range correlation among the net units. The parametric extension of the model has been also considered .

In the following we briefly review some aspects of the dissipative parametric quantum model. For sake of shortness we omit mathematical details. These are reported in the quoted literature.

## 2 The quantum model of brain and dissipation

In QFT spontaneous breakdown of symmetry occurs when the dynamical equations are invariant under some group, say $`G`$, of continuous transformations, but the minimum energy state (the ground state or vacuum) of the system is not invariant under the full group $`G`$. In such a case the vacuum is an ordered state and massless particles (the NG bosons), also called collective modes, are dynamically generated and acting as long range correlations . Propagating over the whole system, they are the carriers of the ordering information: order manifests itself as a global property which is dynamically generated. For example, the magnetic order in ferromagnets is a diffused, i.e. macroscopic, feature of the system. In this way in QFT it is possible to describe ”macroscopic quantum systems”.

Since the collective mode is a massless particle, its presence (condensation) in the vacuum does not add energy to it: the stability of the ordering is thus insured. As a further consequence, infinitely many vacua with different degrees of order may exist, corresponding to different densities of the condensate. In the infinite volume limit they are each other physically (unitarily) inequivalent and thus they represent possible physical phases of the system. The actual phase in which the system sits is determined by some external agent, acting as a trigger of the symmetry breakdown. The observable specifying the ordered state, called order parameter, acts as a macroscopic variable since the collective modes manifest a coherent dynamical behavior. The order parameter is specific of the kind of symmetry into play and its value may be considered as a code specifying the vacuum.

The conclusion is that stable long range correlation and diffuse, nonlocal properties related with a code specifying the system state are dynamical features of quantum origin.

We remark that the von Neumann theorem in quantum mechanics (QM) states that all the representations of the canonical commutation relations are unitary (and therefore physically) equivalent in systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom. In QFT, where the number of degrees of freedom is infinite, the von Neumann theorem does not hold and infinitely many unitarily inequivalent representations exist. It is because of the existence of such inequivalent representations that dynamically generated ordering may exist in a stable state in QFT.

In the quantum model of brain  memory recording is represented by the ordering induced in the ground state by the condensation of NG modes dynamically generated through the breakdown of the rotational symmetry of the electrical dipoles of the water molecules. They are the dipole wave quanta (dwq). The trigger of the symmetry breakdown is the external informational input. The ”code” classifying the recorded information is identified with the ”order parameter”. The recall mechanism is described as the excitation of dwq from the ground state under the action of an external imput similar to the one which has previously produced the memory recording.

The high stability of memory demands that the long range correlation modes (the dwq) must be in the lowest energy state (the ground state), which also guarantees that memory is easily created and readily excited in the recall process. The long range correlation must also be quite robust in order to survive against the constant state of electrochemical excitation of the brain and the continual response to external stimulation. It can be shown  that the time scale associated with the coherent interaction in the QFT of electrical dipole fields for water molecules is of the order of $`10^{14}`$ $`sec`$, thus much shorter than times associated with short range interactions, and therefore these effects are well protected against thermal fluctuations. At the same time, the brain electrochemical activity must be coupled to the correlation modes. It is indeed the electrochemical activity observed by neurophysiology that provides a first response to external stimuli. The brain is then modeled  as a ”mixed” system involving two separate but interacting levels. The memory level is a (macroscopic) quantum dynamical level, the electrochemical activity is at a classical level.

Note that vacua labeled by different code numbers are accessible only through a sequence of phase transitions form one to another one of them. This process destroys previously stored information (overprinting). This problem of memory capacity arises because in the model there is only one kind of code number since only one kind of symmetry is assumed (the dipole rotational symmetry). In order to avoid overprinting a huge number of symmetries (a huge number of codes)  could be assumed. This would introduce serious difficulties and spoil the model practical use.

However, the memory capacity can be enormously enlarged  by considering the intrinsic dissipative character of the brain dynamics (the brain is an open system continuously coupled to the environment). In fact, let us denote the dwq variables by $`A_k`$ and recall that the canonical formalism for dissipative systems  requires the introduction of a “mirror” set of dynamical variables, say $`\stackrel{~}{A}_k`$, describing the environment. The number $`𝒩_A`$ for all $`k`$ of $`A_k`$-modes, condensed in the vacuum $`|0>_𝒩`$, constitutes the “code” of the information. The crucial point of dissipative dynamics is that the vacuum state is now defined to be the state in which the difference $`𝒩_A𝒩_{\stackrel{~}{A}}`$ for all $`k`$ is zero. Thus we see that there are infinitely many vacua, each one corresponding to a different value of the code $`𝒩_A`$. Moreover, each of these states is unitarily inequivalent to the other ones, and thus “protected” from unwanted interferences with other memory states. The ”brain (ground) state” is then represented as the collection (or the superposition) of the full set of memory states $`|0>_𝒩`$, for all $`𝒩`$.

The brain is thus described as a complex system with a huge number of macroscopic quantum states (the memory states). The dissipative dynamics introduces $`𝒩`$-coded ”replicas” of the system and information printing can be performed in each replica without reciprocal destructive interference. A huge memory capacity is thus achieved .

## 3 The parametric extension of the dissipative model

In the parametric dissipative model the dwq frequency is assumed to be time-dependent . Remarkably, it is found that in such a case the couple of equations describing the dwq $`A`$ and the “doubled” modes $`\stackrel{~}{A}`$ is equivalent to the spherical Bessel equation of order $`n`$ ($`n`$ integer or zero) .

The coupled system $`A\stackrel{~}{A}`$ is then found to be described by a parametric oscillator of frequency $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n(k,t)`$. The time-dependence of this frequency means that energy is not conserved in time and therefore that the $`A\stackrel{~}{A}`$ system does not constitute a ”closed” system. However, when $`n\mathrm{}`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$ approaches to a constant, i.e. energy is conserved and the $`A\stackrel{~}{A}`$ system gets ”closed” in such a limit. Thus, as $`n\mathrm{}`$ the possibilities of the system $`A`$ to couple to $`\stackrel{~}{A}`$ (the environment) are ”saturated”: the system $`A`$ gets fully coupled to $`\stackrel{~}{A}`$. This suggests that $`n`$ represents the number of links between $`A`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{A}`$. When $`n`$ is not very large (infinity), the system $`A`$ (the brain) has not fulfilled its capability to establish links with the external world. We also have that $`n`$ “graduates” the rate of variations in time of the frequency, i.e. the ”rapidity” of the system response to external stimuli.

In order that memory recording may occur, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n(k,t)`$ has to be real. Such a condition is satisfied only in a limited span of time $`T_{k,n}`$. For fixed $`k`$, $`T_{k,n}`$ grows linearly in $`n`$, which means that the time span useful for memory recording (the ability of memory storing) grows as the number of links with the external world grows: more the system is ”open” to the external world (more are the links), better it can memorize (high ability of learning).

The reality condition also implies that only modes with $`k`$ greater or equal to a threshold $`\stackrel{~}{k}(n,t)`$ can be recorded. Such a kind of ”sensibility” to external stimuli also depends on some characteristic parameter $`L`$ of the system.

This intrinsic infrared cut-off in turn implies that only wave-lengths $`\lambda \stackrel{~}{\lambda }\frac{1}{\stackrel{~}{k}(n,t)}`$ are allowed: thus (coherent) domains of sizes less or equal to $`\stackrel{~}{\lambda }`$ are involved in the memory recording. Such a cut-off shrinks in time for a given $`n`$. On the other hand, a growth of $`n`$ opposes to such a shrinking. These cut-off changes correspondingly reflect on the memory domain sizes. It is thus expected that, for given $`n`$, ”more impressive” is the external stimulus, i.e. greater is the number of high $`k`$ momentum excitations produced in the brain, more ”focused” is the ”locus” of the memory.

The finiteness of the size of the domains implies that transitions through different vacuum states at given $`t`$ become possible. As a consequence, both the phenomena of association of memories and of confusion of memories, which would be avoided in the regime of strict unitary inequivalence among vacua (i.e. in the infinitely long wave-length regime), are possible .

We also find that modes with larger $`k`$ have a ”longer” life with reference to time $`t`$. Only modes satisfying the reality condition are present at certain time $`t`$, being the other ones decayed (Fig. 1 and 2). This introduces an hierarchical organization of memories depending on their life-time: memories with a specific spectrum of $`k`$ mode components may coexist, some of them ”dying” before, some other ones persisting longer. The sizes of the associated memory domains are correspondingly larger or smaller.

## 4 Conclusions

The results presented above appear to fit qualitatively well with the physiological observations  that more the brain relates to external environment, more neuronal connections will form. We are referring to functional or effective connectivity, as opposed to the structural or anatomical one. While the last one can be described as quasi-stationary, the former one is highly dynamic with modulation time-scales in the range of hundreds of milliseconds . These functional connections may quickly change and new configurations of connections may be formed extending over a domain including a larger or a smaller number of neurons. Such a picture finds a possible description in our model, where the coherent domain formation, size and life-time depend on the number of links that the brain sets with its environment and on internal parameters.

The finiteness of the domain size implies a non-zero effective mass of the dwq. These therefore propagate with a greater “inertia” than in the case of infinite volume where they are massless. The domain correlations are consequently established with a certain time-delay. This appears to agree with the physiological observation that the recruitment of neurons in a correlated assembly is achieved with a certain delay after the external stimulus action . The dwq effective non-zero mass also acts as a threshold in the excitation energy of dwq so that, in order to trigger the recall process an energy supply equal or greater than such a threshold is required. When the energy supply is lower than threshold a ”difficulty in recalling” may be experienced. At the same time, however, the threshold may positively act as a ”protection” against unwanted perturbations (including thermalization) and cooperate to the stability of the memory state. In the case of zero threshold (infinite size domain) any replication signal could excite the recalling and the brain would fall in a state of ”continuous flow of memories” .

Finally, note that after information has been recorded, memory stability implies that the brain cannot be brought to the state in which it was before the information printing occurred (Now, you know it!…). Thus, the same fact of getting information introduces a partition in the time evolution, it introduces the distinction between the past and the future, a distinction which did not exist before the information recording (the psychological the arrow of time).

In fact, the main feature of dissipative quantization is that at each time $`t`$ the system ground state $`|0(t)>`$ is labeled by $`t`$ (“foliation”), so that at $`t^{}t`$ the ground state $`|0(t^{})>`$ is unitary inequivalent to $`|0(t)>`$: in its time evolution the system runs over unitarily inequivalent representations. Such a non-unitary time evolution is found to be controlled by the entropy variation rate, as expected since dissipation implies irreversibility . The psychological arrow of time thus naturally emerges in the dissipative quantum model. Moreover, the system ground state is found to be a thermal state , and the psychological arrow of time is actually concord  with the thermodynamical arrow of time and with the cosmological arrow of time (defined by the expanding Universe direction) .