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# Fractional power-law conductivity in SrRuO3 and its consequences

## Abstract

We combine the results of terahertz time-domain spectroscopy with far-infrared transmission and reflectivity to obtain the conductivity of SrRuO3 over an unprecedented continuous range in frequency, allowing us to characterize the approach to zero frequency as a function of temperature. We show that the conductivity follows a simple phenomenological form, with an analytic structure fundamentally different from that predicted by the standard theory of metals.

One of the most exciting proposals to emerge from the study of high-$`T_c`$ superconductors is that Landau’s Fermi liquid theory (FLT) breaks down in the metallic state above $`T_c`$ Anderson1987 . This would have profound implications, since FLT provides the foundation for our current understanding of metals, together with systems as diverse as liquid 3He and nuclear matter PineNoz . Evidence for its breakdown in high-$`T_c`$ superconductors comes from a variety of experiments, including photoemission, electrical transport and optics Orenstein2000 . More recently similar evidence has been found in other compounds Imada1998 . Here we show that the complex optical conductivity $`\sigma (\omega ,T)`$ of one such material, the ferromagnetic metal SrRuO3 Bozovic1994 ; Klein1996l ; Klein1996r ; Kostic1998 , behaves according to a remarkably simple power-law form, which deviates sharply from the prediction of FLT. This observation provides valuable insight into the nature of charge scattering in unconventional metals.

According to FLT, the qualitative properties of an interacting electron gas are the same as those of a noninteracting gas, if probed on a sufficiently low-energy scale. The optical conductivity of a system of noninteracting, charge $`e`$ carriers obeys the Drude form, $`\sigma (\omega )=(ne^2/m)/(1/\tau i\omega )`$, where $`n`$ is the carrier density and $`m`$ and $`\tau `$ are the effective mass and scattering time of the carriers. FLT predicts that $`\sigma `$ at low $`\omega `$ remains of the Drude form in the presence of interactions, with a spectral weight which decreases as interactions increase. The f -sum rule dictates that the total spectral weight is conserved, so that spectral weight must shift to higher energies. This additional component to $`\sigma (\omega )`$ is known as the incoherent part of the intraband conductivity.

Infrared reflectivity studies indicate that both high-$`T_c`$ superconductors and SrRuO3 exhibit conductivity with an anomalous power-law dependence on frequency, $`\sigma _1(\omega )\omega ^\alpha `$, with $`\alpha 0.5`$ for SrRuO3 Kostic1998  and $`\alpha 0.7`$ in the high-$`T_c`$ materials Schlesinger1990 ; ElAzrak1994 . The Drude form yields $`\sigma _1\omega ^2`$ at comparable frequencies. If FLT is valid, the conductivity in excess of Drude must be identified with interband transitions or the incoherent component of the spectrum, and there must be a crossover at lower frequency to the renormalized Drude conductivity Tanner1992 ; Georges1996 .

Recently, Ioffe and Millis suggested that the entire conductivity spectrum of the high-$`T_c`$ materials could be understood as a single component, rather than two, as in FLT Ioffe1998 . The spectrum they derived was generalized by van der Marel to the following useful form vanderMarel1999 ,

$$\sigma (\omega )=\frac{A}{(1/\tau i\omega )^\alpha },$$
(1)
where $`A`$ is a parameter with units that depend on the value of $`\alpha `$. Ioffe and Millis obtained $`\alpha =1/2`$ by assuming that the carrier lifetime depends strongly on its direction of motion Carrington1992 ; Hlubina1995 ; Stojkovic1996 ; Xiang2000 . In the limit $`1/\tau 0`$, Eq. 1 is similar to one derived by Anderson Anderson1997 , under different assumptions. Note that Eq. 1 includes the Drude form as a special case, with $`\alpha =1`$. In allowing $`\alpha `$ to deviate from unity, we obtain the observed power law dependence of the conductivity on frequency. However, we also subvert a standard assumption of transport physics, that the conductivity at $`\omega =0`$ is proportional to a scattering time. Instead, the dc conductivity is proportional to a fractional power of a scattering time, that is, $`\sigma _{dc}=A\tau ^\alpha `$. Moreover, the analytical structure of $`\sigma (\omega )`$ changes, from having a simple pole at $`\omega =i/\tau `$, to being multiple-valued with a branch point there.

Although the models described above are distinct, they may be difficult to distinguish experimentally if the Drude component predicted by FLT is masked by the incoherent conductivity. The most stringent test of FLT is at low temperature, where the Drude component, if one exists, would be sharpest. In the cuprates, the temperature range over which the normal state conductivity can be studied is limited by the onset of superconductivity. The absence of superconductivity in SrRuO3 permits a much more meaningful test of FLT than previously available.

We find that $`\sigma (\omega ,T)`$ of SrRuO3 at low temperature is described well by Eq. 1 over nearly three decades in $`\omega `$ (6–2400 cm-1) with $`\alpha 0.4`$, in strong disagreement with FLT. Our results at frequencies below 100 cm-1 were obtained from transmission measurements on thin film samples of SrRuO3 grown epitaxially on NdGaO3 substrates AhnPhD ; Eom1992 . To probe the region where $`\omega 1/\tau `$, we used conventional Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy to measure the transmittance ($`𝒯`$). For the range $`\omega 1/\tau `$, we used time-domain terahertz spectroscopy (TDTHz) to measure the complex transmission amplitude $`t(\omega ,T)`$ in the millimeter wave region of the spectrum. The residual resistivity in these films is typically 50 $`\mu \mathrm{\Omega }`$cm. SrTiO3 substrates produce SrRuO3 films with lower resistance, but this substrate material has such a large temperature-dependent dielectric constant that an accurate determination of the conductivity from transmission measurements is prohibitively difficult. At frequencies above 100 cm-1, we measure the reflectivity from a thick film of SrRuO3 deposited on a SrTiO3 substrate Kostic1998 . We have derived $`\sigma (\omega ,T)`$ from each of these measurements, as described below.

We use TDTHz to measure the complex transmission amplitude $`t(\omega )`$ of SrRuO3 in the range 0.2–1.2 THz (6–36 cm-1Nuss1998 . We compared the SrRuO3 film on its substrate to a bare NdGaO3 substrate at each temperature, using a vapor flow cryostat with a translating sample mount. The ratio of the two complex transmission amplitudes, $`t_{sr}(\omega )=t_{sample}(\omega )/t_{ref}(\omega )`$, is a simple function of the substrate index $`n`$, $`\sigma (\omega )`$ of the film, and the film thickness $`d`$:

$$t_{sr}(\omega )=\frac{n+1}{n+1+\sigma (\omega )Z_0d}.$$
(2)
$`Z_0`$ is the impedance of free space. We inverted Eq. 2 to obtain both the amplitude and phase of the complex conductivity as a function of temperature and frequency, which we show in Fig. 1 for our most thoroughly studied SrRuO3 film.

Also shown are the results of the best fit to Eq. 1 with $`\alpha =0.4`$, following the procedure described below. The statistical error on a typical measurement of the conductivity phase $`\varphi _\sigma (\omega ,T)=\mathrm{arg}[\sigma (\omega ,T)]`$ is $`\pm 0.02`$ rad at 1 THz, two orders of magnitude better than that obtained in typical reflectivity measurements at this frequency. The temperature dependence of the effective path length in the substrate and cryostat windows provides the largest source of systematic error, which we estimate to be less than $`\pm 0.03`$ rad at 1 THz. Errors in the measurement of the conductivity amplitude are dominated by statistical uncertainty in the transmission amplitude, which is typically $`\pm 3`$%.

To obtain an objective best fit of Eq. 1 to the TDTHz measurements, we first perform a least-squares fit of the measured conductivity phase to $`\varphi (\omega )=\alpha \mathrm{tan}^1(\omega \tau )`$ at each temperature, for several values of $`\alpha `$. This allows us to determine $`\tau (T;\alpha )`$, the best fit value of $`\tau `$ for each temperature, with different assumed values of $`\alpha `$. Unlike a global fit to $`\sigma (\omega )`$, this procedure is independent of the conductivity amplitude. Next we performed a separate least-squares fit of the amplitude to $`|\sigma (\omega )|=A/(1/\tau ^2+\omega ^2)^{\alpha /2}`$, using the $`\tau =\tau (T;\alpha )`$ from the phase fits and allowing only $`A`$ to vary. The quality of these fits ReducedChi  are shown as a function of $`\alpha `$ in the inset to Fig. 1. The phase fits exhibit a weak optimum at $`\alpha =0.4`$, with a sharp decrease in quality below $`\alpha =0.3`$ but with relatively little change in quality as $`\alpha `$ increases from 0.4 to unity. The amplitude fits, on the other hand, worsen dramatically as $`\alpha `$ changes from 0.3 to unity. Taken together, these fits allow us to limit the range of acceptable values for $`\alpha `$ to 0.2–0.5.

We develop this analysis further in Fig. 2, which shows a logarithmic plot of the conductivity amplitude at our lowest frequency, $`\omega _1/2\pi =0.2`$ THz, versus $`[\tau (T;\alpha )]^\alpha `$, with $`\tau `$ in femtoseconds.

The plot is parametric in temperature for several different values of $`\alpha `$. In Eq. 1, $`\sigma (\omega 0)=A\tau ^\alpha `$; if $`A`$ remains constant with temperature, Eq. 1 will yield a straight line with unity slope on this plot, indicated by the dotted line. The best fit to this slope is obtained for $`\alpha =0.4`$, and already at $`\alpha =0.6`$ a clear deviation is observed. At higher values of $`\alpha `$ the slope decreases yet further, so the case $`\alpha =1`$ corresponding to Drude conductivity requires $`A`$ to increase strongly with temperature. Thus, $`\alpha =0.4\pm .1`$ provides not only the best fit to Eq. 1, but also the most compact description of the data.

In Fig. 3 we show $`\sigma _1(\omega )`$ of SrRuO3 over two and a half decades in frequency, obtained in three separate measurements.

Data in the lowest frequency range is taken from TDTHz measurements at the same four representative temperatures shown in Fig. 1, and extends from 6–36 cm-1. In the intermediate frequency range 26–80 cm-1, we have measured $`𝒯(\omega ,T)`$, which is a real quantity and therefore incapable of providing the complex conductivity without further analysis. Using the $`\tau (T)`$ obtained from TDTHz for $`\alpha =0.4`$, we have calculated the conductivity phase expected in this frequency range at each temperature, then used these phase values to calculate the conductivity amplitude directly from $`𝒯(\omega ,T)`$. The results of this procedure are shown for the same four temperatures as the TDTHz data. The continuity of the results at the crossover frequency of these two distinct measurements may be taken as an indication of the high accuracy with which we have determined the conductivity. At frequencies probed by infrared reflectivity, the conductivity is relatively temperature independent below 100 K, and we show only one measurement taken at 40 K Kostic1998 .

With the parameters obtained from the TDTHz data, Eq. 1 may be used to predict the behavior of the conductivity at all frequencies and temperatures. The dotted lines in Fig. 3 show the conductivity calculated from Eq. 1, using the parameters obtained from TDTHz. With a single global parameter $`A`$ and a single temperature-dependent parameter $`\tau (T)`$, this model fits the data exceptionally well, at frequencies two orders of magnitude higher than those at which the parameters were obtained. As we increase the temperature above 95 K, both our measurements and earlier reflectivity measurements begin to deviate from the form discussed here, and develop a pseudogap structure which may be related to the transition from ferromagnetism to paramagnetism Kostic1998 . We leave a detailed discussion of this behavior to a later publication, limiting our discussion here to temperatures below 95 K, deep within the ferromagnetic state.

As shown in Fig. 3, $`1/\tau `$ sets the frequency scale at which the $`\omega ^\alpha `$ divergence is cut off, forcing $`\sigma _1\tau ^\alpha `$ in the dc limit. Thus the ubiquitous practice of inferring scattering times from electrical transport via $`\sigma _{dc}\tau `$ is erroneous, whenever the conductivity behaves as Eq. 1 with $`\alpha 1`$. The resistivity of SrRuO3 for 25 K $`T`$ 120 K exhibits approximately linear temperature dependence, which then crosses over at lower temperatures to become constant as impurity scattering dominates Klein1996r . In our analysis, this implies a scattering rate with at least a quadratic dependence on temperature.

A simple form which approximates the observed behavior is

$$\frac{\mathrm{}}{\tau (T)}=\frac{\mathrm{}}{\tau _0}+\frac{k_BT^2}{T_0},$$
(3)
with a temperature independent, or elastic, scattering time $`\tau _0`$ and a characteristic temperature $`T_0`$ Ioffe1998 . Here, $`\mathrm{}`$ is Planck’s constant, and $`k_B`$ Boltzmann’s constant. This gives a temperature dependent resistivity, $`\rho (T)=A+BT^2`$, observed in the highest quality films at low temperatures Mackenzie1998 . The inset to Fig. 3 shows $`\tau (T;0.4)`$ together with the best fit to Eq. 3, with $`\tau _0=198`$ fs and $`T_0=40`$ K. The agreement is quite good over the entire temperature range, although in the region $`T>95`$ K $`\tau `$ is comparable to our measurement accuracy.

It is interesting to note that despite the discrepancy of Eq. 1 with FLT, the functional form of Eq. 3 is exactly what FLT would predict for $`\tau `$, though with $`T_0`$ at least two orders of magnitude larger than 40 K. The origin of this temperature dependence, and of the low energy scale $`T_0`$ which controls it, remains one of the important open questions raised by these measurements. Similar behavior has recently been observed in the normal state of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 Corson2000 , and we expect that a considerable body of transport work will require reanalysis in light of the observations presented here. For example, Shubnikhov-de Haas oscillations have been observed in SrRuO3, with amplitudes that display the temperature dependence of a Fermi liquid Mackenzie1998 . It would be interesting to develop theories which produce Eq. 1, to address the existence of these quantum oscillations.

In summary, we have studied in detail the complex conductivity of SrRuO3 at low frequencies and temperatures, and shown that it agrees well with the simple phenomenological form given in Eq. 1. The difference between $`\alpha 0.4`$ observed here and the Drude form expected from FLT, with $`\alpha =1`$, is reflected in the interpretation of $`\tau `$, one of the fundamental parameters in the transport theory of metals. We have described how this quantity influences the measured conductivity, but proper interpretation of its microscopic meaning must await further analysis. In particular, careful studies of the dependence of $`\tau `$ on substitutional impurities or structural disorder would help to reveal its physical origin Ioffe1998 .

###### Acknowledgements.

J. S. D. thanks Daniel Chemla for encouragement in pursuing this work. This work was supported by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences of the U. S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098, by the Stanford NSF-MRSEC Program, and by NSF grants DMR-0071949 and 9870252.


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# Broken Symmetry, Boundary Conditions, and Band Gap Oscillations in Finite Single Wall Nanotubes

## Abstract

We have shown that the interplay between the broken symmetry of finite single-wall nanotubes (SWNT) and the boundary conditions affects the electronic properties of SWNTs in a profound way. For finite SWNTs $`(p,q)`$ characterized by $`p=k+l`$, $`q=kl`$, $`pq=2l`$, $`l=0,1,\mathrm{},k`$, and $`k=1,2,\mathrm{}`$, we found that the band gaps of finite SWNTs belonging to a certain $`k`$ exhibit similar well-defined oscillating patterns but with diminishing amplitudes from the armchair $`(l=0)`$ to the zigzag $`(l=k)`$ SWNTs. These profound changes hold intriguing implications in the potential utilization of these finite NTs as the basic component of molecular scale devices.

Very recently, there is a series of interesting studies related to the feasibility of utilizing carbon nanotubes (NTs) of finite lengths as the basic component for molecular scale electronic and magnetic devices . Specifically, there have been experimental evidences of increasing band gap in NTs of decreasing length . Theoretical calculations  have shown that an armchair single-wall NT (ASWNT), while it is metallic when infinitely long, developed a band gap when it is short and this band gap exhibited a well-defined oscillation as a function of the length of the NT. Mehrez et al found in a theoretical study different transport behavior for ASWNT-based magnetic tunnel junctions of different lengths. These studies had demonstrated that the finiteness of ASWNT has altered the fundamental properties of its electronic structure. However, the physics underlying these profound changes has not been delineated. To explore the full potential of NTs as molecular scale devices, it is imperative to first determine the nature of the electronic structure of all types of SWNTs of finite length, and then to have a clear understanding of its underlying physics. In other words, the logical question to be raised is whether these or any other profound changes are to be found for finite SWNTs of general chirality. In this Letter, we address this issue in terms of the symmetry breaking and the boundary condition.

For an infinite graphene sheet, each atom in the bonding network forms three $`\sigma `$-bonds with its three equivalent neighbors. In addition, the remaining itinerant electron associated with the atom may form a $`\pi `$-bond with the itinerant electron of any one of the three neighbors, resulting in the formation of a double bond between the atom and that particular neighbor. Because of the equivalence of the three neighbors due to the symmetry of the infinite graphene sheet, there are in fact three such equivalent double bond distributions (see, for example, the pattern displayed in Fig. 1). These three bonding configurations are in resonance, thus leading to a network of equivalent resonant bonds for an infinite graphene sheet with no manifestation of any of the double bond patterns. When the infinite graphene sheet is rolled up into an infinite nanotube, nothing is changed as far as the bonding pattern is concerned. The situation is, however, entirely different for a nanotube of finite length. In this case, the double bond pattern can survive under appropriate conditions. The scenario can be understood as follows. Fig. 1 shows one of the possible double bond distribution. If the carbon atoms in the first section (row) are replaced by hydrogen atoms, an examination of the pattern in Fig. 1 indicates that that particular double bond distribution will survive if and only if the sheet is terminated by replacing the carbon atoms in the $`3m^{th}`$ section ($`m=1,2,\mathrm{}`$) by hydrogen atoms. In this situation, there are $`3m2`$ sections in the finite graphene sheet sandwiched between the top and bottom sections of passivating hydrogen atoms. In other words, a finite graphene sheet with ”lengths” of $`3m2=3n+1`$ sections ($`n=0,1,2,\mathrm{}`$) can sustain the double bond distribution, indicating the formation of the $`\pi `$-bond that in turn results in a large gap separating the bonding $`\pi `$ state with the antibonding $`\pi ^{}`$ state. On the other hand, for finite graphene sheets with lengths of $`3n`$ and $`3n1`$ sections, no characteristic double bond distribution of the graphene sheet can be maintained and hence only small gaps exist. When the finite graphene sheet is rolled up into a tube with its circumference along the horizontal direction as shown in Fig. 1, a finite ASWNT is obtained. The analysis of the broken symmetry associated with the finiteness of the graphene sheet and the boundary condition imposed on the finite sheet immediately leads to the conclusion that ASWNTs with lengths of $`3n+1`$ sections will possess large band gaps while ASWNTs with lengths of $`3n`$ or $`3n1`$ sections will only have relatively small gaps. Thus it is the existence or non-existence of the double bond configuration as a result of the interplay between the broken symmetry associated with the finiteness of the ASWNT and the boundary condition that is responsible for the well-defined oscillatory behavior of the band gap of ASWNTs reported in .

To demonstrate our scenario of bonding patterns for finite ASWNTs of different lengths, we calculated the bond charge distribution for these ASWNTs, using the extended Hückel molecular orbital (EHMO) method as it has been shown to give qualitatively correct result in comparison with ab initio calculations. In the calculation, the C-C and C-H bond lengths were kept at commonly accepted values of 1.42Å and 1.09Å respectively. The left panel of Fig. 2 gives the bond charge of the three different types ($`3n+1`$, $`3n1`$, and $`3n`$) of (6,6) finite ASWNTs vs the bond label. Here, the bonds in Fig. 1 are labeled by integers continuously from the top to the bottom. For example, bonds connecting atoms in the first section (hydrogen) and those in the second section (carbon) are labeled by 1, bonds connecting carbon atoms within the second section by 2, bonds connecting carbon atoms between the second and third section by 3, and so on (see Fig. 1, note that bonds labeled by $`3s+2`$ are double bonds, with $`s=0,1,\mathrm{}`$). From the left panel of Fig. 2, it can be seen that, for the finite ASWNT with a length of 16 ($`3n+1`$ type, with $`n=5`$) sections, the bond charge distribution exhibits the characteristic pattern of the double bonds of a graphene sheet as shown in Fig. 1. The existence of the double bond configuration indicates the formation of the $`\pi `$-bonds, thus leading to a large band gap between the bonding $`\pi `$ state and the antibonding $`\pi ^{}`$ state. On the other hand, for finite ASWNTs with lengths of 14 ($`3n1`$ type with $`n=5`$) sections and 18 ($`3n`$ type with $`n=6`$) sections, the bond charge distribution does not follow the correct double bond pattern. Hence ASWNTs with lengths of 14 ($`3n1`$ type) and 18 ($`3n`$ type) sections can only have relatively small gaps. We have also used the EHMO method to calculate the band gap of the finite (6,6) ASWNT as a function of its length. The result is displayed in Fig. 3 for finite ASWNTs with even number of sections (to be discussed later), and in the inset of Fig. 3 for ASWNTs with both even and odd number of sections. The well-defined oscillatory behavior of the band gap as a function of the length of the NTs exhibited in both displays shows the direct correlation to the bond scenario presented above. This oscillatory pattern of the band gap of the finite ASWNT as a function of the length anchored by large band gaps of the order of magnitudes of $`eV`$s for lengths of $`3n+1`$ sections represents a fundamental change in the electronic structure of ASWNTs from a pseudo-one dimensional metallic conductor when they are infinitely long to a zero-dimension large band gap semiconductor at selected lengths.

Having established the pivotal roles played by the finiteness of the ASWNT and its interplay with the boundary condition, it will be interesting to find out how these factors or any modification of them affect the electronic structure of a finite SWNT of general chirality. The totality of SWNTs $`(p,q)`$ can be divided into two groups. Group I is characterized by $`p=k+l`$, $`q=kl`$, $`l=0,1,2,\mathrm{},k`$, and $`k=1,2,\mathrm{}`$, with $`pq=2l`$ while group II by $`p=k+l`$, $`q=kl1`$, and $`l=0,1,2,\mathrm{},k`$, with $`pq=2l+1`$. In this Letter, we focus our study on finite SWNTs belonging to Group I. Specifically, we chose $`k=6`$ to demonstrate the result of our study. The family of NTs in this subset includes the armchair NT (6,6) (metallic when infinitely long), NTs (7,5), (8,4), (10,2), (11,1) (semiconducting when infinitely long), the NT (9,3) (semimetal when infinitely long), and the zigzag NT (12,0) (metallic when infinitely long). We started our study by mapping the (7,5) NT onto a flat surface as shown in Fig. 4. Imagining that the carbon atoms in the top section of the NT are passivated by a section of hydrogen atoms (not shown in Fig. 4), hydrogen-passivated finite (7,5) NTs of different lengths can be obtained by terminating the sheet at different sections at the other end with hydrogen atoms. A close examination of Fig. 4 reveals three interesting properties for (7,5) NTs of finite length. (i) Similar hydrogen-terminations at both ends of the finite (7,5) NTs can only be achieved for such NTs of even number of sections. Referring to Fig. 4, the first section of the (7,5) NT is outlined by the carbon atoms with dangling bonds (denoted by integer 1). It can be seen that there are two steps in the first section where the adjacent atoms are mis-aligned. While each carbon atom in the first section is connected to one passivating hydrogen atom at the top (not shown in Fig. 4), the corner atom, one at each step, is connected to two atoms in the second section (denoted by integer 2). On the other hand, every atom in the second section is connected to one atom in the third section (denoted by integer 3). This alternating pattern persists throughout the sheet from the top to the bottom. As a result, different boundary conditions exist at the top and at the bottom for (7,5) NTs with odd number of sections, while similar boundary conditions exist at both ends of finite (7,5) NTs with even number of sections. In fact, this scenario is also true for the other SWNTs in group I except ASWNTs $`(k,k)`$. From Fig. 1, it can be seen that similar boundary conditions exist at both ends for ASWNTs regardless whether they contain odd or even number of sections. Hence, in this respect, the finite ASWNT is the exception rather than the rule among all the finite NTs in group I. (ii) Figure 4 shows that, for (7,5) NTs with even number of sections, the double bond pattern (with some ”defects” to be discussed in (iii)) can be maintained for those containing $`3n+1`$ sections (with odd $`n`$). Such pattern, however, does not exist for those containing $`3n1`$ (with odd $`n`$) sections or $`3n`$ (with even $`n`$) sections. This picture is consistent with the situation discussed for the ASWNT, as there are again the same three types of finite NTs with the same identical properties. It also means that a well-defined oscillatory pattern consistent with the rule characterizing the oscillatory behavior of the ASWNTs must exist for the band gap of (7,5) NTs containing even number of sections as a function of the length. (iii) For the (7,5) NTs, the top boundary (first section) is characterized by two steps where adjacent atoms are misaligned, creating what are akin to two ”stacking” faults (see Fig. 4). The defects associated with the stacking faults are highlighted as hexagons bordered by solid/dash bonds. These bonds are resonant bonds formed as a result of the resonance between two mis-aligned equivalent bonding configurations (see Fig. 4). We have calculated the bond charges of the defect configuration. We found the bond charges for the resonant bonds to lie between those of the single bonds and double bonds. These findings confirm our picture regarding the nature of the defect configuration. The effect of the presence of these defects in the double bond pattern is to reduce the magnitude of the band gap (see, Fig. 3).

We have calculated the bond charges of (7,5) NTs of various lengths. The results for (7,5) NTs of length 16 (type $`3n+1`$ with $`n=5`$) sections, 14 (type $`3n1`$ with $`n=5`$) sections, and 18 (type $`3n`$ with $`n=6`$) sections are shown in the right panel of Fig. 2. The results are similar to the case of ASWNT with the bond charge distribution for 16 sections exhibiting the double bond pattern shown in Fig. 4 while those for the other two cases (14 and 18 sections) do not, confirming the picture presented in (ii) in the preceding paragraph. The consequences of the three properties enunciated above leads to the prediction that the band gap of (7,5) NTs with even number of sections exhibits a regular oscillatory pattern similar to the one for ASWNTs, namely, large gaps for NTs of $`3n+1`$ sections (with odd $`n`$) and relatively small gaps for NTs of $`3n1`$ (with odd $`n`$) sections or $`3n`$ (with even $`n`$) sections. However, because of the presence of the ”stacking” fault defects, the amplitudes of oscillations are smaller compared to the corresponding ones for ASWNT. We have also calculated the band gaps for the (7,5) NTs with even number of sections. The result displayed in Fig. 3 indeed shows that the band gap of finite (7,5) SWNTs exhibits similar oscillatory pattern as that of the finite ASWNTs but with smaller amplitudes of oscillations, just as predicted using the three properties discussed above.

The argument presented in the discussion of the three properties for (7,5) NTs applies also to (8,4), (9,3), (10,2), (11,1) and (12,0) NTs. However, this series of NTs will have increasing number of defects from (7,5) to (12,0). Therefore, similar oscillatory patterns, but with diminishing amplitudes of oscillations, are expected for these NTs. The result of our calculation shown in Fig. 3 has indeed also confirmed this prediction. The same argument is also valid for all the other families of SWNTs in group I. We have studied families of NTs in this group for other $`k`$ values. We found similar results as expected. For example, the band gaps of the SWNTs in the family corresponding to $`k=5`$, including the series of NTs (5,5), (6,4), (7,3), (8,2), (9,1) and (10,0), show exactly the same behavior as that for the family corresponding to $`k=6`$. In particular, there is hardly any difference between the oscillating pattern for the zigzag SWNT (ZSWNT) (10,0) in the $`k=5`$ family and that for the ZSWNT (12,0) in the $`k=6`$ family. It is interesting to note that both ZSWNTs have vanishing gap when longer than 4 sections while the former is semiconducting and the later is metallic when both are infinitely long. The reason for them to have indistinguishable behavior when they are short must be attributable to the fact that they both have the largest number of ”stacking” fault defects in their respective family and these defects overwhelm the large gap associated with the double bond pattern.

Finally, we have calculated the resistance at the Fermi energy of the family of NTs with $`k=6`$, using the Landauer’s formula. In the calculation, we modeled the leads following the procedure of Mehrez et al. The Hamiltonians of the samples were constructed using the EHMO method. The result is shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that the resistance curves for these NTs of finite lengths also exhibit a well-defined oscillatory pattern. A side-by-side examination of the resistance curves in Fig. 5 and the corresponding band gap curves in Fig. 3 reveals a close correlation between the gap and the resistance.

In conclusion, we have shown that finite SWNTs in each family $`(k)`$ in group I exhibit similar pattern for band gap oscillations with diminishing amplitudes from ASWNT to ZSWNT. We have also established that these characteristic patterns for the band gap are the consequences of the interplay between the broken symmetry associated with the finiteness of the NTs and the boundary conditions. The fundamental change in the electronic structure of all the finite SWNTs in group I has very intriguing implications for utilizing these finite NTs as molecular scale devices. For example, our result indicates that it is more appropriate to use ZSWNTs as molecular scale conductors rather than ASWNTs. On the other hand, ASWNTs of selected lengths may be used as large band gap molecular scale semiconductors. Furthermore, the existence of the double bond pattern raises the possibility of fabricating nanoscale coils . We have also studied the electronic structure of finite SWNTs in group II. It turned out that different physics is operational in that situation. The result of that study will be presented elsewhere.

This work is supported by NSF through the grant (DMR-9802274). We acknowledge the many useful discussions with Prof. Guang-Yu Guo and the use of the computing resources at the University of Kentucky Center for Computational Sciences.

FIGURES Fig. 1 A typical double bond pattern in a graphene sheet. Fig. 2 The (average) bond charge vs the bond label. Fig. 3 The band gap vs the length (the number of sections) for SWNTs containing even number of sections corresponding to the subset $`k=6`$ . The inset shows the band gap curve for the (6,6) ASWNTs containing both odd and even number of sections. Fig. 4 The mapping of (7,5) SWNTs onto a flat surface and the double bond pattern. The stacking fault defects are highlighted as hexagons bordered by resonant (solid/dash) bonds. Fig. 5 The resistance vs the length for the series of SWNTs (6,6), (7,5), and (8,4) containing even number of sections. The inset gives the resistance vs the length curve for the ASWNTs (6,6) containing both odd and even number of sections.


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# Possible Discrimination between Gamma Rays and Hadrons using Čerenkov Photon Timing Measurements

## 1 Introduction

Atmospheric Čerenkov Technique (ACT), is a well established and a unique method for the astronomical investigation of Very High Energy (VHE, also referred to as $`TeV`$) $`\gamma `$ rays. It is based on the effective detection and study of the Čerenkov light emitted by the secondary particles produced in the extensive air showers initiated by the primary $`\gamma `$ ray .

As is well known, the abundant charged cosmic ray particles generate Čerenkov light akin to that produced by the $`\gamma `$ rays as a result of which the $`\gamma `$ ray signal is buried in a vast sea of cosmic ray background. This has been a major difficulty in applying the atmospheric Čerenkov technique successfully for $`\gamma `$ ray astronomy.

The first generation Čerenkov telescopes addressed the problem of cosmic ray background by matching the telescope aperture to the angular size of the Čerenkov flash . In addition, many of the potential astrophysical sources of VHE $`\gamma `$ rays are expected to produce modulated signals (e.g. $`\gamma `$ ray pulsars, X-ray binaries, cataclysmic variables etc). Thus techniques based on well established methods of phase sensitive detection were used to enhance the detection of $`\gamma `$ rays against the randomly arriving background .

This technique cannot be applied however for steady sources of $`\gamma `$rays like the Blazars, normal galaxies or unidentified $`\gamma `$ray sources discovered at $`GeV`$ energies. There are, however, differences in the detailed structure of the detected Čerenkov flash due to the fact that the cosmic ray background protons are spatially and temporally isotropic while the $`\gamma `$ rays emanate from the point sources. In addition, the physics of the hadronic cascades initiated by the protons in the earth’s atmosphere is different from the electromagnetic cascade generated by the $`\gamma `$ rays. Detailed monte carlo simulations have been employed to study these differences. Techniques based on the shape of the lateral distribution of the Čerenkov light pool to delineate the source direction, have been studied  despite large fluctuations in the measured Čerenkov photon densities . There are several Atmospheric Čerenkov arrays designed precisely to apply these techniques to ground based VHE $`\gamma `$ ray astronomy . On the other hand the imaging technique has been shown to be successful and also has been demonstrated to work reliably in detecting emission from several $`TeV`$ $`\gamma `$ ray sources .

The spatial and temporal properties of the Čerenkov photons also contain valuable information on the development and propagation of the EAS in the atmosphere. As a result, systematic studies of these photons as received at the observation level could lead to the development of techniques to distinguish between hadronic or photon primaries. $`\gamma `$ray primaries for example, develop higher in the atmosphere resulting in compact images as well as narrower pulses. One would therefore expect correlations between different pulse shape parameters and imaging parameters.

Extensive studies have already been carried out in this regard using detailed simulation techniques. Most of these studies were carried out at higher energies with the aim of studying the elemental composition of cosmic rays at these energies . The possibility of applying pulse shape discrimination technique to improve the signal to noise ratio in the data from Crab nebula was first demonstrated by Tümer et al. . Their study was solely based on the presence or absence of kinks and other anomalies like long trailing edges of the Čerenkov pulses indicating hadronic origin. These criteria were not based on any systematic simulation studies nor were they conveniently parameterized so that it could be used by others.

Several characteristics of the hadron- & $`\gamma `$ ray showers which were suggested as possible discriminators in the past have been met with limited success. Some of these are the presence of penetrating particles among the EAS secondaries , the ultraviolet excess in hadron initiated showers due to their proximity to the observation level  and time duration . On the other hand methods developed for improving the angular resolution technique  are still in use and are one of the important methods of discrimination for non-imaging arrays which are generally spread out.

A brief description of the efficacy of the pulse shape discrimination in VHE $`\gamma `$ ray astronomy was made by Patterson & Hillas . Their study was based solely on the presence of structure on the leading or trailing edge of the Čerenkov pulses as suggested before . However no systematic studies of the rise or decay times, FWHM etc were carried out. Recently Roberts et al. , developed a technique based on the temporal Čerenkov pulse shape and showed that the use of rise time at large zenith angles and FWHM at smaller zenith angles are effective discriminators. However these studies are carried out at larger zenith angle ($`35^{}`$) and hence the conclusions are relevant only at larger primary energies ($`40TeV`$). On the other hand Cabot et al.  suggest possibility of identifying the muonic component, which precedes the electromagnetic component, of the Čerenkov pulse in order to separate the $`\gamma `$ ray signal from the background. This could be a very efficient technique in experiments based on wavefront sampling technique. But once again this method works only at higher primary energies ($`afewTeV`$) where a significant number of muons are produced.

In an earlier work functional fits have been carried out to the spherical shower front to demonstrate that the radii of curvature are equal to the height of the shower maximum at all observation levels. It has also been demonstrated in that paper that the Čerenkov photon arrival time distributions can be well fitted by a lognormal function. Using these fits, radial and spectral variation of pulse shape parameters have been studied systematically.

In the present work we plan to make a systematic study of the temporal and spatial profile of Čerenkov light from lower energy primaries both from pure electromagnetic cascades as well as hadronic cascades generated by $`TeV`$ energy primaries. The question we are trying to answer is whether the observed differences in experimentally measurable temporal information could be used to separate electromagnetic component from the hadronic background.

In §2 of this paper details of simulations are given, followed by definition of figure of merit for discrimination between $`\gamma `$ rays and cosmic rays in §3. In §4 we discuss the results from the analysis of the curvature of the Čerenkov front whereas in §5 we present results based on the pulse shape parameters and identify the more sensitive of them. In §6 we present the detailed study of the photon arrival time jitter. The dependence of the parameters on the telescope opening angle, altitude of observation, incident angle of the primary as well as cosmic ray species and the shower core distance are discussed in §7. A brief discussion of the results is presented in §8 and conclusions are summarized in §9.

## 2 Simulations

A package called CORSIKA (version 560),  has been used to simulate Čerenkov light emission in the earth’s atmosphere by the secondaries of the extensive air showers generated by cosmic ray primaries or $`\gamma `$ rays. This program simulates interactions of nuclei, hadrons, muons, electrons and photons as well as decays of unstable secondaries in the atmosphere. It uses EGS4 code  for the electromagnetic component of the air shower simulation and dual parton model for the simulation of hadronic interactions at $`TeV`$ energies. The Čerenkov radiation produced within the specified band width (300-650 $`nm`$) by the charged secondaries is propagated to the ground. The US standard atmosphere parameterized by Linsley  has been used. The position, angle, time (with respect to the first interaction) and production height of each photon hitting the detector on the observation level are recorded.

In the present studies we have mainly used Pachmarhi (longitude: 78 26 E, latitude: 22 28$`{}_{}{}^{}N`$ and altitude: 1075 $`m`$) as the observation level where an array of Čerenkov detectors each of area111This is the total reflective area of 7 parabolic mirrors of diameter 0.9 $`m`$ deployed paraxially on a single equatorial mount. 4.35 $`m^2`$ is deployed in the form of a rectangular array. We have assumed 17 detectors in the E-W direction with a separation of 25 $`m`$ and 21 detectors in the N-S direction with a separation of 20 m. This configuration, similar to the Pachmarhi Array of Čerenkov Telescopes (PACT)  but much larger, is chosen so that one can study the core distance dependence of various observable parameters. Monoenergetic primaries consisting of $`\gamma `$ rays, protons and iron nuclei incident vertically on the top of the atmosphere with their cores at the centre of the array have been simulated in the present studies. The showers simulated in this study have a fixed core position which is chosen to be the detector at the centre of the array. The resulting Čerenkov pool is sampled by all the 357 detectors which are used to study the core distance dependence of the parameters studied here. All the telescopes are assumed to have their optic axes aligned vertically.

An option of variable bunch size of the Čerenkov photons is available in the package which serves to reduce the requirement of hardware resources. However since we are interested in the fluctuations of each of the estimated observables, we have tracked single photons for each primary at all energies. Multiple scattering length for electrons and positrons is decided by the parameter STEPFC in the EGS code which has been set to 0.1 in the present studies . Wavelength dependent absorption of Čerenkov photons in the atmosphere is not however taken into account. The present conclusions are expected to be independent of photon wavelengths.

## 3 Figure of merit of a parameter

Figure of merit of a parameter that can distinguish between VHE $`\gamma `$rays and cosmic ray hadrons depends primarily on two factors. Firstly, it should accept most of the $`\gamma `$rays and secondly it should be able to reject most of the hadrons. In general, this figure of merit could be a function of primary energy. In the present work we define such a figure of merit which is often called as quality factor, as :

$$q=\frac{N_a^\gamma }{N_T^\gamma }\left(\frac{N_a^{cr}}{N_T^{cr}}\right)^{\frac{1}{2}}$$
(1)
where $`N_a^\gamma `$ is the number of $`\gamma `$ rays accepted,

$`N_T^\gamma `$ is the total number of $`\gamma `$ rays,

$`N_a^{cr}`$ is the number of background cosmic rays accepted and

$`N_T^{cr}`$ is the total number of background cosmic rays.

The quality factor thus defined is independent of the actual number of $`\gamma `$rays and protons recorded.

In this paper, whenever a pair of distributions of a parameter under study for a hadron and a $`\gamma `$ray primary are shown the threshold value of the parameter is indicated by a vertical line. The threshold is chosen such that it yields maximum quality factor subject to the condition that the accepted fraction of $`\gamma `$rays is $`>30\%`$ and that of protons is $`>1\%`$. The errors on the qulaity factors shown in each case are statistical only.

## 4 Shower front parameters

It has been shown long ago that the radius of curvature of the Čerenkov light front is strongly correlated with the height of shower maximum from the observation level . This has been found to be true for different species of cosmic rays . For photonic primaries the height of shower maximum is decided by the radiation length in the atmosphere while that for hadronic primaries it is decided by the interaction length which in turn depends on the interaction cross-section in air. Hence the radius of curvature could be species specific. Therefore we have investigated the possibility of using the fitted radius of curvature of the spherical Čerenkov front as a parameter to distinguish between $`\gamma `$ ray and proton initiated showers. The details of a spherical fit to the mean arrival times of Čerenkov photons at detectors sampling the front at various core distances are described in detail in . Fig. 1 shows the distribution of the fitted radii for different primary species of various energies. The primaries are incident vertically at the top of the atmosphere except wherever mentioned. Mono-energetic $`\gamma `$ray and hadron primaries of comparable Čerenkov yield are simulated and compared. We also simulated showers, both for $`\gamma `$ rays and protons whose energies are selected randomly from a power law distribution of a differential slope of -2.65. This would also simulate the real data as one would record in an experiment. While the slope of the $`\gamma `$ ray spectrum could be different from what is chosen here, the quality factor does not depend on the number of showers and hence independent of the spectral slope except when it shows strong energy dependence. The energy bandwidth chosen here are 500 $`GeV`$ \- 10 $`TeV`$ for $`\gamma `$ rays while it is 1 $`TeV`$ \- 20 $`TeV`$ for protons.

Quality factors, as defined above, have been estimated for the present sample from the distributions of the estimated radii of curvature for $`\gamma `$ ray and hadronic primaries as shown in figure 1. These are given in table 1. The threshold values in each case are indicated as vertical lines in figure 1. Fraction of total number of $`\gamma `$ ray and proton showers that pass this cut, i.e., fraction of showers with radii below the threshold as well as the number of showers simulated in each case are also tabulated. The last row in the table shows the quality factor estimated for primaries chosen from a powerlaw spectrum as mentioned before. This is consistent with that for mono-energetic primaries showing that a change in the height of shower maximum with energy does not change the quality factor significantly. Fig. 1 shows the distributions of the fitted radii of curvature of the shower front for proton primaries and $`Fe`$ primaries with respect to that for $`\gamma `$ray primaries of equivalent Čerenkov yield. The vertical lines represent the threshold value with respect to which quality factors are estimated. One can see a rather high degree of overlap between the pair of distributions and hence the quality factors from this parameter are rather modest in value but are almost independent of primary energy. However we will see in §7.1 that the use of a circular mask to limit the telescope opening angle improves the quality factor at all energies. Also the quality factor against $`Fe`$ primaries improves dramatically suggesting that this could be the ideal parameter to discriminate heavy primaries.

## 5 Pulse shape parameters

### 5.1 Observation level of Pachmarhi

Even though pulse shape parameters contain information on the history of shower development in the atmosphere, their use for identifying the primary species was always in doubt especially at lower primary energies . On the other hand, it was known that the muons generated in hadron initiated showers will reach the observation level several nanoseconds before the light from the electrons. Consequently, the light from muons would give rise to an unmistakable precursor which could be used as a discriminating parameter .

Here we tried to investigate the possibility of using pulse shape parameters to discriminate between $`\gamma `$ ray and hadron showers, using the same data set as was used for shower front paramemters. Distributions generated using pulse shape parameters were derived from predicted lognormal distribution for individual detectors (see  for details). It may be recalled here that the decay time of the pulse need not be measured directly for this purpose. If one measures the mean arrival time and the RMS fluctuations in Čerenkov photon arrival times at a detector, it will enable us to derive the pulse shape parameters from the data directly . Among the three pulse shape parameters $`viz.`$ the rise time, the decay time & the pulse width, decay time seems to be the most sensitive parameter which exhibits species sensitive behaviour at $`TeV`$ energies. However, Čerenkov photon arrival time distribution yields one set of pulse shape parameters for each of the 357 detectors. So also the arrival time jitter (discussed in §6). Hence for the purpose of estimating the statistical errors on the quality factors, the sample size considered is the product of the number of detectors and the number of simulated showers. In order to take into account the core distance dependence of these parameters (see  for details) they are averaged over 16222The choice of this number is purely arbitrary. We chose this number because the spatial separation of the resulting 22 samples turned out to be reasonably uniform. However this grouping was not done or inclined showers. consecutive detectors arranged in the order of increasing core distance. The resulting 22 (352/16, excluding the detectors at the shower core and the farthest 4) sets of parameters are treated as independent samples of the parameter under study. The distributions of the these samples of decay time both for $`\gamma `$ray and proton primaries of various energies are shown in fig. 2. The number of showers simulated are same as those listed in table 1. The distributions from hadronic primaries are in general characterized by longer tails compared to that from $`\gamma `$ray primaries. There is a fair amount of overlap between the distributions of two types of primaries. All the relevant parameters including the fractions of $`\gamma `$rays and protons whose decay times are less than the threshold value are listed in table 2. In spite of the modest quality factor, one is able to reject nearly 96% of protons from the data while loosing nearly two thirds of the $`\gamma `$ ray signal.

The other pulse shape parameters like the rise time and the pulse width (defined as the full width at half maximum, FWHM) for vertical showers have been found to be quite insensitive to the primary species and hence are not useful parameters to distinguish hadronic events. However as discussed in §7.3 it can be seen that the pulse width could be a good parameter for inclined showers.

## 6 Timing Jitter

The Čerenkov light emitted at the top of the atmosphere reaches the observer later than that from deeper down. The latter appears at larger angles but arrives earlier because the particles travel faster than light in the atmosphere. It was suggested long ago that such small time differences could be useful in discriminating against proton showers . We have seen before, that a majority of the Čerenkov photons originate at around the shower maximum as a result of which at observation level we observe the spherical front centred around that point. However the spread in the arrival time at any core distance is largely decided by the photons emitted elsewhere in the atmosphere. For example, at large core distances a bulk of the photons are emitted at lower atmospheric heights, largely from lower energy electrons undergoing multiple Coulomb scattering. In addition, photons seem to arrive at increasingly larger angles away from the core thus implying larger arrival times. In other words, the spread in the arrival times within a given shower at any core distance has the definite signature of the kinematics of the shower development. Hence we tried to search for species dependent signature in the arrival time spread of Čerenkov photons. We quantify the arrival time spread in terms of the RMS of the photon arrival times at a given detector. The ratio of this RMS to the mean arrival time, called the relative jitter, is used as a discriminating parameter to identify the primary species.

### 6.1 Core distance dependence

It may be recalled that each telescope in the array considered here consists of compactly mounted 7 paraxial parabolic mirrors of diameter 0.9 $`m`$. The average arrival time of Čerenkov photons is calculated for each of the seven mirrors of a telescope, for a given shower. Then the mean arrival time for each telescope is calculated which is the average of seven individual averages. Time jitter is the RMS of seven averages for each telescope as mentioned before. Figure 3 shows a radial plot of the mean arrival times ($`ns`$, marked by +), time jitter ($`ns`$, marked by open triangles) and the relative jitter (which is the ratio of time jitter to the mean, asterisks) both for 1 $`TeV`$ $`\gamma `$rays (left) and 2 $`TeV`$ protons (right). While there is a general increase in the jitter with increasing core distance for both the primaries, it shows a minimum at around the hump region for $`\gamma `$ray primaries. This is expected since most of the photons here are emitted by the high energy electrons and also from a limited range of atmospheric heights. Such a signature is swamped by kinematic fluctuations in the case of hadronic primaries, in addition to exhibiting an increased time spread .

### 6.2 Separation of $`\gamma `$ \- rays from proton primaries

It may be seen from figure 3 that the relative time jitter for both $`\gamma `$ ray as well as proton primaries is almost independent of the core distance. Hence it is chosen as a parameter for $`\gamma `$hadron separation even though it is not a necessary condition.

Fig. 4 shows the comparative distributions of this parameter for $`\gamma `$rays and protons (a & b) as well as $`\gamma `$rays and $`Fe`$ primaries (c) of equivalent Čerenkov yields. Also shown in the figure (d) are comparative distributions for $`\gamma `$ray and proton primaries of varying energies selected from a power law distribution of slope -2.65. The energy bandwidths chosen for $`\gamma `$rays and protons are 0.5 - 10 $`TeV`$ and 1 - 20 $`TeV`$ respectively. The results are based on 100 showers in each case for each species.

It is well known that after shower maximum, $`\gamma `$ray showers attenuate progressively faster with atmospheric depth than do hadronic showers . In addition, the lateral spread also is larger for hadron initiated showers. As a result, the RMS spread in the time of arrival of photons at the observation level is expected to be larger for hadronic showers. Consequently, the distributions in fig 4 are pretty wide with a long tail for hadrons at all primary energies which makes it possible to discriminate them.

Table 3 shows the quality factors derived from relative jitter for vertical showers of $`\gamma `$rays, protons and iron primaries. From the table it can be seen that using relative jitter as a discriminating parameter one can reject more than $``$80% of protons while retaining more than $``$80% of $`\gamma `$rays (from spectrum).

## 7 Sensitivity to various operational parameters

### 7.1 Effect of telescope opening angle on quality factors

The opening angle of a Čerenkov telescope is often limited by placing a circular mask at the focal point in front of the photocathode. This limits the arrival angle of the photons reaching the photocathode. In the absence of a mask the opening angle is limited by the photocathode diameter. In other words, the limiting mask is expected to reduce the mean arrival angle of photons, reduce the mean arrival time as well as increase the average production height. Table 4 summarizes the effect on aforesaid shower parameters by placing a $`3^{}`$ (FWHM) mask at the focal point of a detector. This is to demonstrate qualitatively its effect on some of the parameters of shower development. Vertically incident showers are considered here. The changes in the mean angle of arrival and time is around 30% for $`\gamma `$rays while it is significantly larger for proton primaries. The mean production height is much less sensitive to the presence of mask which increases the mean production height by about 10% and 14% for $`\gamma `$ray and proton primaries respectively.

The question we are addressing here is the effect of telescope opening angle on each of the quality factors discussed here. Tables 5, 6, 7 & 8 summarize the results relating to the role of mask when radius of curvature, pulse decay time, pulse width and relative jitter are used as parameters to discriminate against cosmic ray hadrons. The same data set is used to compare the results with and without mask. In the no-mask case all the Čerenkov photons incident on a detector, irrespective of their angle of incidence, are accepted. Pulse width was included in this case to show that if a mask is in use it could be a useful parameter to discriminate against heavy primaries. Its sensitivity improves with increasing primary energy consistent with other such studies. From tables it can be readily seen that the use of a mask ($`5^{}`$ FWHM) improves the efficiency of the radius of curvature as a discriminating parameter while the pulse shape parameters show a marked improvement only for heavy primaries. For the relative timing jitter the efficiency as a discriminating parameter reduces when a mask is used. This, even though a marginal effect, is quite understandable. Limiting the photon arrival angles to near vertical direction reduces the RMS fluctuations because of limited range of pathlength differences.

### 7.2 Altitude dependence of quality factors

As the altitude of observation increases, the shower maximum for a given primary energy comes closer to the observation level. As a result, the lateral distribution of Čerenkov photons has been known to change with the altitude of the observation level. The core distance at which the hump appears as well as the prominence of the hump will be smaller with increasing altitude of observation . Since the Čerenkov front is being intercepted at different observation levels during its propagation in the atmosphere, the shower parameters like the average arrival angle, time $`etc`$ also will be different at different observation levels. As we will see in §7.5 that the species discriminating efficiency of the parameter does vary, even though weakly, with core distance. Hence it would be interesting to see if their role depends on the observation level too. Therefore we studied the role played by the observation altitude in using the various types of parameters studied here.

Tables 9, 10 & 11 summarize the quality factors for the pulse decay times as well as the relative timing jitter at two different observation levels $`viz.`$ sea level and 2.2 $`km`$ above mean sea level (for 500 $`GeV`$ $`\gamma `$rays and 1 $`TeV`$ protons). In comparison with the quality factors for the same parameters in table 2 & 3 it can be seen that the quality factors from pulse decay time improve steadily with decreasing altitude while those from timing jitter are almost independent of altitude. In order to understand this we computed the quality factors, for detectors only around the hump region after taking into account the varying hump distances from the core at three altitudes. It is found that the quality factors so calculated for pulse decay time are respectively 8.1, 6.6, and 3.6 for sea level, 1 $`km`$ and 2.2 $`km`$ altitudes. As one would see later (table 16) that the quality factors computed exclusively for pre-hump & post-hump regions are poorer than that for the hump region. Hence the improvement in quality factor at lower altitudes is mainly due to the increased prominence of hump at lower atmospheric depths.

The relative timing jitter, on the other hand seems to be much less sensitive to core distance (see figure 3) and hence doesn’t vary significantly with observation altitude.

### 7.3 Incident angle dependence of quality factors

At larger zenith angles rising absorption and the increasing distance from the shower maximum raise the energy threshold of the primary that are detected by an atmospheric Čerenkov telescope. After the shower maximum $`\gamma `$ray induced showers attenuate progressively faster with atmospheric depth than do the hadronic showers. As a result one would expect a zenith angle dependence on the sensitivity of the parameters studied here. Qualitatively speaking inclined showers at a given altitude behave similar to vertical showers at a lower altitude. As a result, one would expect the quality factor to improve with zenith angle, as it would with a decrease in the altitude of observation. The species sensitive imaging parameters like the azwidth for example, have been shown to be much less sensitive for primaries incident at angles $`30^{}`$ . Hence we wanted to check the possible dependence of the parameters, discussed here, on zenith angle of the primary. We have generated showers initiated by $`\gamma `$rays and hadrons incident at the top of atmosphere at a fixed zenith angle of $`30^{}`$ to the vertical and uniformly distrbuted in azimuth.

The quality factors have been derived at one test energy for comparison for all the parameters under consideration in the present study. The results are summarized in the following tables.

Table 12 summarizes the efficiency of the radius of curvature of the light front as a discriminant for inclined showers of energy 500 $`GeV`$ and 1 $`TeV`$ for $`\gamma `$ray and proton primaries respectively. The results are based on 200 showers each of $`\gamma `$rays and protons. It can be readily seen from a comparison with table 1 that there is a significant improvement in the quality factors for inclined showers. This could be partly due to an increase in the range of fitted radii of proton showers.

Tables 13 & 14 summarize the results of using two of the pulse shape parameters $`viz.`$ pulse decay time and pulse width for species identification for showers incident at $`30^{}`$ to the vertical. The results are based on 100 showers each of $`\gamma `$rays & protons. Keeping in mind that the decay times are not grouped for inclined showers (unlike vertical showers) quality factor for decay time improves for inclined showers.

Table 14 on the other hand has an interesting result. As mentioned in §5.1, pulse rise time and pulse width do not exhibit significant sensitivity to primary species for vertical showers. However for inclined showers pulse width becomes a useful parameter as shown in table 14. This is consistent with the results of Roberts $`etal.`$ , who showed that the quality factor for pulse width peaks at around an inclination of $`35^{}`$ to the vertical at a given altitude of observation.

The relative shower to shower fluctuations in pulse shape parameters have been found to be less for inclined showers  unlike at higher energies where the trend reverses . Table 15 summarizes the quality factors using the timing jitter as the parameter. It may be seen from a comparison of tables 3 & 15 that the species sensitivity of the timing jitter falls with zenith angle of the primary.

The sensitivity of each of the parameters for inclined showers has been further studied after introducing a focal point mask. The results are again summarized in tables 12-15. The opening angles of inclined showers are smaller than that for vertical showers because, inclined showers reach shower maximum at a higher altitude where the Čerenkov angle is smaller. Further, the lower energy electrons propagate in a lower density medium thus undergoing less frequent Coulomb scattering. Consequently, the Čerenkov emission from inclined showers is more collimated compared to that from a same energy primary in vertical direction. Hence the use of a focal point mask is not expected to change the quality factors significantly since a smaller fraction of photons are obstructed by it. The results in tables 12-15 show no major change in quality factors when focal point masks are introduced, essentially supporting the above argument.

For reasons mentioned above, the differential pathlengths of Čerenkov photons also reduce resulting in a poor sensitivity for timing jitter for inclined showers compared to that for vertical showers. The results of table 15 support this conclusion. Once again the use of a focal point mask has no significant effect on the quality factor. However at higher primary energies it is observed that the spread in the arrival times of Čerenkov photons increases with the mass of the primary and the zenith angle . This is due to the increased muon production in cascades generated by the heavier primaries.

### 7.4 Species dependence of quality factors

Each of the three species sensitive parameters under study here were applied to $`Fe`$ primaries as well. It can be easily seen that in all the cases these parameters are more efficient in discriminating heavy primaries as compared to protons. The radius of the shower front, for example, shows a higher sensitivity for $`Fe`$ primaries which is a reflection of the fact that, an $`Fe`$ shower reaches its maximum development at a higher altitude compared to that of a lower $`Z`$ primary. The efficiency also improves significantly with the use of a mask, a feature similar to that of proton primaries.

The pulse shape parameters on the other hand do not exhibit a large change in sensitivity for high $`Z`$ primaries. However the use of mask shows a drastic improvement in sensitivity of decay time as the quality factor changes from $`2.5`$ (with out mask) to $`7`$ (with a $`5^{}`$ mask).

The photon arrival time jitter is particularly sensitive to high $`Z`$ primaries. This perhaps is quite understandable since the $`Fe`$ shower if considered as superposition of proton showers is expected to be more spread out laterally and hence the timing jitter will deviate more than that for $`\gamma `$ray showers.

This demonstrates that the parameters discussed here are sensitive not only to proton primaries but also to high $`Z`$ primaries, unlike Hillas’s image parameters which are not very sensitive to heavy primaries of cosmic rays.

### 7.5 Core distance dependence of quality factors

There are mainly three effects that determine the lateral distribution of Čerenkov light at the observation level: the finite Čerenkov angle, Coulomb scattering of the progenitor electrons and the transverse momentum $`p_t`$, in hadronic interactions. While the first effect is mainly responsible for the proverbial ‘hump’ in the lateral distribution of $`\gamma `$ray initiated showers the third effect is responsible for the observable differences between the two types of primaries and the second effect is responsible for smoothing out the other two effects. As a result, one expects species specific parameters to show a dependence on the core distance of the detectors which measure these parameters. Table 16 summarizes the relative efficiencies of one of the parameters, $`viz`$ pulse decay time as measured by detectors at pre-hump, hump & post-hump regions of showers. It can be seen that the difference between $`\gamma `$ray and proton initiated showers is maximum at around the hump region resulting in maximum quality factor at a given primary energy. At the other two regions, $`viz.`$ pre-hump & post-hump regions, the quality factors are comparable. However in practice it may not be always possible to detect the hump. Hence it may be advisable to limit the core distance of the triggering events to within the hump region at a given altitude of observation which is quite feasible since hump radius is not very sensitive to primary energy.

## 8 Discussions

In the present study we did not take into account the effect of detector response on the parameters selected here. It is implicit that in an experiment the pulse shapes have to be measured using high bandwidth electronics to minimize the shape distortion due to instrumental response so that the pulse shape parameters could be effective discriminators. However while applying these techniques to real data, it is inevitable that the theoretical parameters discussed here be suitably corrected for instrumental response used in the system. The threshold values of the parameters have to be derived for a given detection system and then applied to the data in order to reject events of hadronic origin.

The quality factors derived from the current studies have been tested for stability by estimating the same for subsets of the totality of data used. Hence their values are not critically dependent on the sample size. However it must be mentioned we chose to use that value of the parameter averaged over 16 detectors, thus reducing the 357 radial samples to 22. Obviously, the quality factors will improve if one averages over a larger number of detectors, as has been seen in our analysis. This only means that arrays with larger number of detectors can reject hadronic showers with a better efficiency.

The effect of mask has been studied qualitatively here. In order to apply the technique to real data one has to use the actual mask diameter. It is possible, in principle, to optimize the mask diameter for the best hadron rejection efficiency.

### 8.1 Radius of curvature of the shower front:

From the table 1 it can be seen that the radius of curvature of the Čerenkov front can enable us to reject around 20% of proton events at all energies. The rejection efficiency could improve to 50% if one uses a mask to limit the photon incidence angle. On the other hand this parameter is very sensitive to heavy primaries and hence one can reject up to $`99\%`$ (with or without a $`5^{}`$ mask) of them.

At higher primary energies ($`>20`$ $`TeV`$), the height of shower maximum has been shown to be directly proportional to the slope of the Čerenkov photon lateral distribution . This has been suggested to be a good parameter to distinguish between $`\gamma `$ rays and hadrons. The present results show that the height of shower maximum, measured as the fitted curvature of the light front, is a reasonably good parameter even at lower energies and the sensitivity improves for inclined showers. As already mentioned, it is particularly useful to discriminate against heavy primaries. It can be readily seen from tables 1 & 5 that the quality factor is sensitive to photons arriving at large incidence angles. This is particularly so for heavy primaries.

However the conventional method of measuring the height of shower maximum at higher primary energies is by measuring the pulse width . This technique seems to work only at large core distances and at primary energies $`10^{15}eV`$ as the two parameters do not show any correlation at primary energies studied here.

### 8.2 Pulse shape parameters

There are not many results published in the literature regarding the usefulness of the pulse shape parameters to discriminate hadronic showers from electromagnetic showers at lower primary energies. Rodríguez-Fríes et al.  reported that the pulse width could be used as a discriminating parameter at primary energies $`100TeV`$ and their results show that sensitivity of this parameter is too poor at 10 $`TeV`$. This conclusion is consistent with the present results.

Patterson & Hillas  too have concluded that the pulse widths of simulated proton showers are not very different from those for electromagnetic showers and hence unlikely to be useful as a discriminating parameter consistent with the conclusions of the present study. However we find that it could be a useful parameter for distinguishing inclined hadronic showers.

The present results show that the pulse width and pulse decay time to be good discriminating parameters when used with a mask. However our study shows no sensitivity to pulse rise time in contrast to the conclusions of Roberts $`etal.`$ . Roberts $`etal.`$ on the other hand do not use fall time to achieve discrimination against hadrons for they find that optimum quality factor was achieved only by rejecting an excessive fraction of $`\gamma `$ray cascades, unlike in the present studies. They also find that rise time cut discriminates best against heavy primaries while we find that the decay time discriminates best against heavy primaries. The $`\gamma `$ray acceptance fractions when decay time is used as a discriminating parameter is in the range 30-38% in contrast to the results of Roberts $`etal.`$ .

### 8.3 Timing jitter

Cabot et al.  have estimated the relative mean times of arrival of Čerenkov photons at various core distances. The present results shown in fig. 3 (shown as +) agree well with theirs. The mean arrival times are fairly independent of the primary species. However the RMS fluctuations in arrival times depend on the range of differential pathlengths which in turn depend on the details of the interaction kinematics. Hence they bear the signature of the primary radiation.

One can ask the question how does the relative jitter vary with primary energy. It could be seen from figures 4a, 4b & 4d that the distributions of relative jitter become narrower with increasing energy for both $`\gamma `$ray and proton primaries while average value of the relative jitter falls with increasing primary energy far more rapidly for proton primaries than for $`\gamma `$rays. Figure 5 shows the primary energy dependence of relative jitter averaged over all core distances. Hence the quality factor for $`\gamma `$ray and proton primaries is expected to fall with increasing primary energy as could be seen from table 3.

In an experiment it is not readily obvious how to measure the mean arrival time and the timing jitter. Normally most of the experiments use discriminators which trigger at known thresholds. Knowing that a typical Čerenkov pulse can be well described by a lognormal function (modulated by the phototube response) it is possible to estimate its coefficients knowing when the pulses from individual elements cross the preset threshold as well as the pulse height. The coefficients of the lognormal functions are related to the mean arrival time and its RMS value. It is therefore essential to have independent multiple sampling of the threshold crossing time and photon density from a single Čerenkov telescope. Further details are beyond the scope of this paper.

## 9 Conclusions

Three different measurable parameters based on Čerenkov photon arrival times at detectors at different core distances at the observational level have been found to be useful in distinguishing between electromagnetic and hadronic showers. The sensitivity of these parameters peaks at around the hump region and hence best discrimination would be obtained by limiting the measurements from detectors around the hump region. The sensitivity of these parameters also seems to increase with the zenith angle of the primary at the top of the atmosphere. This is a useful property in contrast to the imaging technique which is most sensitive at small zenith angles . Similarly, the use of a circular mask at the focal point also increases the quality factor in some cases, especially for the curvature of the shower front. However the last two conclusions are not true to relative timing jitter in which case the sensitivity falls with increasing angle of incidence with respect to the vertical and marginally by the use of a mask.

Although the quality factors for individual parameters are not very large by themselves, by applying them in tandem would greatly augment the detection sensitivity of ground based VHE $`\gamma `$ray telescopes designed to exploit the wavefront sampling techniques. Table 17 demonstrates the improvement in the quality factor when the decay time and the timing jitter are applied successively to the same sample of showers. The dramatic improvement in the quality factor exhibits the orthogonal nature of the parameters.

The separation efficiency seems to decrease with increasing altitude of observation mainly because of the decreasing prominence of the hump in the case of electromagnetic showers. This, once again supports the earlier conclusion that the Čerenkov photons around the hump region are more sensitive to photonic primaries. Hence sampling of photons from this region of the light pool is recommended for better discrimination of hadronic primaries.

We would like to acknowledge the fruitful discussions with and helpful suggestions from Profs. K. Sivaprasad, B. S. Acharya and P. R. Vishwanath during the present work.


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# 1 Introduction

## 1  Introduction

Most of the different tasks included in Natural Language Processing (such as Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Information Filtering, Natural Language Interfaces and Story Understanding) apply different levels of Natural Language Understanding. For instance, in the case of Information Extraction, the Natural Language Understanding component plays a crucial role. This is due to the fact that most of the information to be extracted can only be identified by recognizing the conceptual roles. This area has been greatly promoted by the Message Understanding Conferences (MUC’s) organized by TIPSTER.

Such conferences have shown the tendency of the Information Extraction Systems to be more domain \[Wilks and Catizone, 1999\] and language independent \[Humphreys et al., 1998\] \[Kilgariff, 1997\], making Information Extraction stand closer to Natural Language Understanding. Currently, other related areas (such as Story Understanding \[Riloff, 1999\]) have begun to adapt the recent improvements done in Information Extraction.

An important step in any process that implies Natural Language Understanding is Semantic Interpretation. Semantic Interpretation can be defined as the process of obtaining a suitable meaning representation for a text. The input of the Semantic Interpreter can vary largely, going from raw text to full parsing trees. Likewise, the output of the Semantic Interpreter can also vary considerably (logical formulae, case-frames, SQL), mostly influenced by the type of application. In relation to this, two important sub-tasks can be distinguished within Semantic Interpretation: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Semantic Parsing, being the latter the interest of the current work. Further, an essential part of the Semantic Parsing involves the production of a case-role analysis in which the semantic roles of the entities, such as *starter* or *instrument*, are identified \[Brill and Mooney, 1997\].

The work here presented focuses on this problem, in particular on the issue of obtaining the verbal argument structure of the sentence. Our proposal for obtaining the representation of the meaning components (roles) of the verb is based on the application of the linguistic theory of the verbal subcategorization developed inside the Pirapides Project \[Fernández et al., 1999\], and is performed by means of complex pattern recognition techniques.

Pirapides is a project centered on the study of the English, Spanish and Catalan verbal predicates. Pirapides has several goals: On the one hand, from a theoretical point of view, a deep study is being carried out of the units that the model of a verbal entry has produced. This syntactic component focuses on the representation of the interaction between the syntactic and semantic components.

On the other hand, from an application-oriented point of view, a lexicon (LEXPIR) is being developed, based on this theoretical model, which will be used to analyze the corpus.

Following this brief introduction, Section 2 presents the linguistic model and Section 3 the computational model. Then, Section 4 describes the experiments carried out and the results obtained. Finally, Section 5 draws some conclusions and presents further work.

## 2  Lexical Model

The syntactic analysis using Context Free Grammars (CFG) for non domain-specific Spanish corpora has several limitations: it is basically impossible to carry out an analysis at a sentence level including syntactic functions. This is mainly due to the optionality of some constituents (such as the subject), and also because of the free order of the constituents.

Further, phrase analysis is not enough in order to obtain a suitable interpretation of the sentence. Thus, it becomes necessary to explore new tools to go beyond the phrase level.

Bearing this goal in mind, a hierarchical verbal lexicon for Spanish (LEXPIR) is being developed. In this lexicon, verbs are grouped hierarchaly based on their meaning components as well as their diathetic alternations \[Fernández and Martí, 1996\] \[Fernández et al., 1999\], \[Morante et al., 1998\]. Moreover, each group is subclassified according to the number of components which can be explicitly realized. In addition, LEXPIR includes, for each verb sense, information about the number of arguments, their syntactic realization, the prepositions they can take, their semantic component, their agreement and their optionality.

The information is propagated within the hierarchy in a top-down manner, that is, each verb inherits the elements from its group and each group from its class. However, the inherited information can be overwritten by the information already associated to the specific verb entry (default monotonic inheritance).

As shown in Figure 1, the trajectory class has five components: *starter*(1), *entity*(2) and the *trajectory*, which is the component which defines the class. The trajectory can be further divided into three components: *route*(3), *source*(4) and *destination*(5). Each one of these components has a basic phrase structure, a set of prepositions introducing them and a particular semantics. Moreover, one of the components must be in agreement with the verb.

There are four subclasses included in the trajectory class: *non-autonomous movement*, *autonomous movement*, *communication* and *transfer* (although the last one has not been formalized yet).

The non-autonomous movement subclass is characterised by the fact that it explicitly realizes the five components: “Alguien (1) desplaza algo (2) por un lugar (3) desde un punto (4) a otro (5)” (somebody moves something through a place from one point to another).

The autonomous movement presents a co-indexation between the components *starter* and *entity*. E.g.: “Alguien (1,2) va por un lugar (3) desde un punto (4) a otro (5)” (somebody goes through a place from one point to another). As it can be seen in the example, (1) is at the same time the *starter* of the event *go* and the *entity* that is moved.

Finally, in the communication class there are only three components which are explicit: *starter*, which is at the same time the *source*, *entity* and *destination*). E.g.: “Alguien (1,4) dice algo (2) a alguien (5)” (somebody says something to somebody).

Regarding prepositions, those which can appear in the destination component (5) are specified in the subclasses and can be divided into two groups: “p\_dest1” which includes “a/para” (to) and “p\_dest2” which includes the rest of preposition for *destination*.

Moreover, specific verb forms can impose their own restrictions. For instance, “charlar” (to chat) is a verb which, in contradiction with the rest of the verbs in the communication class, does not accept an NP in the entity component and the PP must have the preposition “de/sobre” (about). Furthermore, it cannot take the prepositions “a/para” to express destination and uses the preposition “con” instead. E.g.: “Alguien (1) charla de algo (2) con alguien (5)” (somebody chats about something with somebody).

Finally, in order to obtain the alternation schemes for a verb, the information of the verb is composed with the alternations of the class. The different elements that appear on a model are explained below for a specific case: the basic model for the trajectory verbs (see Table 1).

* *Id Number*: Numeric value that identifies the meaning component.
* *Syntax*: Syntactic realization of the semantic component. For the second component this information is unspecified (x) as the syntactic realization depends on the subclass. Moreover, this element, which is usually the Direct Object, has other restrictions: if its semantics indicates that it is \[+human/animate\] it should be a PP, while if it is \[-human/animate\] it has to be realized as an NP.
* *Preposition*: List of prepositions which have been established according to their meanings and occurrences.
* *Component*: Meaning component determined by the class.
* *Semantics*: Semantics of the component; this is a feature specific of the argument.
* *Agreement*: Person and number agreement with the verb.
* *Optionality*: This indicates which elements are optional inside the sentence.

Treating the optionality of the meaning components within the model itself allows us to reduce the number of possible alternations which have been established at a theoretical level (Pirapides takes the underspecification of a component as an alternation). Only that information which is different to the one association to the class is actually marked. For instance, in the Pasiva perifrástica model associated to the communication class (see Figure 1), the entity element (defined as {entity;NP;x;Top:yes;no}), has to be realized as an NP and also has to agree with the verb, which is not the usual case in the communication class.

## 3  Computational Model

LEXPIR allows the construction of patterns for all the possible syntactico-semantic alternations of a verb. However, our goal is to identify the meaning components of these patterns among the components of the partial parsing tree of a sentence. Simultaneous to the selection of the most similar verbal scheme for the sentence, the meaning components are also obtained.

Due to the richness of the language (adjuncts, free order, etc.) there is a need to apply robust pattern recognition techniques which allow to change the position of some elements, the absence of certain elements or the presence of new elements. The following subsections focus on the definition of the technique used for recognizing these complex structures within a sentence.

### 3.1  Approximate pattern matching

The use of full parsing trees \[Atserias et al., 1999\] implies previous decisions on the relationship between elements (e.g. PP-attachments). A mis-identified syntactic component, or whose limits have not been correctly set, makes difficult not only the recognition of the meaning components but also the recognition of the model itself.

To avoid this problem it was decided to use a syntactic analysis based on syntactic unambiguous groups: chunks \[Abney, 1991\]. This turns the problem of comparing phrase structure trees into a problem of aligning phrase group sequences.

### 3.2  Similarity measures

Our similarity measure is defined in terms of the minimum cost sequence of editing operations that transforms one structure into the other. The main differences with previous works on approximate pattern matching based on editing operations \[Tsong-li et al., 1994\], \[Shasha et al., 1994\] is that the elements in our sequences are Feature Structures (FS). So the relabelling operation is performed on the attributes.

As a consequence, the following editing operations were defined:

* *Delete*: Deletes an element of the sequence.
* *Insert*: Inserts a new element in the sequence.
* *Move*: Changes the order of an element in the sequence (e.g.: “\[We\] \[went\] \[to Barcelona\] \[by plane\]” and “\[by plane\] \[We\] \[went\] \[to Barcelona\]”).
* *Relabel*: Changes the value of the feature (attribute) of an element in the sequence.

The cost of a sequence of operations is the addition of the cost of each operation. In order to avoid having to choose the smallest model, a correction factor inversely proportional to the number of nodes is added to the similarity measure. It should be pointed out that the number of Relabel and Delete operations gives a measure of the goodness of the matching while the number of Insert operations measures how much information from the sentence is not captured by the pattern.

## 4  Experiments

The experiments here presented aim to prove not only the feasibility of the linguistic and computational models but also the possibility to apply the system for improving and developing the verbal subcategorization lexicon (LEXPIR).

In order to carry out the experiments a preliminary version of LEXPIR was manually built, which contained 61 verbs belonging to the trajectory class. Then, 170 sentences taken from an Spanish newspaper were labelled by hand with the verbal models and the meaning components. It should be also mentioned that only three sentences present more than one model.

### 4.1  Processing the corpus

The corpus was pre-processed automatically to obtain a parsed tree for each sentence. Firstly, the corpus was morphologically analized *MACO* \[Carmona et al., 1998\] and disambiguated *Relax* \[Padró, 1998\]). Secondly, the Spanish Wordnet \[Rodríguez et al., 1998\] was used to semantically annotate the corpus with the 79 semantic labels defined in the preliminary version of EuroWordnet Top Ontology. Then, in order to obtain a partial parsing a context free parser based on charts *TACAT* and a wide coverage grammar of Spanish111Several rules were added to the grammar so as to deal with noun complements. \[Castellón et al., 1998\] were used to obtain the partial parsing trees (see Figure 1). Finally, those parsed tree were used by our system to produce a case-role representation of the meaning components.

For instance, Figure 3 shows the feature structure of the meaning components obtained from the parsed tree shown in Figure 2.

### 4.2 Evaluation & Results

The evaluation of a system which performs semantic interpretation is a difficult task. One of the contributions of the MUC’s has been to establish a set of evaluation metrics and a common frame for the evaluation of Information Extraction Systems. The MUC evaluation methodology is based on a pre-alignment of the entities from the solution and response.

However, in order to evaluate the results of our system, the existence of two main differences has to be taken into account: multiple instantiation and entity fragmentation.

* *Multiple instantiation of the same model (entity)*: The generation of different instantiations of the same entity is unusual in Information Extraction, while our system does so. For instance, for the sentence “\[Pedro\] \[habló\] \[con normalidad\] \[con Andrés\]” (Pedró talked normally with Andrés), two solutions of the basic model are obtained, one filling the role *entity* with *normalidad* and the other with *Andrés*.
* *Entity Fragmentation*: On the other hand, IESs do not always recognize an entity as a whole, so that they generated several entities corresponding to the different fragments. In our system this could not happen as only a model per sentence is considered.

Assuming the existence of only one correct instantiation of a model per sentence, our pre-alignment method consists in comparing all the answers of the same model with the corresponding solution. As in MUC-7, a role is correct if, and only if, both values are equal as strings.

Table 3 shows the results in the identification of the meaning components corresponding to verb arguments and applying the MUC-7 evaluation metrics (see Table 4). Further, Table 2 shows the results obtained on the identification of the verb model . It should be mentioned that due to errors in the pre-processing of the corpus, the system was unable to identify any model for 5 of the 170 sentences.

## 5  Conclusions & Further Work

This paper has presented a semantic parsing approach for non domain-specific texts. Our approach is based on the application of a verbal subcategorization lexicon (LEXPIR) developed in the Pirapides project.

The results of the experiment are very promising. Even though they have been carried out using a limited corpus and lexicon, they have proved the feasibility of the linguistic and computational models.

As further work it is planned to cover linguistic phenomena other than the verbal subcategorization and to expand our system to deal with the combination of multiple models beyond the usual cascade approach. To design a more general framework, it has also been planned to formalize the role identification and model combination processes as a Consistency Labelling Problem \[Pelillo and Refice, 1994, Padró, 1998\] in which different nominal and verbal models can compete for their case-role assignments.

## 6  Aknowledgments

This research has been partially funded by the Spanish Research Department (Spontaneous-Speech Dialogue System for Limited Domains TIC98-423-C06)

Jordi Atserias is a doctoral student at the Software Department, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. batalla@lsi.upc.es; URL: http://www.lsi.upc.es/$``$batalla

Irene Castellón is a researcher and professor at the Universitat de Barcelona. castel@lingua.fil.ub.es; URL: http://www.ub.es/ling/labcat.htm

Montse Civit is a doctoral student at the Software Department, Universitat de Barcelona. civit@lsi.upc.es; URL: http://www.lsi.upc.es/$``$civit

German Rigauis a researcher and professor at the Software Department, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. g.rigau@lsi.upc.es; URL: http://www.lsi.upc.es/$``$rigau