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# The Little Bang: Searching for quark-gluon matter in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

## 1 PROLOGUE

On Feb. 10, 2000, CERN announced officially  that (I paraphrase) “compelling evidence now exists for the formation of a new state of matter at energy densities about 20 times larger than that in the center of atomic nuclei and temperatures about 100000 times higher than in the center of the sun. This state exhibits characteristic properties which cannot be understood with conventional hadronic dynamics but which are qualitatively consistent with expectations from the formation of a state of matter in which quarks and gluons no longer feel the constraints of color confinement.” I will here explain the scientific arguments  which led to this conclusion. The announcement was not triggered by a single experimental discovery which had just happened, but emerged from a painstaking analysis of many different sets of data collected during 15 years of heavy-ion collision experiments at the CERN SPS, especially of results obtained during the last five years with the 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ 207Pb beam and reported over the last 24 months . It happened at a time when the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider RHIC at BNL was about to turn on and CERN was taking stock of what had been achieved so far with the up to then highest energy heavy-ion beams available. The announcement gave credit to the achievements of an international community of almost 500 enthusiastic physicists from all over the world who had initiated and driven to success the heavy-ion program at CERN, participating in seven large and several smaller experiments with complementary goals in order to search for the creation of the theoretically predicted “quark-gluon plasma” (QGP) in heavy-ion collisions.

The reaction of the international press to this announcement was very strong but the reports were not always accurate. Several stated that CERN had claimed the “discovery of quark-gluon plasma”. This was not true: The CERN press release  and the scientific document on which it was based  had been formulated very carefully and made a clear and conscious distinction between “evidence for a new state of matter” (which we claimed) and “discovery of QGP” (which we didn’t). I will also report on the remaining open questions, trying to point out (as I did in my talk on Feb. 10 ) what is needed to turn the present evidence into incontrovertible proof. Several crucial issues can only be resolved by heavy-ion experiments at the higher energies provided by RHIC and LHC.

## 2 THE QUARK-HADRON TRANSITION

The QCD phase diagram  features a transition from a gas of hadronic resonances (HG) at low energy densities to a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at high energy densities. The critical energy density $`ϵ_\mathrm{c}`$ is of the order of 1 GeV/fm3 . It can be reached by either heating matter at zero net baryon density to a temperature of about $`T_\mathrm{c}170`$ MeV, or by compressing cold nuclear matter to baryon densities of about $`\rho _\mathrm{c}310\rho _0`$ (where $`\rho _0=0.15`$ fm-3 is the equilibrium density), or by combinations thereof. A simple version of the phase diagram is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Sketch of the QCD phase diagram, temperature $`T`$ vs. the baryon chemical potential $`\mu _\mathrm{B}`$ associated with net baryon density $`\rho _\mathrm{B}`$. The cross-hatched region indicates the expected phase transition and its present theoretical uncertainty, with the dashed line representing its most likely location. Lines with arrows indicate expansion trajectories of thermalized matter created in different environments. (The lines labelled “RHIC”, “LHC” and “early universe” should be much closer to the temperature axis but would then have been difficult to draw.) For a discussion of the chemical and thermal freeze-out lines and the location of the data points see text.

By colliding heavy ions at high energies, one hopes to heat and compress hadronic matter to energy densities above $`ϵ_\mathrm{c}`$. At lower beam energies (SIS @ 1 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$), the nuclei are stopped and the nuclear matter is compressed and moderately heated. At higher beam energies one reaches higher temperatures, but since the colliding nuclei are no longer completely stopped, the baryon chemical potential of the matter created at rest in the center-of-momentum system decreases (AGS @ 10 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ and SPS @ 160 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$). At the heavy ion colliders RHIC ($`\sqrt{s}=200A`$ GeV) and LHC ($`\sqrt{s}=5500A`$ GeV) the baryon chemical potential of the reaction fireball is so small that one essentially simulates baryon-free hadronic matter, very much like the expanding early universe. If the matter thermalizes quickly at energy densities above $`ϵ_\mathrm{c}`$, it will pass through the quark-hadron phase transition as the collision fireball expands and cools.

Along the temperature axis at $`\mu _\mathrm{B}=0`$ our knowledge of the QCD phase diagram is based on hard theory (lattice QCD), but for nonzero baryon density we must rely on models interpolating between low-density hadronic matter, described by low-energy effective theories, and high-density quark-gluon plasma, described by perturbative QCD. The theoretical uncertainties at high-baryon densities are thus difficult to quantify and relatively large (typically $`𝒪(3050\%)`$). At zero baryon density, the situation is much cleaner: numerical simulations of QCD with 3 dynamical light quark flavors on the lattice are now available, and the systematic errors due to lattice discretization and continuum extrapolation are controllable and beginning to get small . The critical temperature $`T_\mathrm{c}`$ for real-life QCD is predicted as $`T_\mathrm{c}170`$ MeV $`\pm 15\%`$ . Near $`T_\mathrm{c}`$ the energy density in units of $`T^4`$ changes dramatically by more than a factor of 10 within a very narrow temperature interval (see Figure 2). Above $`T1.2T_\mathrm{c}`$, $`ϵ/T^4`$ appears to settle at about 80% of the Stefan-Boltzmann value for an ideal gas of non-interacting quarks and gluons.

Figure 2. Energy density in units of $`T^4`$ for QCD with 3 dynamical light quark flavors of mass $`m/T=0.4`$ . For two light and a heavier strange quark flavor ($`m/T=1`$) the energy density decreases by $`15\%`$ . The lower horizontal axis gives $`T/T_\mathrm{c}`$, the upper one converts $`T`$ to MeV using $`T_\mathrm{c}=170`$ MeV. For various values of $`T`$ absolute values for the energy density $`ϵ`$ in GeV/fm3 are indicated, using the same $`T_\mathrm{c}`$.

According to Figure 2 only about 600 MeV/fm3 of energy density are needed to make the transition to deconfined quark-gluon matter. It is, however, very expensive to reach temperatures well above $`T_\mathrm{c}`$: an initial temperature of 220 MeV, about 30% above $`T_\mathrm{c}`$, already requires an initial energy density $`ϵ3.5`$ GeV/fm3 , about 6 times the critical value. We will see that this severely limits the reach of the CERN SPS into the new QGP phase: only the region at and slightly above $`T_\mathrm{c}`$ can be probed. We are “living at the edge” (W. Zajc)! To really penetrate deep into the new phase requires the much higher energy densities which become accessible with the heavy-ion colliders RHIC and LHC.

At $`T_\mathrm{c}`$ two phenomena happen simultaneously : color confinement is broken, i.e. colored degrees of freedom can propagate over distances much larger than the size of a hadron, and the approximate chiral symmetry of QCD, which is spontaneously broken at low temperatures and densities, gets restored. Both effects are important since they significantly accelerate particle production: the liberation of gluons in large densities opens up new gluonic production channels, and the threshold for quark-antiquark pair production is lowered since the quarks shed a large fraction of their constituent mass which is dynamically generated by their interaction with the quark condensate characterizing the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry at low densities.

Much less important for the dynamics of heavy-ion collisions is the actual order of the phase transition: depending on the value of the strange quark mass, existing lattice calculations allow for anything between a smooth crossover, similar to the one seen in Figure 2, and a weakly first order transition with a latent heat which is small on the vertical scale of Figure 2. The resulting differences in the dynamical evolution of the expanding fireball are almost certainly unmeasurable, except if the phase diagram features a critical point and the experiments pass close to it .

## 3 RECONSTRUCTING THE LITTLE BANG

As the two nuclei hit each other with full speed, a superposition of nucleon-nucleon (NN) collisions occurs. What is different compared to individual NN collisions is that (i) each nucleon may scatter several times, and (ii) the liberated partons from different NN collisions rescatter with each other even before hadronization, as do the secondary hadrons produced in different NN collision. Both features change the particle production per participating nucleon. But only the rescattering processes can lead to a state of local thermal equilibrium, by redistributing the energy lost by the beams into the statistically most probable configuration. These rescatterings result in thermodynamic pressure acting against the outside vacuum which causes the reaction zone to expand collectively. The expansion cools and dilutes the fireball below the critical energy density of the quark-hadron transition, at which point hadrons are formed from the quarks and gluons (hadronization). Further interactions between these hadrons cease once their average distance exceeds the range of the strong interactions: the hadrons “freeze out”.

The strong interactions among the partons and hadrons before freeze-out wipe out most information about their original production processes. The extraction of information about the interesting hot and dense early collision stage thus requires to exploit features which are either established early and not changed by the rescattering and collective expansion or can be reliably back-extrapolated. Correspondingly one classifies the observables into two classes, early and late signatures. (A comprehensive review of QGP signatures with a complete list of references can be found in .)

The conceptually cleanest early signatures are the directly produced real and virtual photons (i.e. not those resulting from hadron decays after freeze-out) since photons show no strong interaction and directly escape from the fireball (virtual photons materialize as $`e^+e^{}`$ or $`\mu ^+\mu ^{}`$ pairs). They are emitted throughout the expansion, but their production is expected to be strongly weighted towards the hot and dense initial stages. Unfortunately, direct photons are rare, and the experimental background from hadronic decay photons after freeze-out is enormous.

Another early signature are hadrons made of charmed quarks. At SPS energies, $`c\overline{c}`$ pairs can only be created in the primary NN collisions, because the secondary scatterings are not energetic enough to overcome the $`c\overline{c}`$ threshold. The only thing that can happen to them is a redistribution in phase-space, changing the relative amounts of mesons with hidden ($`c\overline{c}`$ charmonium) and open charm ($`\overline{c}q`$ and $`\overline{q}c`$). It was shown that such a redistribution is much easier in the color-deconfined QGP phase than by reinteraction of charmed particles with other hadrons; in this way charm-redistribution becomes also an early signature. But also charm production is a very rare process at SPS energies and below.

Hadrons made of up, down and strange quarks, which can be relatively easily produced and destroyed in all stages of the fireball expansion (I’ll slightly qualify this statement further below with regard to strange hadrons), are late signatures. They provide only indirect information about the early collision stages. But they are very abundant, forming more than 99.99% of all emitted particles, and can thus be measured very accurately. We’ll thus use these late signals to reconstruct the Little Bang and then check the consistency of the resulting picture with the less detailed direct information from the early signals.

I would like to note that this procedure is quite analogous to the reconstruction of the cosmological Big Bang from observations. The three observational pillars of the Big Bang theory are the Hubble expansion (which goes on until today), the cosmic microwave background of thermal photons (which decoupled when our universe was about 300,000 years old), and the measured abundances of light atomic nuclei (which reflect the primordial nucleosynthesis until about 3 minutes after the Big Bang). Almost everything before that time is based on a theoretical back-extrapolation using Einstein’s equations and the Standard Model of particle physics and not on direct astrophysical observations. The only exception is the observed baryon number asymmetry which was presumably established very early but which is still not entirely understood.

## 4 INITIAL CONDITIONS

Before starting to analyze the final freeze-out stage of the collision using the late signatures, it is useful to get an idea about the global conditions of the fireball formed shortly after impact. Following Bjorken  it is possible to estimate the initially produced energy density by measuring the total transverse energy $`E_T`$ (excluding the fraction due to motion along the beam direction) and putting it into an estimated initial volume of the reaction zone. Assuming boost-invariant longitudinal expansion (which is expected to hold at high energies  and for which evidence exists in the midrapidity region even at SPS energies ) we can identify the space-time rapidity $`\eta =0.5\mathrm{ln}[(t+z)/(tz)]`$ with the momentum-space rapidity $`y=0.5\mathrm{ln}[(E+p_z)/(Ep_z)]`$ and write

$$ϵ_{\mathrm{Bj}}(\tau _0)=\frac{1}{\pi R_{\mathrm{rms}}^2}\frac{1}{2\tau _0}\frac{dE_T}{dy}.$$
(1)
Inserting $`\pi R_{\mathrm{rms}}^2=63`$ fm2 for the overlap area of two Pb nuclei colliding at zero impact parameter, choosing $`\tau _0=1`$ fm/$`c`$ to evaluate the length $`2\tau dy=2\tau d\eta `$ of a slice of a cylinder of width $`d\eta `$ at midrapidity $`y=\eta =0`$, and using $`dE_T/dy(y=0)400`$ GeV for central Pb+Pb collisions  (“very” central collisions even give up to 10% more) one obtains

$$ϵ_{\mathrm{Bj}}^{\mathrm{Pb}+\mathrm{Pb}}(1\mathrm{fm}/c)=3.2\pm 0.3\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{fm}^3.$$
(2)
As QGP searchers we thus play in the right ball-park; if the matter were already thermalized after 1 fm/$`c`$ (which at this point we don’t know yet), Figure 2 tells us that the initial temperature would have been $`T_0210220`$ MeV. Similar initial energy densities are obtained from a detailed phase-space analysis of the hadronic freeze-out state after back-extrapolation to the time before the onset of transverse expansion . Perhaps more importantly, initial energy densities between 2 and 10 GeV/fm3 during the first 1-2 fm/$`c`$ are obtained  even in approaches which avoid quarks and gluons as relevant degrees of freedom, like the URQMD code which uses hadronic strings and resonances to describe particle production and rescattering and is tuned to NN data. Indeed, for Pb+Pb collisions at the SPS, URQMD predicts that the prehadronic component (strings) dominates over the produced hadrons for nearly 8 fm/$`c`$ ! This further strengthens our expectation to see new physics at the SPS.

## 5 THERMAL FREEZE-OUT: AN EXPLODING THERMAL FIREBALL

The measured hadron spectra contain two pieces of information: (i) Their normalization, i.e. the yields and abundance ratios, provides the chemical composition of the fireball at the “chemical freeze-out” point (i.e. when the hadron abundances freeze out); this yields information in particular about the degree of chemical equilibration, to be discussed in Section 7. (ii) The hadronic momentum spectra provide information about thermalization of the momentum distributions and collective flow. The latter is caused by thermodynamic pressure (resulting from intense rescattering among the consituents) and thus reflects, in a time-integrated way, the equation of state of the fireball matter. The expansion rate at “thermal freeze-out” (i.e. along the last-scattering hypersurface which marks the decoupling of the momenta) provides the Little Bang analogue of the Hubble constant for the Big Bang, while the corresponding freeze-out temperature parallels the temperature of the cosmic microwave background at the point of photon decoupling.

As in cosmology, where the photon temperature is affected by the Hubble expansion and red-shifted from originally 3000 K to 2.7 K today, the hadronic momentum spectra are affected by the collective expansion of the collision fireball. Only in this case the expansion occurs in three dimensions, and the fireball is observed from outside, resulting in a blue-shift of the apparent temperature of the spectra. Since the longitudinal expansion is ambiguous in that it is difficult to assess which fraction of the finally observed longitudinal flow is generated by hydrodynamic pressure and how much is a result of incomplete stopping of the two nuclei, we concentrate on transverse flow, reflected in the transverse mass ($`m_{}=\sqrt{m^2+p_{}^2}`$) spectra. This type of flow is only created after impact.

Roughly, if rescattering among the fireball constituents results in thermalization and collective flow, the shapes of all hadronic $`m_{}`$-spectra can be characterized by just two numbers: the temperature $`T_\mathrm{f}`$ and the mean transverse flow velocity $`v_{}`$ at freeze-out. More exactly, this is only true if all hadrons decouple simultaneously (i.e. their rescattering cross sections are similar), and the form in which the spectra are characterized by $`v_{}`$ may depend on the flow velocity and density profiles. For this presentation I will neglect the latter subtlety; the former can be checked experimentally.

In the relativistic region, i.e. for $`m_{}>2m_0`$, the rest masses can be neglected, and the effect of flow on the spectra is given by the simple blue-shift formula

$$T_{\mathrm{slope}}=T_\mathrm{f}\sqrt{\frac{1+v_{}}{1v_{}}}.$$
(3)
At large $`m_{}`$ all hadron spectra should have the same inverse slope $`T_{\mathrm{slope}}`$ (this tests thermalization) but measuring it does not allow to separate thermal from collective motion.

In the nonrelativistic region $`m_{}<2m_0`$, on the other, flow does couple to the rest mass: for a linear transverse flow velocity profile and a Gaussian transverse density profile one finds exactly

$$T_{\mathrm{slope}}=T_\mathrm{f}+\frac{1}{2}m_0v_{}^2.$$
(4)
Such an approximately linear rest mass dependence is indeed observed. Figure 3 shows clearly that the spectra contain a collective flow component; inverse slopes of 300 MeV or more as seen e.g. for the protons can obviously not be interpreted as hadronic temperatures (see Figures 1 and 2). There is some scatter between the data from different experiments, partly due to different kinematic regions for fitting the slope. The pion spectra are particularly troublesome due to the strong deformation at low $`m_{}`$ from resonance decay contributions and Coulomb effects. Strictly speaking, the pions should not be included in this plot since they are never non-relativistic in the accessible region.

Figure 3. Inverse slopes $`TT_{\mathrm{slope}}`$ of the measured $`m_{}`$-distributions from 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Pb collisions for various hadron species, plotted against their rest mass . Results from different experiments are labelled by different symbols. The line is described in .

The deuterons don’t really belong here either: they are too fragile to be considered part of the equilibrium ensemble. In the thermal state they are continually broken up by collisions, re-forming only at freeze-out by coalescence of protons and neutrons. That they fit into the systematics of Figure 3 is rather a test of the coalescence mechanism by which the deuterons inherit the temperature and flow from their parent nucleons . In fact, the way they fit makes an important statement about the transverse profile of the fireball at freeze-out: for a Gaussian density distribution the deuteron slope should be identical to that of the parent nucleons, whereas the observed larger inverse deuteron slope requires a more box-like density distribution, with more weight at larger flow velocities .

An interesting exception to the trend is provided by the $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$: it’s spectrum is considerably steeper. This reflects their earlier kinetic freeze-out, due to an absence of strong scattering resonances with the dominating pion fluid  which are essential for the kinetic re-equilibration of the other hadron species.

After all these caveats it is clear that a very accurate determination of $`v_{}`$ from the slope in Figure 3 alone is not possible. But transverse flow also affects other observables, in particular two-particle correlations in momentum space, like the quantum statistical Bose-Einstein (Hanbury Brown-Twiss) correlations between identical bosons, or the correlations due to “soft” final state interactions among the particles after their last “hard” scattering which e.g. cause the coalescence of two nucleons into a deuteron. In both cases correlations occur only between particles which are close in phase-space; by measuring the width of the correlation in momentum space one can thus estimate the size of the emitting source in coordinate space. Collective expansion tends to reduce the size of the regions within which particles can develop such correlations; thermal motion, controlled by the thermal velocity $`\sqrt{T/M_{}}`$, smears out the flow velocity gradients and thus acts in the opposite direction. This leads to a characteristic dependence of the size of the effective emission region for correlated pairs on their transverse mass $`M_{}`$; its transverse size is controlled by the transverse flow velocity, $`v_{}`$ as shown by the approximate formula

$$R_{}^2\frac{R^2}{1+\xi v_{}^2(M_{}/T_\mathrm{f})}.$$
(5)
Here $`\xi =𝒪(1)`$ is a model-dependent factor which depends on the flow velocity and density profiles, and $`R`$ characterizes the geometric transverse size of the fireball at freeze-out.

The formula (5) predicts that the effective radius $`R_{}`$ extracted from the correlations scales only with the transverse mass $`M_{}`$ of the particle pair, irrespective of the rest masses of the individual particles. This is borne out by experiment, see Figure 4. Similar results, consistent with those shown in Figure 4, were obtained by the NA49  and NA52 collaborations .

Figure 4. Effective radius $`R_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ of the emission region extracted from $`\pi \pi `$ and $`KK`$ Bose-Einstein (HBT) correlations, from $`pp`$ final state interaction correlations and from the deuteron coalescence probability $`d/p^2`$, as a function of the transverse mass $`M_TM_{}`$ of the particle pair. The HBT correlations were analyzed in 3 dimensions, and $`R_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ was defined by the geometric mean of the two transverse and the longitudinal size parameters, $`R_{\mathrm{eff}}=(R_{}^2R_{})^{1/3}(R_s^2R_L)^{1/3}`$. (Figure taken from .)

While Eq. (5) does not permit to separate $`T_\mathrm{f}`$ from $`v_{}`$ either, the correlation between the two parameters in (5) is exactly opposite to that provided by the spectral slopes in (3) and (4). Combining them in a simultaneous analysis of spectra and correlations  (see Figure 5) allows for a rather accurate separation of directed collective and random thermal motion, yielding $`T_\mathrm{f}100`$ MeV and $`v_{}0.55c`$. The corresponding thermal energy density is only about $`ϵ_\mathrm{f}0.05`$ GeV/fm3 . Even when the kinetic flow energy is added this still implies an expansion of the fireball volume by a factor 40 from $`\tau _0`$ to $`\tau _\mathrm{f}`$. HBT measurements show that the transverse area grows by a factor 4–5, consistent with the large transverse expansion velocity $`v_{}`$ ; the remaing factor 8–10 must come from longitudinal growth.

Figure 5. $`\chi ^2`$ contours for the fit of the measured HBT radius parameters from $`\pi \pi `$ Bose-Einstein correlations  (widely spaced contours) and of the negative particle spectrum  (narrowly spaced contours) in the rapidity window $`3.9<Y_{\mathrm{lab}}<4.4`$ from 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Pb collisions. The best fits require freeze-out temperatures slightly below 100 MeV and average transverse expansion velocities of about 0.55 $`c`$. For details the reader should refer to  from where this figure was taken.

## 6 THE MISSING RHO: OBSERVING THERMALIZATION AT WORK

With strong experimental evidence that the Little Bang started out at an energy density above 3 GeV/fm3 , but only decoupled at about 50 MeV/fm3, we may ask: how can we find out what happened in between? Here the $`\rho `$ meson can provide a first answer: it can decay into $`e^+e^{}`$ or $`\mu ^+\mu ^{}`$ pairs which escape from the fireball without further interactions, and this $`\rho `$-decay clock ticks at a rate of 1.3 fm/$`c`$, the natural lifetime of the $`\rho `$. What I mean by this is that after one generation of $`\rho `$’s has decayed, a second generation is created by resonant $`\pi \pi `$ scattering, which can again decay into dileptons, etc. The number of extra dileptons with the invariant mass of the $`\rho `$ is thus a measure for the time in which the fireball consists of strongly interacting hadrons . Obviously, $`\rho `$ mesons do not exist before hadrons appear in the fireball, so they won’t tell us anything about a possible QGP phase in its initial stages. But they still allow us to look inside the strongly interacting hadronic fireball at a later stage, still long before the hadrons decouple.

The experimental check of this conjecture yields a surprise: when the CERES/NA45 collaboration looked at the $`e^+e^{}`$ spectrum in 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Au collisions (see Figure 6), they could not find the $`\rho `$ at all! Sure, there were extra $`e^+e^{}`$ pairs in the mass region of the $`\rho `$ and below (about 2.5–3 times as many as expected), but instead of a nice $`\rho `$-peak at $`m_\rho =770`$ MeV one finds only a broad smear . Many explanations of the CERES-effect have been proposed, but the simplest one consistent with the data (for a review see ) is collision broadening: there is strong rescattering of the pions, not only among each other, but also with the baryons in the hadronic resonance gas, and this modifies their spectral densities and, as a consequence, leads to a smearing of the $`\rho `$-resonance in the $`\pi \pi `$ scattering cross section.

This demonstrates that, after first being formed in the hadronization process, the pions (the most abundant species at the SPS) undergo intense rescattering before finally freezing out. And this again is the mechanism which allows the fireball to reach and maintain a state of approximate local thermal equilibrium, to build up thermodynamic pressure and to collectively explode, as seen from the above analysis of the freeze-out stage. That the dileptons from collision-broadened $`\rho `$’s outnumber those from the decay of unmodified $`\rho `$’s emitted at thermal freeze-out (which should show up as a normal $`\rho `$-peak) shows that the hadronic rescattering stage must have lasted several $`\rho `$ lifetimes.

Figure 6. Invariant mass spectrum of $`e^+e^{}`$ pairs from 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Au collisions . The solid line is the expected spectrum (the sum of the many shown contributions) from the decays of hadrons produced in $`pp`$ and $`pA`$ collisions (where it was experimentally confirmed ), properly scaled to the Pb+Au case. Two sets of data with different analyses are shown. Note that the $`\rho `$-peak reappears if only $`e^+e^{}`$ pairs with $`p_{}>500`$ MeV/$`c`$ are selected ; such fast $`\rho `$’s escape quickly from the fireball and are not as strongly affected by collision broadening.

## 7 SEEING THE QUARK-HADRON TRANSITION

In the rest of this talk I will concentrate on observables which in heavy-ion collisions were found to be drastically different from NN collisions but which we now believe cannot be changed quickly enough by hadronic rescattering during the time available between hadronization and kinetic freeze-out. Observables for which this last property can be firmly established yield insights about where heavy-ion collisions differ from NN collisions already before or during hadronization, irrespective whether or not the hadrons rescatter with each other after being formed.

Of course, the formation of a quark-gluon plasma is one possibility how the early stage of a heavy-ion collision may differ from that in a NN collision. It is thus important to review a few key QGP predictions and check how they fare in comparison with the data. In the present Section I discuss strangeness enhancement as a QGP signature, returning to two further QGP predictions in the following two Sections.

Strangeness enhancement and chemical equilibration was one of the earliest predicted QGP signatures . The idea is simple: color deconfinement leads to a large gluon density which can create $`s\overline{s}`$ pairs by gluon fusion, and chiral symmetry restoration makes the strange quarks relatively light, thus reducing the production threshold (not to mention that in the QGP strange quarks can be created without the need for additional light quarks to make a hadron). The two effects together should cause a significant reduction of the time scale for strangeness saturation and chemical equilibration, compared to hadronic rescattering processes after hadronization where the production of strange hadron pairs with opposite strangeness is suppressed by large thresholds and small cross sections. Since the production of strange hadrons in NN and $`e^+e^{}`$ collisions is known to be significantly suppressed relative to the expectation from simple statistical phase-space considerations , this should lead to a relative enhancement of strangeness production in heavy-ion collisions.

Kinetic simulations, based on known hadronic properties and interaction cross sections, have now convincingly shown that it is not possible to create a state of hadronic chemical equilibrium and a significant amount of strangeness enhancement out of a non-equilibrium initial state by purely hadronic rescattering (for a recent review see ). If you want to get those features out, you have to put them in at the beginning of the simulation.

There may be many different ways of doing so. However, the most efficient way of creating a state of (relative or absolute) hadronic chemical equilibrium appears to be provided by the hadronization process itself: due to color-confinement, the coalescence of colored quarks into hadrons is a process with very large cross sections, allowing for many different arrangements among the quarks with essentially equal probability. If before hadronization the quarks and gluons are essentially uncorrelated (like in a QGP), then the most likely outcome of the hadronization process is a statistical occupation of the hadronic phase-space, i.e. a state of maximum entropy, subject only to the constraints of conservation of energy, baryon number, net strangeness, and (sic!) the total number of available $`s\overline{s}`$ pairs. Thus, if (as predicted for the QGP ) the number of $`s\overline{s}`$-pairs is enhanced before the onset of hadronization, or by the fragmentation of gluons during hadronization, their statistical distribution over the available hadronic channels will naturally lead to an apparent hadronic chemical equilibrium state (with the appropriate enhancement of, say, the $`\overline{\mathrm{\Omega }}`$) even if none of the hadrons ever scattered with each other after being formed.

Figure 7. A compilation of measured particle ratios from 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Pb collisions, compared with a hadron resonance gas in complete chemical equilibrium (full strangeness saturation) at $`T_{\mathrm{chem}}=168`$ MeV and $`\mu _\mathrm{B}=266`$ MeV .

Such a state of “apparent” or “pre-established” chemical equilibrium is indeed seen in the experiments: Figure 7 shows some 18 hadronic particle ratios measured in 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Pb collisions, compared with a chemical equilibrium fireball model at $`T_{\mathrm{chem}}=168`$ MeV and $`\mu _\mathrm{B}=266`$ MeV . The agreement between the data is at least as good as between different experiments. The value of $`T_{\mathrm{chem}}`$ is interesting: in the maximum entropy sense it characterizes the energy density at which hadronization occurs (about 0.5 GeV/fm3 ) and coincides within errors with the critical temperature for color deconfinement from lattice QCD. If the hadrons were formed by hadronization of a prehadronic state at the critical energy density $`ϵ_\mathrm{c}`$ and their abundances froze out at $`T_{\mathrm{chem}}=168`$ MeV, there was indeed no time to achieve this equilibrium configuration by hadronic rescattering; the hadrons must have been “born” into chemical equilibrium .

Figure 8. The strangeness suppression factor of produced strange vs. nonstrange valence quarks, $`\lambda _s=2\overline{s}s/\overline{u}u+\overline{d}d|_{\mathrm{produced}}`$, in elementary particle and heavy-ion collisions as a function of $`\sqrt{s}`$ . The two points each for $`p\overline{p}`$ collisions reflect the inclusion (exclusion) of the initial valence quarks.

But this only half the story. Namely, a similar picture of statistical hadronization at the critical energy density $`ϵ_\mathrm{c}`$ arises even from an analysis of $`e^+e^{}`$, $`pp`$ and $`p\overline{p}`$ collisions . What is really dramatically different in heavy-ion collisions is the level of strangeness saturation reflected in the apparent chemical equilibrium state: Figure 8 shows that the overall fraction of strange particles is about twice as high in heavy-ion collisions as in elementary particle collisions! Essentially the strangeness suppression observed in NN collisions has disappeared in AA collisions. According to the preceding paragraph, this extra strangeness cannot have been produced by final state rescattering; it thus reflects the properties of the prehadronic state before hadronization. This points to a new, fast strangeness production mechanism before hadronization, as predicted for QGP .

Figure 9. Enhancement factor for the midrapidity yields per participating nucleon in 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ Pb+Pb relative to p+Pb collisions for various strange and non-strange hadron species .

A very striking way of plotting these findings is shown in Figure 9 : relative to $`p`$+Pb collisions, the number of produced strange hadrons per participating nucleon is the more strongly enhanced the more strange (anti)quarks for its formation are required. For $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ and $`\overline{\mathrm{\Omega }}`$ this enhancement factor is about 15! The tendency shown in Figure 9 is completely counterintuitive for hadronic rescattering mechanisms, where multistrange (anti)baryons are suppressed by higher thresholds than kaons and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$’s; but it is perfectly consistent with a statistical hadronization picture  where multi-strange particles profit more from the global strangeness enhancement than singly strange hadrons.

Kinetic codes like URQMD  tend to lose (anti)baryons (and thus a fraction of the initial enhancement of multi-strange (anti)baryons) by baryon-antibaryon annihilation during the rescattering stage. It was recently shown  that this is to a large extent a manifestation of the lack of detailed balance in the codes which include processes like $`\overline{p}pn\pi `$ (with $`n=56`$) but not their inverse. Rapp and Shuryak  argue that, as the system cools below $`T_{\mathrm{chem}}`$, pions and kaons don’t annihilate but instead build up a positive chemical potential which enhances the probability for the inverse reaction and strongly reduces the net annihilation of antibaryons. This is really fortunate, because it is this lack of abundance-changing processes during the hadronic expansion stage which allows us to glimpse the hadronization process itself through the final hadronic abundances, in spite of intense, resonance-mediated elastic rescattering among the hadrons between hadronization at $`T_{\mathrm{chem}}170`$ MeV and kinetic freeze-out at $`T_\mathrm{f}100`$ MeV.

## 8 $`J/\psi `$ SUPPRESSION AND COLOR DECONFINEMENT

The observation of hadronic chemical equilibrium abundances has taken us from kinetic freeze-out all the way back to the hadronization transition. The observed strangeness enhancement gives indirect information about the state that existed before hadronization. It is consistent with the hypothesis that this state consisted of color-deconfined quark-gluon matter and that intense rescattering among the quarks and gluons, before or during the hadronization process, produced the extra strangeness. But this may not be the only explanation. Can one find other, perhaps more direct indications for matter containing deconfined gluons in the early collision stages?

This brings us to the second key prediction for QGP formation: Matsui and Satz suggested  that the high gluon density resulting from color deconfinement should Debye-screen the color interaction potential between a $`c`$ and a $`\overline{c}`$ quark pair produced during the initial impact of the two nuclei and thus prevent them from binding into charmonium states ($`J/\psi `$, $`\chi _c`$, $`\psi `$’). Instead, they would eventually find light quark partners to make hadrons with open charm. This would lead to a suppression of charmonium production in heavy-ion collisions, and the screening mechanism should lead to a specific suppression pattern which, as a function of energy density achieved, first affects the loosely bound $`\psi `$’ and $`\chi _c`$ states and then the strongly bound $`J/\psi `$ ground state .

There is an expected background to this charmonium suppression which already exists in $`pA`$ collisions and can be studied there in order to extrapolate it to $`AA`$: if you put yourself in the CM frame, a $`c\overline{c}`$ pair created in a hard $`pp`$ collision (i.e. after $`1/(2m_c)<0.1`$ fm/$`c`$) will be affected by interactions with other nucleons from the rest of the nucleus which is still sweeping over it. This “normal suppression” has by now been well studied  and is indicated by the straight lines in Figure 10. It follows an exponential attenuation with the length $`L`$ of cold nuclear matter of density $`\rho _0`$ sweeping over the $`c\overline{c}`$-pair, with an absorption cross section of about 6 mb for both the weakly bound $`\psi `$’ and the tightly bound $`J/\psi `$! The equal absorption is understood as an effect on the pre-resonant $`c\overline{c}`$ state at early times, before the bound charmonium states actually form (which at SPS energies and above happens only after the whole nucleus has passed over the pair).

Figure 10 shows that a deviation from this “normal” absorption occurs in heavy-ion collisions once the nuclear overlap volume (related to the variable $`L`$) becomes sufficiently large. The weakly bound $`\psi `$’ suffers “anomalous absorption” first, at around $`L=5`$ fm, while for the $`J/\psi `$ and/or the $`\chi _c`$ (which in $`pA`$ collisions is known to contribute about 30% to the measured $`J/\psi `$ yield via its radiative decay $`\chi _c\gamma J/\psi `$) the anomalous absorption does not set in until about $`L=7.5`$ fm.

Figure 10. NA38/NA50 data on $`\psi ^{}/DY`$ and $`(J/\psi )/DY`$ , plotted as a function of the nuclear thickness parameter $`L`$ (see text).

Figure 11. Left: “Anomalous $`J/\psi `$ suppression” (see text) as a function of initial energy density . Right: The ratio $`(J/\psi )`$/Drell-Yan production, as a function of the measured transverse energy $`E_T`$, compared to different hadronic comover models .

The $`J/\psi `$ suppression has in the meantime been studied in much greater detail as shown in Figure 11. The left part shows the “anomalous suppression” (with the normal pre-resonant absorption on the incoming nuclei divided out) as a function of energy density . The latter is computed from the measured transverse energy $`E_T`$ via Bjorken’s formula (1), where the effective overlap area in the denominator is related to $`E_T`$ via a geometric model and Glauber theory . The observed suppression pattern is interesting: it occurs in two “waves”, with an intermediate flattening after about 30% of suppression (which one might be tempted to associate with the complete suppression of the $`\chi _c`$ component) followed by a stronger suppression at energy densities above 3 GeV/fm3 .

The real origin of this “wavy” structure is not yet clear; on a superficial level it is qualitatively consistent with a suppression hierarchy $`\psi ^{}\chi _cJ/\psi `$ as expected from the QGP color-screening scenario. In any case, the right part of Figure 11 shows that it can not be reproduced by conventional hadronic final state interactions (collision dissociation) between the charmonium and the produced hadrons. Such “hadronic comover models” must be tuned to relatively large inelastic $`J/\psi `$-comover scattering cross sections to even reproduce the average suppression in Pb+Pb collisions, at the expense of sometimes overpredicting the effect in S+U collisions. Even then most of the destructive interactions happen at very early times where the comover densities are so high that a hadronic description should really not yet apply. Most importantly, however, they all consistently fail to reproduce the strong suppression at very high $`E_T`$.

It was recently noted that the apparent onset of the second, stronger suppression above $`ϵ=3`$ GeV/fm3 coincides roughly with the “knee” in the $`E_T`$-distribution, i.e. with the point of full nuclear overlap above which one enters the region of $`E_T`$ fluctuations . These fluctuations tend to increase the $`J/\psi `$ suppression even in the comover models, but the effect is not strong enough to reproduce the data . On the other hand, if one associates them with fluctuations of the energy density in the QGP Debye-screening approach the fluctuation effects are much stronger and the data can be reproduced . It would be important to clarify this issue, e.g. by performing U+U collisions where, due to the deformation of the uranium nucleus, in the tip-on-tip configuration similar energy densities can be reached without having to exploit $`E_T`$ fluctuations.

## 9 THERMAL ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION

The third (and earliest) key prediction for QGP formation was thermal radiation of (real and virtual) photons from the thermalized quarks in the QGP . They are conceptually clean direct probes of the QGP phase itself, but experimentally difficult due to large backgrounds. Nonetheless, experiments at the SPS have searched for this type of radiation. An excess yield in the photon spectrum above about 1.5 GeV which is attributed to direct emission was found by WA98  and discussed by Th. Peitzmann at this meeting. It is, I think, fair to say that the relation of this signal with thermal QGP radiation is presently unclear. The NA50 Collaboration found an excess in the dimuon spectrum between the $`\varphi `$ and $`J/\psi `$ peaks which was interpreted by them as an excess in open charm production  but which may also be due to thermal QGP radiation . Again, the true origin is not clear. The situation is such that, for the initial temperatures reachable at the SPS, the theoretical predictions for a thermal radiation signal are so low that it is not obvious that it can be dug out from the experimental background. Since the thermal radiation rate goes with $`T^4`$, the higher initial temperatures reachable at RHIC and LHC, combined with the longer lifetime of the plasma phase, should help a lot to see the plasma “shine” and thus confirm this prediction experimentally.

## 10 CONCLUSIONS

Relativistic heavy-ion collisions at the CERN SPS have taken us into new and unprecedented regions of energy density: in Pb+Pb collisions at 158 $`A`$ GeV/$`c`$ initial energy densities of about 3.5 GeV/fm3 (i.e. more than 20 times the energy density of cold nuclear matter) have been created over large volumes. If the matter was approximately thermalized even at this early stage (for which we do not yet have convincing direct evidence, although data on elliptic flow , which I had no time and space to discuss, point in this direction), the initial temperature was around 210–220 MeV, i.e. 30% above the critical temperature for color deconfinement.

We have strong and direct experimental evidence for a large degree of thermalization and strong collective behaviour in the late stages of the collision, driven by intense rescattering among the fireball constituents which is directly visible in the low-mass dilepton spectra. At kinetic freeze-out the fireball radiates hadrons with a temperature of about 100 MeV, at the same time undergoing collective explosion with more than half the light velocity (the “Little Bang”).

Extensive theoretical simulations have shown that conventional hadronic processes during the hadronic rescattering phase lead mostly to elastic collisions and are very inefficient in changing the final hadron abundances. The observed hadronic particle ratios thus reflect the “primordial hadrosynthesis” in the Little Bang and provide a direct glimpse of the hadron formation stage. The data show that the hadrons are born into a state of “pre-established chemical equilibrium” at a temperature of about 170 MeV which coincides with the deconfinement temperature predicted by lattice QCD. This is the first observation of thermal equilibrium matter at such a high temperature and energy density. The phenomenon is most easily understood in terms of statistical hadronzation of a QGP, although other mechanisms with similar statistical features cannot be excluded. The experimentally determined “chemical” and “thermal” freeze-out points can be connected by an isentropic expansion trajectory as indicated in Figure 1. (Note that the part of the same trajectory which runs through the QGP phase is so far speculative.)

Strangeness enhancement and charmonium suppression have been predicted as QGP signatures and are indeed found to characterize the prehadronic state from which the observed hadrons appear during hadronization. These features cannot be understood in terms of conventional hadronic final state rescattering effects after hadronization. They are consistent with QGP expectations, although other explanations may still be possible. The inability to understand these properties in terms of known hadronic physics warrants the characterization of this prehadronic state as a “new state of matter” .

So what is missing to claim “discovery” of the quark-gluon plasma? First, on the theoretical side, we only know that with known hadronic physics we can not describe the data, but it has not yet been shown that a fully dynamical theory which begins with QGP and follows the system until freeze-out actually can describe all observations. One reason is that a description of strongly interacting matter and its dynamics in the neighborhood of the phase transition is an exceedingly difficult problem, and that at the SPS we are never far away from the phase transition. This task may thus become easier at RHIC/LHC than at the SPS. Furthermore, the evolution of the “late signatures” from $`pp`$ via $`pA`$ to $`AA`$ collisions, to establish a clear line between “conventional hadronic physics” and “new physics” has so far not received enough careful theoretical attention. This should be remedied, but it requires much improved $`pp`$ and $`pA`$ data at the same energy, with more differential experimental information. Such data can (only) be obtained at the SPS.

Further important experimental questions which can be answered at the SPS (and in a few cases only there) are: Assuming that we have seen quark deconfinement, where is its energy threshold? How big does the collision system have to be to establish approximate thermal equilibrium and strangeness saturation and to exhibit collective flow? If charmonia are suppressed, what happens with open charm – is Drell-Yan production of dileptons (which depends on the quark structure functions in the colliding nuclei) really the appropriate normalization for $`J/\psi `$ suppression (which is sensitive to the gluon structure functions since $`c\overline{c}`$ pairs are made from gluons)? Some answers will be provided by data already collected at lower beam energies and with smaller nuclei and more peripheral collisions. A search for open charm at the SPS was proposed  and recently approved. But other questions are still waiting for proposals to be made.

Still, with the SPS we will never be able to get “away from the edge”. A detailed characterization of the “new state of matter” will only be possible when the larger initial energy densities and resulting longer plasma lifetimes before hadronization provided by RHIC and LHC become available. The higher initial temperatures are expected to give an observable thermal radiation signal, thus allowing to measure the thermal “QGP structure functions”. The higher collision energies allow for the creation of high-$`p_t`$ jets which can then be used as probes of the QGP, by their interactions with the plasma when they penetrate it. And last not least, the fact that RHIC is a dedicated heavy-ion machine at which experiments can be run for a large fraction of each year is conducive to the systematic studies that will be required to eventually obtain a complete and consistent picture of quark-gluon plasma dynamics.


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# Starburst or Seyfert? Adding a radio and far-infrared perspective to the investigation of activity in composite galaxies

## 1 Introduction

The possible existence of a relationship between massive star formation and an active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a long standing, controversial issue. An increasing number of galaxies have been shown to contain both intense star formation, typical of a starburst galaxy, as well as a non-thermal ionising source, attributed to an AGN. Well known examples of such composite galaxies are NGC 1068 (Thatte et al. 1997), NGC 7469 (Genzel et al. 1995), Mrk 477 (Heckman et al. 1997) and Circinus (Oliva et al. 1995), all of which contain, in addition to a Seyfert nucleus, circumnuclear star formation that contributes significantly to the total luminosity. In many such cases, the composite nature of the galaxies is based on optical and NIR observations. However, radio observations can also be a powerful tool for distinguishing starburst and AGN activity.

In general, galaxies dominated by starbursts exhibit diffuse radio emission as the result of synchrotron radiation associated with supernova remnants and cosmic rays (Sramek & Weedman 1986). Seyfert galaxies, on the other hand, generally exhibit more compact emission or, in the more radio-energetic cases, linear structures, identifiable as jets and radio lobes (Wilson et al. 1991). The use of radio morphology to distinguish the dominant activity within galaxies is well established (Norris et al. 1988a; Wilson 1988; Crawford et al. 1996). As one example, NGC 1068, a known composite galaxy, has been observed in the radio to contain both diffuse emission, presumably as a result of star formation, and linear structure, attributed to a jet (Wilson & Ulvestad 1982; Wynn-Williams et al. 1985; Gallimore et al. 1997).

As a step towards exploring the possible relationship between starburst and Seyfert activity within a homogeneous data set, we have formed a sample of galaxies that are composite in nature. The galaxies were chosen on the basis of optical spectroscopy and investigated further using near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy (Hill et al. 1999: Paper 1). In this previous study, we found only one galaxy, from a sample of 12, to be dominated in the optical/NIR by star formation, with minimal, if any, contribution from an AGN. However, the remaining 11 galaxies show evidence that they are composed of a starburst population and dust heated to temperatures of up to 1000 K by an AGN. In this paper, we present a radio study of the sample in an attempt to place tighter limits on the AGN contribution.

The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) was used to image our sample at 3 and 6 cm. These data are combined with additional information such as radio spectral indices and far-infrared (FIR) colours to investigate further the nature of the powering source. We also present long-baseline interferometry observations using the Parkes-Tidbinbilla Interferometer (PTI; Norris et al. 1988b). PTI is sensitive to structures with sizes $`0.1^{\prime \prime }`$ (corresponding to 40 pc at the mean distance of the sample) at 13 cm and brightness temperatures $`>`$105 K. PTI will therefore respond to the non-thermal emission from compact cores of Seyferts with brightness temperatures $``$108 K, yet is essentially blind to extended H II regions or supernovae associated with starbursts, which have typical brightness temperatures of 104 K. However, recent studies suggest that extremely luminous radio supernovae (RSNe) associated with starbursts may also account for some of the emission detected with PTI (Kewley et al. 2000a; Smith et al. 1998a).

The sample selection criteria are presented in Section 2. Details of the observations and data reduction for the ATCA and PTI are given in Section 3. Our results are presented and discussed in Section 4, with our conclusions in Section 5. Throughout this paper, we adopt H0 = 75 km s-1 Mpc-1 and q0 = 0.5.

## 2 Sample Selection

Our sample consists of galaxies, identified in Paper 1, that have characteristics intermediate between starbursts and AGNs based on optical spectroscopy. We used the optical emission-line diagnostic diagrams of Veilleux & Osterbrock (1987), where the emission-line ratios of \[O III\]/H$`\beta `$, \[N II\]/H$`\alpha `$, \[S II\]/H$`\alpha `$ and \[O I\]/H$`\alpha `$ are compared, to find galaxies that are not clearly identified as either a starburst or AGN. The emission-line ratios used by Veilleux & Osterbrock are generally good discriminators of starbursts and AGNs, because each ratio consists of a forbidden line, which is relatively strong in the partially ionised regions of AGNs, compared with a hydrogen recombination line, which is excited by hot stars formed in starbursts. The galaxies in our sample lie in an intermediate region between the starburst and AGN groupings, either by falling within $`\pm `$0.15 dex of the boundary line separating starbursts and Seyferts, or by falling within the domain of starburst galaxies in one diagnostic diagram and within the domain of AGNs in another. The sample was also constrained by a redshift upper limit of $`z=0.035`$ and declinations south of +24. Full details of the sample selection are given in Paper 1.

NIR spectroscopy, undertaken in Paper 1, showed that the ambiguous nature of the galaxies was not limited to optical emission but that NIR emission-line ratios also failed to distinguish the galaxies as starburst or AGN. From this, and from further results in Paper 1, we concluded that the galaxies are composites, containing both a starburst and AGN component.

## 3 Observations and Reductions

### 3.1 ATCA

Radio continuum observations were made in 1996 April 8–11, using the Australia Telescope Compact Array in the 6A configuration, which utilises all six antennas and covers east-west baselines from 337 m to 6 km. Observations were made simultaneously at 6 and 3 cm, centred on frequencies of 4.800 and 8.640 GHz respectively, each spanning a bandwidth of 128 MHz. The galaxies were observed in the time-efficient snapshot mode, whereby a number of short observations, or cuts, of each galaxy are made over a wide range of hour angles (Burgess & Hunstead 1995). Between 10–20 cuts, each approximately 10 minutes, were made for every galaxy. Unresolved phase calibrators were observed before and after every galaxy observation; the primary flux density calibrator was PKS B1934$``$638.

Standard calibration and data reduction were performed using MIRIAD (Sault et al. 1995). Natural weighting was applied to both frequencies to maximise sensitivity. The data were CLEANed and since all fields contained at least one compact object, self-calibration was used to provide additional corrections. Despite limited uv coverage using the snapshot method, the noise level in each image was close to theoretical, measuring 70–90 $`\mu `$Jy beam-1 rms. The resolution of the images ranged from 2′′ to 4′′ FWHM at 3 cm and 4′′ to 8′′ FWHM at 6 cm.

### 3.2 PTI

Radio interferometry observations were made at 13 cm using the Parkes-Tidbinbilla Interferometer during two sessions in 1996, June 1–2 and October 19–20. Two bandpasses, centred on 2.290 GHz and 2.298 GHz, were observed simultaneously, each with bandwidths of 8 MHz. The data were recorded in real-time using a microwave link between the 64 m Parkes radio telescope and the 70 m telescope at Tidbinbilla (part of the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex), providing a fringe spacing of 0.1′′ at 2.3 GHz. Nineteen sample galaxies were observed with PTI as well as three starburst galaxies and three AGNs for comparison purposes. Unfortunately, it was not possible to observe galaxies with RAs between 16h–20h as the Tidbinbilla telescope was being used to track the Galileo spacecraft. Each galaxy was observed at a single hour angle for approximately 20 minutes; unresolved flat-spectrum calibrators were observed about every 2 hours.

The AIPS task FRING was used to search for detections in both delay and fringe rate, by applying a Fourier transform fringe-search technique. In this way, we have been able to detect sources that are offset from the phase and delay centre by plotting the correlated intensity as a function of fringe frequency; fringe rate and delay were then used to calculate source positions. Sources were detected up to 3 away from the pointing centre. Furthermore, to ensure that we did not miss any detections of galaxies within the sample due to strong off-centre sources, FRING was run repeatedly, while decreasing the area searched in delay and rate (see Section 4.3).

## 4 Results

### 4.1 Radio Imaging

Sixteen galaxies with declinations $`<15^{}`$ (see Table 1) were observed with the ATCA, including four close galaxy pairs (ESO 550-IG025, ESO 440-IG058, ESO 527-IG07 and ESO 343-IG013) and two merging galaxies (MCG-02-33-098 and MCG-02-33-099). Optical spectra of these galaxies, given in the literature, identify them as intermediate between starbursts and AGNs (see Section 2 and Paper 1) with two exceptions: the western nucleus of ESO 527-IG07 has no published optical spectrum, and the merging galaxy MCG-02-33-099 has an optical spectrum typical of a starburst.

In Figure 1 we present the ATCA 6 cm images overlaid as contours on images from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), using the second epoch (red-sensitive) DSS-II.333We note that Deutsch (1999) has found positional errors $`1^{\prime \prime }`$ ($``$ 1 pixel) in both RA and Dec for some images in the prepublication release of the DSS-II. Of the 14 composite galaxies, 13 were detected with the ATCA and in the majority of cases the emission is unresolved. The only non-detection was the northern nucleus of ESO 440-IG058, which has a 3$`\sigma `$ upper limit of 0.2 mJy.

Extended radio structure was found in two galaxies: the southern galaxy in the pair ESO 440-IG58 and the southern galaxy in the pair ESO 343-IG013. The latter pair, in particular, appears to represent a current interaction with tidal tails being seen in optical images. In Figure 2 we present the ATCA 3 cm images overlaid as contours on the DSS-II images for ESO 440-IG058 and ESO 343-IG013. The increased resolution of the 3 cm images shows that the extended radio emission in ESO 440-IG058 south probably traces the star formation in the disk of the galaxy.

Total flux densities for the galaxies, given in Table 2, were obtained using the MIRIAD task SFIND, which performs a Gaussian profile fit. We also include 20 cm flux densities from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS) (Condon et al. 1998). The NVSS images (45′′ FWHM) are of lower resolution than the ATCA images so, not surprisingly, the four galaxy pairs observed with the ATCA (ESO 550-IG025, ESO 440-IG058, ESO 527-IG07 and ESO 343-IG013) and the pair of merging galaxies (MCG-02-33-098 and MCG-02-33-099) are detected as single sources by the NVSS. For ESO 440-IG058, ESO 527-IG07 and ESO 343-IG013 the 20 cm emission appears to be centered on the dominant ATCA source. For the non-interacting galaxies the 20 cm emission aligns closely with the ATCA emission, except for ESO 374-IG032 where the NVSS image includes an unrelated source detected at 6 cm with ATCA, lying 45′′ south of the galaxy. For this galaxy, therefore, and for the galaxy pairs, we have divided the 20 cm flux density into two components in proportion to their 6 cm flux densities.

### 4.2 Spectral Index

Ideally, to determine the spectral index, $`\alpha `$ (where $`\mathrm{S}\nu ^\alpha `$), of the composite galaxies we require a scaled array in which the baselines (in wavelengths) at 3 and 6 cm are matched. We approximate a scaled array for the 3 and 6 cm images by applying natural weighting to both data sets, thereby giving more significance to the shorter baselines, and by convolving the 3 cm images to the corresponding 6 cm beam so that the images are brought to the same resolution.

Although the spectral index is often determined between just two frequencies, we draw on the NVSS data to expand the frequency baseline. In Table 2, we present the spectral index for each nucleus, measured between 3–6 cm ($`\alpha (6,3)`$) and 6–20 cm ($`\alpha (20,6)`$). Starburst and Seyfert galaxies typically have a spectral index of $`\alpha 0.7`$, although Seyferts are more likely to have steeper spectra, with $`\alpha <1.1`$. (e.g., de Bruyn & Wilson 1978; Sramek & Weedman 1986; Edelson 1987). The mean spectral index for our galaxies, $`\alpha (6,3)=0.65\pm 0.08`$, is consistent with the expected value for both starbursts and Seyferts. The galaxy ESO 436-G026 has an unusually flat spectrum between 3 and 6 cm that steepens significantly towards 20 cm. We attribute this to the presence of a flat-spectrum AGN core, as this galaxy was detected with PTI and has a high core-to-total flux density ratio (see Section 4.3).

### 4.3 PTI

Unresolved radio emission (referred to here as a PTI ‘core’) was detected in five of the 20 composite galaxies observed with PTI. The sensitivity limit of PTI, corresponding to a 3$`\sigma `$ detection, was measured to be 0.9 mJy at 13 cm. The flux densities of the five PTI cores are given in Table 3, as well as the estimated total 13 cm flux densities derived from the data in Table 2. In addition to system noise, the PTI core flux densities have nominal errors of $``$7% due to uncertainty in the antenna gains. Studies of radio galaxies involving multiple observations of individual sources (Slee et al. 1994; Morganti et al. 1997) have shown that the correlated PTI flux density can scatter by as much as 20% due to time variability and/or source structure. In our study only one galaxy, Mrk 1344, was observed twice, in 1996 June and again in 1996 October, and the two measurements agree to well within the combined calibration errors.

We now raise the question: Is our detection rate of 25% consistent with a sample of galaxies that contain AGNs? In the first instance we compare this result with the detection rate found for the three starburst galaxies and three Seyfert galaxies we observed for comparison in this study. PTI cores were detected in two of the three Seyfert galaxies but in none of the starbursts. This result is typical of other studies: Norris et al. (2000) detected only one of 74 starburst galaxies but obtained a PTI detection rate of 38% from 221 Seyferts; Heisler et al. (1998) detected none of three starbursts but found PTI cores in 10 out of 11 Seyferts. We propose that the detection rate for our composite sample, while not being exceptionally high, is consistent with a sample of AGNs, assuming that PTI is insensitive to the low brightness temperatures and diffuse structure typical of starbursts. This interpretation is apparently contradicted by studies in which compact radio cores are detected in many starburst galaxies. One such study by Lonsdale et al. (1993) found detection rates of eight from 15 starbursts (53%) and seven from 13 Seyferts (54%) with 18 cm VLBI observations. These high detection rates for starburst galaxies, and also Seyferts, are perhaps not surprising as the Lonsdale et al. sample was preferentially selected from galaxies known to contain compact radio cores with angular size $`0.25^{\prime \prime }`$. The sample may also be subject to a luminosity selection effect, as it was selected from among the most luminous members of the IRAS Bright Galaxy Sample, with $`\mathrm{log}(L_{FIR}/L_{})11.25`$.

The detection of VLBI cores in many of the starburst galaxies in the Lonsdale et al. (1993) sample, combined with their strong IRAS emission, may simply indicate a dominance of dust-obscured AGNs and does not necessarily imply a starburst origin for the compact cores. The alternative possibility, that a starburst-related process may produce compact radio emission, comes from the discovery of a new class of exceptionally luminous RSNe (Yin & Heeschen 1991; Lonsdale et al. 1992; Wilkinson & de Bruyn 1990). Smith et al. (1998a) claim that from 11 detections of starburst galaxies, 7 may be explained by extremely luminous RSNe. However, the only galaxy to date where the compact core can definitively be attributed to a starburst is the ultraluminous IRAS galaxy (ULIRG), Arp 220, where high resolution images have revealed numerous unresolved sources interpreted as RSNe (Smith et al. 1998b).

To investigate the possibility of RSNe in our sample we follow Smith et al. (1998b) and compare our PTI detections with the well studied and unusually bright RSN, SN 1986J in the galaxy NGC 891 (Weiler, Panagia & Sramek 1990). During 1986, SN 1986J peaked at 6 cm reaching a flux density of $``$130 mJy. Using the (optically thick) spectral index calculated at that time from 6 cm and 20 cm observations of the supernova, we derive a corresponding 13 cm flux density of $``$100 mJy. Our sample galaxies are on average 10 times more distant than NGC 891, so if a RSNe similar to 1986J existed in our sample, it would be at a level of approximately 1 mJy and just marginally detectable with PTI. Since 1986J is amongst the most luminous RSNe ever discovered, the nature of the PTI detections is not yet determined.

An interesting caveat in the debate over a starburst or AGN origin of compact radio cores is given in the recent work of Kewley et al. (2000a). In their study of warm infrared galaxies, they detected compact radio cores in 8 from 10 (80%) AGNs and 10 from 27 (37%) starbursts. However, the core luminosities of the starburst galaxies were lower than those in the AGNs, suggesting that the starburst cores may be radio-luminous supernovae. Comparing the luminosity of our five PTI detections with those in the Kewley et al. sample, we find that three galaxies (ESO 550-IG025, MCG+00-29-23 and IRAS 12224-0624) are consistent with AGN-like compact cores, while the remaining two galaxies (ESO 436-G026 and Mrk 1344) are possibly starburst-related. However, in the specific case of ESO 436-G026, the flatness of its radio spectrum between 3–6 cm does favour the presence of an AGN core.

We cannot tell from the radio data alone whether our PTI detections are weak AGN cores or radio-luminous supernovae. However, we can compare the flux density of the compact core (derived from the PTI detections or 0.9 mJy limits for non-detections) with the total 13 cm flux density (derived from the ATCA observations). These are used to determine a core-to-total flux density ratio, given in Table 3. For the composite galaxies we find on average that a compact core accounts for $`<10`$% of the total radio emission. Interestingly, the compact radio cores in the reference Seyfert galaxies in Table 3 also contribute typically $`<10`$% of the total. We show in Section 4.7 that a similar AGN contribution in the optical is sufficient to account for the ambiguous optical emission line ratios of the composite galaxies.

### 4.4 Supernova or AGN

The PTI results indicate that most galaxies in our sample are not AGN-dominated. Since it is generally assumed that the radio emission from galaxies with starburst characteristics is predominantly non-thermal emission from cosmic rays accelerated by supernova remnants (SNRs), we follow Condon & Yin (1990) and estimate the Type II supernova rate from

$$\mathrm{N}_{\mathrm{SN}}(\mathrm{yr}^1)=7.7\times 10^{24}\nu ^\alpha \mathrm{L}_{\mathrm{NT}},$$
(1)
where $`\mathrm{L}_{\mathrm{NT}}`$ is the non-thermal component of the radio luminosity in WHz-1, $`\nu `$ is the frequency in GHz and $`\alpha `$ is the non-thermal radio spectral index, taken here to be $`0.8`$. The supernova rate can then be used to estimate the number of ionising photons

$$\mathrm{N}_{\mathrm{UV}}(\mathrm{s}^1)=8.2\times 10^{54}\mathrm{N}_{\mathrm{SN}}(\mathrm{yr}^1)$$
(2)
and, by assuming the average ionising flux from OB stars to be $`\mathrm{N}_{\mathrm{UV}}=2\times 10^{48}\mathrm{s}^1`$ (Smith, Herter & Haynes 1998), a star-formation rate (SFR) can be derived and is given in Table 4.

Since the SFR is derived from the supernova rate, it is an indication of the past SFR for massive stars in the galaxy, as the progenitors of Type II SNe are massive stars ($`\mathrm{M}>8\mathrm{M}_{}`$) with lifetimes $`10^6`$ years. The SFR may be somewhat over-estimated since we have assumed that all of the radio emission is non-thermal. The empirical relationship between the non-thermal and thermal radio emission (Condon & Yin 1990) suggests that 25% of the total 4.85 GHz radio flux density may be thermal (Smith, Herter & Haynes 1998).

The galaxy NGC 1614 has an inferred supernova rate four times larger than any other galaxy in the sample. It has a high FIR luminosity, and is usually classified as a starburst galaxy (Keto et al. 1992). However, based on our selection criteria, NGC 1614 has ambiguous optical emission-line ratios (Veilleux et al. 1995). Although Neff et al. (1990) find no direct evidence of an AGN in NGC 1614 they suggest that the galaxy may be a precursor to a Seyfert (i.e., the AGN has not yet turned on) due to the high luminosity they measure for the nucleus of the galaxy. No signs of an AGN have been found in other studies of NGC 1614 (Lançon et al. 1996; Heisler et al. 1999).

The median supernova rate from Table 4 is 0.2 yr-1, which is high compared with the rate of 0.03 yr-1 found for Seyfert 2 galaxies with circumnuclear star formation (Forbes & Norris 1998). This suggests a dominance of star formation within our sample. However, it is surprising that Mrk 52, which was found to be dominated by star formation in Paper 1, has an exceptionally weak SFR.

### 4.5 FIR spectral energy distribution

The heating mechanisms at work in galaxies can be investigated using FIR colours. The majority of IRAS galaxies (70–80%) appear to be dominated by star formation, with the FIR emission being due to dust heating from an intense starburst (Sanders & Mirabel 1996; Leech et al. 1989). This appears to hold even for the ULIRGs with $`\mathrm{L}_{\mathrm{FIR}}>10^{12}\mathrm{L}_{}`$ (Genzel et al. 1998). Mergers are also common, with $``$ 70% of the ULIRGs involved in interactions (Leech et al. 1994). However, the proportion of mergers does drop considerably for $`\mathrm{L}_{\mathrm{FIR}}<10^{11}\mathrm{L}_{}`$ (Sanders & Mirabel 1996). The extreme luminosities of some IRAS galaxies, their extensive star formation, and the large fraction of mergers have led to suggestions that these galaxies are presently in a transient phase which may be important in the formation of an active nucleus (Sanders et al. 1988).

All the composite galaxies in our sample have published IRAS flux densities and in Figure 3 we present three FIR colour-colour diagrams which can be used to discriminate between starburst and Seyfert excitation. Included in these diagrams are a reddening line, extreme mixing curve and empirical starburst line taken from Dopita et al. (1998). The reddening line was obtained by applying IR extinctions given by Dwek et al. (1997) to an average Seyfert 1, with flux density normalised to 10 mJy at 100 $`\mu `$m. The empirical starburst line joins the average flux values of a “cool” starburst to a “hot” starburst taken from the data of Rush et al. (1993), again with the flux density normalised to 10 mJy at 100 $`\mu `$m. The extreme mixing line was determined by adding a percentage of the “cool” starburst flux to the non-reddened average Seyfert 1 value. Dopita et al. (1998) make it clear that any number of mixing curves can be added to these FIR colour-colour diagrams but the mixing curve used here is an extreme solution and, therefore, all objects are expected to lie within the region bounded by the reddening line, the empirical starburst line and the extreme mixing curve.

In Figure 3a the composite galaxies lie along the starburst line, while in Figures 3b and 3c the composite galaxies are clustered around the top end of the AGN/starburst mixing curve. This indicates that star formation is dominating the FIR emission, with a starburst contribution of $`>`$ 90%, consistent with the PTI results which place the AGN contribution at $`<`$ 10%.

### 4.6 FIR-radio correlation

One of the tightest correlations for radio-quiet star-forming galaxies is found between the FIR and radio luminosities. Although the correlation has been known for two decades or more (Dickey & Salpeter 1984; de Jong et al. 1985; Wunderlich, Klein & Wielebinski 1987; Condon 1992), its origin is still not clear. Starburst activity is one likely explanation: the massive OB stars formed within starbursts heat the surrounding dust which re-radiates in the FIR, while the radio emission comes about through the death of these massive stars as supernovae that accelerate cosmic rays and in turn produce synchrotron radiation (Helou & Bicay 1993; Volk 1989). The uncertainty in this scenario is in the feedback mechanism required to link the FIR and radio emission so tightly.

Starburst galaxies generally show a tighter FIR-radio correlation than Seyferts (Roy et al. 1998; Condon 1992; Norris et al. 1988a), while the more energetic AGNs, such as quasars and radio galaxies, do not fit the correlation due to enhanced radio emission from the AGN (Sopp & Alexander 1991). The FIR-radio correlation for the present sample is shown in Figure 4, together with the fit from de Jong et al. (1985). The composite galaxies are also seen to follow the correlation. If the starburst origin for this correlation is correct, then star formation is again seen to be the dominant process in these galaxies.

### 4.7 Comparison with optical and NIR spectroscopy

As mentioned in Section 2, the sample of composite galaxies was chosen on the basis of the Veilleux & Osterbrock (1987) optical emission-line diagnostic diagrams. These diagrams are presented in Figure 5 and include starburst and AGN data from the literature, and also two photoionisation models developed in Paper 1 using MAPPINGS II (see Sutherland & Dopita 1993). The starburst model is based on the stellar atmosphere models of Hummer & Mihalas (1970) with a stellar temperature of 40 000 K, while the AGN model was created from a power-law ionising spectrum of the form $`f_\nu \nu ^\alpha `$, with $`\alpha =1.5`$. Other model parameters include a hydrogen density of 103 cm-3 and solar metallicity.

The galaxies that were detected with PTI do not appear to occupy any special position within Figure 5. However, we have also included on the diagnostic diagrams a mixing line from the low-ionisation starburst galaxies to the high-ionisation AGNs. The end points for the mixing line were determined by taking a median of the emission-line ratios for starbursts and AGNs (with a cut-off of $`\mathrm{log}([\mathrm{OIII}]/\mathrm{H}\alpha )>0.5`$ applied to the AGN ratios to omit LINERS) taken from Veilleux & Osterbrock (1987 and references therein) and Veilleux et al. (1995). It becomes evident that an AGN contribution of $``$ 10% of the total emission of the galaxy can still account for the borderline position of the composite galaxies within the diagnostic diagrams. In fact, it has been recently found that the optical diagnostic diagrams are especially sensitive to the presence of an AGN. Kewley et al. (2000b) applied a mixing line from their photoionisation (or starburst) model to their shock (or AGN) model and found that objects with as little as 20% AGN contribution to their energy budget may be classified as AGN in the optical diagnostic diagrams.

Our study of NIR diagnostic diagrams in Paper 1 found that the line ratio diagram of \[Fe II\]/Pa$`\beta `$ vs \[O I\]/H$`\alpha `$ was the most useful for distinguishing starbursts and Seyferts. This diagram is shown in Figure 6 with the same starburst and power-law models presented in Figure 5 and with the composite galaxies again differentiated by the PTI detections. The two galaxies detected with PTI, and for which we have NIR data, have the largest \[Fe II\](1.25$`\mu `$m)/Pa$`\beta `$ ratios and therefore are most likely to be classified as AGNs from this diagram (see Paper 1).

## 5 Conclusions

We have presented arc-second radio images and long-baseline radio interferometer observations to extend our study of composite galaxies with ambiguous optical emission-line ratios. Extended radio morphology in radio-quiet galaxies is usually attributed to starbursts and we found that only two galaxies, ESO 440-IG058 south and ESO 343-IG013 south, showed extended emission with the ATCA. The radio continuum images were also used to derive spectral indices for the galaxies, with the average being $`\alpha (6,3)=0.65\pm 0.08`$ which is typical of both starbursts and Seyferts.

Our interferometry observations revealed compact cores in five of the 20 galaxies observed, which may be due either to a weak ($`<10`$% of total flux density) AGN component or a radio-luminous supernova. The majority of non-detections for the sample does not rule out the existence of an AGN core but points to the starburst being the dominant flux density contribution within the galaxies. A similar result was found upon examining the FIR emission which we also found to be dominated by star formation.

From our radio observations and examination of the FIR fluxes we conclude that star formation dominates the composite galaxies, and we attribute only a small fraction of the emission ($``$ 10%) to an AGN component. However, we have shown that an AGN contribution as small as this is still sufficient to identify the galaxies as composites within the optical diagnostic diagrams.

We thank Edward King and staff at the Tidbinbilla Tracking Station for help with the PTI observations. We also thank the referee for insightful comments which greatly improved this paper. TLH acknowledges receipt of an Australian Postgraduate Award, and thanks Museum Victoria and Rachel Webster for support during the writing of this paper. RWH acknowledges funding from the Australian Research Council. The Australia Telescope Compact Array and the Parkes Telescope are part of the Australia Telescope which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by CSIRO. This research has made use of the NASA Astrophysics Data System service and of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has also made use of the Digitized Sky Surveys (DSS) produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166.


text:
# 1 ℰ(𝛿,𝑝,Ω)-ℰ(0,𝑝,Ω) vs. 𝛿 at different Ω, 𝛼=0.5. (a) 𝑝=2, Ω={0.000, 0.005,…, 0.100} (from bottom to top); (b) 𝑝=1.9, Ω=0.065 (1), 0.070 (2), …, 0.100 (8); (c) 𝑝=2.1, Ω=0.060 (1), 0.065 (2), …, 0.100 (9).

Incommensurate Spin–Peierls Phases
in the One–Dimensional Quantum Isotropic $`XY`$ Model

OLEG DERZHKO, TARAS KROKHMALSKII

Institute for Condensed Matter Physics

1 Svientsitskii Street, L’viv–11, 79011, Ukraine

## Abstract

Using the numerical approach for a study of the thermodynamic properties of the nonuniform one–dimensional spin-$`\frac{1}{2}`$ isotropic $`XY`$ model in a transverse field we examine different lattice distortions to reveal which spin–Peierls phases are realized in the magnetic chain at zero temperature in the presence of external field.

An interest in the theoretical study of quantum spin chains exhibiting spin–Peierls phases has incredibly grown since the discovery of the first inorganic spin–Peierls compound CuGeO3 (for a review see1). Although the quantum Heisenberg model is usually used as an appropriate model to describe the spin–Peierls phase transition in the available materials some generic features can be clarified within the framework of the simpler spin-$`\frac{1}{2}`$ isotropic $`XY`$ chain (see2,3 and references therein). The latter spin model can be reformulated using the Jordan–Wigner transformation as a one–dimensional model of tight–binding spinless fermions. As a result, the exhaustive analytical and numerical analysis of different properties of the model becomes possible.

In what follows we analyze a stability of various spin–Peierls phases at zero temperature in the presence of external field. For this purpose we consider a nonuniform spin-$`\frac{1}{2}`$ isotropic $`XY`$ chain in a transverse field defined by the Hamiltonian

$`H={\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{N1}{}}}J_n\left(s_n^xs_{n+1}^x+s_n^ys_{n+1}^y\right)+\mathrm{\Omega }{\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{N}{}}}s_n^z.`$ (1)
Here $`J_n=J\left(1+\delta _n\right)`$ is the nonuniform exchange interaction between the sites $`n`$ and $`n+1`$ and the sequence of parameters $`\delta _1,\mathrm{},\delta _{N1}\left\{\delta _n\right\}`$ defines a certain lattice distortion. $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ is the value of a uniform external field directed along $`z`$ axis. Using the numerical approach described in detail in4 we calculate the ground state energy $`E_0(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })=Ne_0(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })`$ of the spin chain (1). The ground state energy does not depend on the sign of $`J`$; we fix the units putting in what follows $`|J|=1`$. We accurately analyze the finite–size effects to be sure that our results pertain to the thermodynamic systems. Taking $`N=1000`$ we no more observe the finite–size effects which are nicely pronounced when $`N=100`$ or less.

In the adiabatic treatment of the spin–Peierls instability at zero temperature one should examine the total energy which consists of the magnetic part $`E_0(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })`$ and the elastic part $`\alpha _{n=1}^N\delta _n^2`$ for different lattice configurations $`\left\{\delta _n\right\}`$. Here $`\alpha `$ is the parameter which measures the lattice stiffness. The total energy per site will be denoted by $`(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })`$.

To begin with, we assume $`\alpha =0.5`$ and examine the dimerization ansatz $`\delta _n=\delta (1)^n`$, $`0\delta 1`$. $`(\delta ,\mathrm{\Omega })(0,\mathrm{\Omega })`$ is shown in Fig. 1a.

Inspecting the displayed curves one concludes that i) if $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ does not exceed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_a`$ ($`0.035`$) only the dimerized phase occurs (with the dimerization parameter $`\delta ^{}0.065`$); ii) if $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ exceeds $`\mathrm{\Omega }_a`$ but does not exceed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ ($`0.045`$) both the dimerized and uniform phases are possible, however, the former phase is favorable; iii) if $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ exceeds $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b`$ but does not exceed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c`$ ($`0.065`$) both the dimerized and uniform phases are possible, however, the latter phase is favorable; iv) if $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ exceeds $`\mathrm{\Omega }_c`$ only the uniform phase is possible. Such a behavior of the total energy corresponds to a scenario of the first order phase transition driven by the external field. Within the frames of the adopted ansatz for $`\delta _n`$ we are restricted to the dimerized and uniform phases and cannot judge about a possibility of more complicated lattice distortions.

To discuss whether the total energy can be lowered by another (not uniform) lattice pattern as the field increases we introduce a trial distortion of the form

$`\delta _n=\delta \mathrm{cos}\left({\displaystyle \frac{2\pi }{p}}n\right),`$ (2)
where $`p`$ is the period of modulation (e.g., $`p=2`$ yields the dimerization ansatz). A behavior of $`(\delta ,p,\mathrm{\Omega })`$ for $`p=1.9`$ and $`p=2.1`$ as the field increases can be seen in Figs. 1b and 1c, respectively. From the displayed plots one concludes that a long–period structure does arise, if $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ exceeds the value about $`0.06`$. Thus, the dimerized phase transforms into a long–period phase rather than into the uniform phase while the field increases.

Further, let us clarify whether for any small field there exists such $`p`$ which yields the total energy lower than that for the dimerized chain. For a certain $`\alpha `$ at the fixed $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ ($`=0,\mathrm{\hspace{0.33em}0.025},\mathrm{\hspace{0.33em}0.05},\mathrm{}`$) we examine the dependence $`(\delta ,p,\mathrm{\Omega })`$ vs. $`\delta `$ seeking the minimal value of $`(\delta ,p,\mathrm{\Omega })`$ for different $`p`$ (in a sufficiently large region) and then compare those minimal values. As a result, we find the value of $`p`$ of the most energetically favorable lattice distortion (2). It will be denoted as $`p^{}`$. We repeat the search of the most favorable $`p`$ at the fixed $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ for different $`\alpha `$. The results obtained are collected in Fig. 2.

From Fig. 2a one can learn, for example, that for $`\alpha =0.5`$ the dimerized phase is favorable at least up to $`\mathrm{\Omega }=0.025`$ whereas at $`\mathrm{\Omega }=0.05`$ it is already unstable with respect to the transformation into a long–period phase (with $`p`$ about $`2.06`$). The important conclusion that can be drawn from Fig. 2a is that the dimerized phase for any $`\alpha `$ persists up to a certain characteristic field (the value of which decreases as $`\alpha `$ increases). Another evident observation is that at zero field the dimerized phase brings the lowest total energy for any $`\alpha `$ (that agrees with the result proved in5).

With the increase of the field the lattice parameterized by (2) may exhibit short–period phases, for example, the trimerized phase6 for which $`p=3`$. However, as we shall see below, a behavior of the trimerized phase is essentially different in comparison with that of the dimerized phase. Fig. 3a demonstrates that the trimerized phase may really occur at the field about $`0.5`$.

In the same region of fields, various long–period structures are possible (Figs. 3b, 3c). Moreover, for any small deviation of the field from 0.5 there exists such $`p`$ for which the lattice distortion (2) gives smaller energy than for $`p=3`$. This can be seen in Fig. 2b. Thus, contrary to the dimerized phase, the trimerized phase does not persist with the field varying and so it continuously transforms into a certain long–period phase.

It is worth noting that using the exact analytical expression3 for $`e_0(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })`$ for the spin-$`\frac{1}{2}`$ isotropic $`XY`$ chain in a transverse field of period 3 one can find that there may exist two lattice distortions, which preserve the chain length ($`\delta _1+\delta _2+\delta _3=0`$), for which $`(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })`$ may have an extremum. Namely, $`\delta _1=\delta _2`$ (it follows from (2) if $`p=3`$) and $`\delta _1=\delta _2`$. We check numerically that in both cases $`(\left\{\delta _n\right\},\mathrm{\Omega })`$ really exhibits a minimum at $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ about 0.5 (see Fig. 4).

However, due to the instability with respect to the transformation into long–period phases those trimerized patterns are not so important as the dimerized configuration.

To summarize, using a numerical approach we examined (within the adiabatic approximation) a stability of various lattice distortions of the spin-$`\frac{1}{2}`$ isotropic $`XY`$ chain at zero temperature in the presence of external field. We found that while the field increases the favorable at zero field dimerized phase persists until the field achieves a certain characteristic value, at which a first order transition into incommensurate phase occurs. Although in a moderate field one can find distortions having short periods (for example, of period 3) which bring a gain in the total energy, any small variation of the field leads to more energetically favorable long–period structures. In strong fields, the uniform lattice can be expected. Clearly, since we are restricted to the adopted ansatz for a lattice distortion (2) we can say for sure what lattice distortion is not realized rather than to point out which lattice distortion should occur. Finally, let us note that the elaborated numerical procedures can be easily applied to other distortion patterns, e.g., an array of solitons7.

The authors thank J. Richter and O. Zabyrannyi for discussions. O. D. acknowledges the kind hospitality of the Magdeburg University in the summer of 2000 when a part of this work was carried out.

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4. Derzhko O., Krokhmalskii T., phys. stat. sol. (b), 208, 221 (1998).

5. Kennedy T., Lieb E. H., Phys. Rev. Lett., 59, 1309 (1987).

6. Okamoto K., Solid State Commun., 83, 1039 (1992).

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