text:
# A Comment on the Tsallis Maximum Entropy Principle

## I Introduction

From considerations of multifractals, Tsallis  was led to conjecture a generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy given by

$$S_q(p)=\frac{1}{q1}\left[1\underset{i=1}{\overset{m}{}}p_i^q\right],$$
(1)
where $`p=(p_1,\mathrm{},p_m)`$ is a probability distribution for a discrete random variable with values $`ϵ_1,\mathrm{},ϵ_m`$ and $`q`$ is any real number different from one. $`S_1`$ is defined to be the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy, in agreement with the limit $`q1`$. (Boltzmann’s constant is set to one.) Non-Gibbsian distributions are obtained by extremizing the Tsallis entropy under special constraints, described below, while using $`q`$ as an adjustable parameter. The parameter $`q`$ typically has no direct physical interpretation, but when it is used as an adjustable parameter the resulting distributions can give surprisingly good agreement with experimental data in a wide variety of fields . In a few cases, $`q`$ is uniquely determined by the constraints of the problem and may thereby bear some physical interpretation .

Although the Tsallis entropy preserves all of the familiar thermodynamic formalism, Curado  has noted that this is true of a much broader class of entropies. Given the myriad of possible entropy functions, one is led to ask why the Tsallis entropy is special, and a natural place to look for answers is in the theory of large deviations , which gives a probabilistic justification for the maximum entropy principle in terms of a unique entropy function. In this brief report we compare the probabilities obtained by Tsallis’s maximum entropy principle with the asymptotic frequencies predicted by large deviation theory (i.e. the law of large numbers) under similar constraints. We find that the two do not in general agree.

## II Tsallis Maximum Entropy Principle

If no constraints are imposed upon $`p`$ (other than that it be nonnegative and normalized), $`S_q`$ is readily seen to be extremized by $`p_i=1/m\mu _i`$. (The case $`q=0`$ is special, as $`S_0`$ is a constant function.) This conclusion, independent of $`q`$, agrees with the usual Boltzmann-Gibbs result and corresponds to a microcanonical ensemble. If we view $`\mu `$ as a sampling distribution, then the empirical distribution of frequencies obtained from a random sample $`x_1,\mathrm{},x_n`$ converges to $`\mu `$ almost surely as $`n`$ grows large. This well-known result, originally due to Boltzmann , may be viewed as a example of the (strong) law of large numbers. Since $`S_q`$ has a global extremum at $`\mu `$, the distribution predicted by extremizing $`S_q`$ agrees with the actual asymptotic empirical distribution.

Placing additional constraints when extremizing $`S_q`$ may result in a distribution dependent upon $`q`$, i.e. one at variance with that predicted from the Boltzmann-Gibbs case $`q=1`$. As a generalization of the internal energy constraint, Tsallis  has suggested the following constraint be used when extremizing $`S_q`$:

$$\underset{i=1}{\overset{m}{}}(ϵ_iu)p_i^q=0,$$
(2)
where $`u`$ is a given fixed constant. For $`q=1`$ this of course reduces to the usual expectation value constraint. By extremizing (1) subject to (2), one obtains a solution in general different from the Boltzmann distribution. This solution is given explicitly by

$$p_i\left[1(1q)\alpha (ϵ_iu)\right]^{1/(1q)},$$
(3)
where $`\alpha `$ is chosen such that Eqn. (2) is satisfied. It has been noted that this explicit form of the distribution appears to be more numerically robust than the more common implicit form, for which $`\alpha =\beta /_{j=1}^mp_j^q`$ .

For $`q=1`$ the constraint on the expectation may be interpretation as a constraint on the sample mean, the two being equivalent for large samples. Thus, if we consider random samples $`x_1,\mathrm{},x_n`$ from $`\mu `$ which satisfy

$$\frac{1}{n}\underset{k=1}{\overset{n}{}}x_k=u,$$
(4)
then the empirical distributions of such samples will approach the Boltzmann distribution $`p_ie^{\alpha ϵ_i}`$ as $`n`$ grows large.

The question arises whether a similar interpretation may be made of the constraint in Eqn. (2) for $`q1`$ and, more importantly, whether the resulting empirical distribution converges to that given by Eqn. (3). As our observable is discrete, let $`f_{n,i}(x_1,\mathrm{},x_n)`$ denote the observed frequency of $`ϵ_i`$ in the sample $`x_1,\mathrm{},x_n`$. (There is no obvious interpretation for continuous values.) We may interpret Eqn. (2) to mean

$$\underset{i=1}{\overset{m}{}}(ϵ_iu)f_{n,i}(x_1,\mathrm{},x_n)^q=0.$$
(5)
We will show that random samples drawn from $`\mu `$ which satisfy Eqn. (5) do not in general give rise to empirical distributions which converge to the Tsallis prediction of Eqn. (3).

## III Conditional Convergence of the Empirical Distribution

The general problem we are considering is the convergence in probability of the empirical frequencies $`f_n=(f_{n,1},\mathrm{},f_{n,m})`$, where $`f_n`$ is a random vector with domain $`\{ϵ_1,\mathrm{},ϵ_m\}^n`$ taking values in the convex set $`𝒫=\{p^m:p_i0,_{i=1}^mp_i=1\}`$. Unconstrained, an infinite random sample $`x_1,x_2,\mathrm{},`$ from $`\mu `$ gives rise to a sequence of empirical frequencies which converge in probability to $`\mu `$. Sanov’s theorem  gives the large deviation rate function for this convergence to be just the negative of the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy:

$$I_\mu (p)=S_1(p)\mathrm{log}m.$$
(6)
Loosely speaking, Sanov’s theorem states that for $`A𝒫`$, $`\mu ^n[f_nA]\mathrm{exp}[ninf_{pA}I_\mu (p)]`$ for large $`n`$ (cf. the Boltzmann-Einstein formula $`W=e^S`$). The asymptotic measure, $`\mu `$, is the unique minimum of the rate function $`I_\mu `$, which is continuous and strictly convex.

When we impose additional constraints on $`f_n`$, the asymptotic value changes from $`\mu `$ to a new distribution which minimizes $`I_\mu `$ under the added restrictions . If we condition on the sample mean for example, i.e.

$$\underset{i=1}{\overset{m}{}}ϵ_if_{n,i}(x_1,\mathrm{},x_n)=u,$$
(7)
the resulting asymptotic distribution is no longer $`\mu `$ but the canonical distribution $`P_ie^{\beta ϵ_i}`$, where $`\beta `$ satisfies

$$\underset{i=1}{\overset{m}{}}ϵ_iP_i=u.$$
(8)
It is in this sense that finding the asymptotic empirical distribution under (7) is equivalent to maximizing $`S_1`$ under (8).

More generally, imposing condition (5) results in an asymptotic distribution which minimizes $`I_\mu `$ (maximizes $`S_1`$) subject to (2). This distribution is given implicitly by

$$P_i\mathrm{exp}\left[\beta (ϵ_iu)P_i^{q1}\right],$$
(9)
where $`\beta `$ is such that Eqn. (2) is satisfied with $`p`$ replaced by $`P`$. Comparison with Eqn. (3) shows that both $`p`$ and $`P`$ will agree when $`q1`$.

## IV Comparison of the Two Distributions

For $`q=0`$, Eqn. (3) gives $`p_i=[1\alpha (ϵ_iu)]/m`$, with $`\alpha `$ unrestricted, while Eqn. (9) implies $`P_i=1/m`$. Clearly both agree if $`\alpha `$ is arbitrarily chosen to be zero. However, as we have noted $`S_0`$ is a constant function, so the entropy extremization procedure may be expected to break down in this case.

Taking $`u`$ to be the equilibrium value $`u_{}=_{i=1}^mϵ_i/m`$ also results in general agreement between $`p`$ and $`P`$ for all $`q0`$. Indeed, by choosing $`\alpha =\beta =0`$ we see that $`p_i=1/m`$ is the unique solution for both Eqn. (3) and Eqn. (9). This agreement simply reflects that fact that both $`S_1`$ and $`S_q`$ have the same global extremum.

When $`m=2`$ the two constraints are sufficient to uniquely determine the distribution, and for this reason general agreement is also expected. In particular we find

$$p=P((ϵ_2u)^{1/q},(uϵ_1)^{1/q}),$$
(10)
assuming $`ϵ_1<ϵ_2`$ and $`q0`$. It is readily verified that Eqn. (2) is satified. By solving for $`\alpha `$ and $`\beta `$, Eqns. (3) and (9), respectively, may be satisfied as well.

Disagreement between $`p`$ and $`P`$ is therefore expected when $`m3`$. To show this explicitly, we may compute $`p`$ from Eqn. (3) for an arbitary $`u`$ and then search for a value of $`\beta `$ such that Eqn. (9) is satisfied when $`p`$ is substituted for $`P`$. The claim is that a single $`\beta `$ cannot always be found which satisfies this equation for all values of $`i`$ when $`m3`$.

The case $`q=1/2`$ is particularly amenable to analytic study  and appears in an early application of the Tsallis entropy to turbulence in a two-dimensional electron plasma . For this case, Eqn. (3) may be solved explicitly in terms of $`u`$ to obtain

$$p_i\left[\frac{1}{m}\underset{j=1}{\overset{m}{}}(ϵ_ju)^2(ϵ_iu)(u_{}u)\right]^2.$$
(11)
Using a given value of $`u`$ and the corresponding $`p`$ given above, we then consider zeros of the functions $`d_i`$, where

$$d_i(\beta )=\frac{\mathrm{exp}\left[\beta (ϵ_iu)p_i^{1/2}\right]}{_{j=1}^m\mathrm{exp}\left[\beta (ϵ_ju)p_j^{1/2}\right]}p_i,$$
(12)
for $`i=1,\mathrm{},m`$. A plot of these functions is shown in Fig. 1 for selected parameter values. The failure of all three graphs to have a zero at the same value of $`\beta `$ indicates that $`p`$ and $`P`$ are in this case distinct.

From this example one can derive a general necessary condition for agreement with $`P`$. Suppose that for given $`q`$, $`ϵ`$, and $`u`$ there exists a simultaneous solution to both Eqns. (3) and (9). (More generally, $`p`$ may be any probability distribution satisfying Eqn. (2).) Substituting the former into the latter we find

$$p_i=\mathrm{exp}[\beta (ϵ_iu)p_i^{q1}]/Z(\beta ),$$
(13)
where

$$Z(\beta )=\underset{j=1}{\overset{m}{}}\mathrm{exp}[\beta (ϵ_ju)p_i^{q1}].$$
(14)
The value of each $`p_i`$ is fixed in terms of the given parameters, so a single value of $`\beta `$ must simultaneously satisfy Eqn. (13) for $`i=1,\mathrm{},m`$. If any $`p_i=0`$ then Eqn. (13) cannot possibly be satisfied, so suppose all $`p_i`$ are nonzero. For any given $`ji`$,

$$\beta =[\mathrm{log}p_j+\mathrm{log}Z(\beta )]/[(ϵ_ju)p_j^{q1}].$$
(15)
Substituting this expression back into Eqn. (13) gives

$$\mathrm{log}Z(\beta )=\frac{(ϵ_iu)p_i^{q1}\mathrm{log}p_j(ϵ_ju)p_j^{q1}\mathrm{log}p_i}{(ϵ_ju)p_j^{q1}(ϵ_iu)p_i^{q1}}.$$
(16)
The RHS of Eqn. (16) is invariant under the interchange of $`i`$ and $`j`$, so it has at most $`m(m1)/2`$ distinct values. The LHS, of course, is the same for all choices of $`i`$ and $`j`$. Now, the RHS will be independent of the choice of $`i`$ and $`j`$ if either (1) $`q=1`$, (2) $`m=2`$, or (3) $`p_i=p_j`$ for all $`i`$ and $`j`$, the latter being equivalent to $`u=u_{}`$, which is equivalent to $`\alpha =0`$. Assuming none of these three conditions hold, the RHS must be the same for all choices of $`i`$ and $`j`$ if indeed $`p=P`$. This gives a necessary condition for agreement.

## V Discussion

We have compared the probability distribution over $`m`$ states predicted from Tsallis’s maximum entropy principle, which constrains the normalized $`q`$-expectation to a value $`u`$, to the asymptotic frequencies when the empirical $`q`$-expectation is similarly constrained. The two will always agree if either (1) $`q=1`$, (2) $`m=2`$, or (3) $`u=u_{}`$. A specific example for which $`q=1/2`$ and $`m=3`$ was used to demonstrate numerically that the two distributions may be different. For the case in which none of these three conditions hold, we derived a necessary condition to be satisfied by any candidate distribution in order that it be identical to true asymptotic distribution.

From the point of view of large deviation theory, the maximum entropy principle specifies the overwhelmingly most probable distribution to be realized by a large-sample empirical distribution under given constraints. The uniqueness of the rate function in large deviation theory implies that the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy plays a special role in determining this most likely distribution. For this reason, novel entropy functions such as that proposed by Tsallis may give results which are at variance with actual sample frequencies except, as observed, in some special cases.


format: text

text:
# Simulating clusters of galaxies: a brief history of “N” and overmerging

## 1 Introduction

The notion that a galaxy cluster forms via gravitational instability within an expanding universe was first discussed by van Albada (1961). The first numerical studies of cluster stability with 10-100 particles were carried out by von Hoerner (1960) and Aarseth (1963). An investigation of the virialisation process using several hundred particles was carried out by Henon (1964) and Peebles (1970). The assumption being that the “galaxies” had already collapsed prior to the turn around of the cluster. From these first simulations it was clear that one could form an equilibrium cluster of particles with global properties not too unlike the theorists “ideal” Coma cluster.

White (1976) followed the evolution of 700 unequal mass particles expanding with the Hubble flow. In this case it was possible to follow the collapse of groups of particles prior to the formation of the cluster. However, these clumps of bound particles were erased during the collapse and virialisation of the final system. This work may have been the key motivation behind the seminal paper “Core condensation within heavy halos…” (White & Rees 1978). This paper argued that cooling and settling of baryons at the centres of dark matter halos was essential to the formation and survival of galaxies in dense environments. Although a valid description of galaxy formation, it is now apparent that this process is not necessary in order to resolve substructure within hierarchical models.

Figure 1 The hierarchical evolution of a galaxy cluster in a universe dominated by cold dark matter. Small fluctuations in the mass distribution are present but barely visible at early epochs. These grow by gravitational instability, merging and accretion of mass, eventually collapsing into virialised quasi-spherical dark matter halos. This plot shows a time sequence of 6 frames of a region of the universe that evolves into a cluster of galaxies. The colours represent the local density of dark matter plotted using a logarithmic colour scale. Linear over-densities are darker blue, whereas the non-linear collapsed regions attain over-densities of a million times the mean background density and are plotted as yellow/white. Each box is 10 Mpc on a side and the final cluster virial radius is 2 Mpc.

In the 1980’s more detailed cosmological models were developed in which the mass of the universe was dominated by collisionless particles. The linear power spectrum of density fluctuations was determined by the growth of fluctuations in the expanding universe and the temperature of the dark matter particle. The cold dark matter (CDM) model was born (Peebles 1983).

N-body simulations of cluster formation were used to constrain the hot dark matter model (White etal 1984) and most subsequent work has focussed on the cold dark matter model (CDM), the currently favoured scenario for structure formation in the universe. Warm dark matter has not received a great deal of attention in the literature - primarily because this model could not naturally produce a closure density of dark matter. Attention has now shifted from standard CDM models, which fail for a variety of reasons, to a Lambda dominated CDM universe. Since the universe is clearly not as simple as one might wish, alternative models such as warm or self interacting dark matter may become more popular. Perhaps the widespread acceptance of a positive Lambda term stems mainly from the fact that the most hierarchical model fails without its inclusion. Although a hierarchical universe can explain many fundamental observations, from the microwave background to clustering at high redshifts, we still know next to nothing about the physical nature of the dark matter.

Many of the numerical simulations during the 1980’s focussed on a comparison between models and observations of large scale structure. Studies of individual halo properties were taken from large cosmological volume simulations. For example, Frenk etal (1985) and Quinn etal (1986) analysed the structure of dark matter halos that contained just a few thousand particles per object. Code development, “volume renormalisation” and faster computers lead to the ability to simulate individual clusters with more than $`10^5`$ particles and with a force resolution of approximately 1–2% of the virial radius (Dubinski & Carlberg 1991, Warren etal 1992, Summers etal 1996, Tormen etal 1996, 1997, 1998). These simulations still produced smooth dark matter halos with very little surviving dark matter subhalos – although interesting results were found concerning the inner structure of halos and the formation and accretion history of halos.

Warren etal and Carlberg were the first to resolve the inner 10% of a halos virial radius and claimed a power law slope $`\rho (r)r^1`$. Later simulations by Navarro etal (1997) revealed the remarkable scaling properties of CDM halos across a wide range of mass scales, from dwarf galaxies to galaxy clusters. Determining the central cuspy profile of dark matter halos is an important but difficult computational problem and we have seen recent progress in this area from many groups.

Analytic work concerning the overmerging problem began with White & Rees (1978) who discussed the various numerical and physical processes that could lead to the loss of substructure. Carlberg (1994) argued that particle-halo heating was the cause of overmerging, a result also claimed by van Kampen (1995). However the timescale for this process was at least a Hubble time whereas overmerging appeared on an orbital timescale. Moore etal (1996) argued that the resolution at that time was sufficient to overcome relaxation and tidally accelerated disruption by the finite mass background particles.

The physical processes of tidal disruption via halo-halo collisions and by the global cluster potential take place on a more rapid timescale and could explain the loss of substructure in the simulations prior to 1998 (Moore etal 1996 – the investigation of the importance of this process lead to the notion of galaxy transformation in clusters by tidal heating – galaxy harassment.) Tidal disruption is rapidly enhanced if halos are poorly resolved in their central regions ($`\mathrm{𝑐𝑓}`$ Figure 2). The survival of dark matter substructure depends critically on the central density structure which in turn depends on the force and mass resolution in a simulation. For example, if halos have resolved singular density profiles $`\rho (r)r^2`$, then it is physically impossible to entirely disrupt a satellite halo. Only through physical merging can such halos be lost.

The key motivation behind the Seattle HPCC group (http://www-hpcc.astro.washington.edu/) was to construct a high performance parallel treecode (PKDGRAV) that could simulate the formation of cosmic structures with high resolution. The aim was to resolve $`\mathrm{𝑠𝑢𝑏}\mathrm{𝑔𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑐}`$ halos with thousands of particles and $`\mathrm{𝑘𝑝𝑐}`$ force resolution. After a long testing program a set of accuracy parameters were chosen that allowed the correct growth of fluctuations to be followed on large scales, as well as accurately following the orbits of particles in the most dense regions.

Figure 2 The same cluster simulated in Figure 1 but with two different values of the softening length and keeping the particle mass fixed. The left panel shows a close up view of the inner 500 kpc of the last frame of Figure 1. In this case the softening was 0.2% of the virial radius. The right panel shows the same region of the same cluster but simulated with a softening length of 1.5% of the virial radius. The lack of substructure halos in the right panel demonstrates that softened halos are easily disrupted by tidal forces.

The first simulation to finish was the 1.3 million particle “Virgo” cluster simulation presented in Moore etal (1998) and analysed by Ghigna etal (1998). This was a simulation of the formation of a single galaxy cluster within a standard CDM universe (Figure 1). The box size was 100 Mpc but a series of nested shells of different mass particles allowed the cluster to be resolved at high resolution. Many hundreds of dark matter subhalos could be found orbiting within the cluster - the overmerging problem was resolved. A higher resolution study of the same cluster demonstrates that the central density profile appears to have converged as have the global properties of the subhalos within the cluster (Ghigna etal 2000). (Similar high resolution studies were being carried out at the same time by several other groups (c.f. Klypin etal 1999, Colin 1999, Okamoto & Habe 1999, Jing 2000, Fukushige & Makino 2000).

It is interesting to see how numerical calculations are scaling with respect to algorithmic and computational developments. The cluster simulation by Peebles (1970) contained 300 particles and had a force resolution of order 100 kpc. The highest resolution simulation published to date is by Ghigna etal (2000) in which a cluster halo was simulated with 10 million dark matter particles and force softening of 1 kpc. Roughly a factor of $`10^7`$ times the computational cost in a timescale of 30 years – an increase in speed that arises from both algorithmic and hardware developments. Four major development have lead to this performance increase: grid based codes or treecodes reduce the work of long range force calculations, multistepping saves moving all the particles on the same short timestep as the handful of particles in dense regions, faster cpu’s, parallel codes can scale up to 90% efficiency on large numbers of nodes. Figure 3 shows the “N” versus year plot for several cluster simulations over the last 38 years.

Figure 3 A selection of dark matter only cluster simulations. I have attempted to plot the number of particles within the final virial radius against the publication year. The dashed line illustrates “Moore’s law” (named after Gordon Moore who founded Intel and noted the rapid increase in the density of transistors on a silicon chip with time) which roughly equates to a doubling of cpu speed every three years. This type of plot suffers from many biases and is not meant to be taken seriously. The fact that recent simulations lie on this curve does not imply that algorithmic advances are not important – quite the opposite since the force softening is reduced typically in proportion to $`N^{1/3}`$ which requires more computational work.

We now have a host of new observational tests of the hierarchical structure formation paradigm that include: the extent of galactic halos in clusters or satellites in galactic halos, the orbital distribution of cluster/satellite galaxies, the number of satellites as a function of their circular velocity or mass, the spatial and velocity distribution of satellites, the central density profiles of clusters and galaxies are close to $`r^{1.5}`$. Unfortunately, observational tests of these model predictions on cluster scales are non trivial and just a few exist in the literature (Tyson etal 1998, Natarajan etal 1999, Smith etal 2000).

## References


text:
# Analysis of Vocal Disorders in a Feature Space

## Introduction

The voicing source can produce in addition to periodic vibrations (the normal phonation) a great variety of complex signals, due to the fact that many sources of non-linearity are involved in the air-flow production and in the laryngeal vibration processes berg . These features have been modelled successfully in the past years by an asymmetric two-mass model of the vocal folds ishizaka . Standard methods of voice analysis, such as the estimation of jitter and shimmer and the harmonics-to-noise ratio, are valuable for the characterization of regular phonation. However, in the case of voice disorders abrupt changes to irregular regimes occur and these measurements are of limited relevance kelman .

Many studies berg ; herzel2  suggest that some of the complexities observed in rough, disordered voices are not caused by external sources, but by the intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of vocal fold movement. Given the nonlinearities associated with the laryngeal source (i.e. the pressure-flow relation in the glottis, the stress-strain curves of vocal fold tissues, the vocal fold collisions), this should not come as a great surprise.

The transitions to qualitatively new oscillatory behavior indicate the suitability of the methods from nonlinear dynamics; e.g. in herzel  it is shown that a sufficiently large tension imbalance of the left and right vocal fold induces bifurcations to chaos. Asymmetries due to paralysis, polyps, papilloma, cancer etc. produce the same effects and simulations of coupled oscillators reuter  can provide insight into the sources of such vocal instabilities and are, therefore, of potential use for diagnosis and treatment of voice disorders. Furthermore the reconstruction of attractors and the estimation of their properties indicate low dimensionality in the systems generating the voice signals.

Herzel et al. herzel2  have shown that indications of secondary Hopf bifurcations can be found in pathological voices, as well as sudden jump from one limit cycle to another one with different period and amplitude. Different attractors may coexist in nonlinear systems and, therefore, even extremely tiny changes of parameters, like muscle tension, may lead to abrupt jumps to other regimes. The occurrence of such a situation should be reflected in quantities like the entropy and the fractal dimension of the (global) attractor.

Qualitatively, the origin of bifurcations and low-dimensional attractors can be understood as follows: Normal phonation corresponds to an essentially synchronized motion of all vibratory modes. A change of parameters such as muscle tension or localised vocal fold lesions may lead to a desynchronization of certain modes resulting in bifurcations and chaos. The following modes are of particular relevance: Motion of the left and right vocal fold, horizontal and vertical modes, interaction of the ventricular and vocal folds, interaction of vocal fold vibrations with sub- and supra-glottal acoustic resonances, and vortices generated at the glottis.

Although normal phonation and voice disorders can be distinguished qualitatively by human very easily, a quantification and data distribution of the disease is highly desirable. This work is motivated by clinical interests, which lie in objectively evaluating the effort made by cordectomised patients during an utterance, as it could be indicative of patient status, also as far as post-operatoty functional recovery is concerned kasuya ; manfredi .

## Geometric signal separation

The idea of geometric signal separation in a feature space is used in different applications, to identify the dynamical state of a complicated system, where for practical reasons the system itself is connected to a simple measurement device which records a scalar time series. Sufficiently long subsections of this series are transformed into feature vectors $`v`$ in a feature space $`V`$. The entries of $`v`$ are chosen to be quantities which contain the compressed information of the signal relevant for the task to be performed and which can be estimated directly from the time series. Neighbourhood relations in this space, based on the computation of distances between feature vectors, allow for various classification and diagnosis tasks. It can be necessary to introduce a local metric, since the variability of quantities may range over very different scales.

During a training period pre-classified (e.g. by human experts) data sets are collected and each one is converted into a feature vector. This set of vectors is divided into clusters, where each cluster represents a dynamical state of the system. In the data classification period feature vectors are calculated and compared to the clusters in $`V`$. The distance of each test vector to the closest cluster is thresholded to yield a distinction between classes. A successful application of the method for on-line failure detection on electro-motors is discussed in guttler .

The basic idea of using a feature space for our purpose is therefore to eliminate the short-time variability of the time series, extracting characteristic features. As a first step for the classification of vocal disorders, one has to select suitable entries of the feature vectors $`v`$. These have to contain extremely condensed information from the time series, reflecting somehow a pseudo-state of the dynamical system that has produced the sentence. In other words, healthy patients and sick ones should be associated to feature vectors that populate different regions of the feature space.

In berry , it was shown by means of the empirical orthogonal functions that normal phonation is well represented by only two eigenmodes, while the simulation of disordered voice has shown that the three strongest modes can cope with 90% of the variance. So the fractal dimension of the attractor is a good entry of the feature space, since healthy people should produce smaller dimension-values than patients with some kind of disease. There are several ways to quantify the self-similarity of a geometrical object by a dimension. From a computational point of view it is convenient to proceed in the way illustrated in kantz1 . Let us define the correlation sum for a collection of points $`x_n`$ in some vector space to be the fraction of all possible pairs of points which are closer than a given distance $`ϵ`$ in a particular norm. The basic formula is:

$$C(ϵ)=\frac{2}{N(N1)}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\underset{j=i+1}{\overset{N}{}}\mathrm{\Theta }(ϵx_ix_j),$$
(1)
where $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$ is the Heaviside step function. The sum just counts the pairs $`(x_i,x_j)`$ whose distance is smaller than $`ϵ`$. In the limit of an infinite amount of data $`(N\mathrm{})`$ and for small $`ϵ`$, we expect $`C`$ to scale like a power law, and we can define the correlation dimension $`D`$ by:

$$D=\underset{ϵ0}{lim}\underset{N\mathrm{}}{lim}\frac{\mathrm{ln}C(ϵ,N)}{\mathrm{ln}ϵ}.$$
(2)
Since in the latter there are two limits involved, and both limits are not computable in a closed form, one has to look very carefully to the results before claiming some numbers as the value of the correlation dimension. It should be clear that one needs a lot of points in order to estimate $`C(ϵ)`$ over a large enough range of length scales. A few hundred are definitely not enough to yield a statistically significant result at the small length scales, where also the noise starts to play a noteworthy role. With our time series a clear identification of a dimension was not always possible; this is essentially the reason why we will introduce a pseudo-dimension or dimension-like quantity. It is important to remember a result reported in kantz1 . In theory, the maximum dimension $`D_M`$ that can be calculated for a data file of length $`N`$ is:

$$D_M2\mathrm{lg}_{10}(N2).$$
(3)
Therefore, approximately eight dimensions is the maximum which can be calculated from a 22 KHz sampled sentence lasting one second.

One other candidate for the feature space is represented by the entropy, a fundamental concept in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. Entropy describes the amount of disorder in the system, but one can generalise this concept to characterise the amount of information stored in more general probability distributions. Let us introduce a partition $`𝒫_ϵ`$ on the dynamical range of the observable, and the joint probability $`p_{i_1,i_2,\mathrm{},i_m}`$ that at an arbitrary time $`n`$ the observable falls into the interval $`I_{i_1}`$, at time $`(n+1)`$ it falls into interval $`I_{i_2}`$ and so on. Then one defines block entropies of block size $`m`$ and partition radius $`ϵ`$ the quantity:

$$H_q(m,ϵ)=\frac{1}{1q}\mathrm{ln}\underset{i_1,i_2,\mathrm{},i_m}{}p_{i_1,i_2,\mathrm{},i_m}^q.$$
(4)
The order-$`q`$ entropies are then:

$$h_q=\underset{𝒫_ϵ}{sup}\underset{m\mathrm{}}{lim}\frac{1}{m}H_q(m,ϵ)=\underset{𝒫_ϵ}{sup}\underset{m\mathrm{}}{lim}(H_q(m+1,ϵ)H_q(m,ϵ)).$$
(5)
In the strict sense only $`h_1`$ is called the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy kolmo ; sinai , but in fact all order-$`q`$ entropies computed on the joint probabilities are entropies in the spirit of Kolmogorov and Sinai, who were the first to consider correlations in time in information theory. Due to the numerical problems encountered in the estimation of the entropy from real data, namely the finite length of the time series and the presence of noise, we will use a pseudo-entropy in the following.

The full feature vector contains the following quantities:

* Spectral Factor: It is the averaged ratio between the amplitude of frequencies under $`1`$ KHz and frequencies between $`4`$ and $`6`$ KHz; it is motivated by the effort sick subjects have to face when they want to speak; this induces instabilities that are reflected by the power spectrum (sick subjects present a smaller value).
* Pseudo-Entropy: The quantity $`h_2`$, as defined in Eq. 5, is averaged for $`ϵ`$-values of 5% to 10% of the variance of the data for embedding dimensions ranging between 2 and 8, upper limit suggested from Eq. 3. Sick subjects should present a bigger value than healthy people.
* Pseudo-Correlation Dimension: The quantity $`D`$, as defined in Eq. 2, is averaged for $`ϵ`$-value of 5% to 10% of the variance of data for embedding dimensions ranging between 2 and 8. Sick subjects should present a bigger value than healthy people.
* First zero-crossing of the Autocorrelation Function: This parameter is related to the ability of the subject in correctly pronouncing a word. In particular, dysphonic patients are not able to isolate every vowel, and the resulting time series is more correlated than for healthy subjects. The estimation method is the same as in kantz1 .
* First Lyapunov Exponent: This is a convenient indicator of the sensitivity to small orbit perturbations characteristic of chaotic attractors, as it gives the average exponential rate of divergence of infinitesimally nearby initial conditions. Some sicknesses can induce sudden jumps from the limit cycle (to which a zero maximum Lyapunov exponent is associated) to another one with different period and amplitude (but again with zero maximum Lyapunov exponent); if the jump is due to a bifurcation one can see a positive value. Estimating this quantity, anyway, one has to be careful because Lyapunov exponents for speech data are inconsistent111Kumar and Mullik kumar  found the maximum exponent to be positive, characteristic of chaos, for normal vowel and consonant productions. In contrast, Narayanan and Alwan nara  calculated a maximum exponent of zero, indicating a limit cycle, for normal vowel phonation and a positive value for voiced and voiceless fricative productions. Herzel herzel  found a maximum exponent of zero for healthy vowel phonation, while a dysphonic vowel sample yielded a positive value. All authors cautioned, however, that calculation of the exponent is highly sensitive to short data sets and nonstationarity. In fact, critical sensitivity to noise kantz2  makes calculation of a Lyapunov exponent highly suspect and inconclusive for voice data..
* Prediction Error: We apply the idea presented in farmer ; when a well defined attractor is present, then the prediction error has to be small. Normal phonations were found indeed to lie with a good approximation on a limit cycle, while sick people commonly produce more disordered time series.
* Jitter: As in herzel , to take into account the short-term (cycle-to-cycle) variation in the fundamental frequency of the signal. Commonly, for healthy voices, the jitter is lower than $`1\%`$, while higher values characterise disphonic phonation.
* Shimmer: As in herzel , to take into account the short-term (cycle-to-cycle) variation in the amplitude of the signal. As for the jitter, large values commonly indicate great effort in speaking.
* Peak in the Phoneme Transition: The transition between one phoneme and the following shows a much longer transient for sick people (they have problems to switch from a dynamical regime to the following). Every phoneme contains a pitch that is repeated a number of time variable between 10 and 20, as presented in lm ; lm2 . One has then to identify the time length of such a pitch and to compare the distance between this pattern and one of the same length coming from the same phoneme. Moving the second pattern along the full phoneme, one gets a distribution of distances (with a zero when the reference pitch is considered and saturation values close to the end of the actual phoneme); the maximum peak of this distribution before the saturation, i.e. before the end of the current phoneme, gives what we call Phoneme Trasition. We have discovered that this quantity is comparable, for our purposes, to the already mentioned harmonics-to-noise ratio. We prefer to estimate the Peak in the Phoneme Transition because it looks more reliable. Sick subjects present bigger values than healthy people.
* Residual Noise: The algorithm presented in lm  is applied to the time series. Noise can be easily removed if the series contains redundancy and, roughly speaking, redundancy is a synonym of healthy222In kasuya ; manfredi  the Normalized Noise Energy is introduced to measure the dysphonic component of the voice spectrum related to the total signal energy. The deviation from periodicity in the sub-phoneme structures, due to the dysphonia, can be interpreted as noise and then a way to quantify this additive component is preposed.. After applying the noise reduction algorithm, we look at the variance of the difference between the original and the processed signal. Healthy subjects are related with small values, sentences spoken by sick people look very noisy and therefore present a bigger value of the residual noise after the filtering.

Of course the feature vector is redundant, but this is something somehow unavoidable, since all the entries have to come from the same time series and in this meaning they must be more or less correlated. Furthermore working in a larger dimensional feature space helps to better identify the pathology, since the distances between points become larger. Of course a *Principal Component Analysis* is very helpful in detecting the trade off between redundancy and robustness.

## Experimental results

We now proceed to collect male voice samples from three categories of subjects333These voice samples were recorded in a quiet room at the Phoniatric Section of the Otholaryngoiatric Institute, Careggi Hospital, Firenze.:

* People suffering from dysphonia444Adult subjects affected by T1A glottis cancer, a tumour confined to the glottis region with mobility of the vocal cords. (12).
* Healthy people (17).
* People with pathologies under medical treatment555Subjects operated via endoscopic laser or traditional lancet technique. (4).

All these subjects have been asked to say the italian word aiuole (flower-beds), as it is made up with the five main Italian vowel sounds: ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’. Every time the word was uttered in isolation. The use of a complete word instead of sustained vowels is due to the clinical interest in evaluating the effort made by the patient during the entire vocal emission, also as far as the glide between vowels (‘ai’, ‘iu’, ‘uo’) is concerned. The sentences have been recorded in a .wav mono, 16-bits linear, 22050 Hz format converted into sequences of real numbers666Every voice sample is slightly shorter than 1s; this means that the corresponding time series contains about 20000 points and given to the feature vector building algorithm, which always treats them as whole words.

A two-dimensional projection of the feature space is visible in Fig.1, namely onto the pseudo-correlation dimension and the first zero-crossing of the autocorrelation function. A principal component analysis has revealed it to be one of the clearest bidimensional projection. Others give as well good separation, but since they have combination of features as axes we prefer to present the results as in Fig.1.

As expected, a normal voice does not exceed the third dimension, while up to 5 degrees of freedom are necessary to represent a pathologic phonation. A similar sharp distinction is given by the autocorrelation function: Dysphonic subjects are not able to well isolate every vowel and the resulting time series is more correlated, i.e. the first zero-crossing is reached after 1.2 ms (typical values for healthy subjects range between 0.2 ms and 0.4 ms).

Similar results are readable through the entropy as far as sick people produce more disordered series; the prediction error is smaller for normal phonations because in the phase space they lie with a good approximation in a limit cycle. Also the filtering of the time series is easier when no disease is there; the absence of bifurcations facilitates the search of neighbours and improves the quality of the noise reduction (lm ).

In order to check the classification ability of the method, we have collected two more sets of data:

* Healthy people simulating a disease (17).
* Artificial voices (12).

In the first set, people have tried to say aiuole in the strangest possible way (getting sometimes very impressive records!), simulating hoarseness. They could listen as many time as they wanted to sentences spoken by diseased speakers and they were given the instruction to imitate them as close as possible. In the second we have used the speech synthetizer in bell\_labs  with different languages and several voices (man, gnat, raspy, woman, coffee drinker, ridiculous, child, big man). Fig.2 shows the results. It is very interesting to note that, although the simulated and the diseased sentences sound quite similar, they are correctly classified by the algorithm. In particular nobody was able to exceed the dimension three, since the dysphonia is something that one cannot directly control777In the two-mass model of the vocal cords, introduced in ishizaka , the desynchronization is the source of irregularity and it is achieved through the introduction of asimmetry in the model itself. In the speech production, the left and right fold can be regarded as separate oscillators which are coupled via the airflow and collisions. For strong asymmetry, like a unilateral vocal fold paralysis, both folds may desynchronize, leading to complex vibratory pattern. In simulating the disease it’s not clear what one should do in order to get this asymmetry effect.. Less amazingly, artificial voices lie inside the healthy zone, but they also sound somehow less rich and, so to say, artificial.

Fig.1 shows also the results concerning the set of voices coming from cordectomised patients. They lie between the healthy and the sick region, with small pseudo-correlation dimension values but large first zero-crossing of the autocorrelation ones. This result, though preliminar, shows that cordectomised subjects still require more effort in speaking with respect to healthy people, due to the limited extension of the produced scar fold. More results could be obtained if the long-time path followed by patients after treatment were available.

In order to quantify the degree of illness, we define the following index. First, the centre of mass of both the healthy ($`\overline{healthy}`$) and pathologic clusters ($`\overline{sick}`$) is computed. Then the distances $`d(new,\overline{healthy})`$ and $`d(new,\overline{sick})`$ of the voice sample under test from $`\overline{healthy}`$ and $`\overline{sick}`$ respectively are evaluated. Due to the different range covered by the different components of the feature vector, a weighted distance is considered, where the weights are the inverse of the standard deviations of the distribution of the entries. The healthy index $``$ is defined as:

$$(new)=20\mathrm{log}_{10}\frac{d(new,\overline{healthy})}{d(new,\overline{sick})}.$$
(6)
A strong negative value of $``$ indicates a healthy voice, while a big positive one reveals the presence of some kind of pathology. Of course it is necessary to introduce some thresholds to get a good classification, according to clinical considerations.

We have computed the healthy index $``$ for the full set of data, getting the distribution for healthy and sick people shown in Fig.3. The peak on the left is relative to normal phonation, while the right one regards only disphonic voices. Cordectomised patients got an index value ranging between -7 and 4, artificially generated voices between -77 and -45, healthy people simulating a disease are situated between -53 and -5. It is again interesting to note how difficult (if not impossible) it is for healthy people to simulate a real disease, since it operates directly into the physiologic level.

Notice that the healthy index is based on all the entries of the feature vector. Reducing the number of parameters causes a smoothed distribution of voices, with a worse classification. Since in this application the computation time was not a problem (the word *aiuole* is vey short and the total number of samples is very limited), we did not put to much effort in determining up to which extent we can neglect some parameter. As already discussed, some of them play a more important role than some other and this aspect needs to be considered in more details if the speed of the classification becomes a crucial point.

## Conclusions

The vocal folds, together with glottal airflow, constitute a highly nonlinear self-oscillating system. According to the accepted myoelastic theory of voice production, the vocal folds are set into vibration by the combined effect of subglottal pressure, the viscoelastic properties of the folds, and the Bernoulli effect berg . The effective length, mass, and tension of the vocal folds are determined by muscle action, and in this way the fundamental frequency and the waveform of the glottal pulses can be controlled. The vocal tract acts as a filter which transforms the primary signals into meaningful voiced speech. Normal sustained voiced sound appears to be nearly periodic, although small perturbations are important for the naturalness of speech. On the other hand, vocal instabilities due to bifurcations are often symptomatic in voice pathology.

This work aims at classifying vocal disorders through the construction of an appropriate feature space. The main point is the identification of the entries of the feature vectors, as these should be quantities into which differences between normal and disordered phonation are well visible. This choice is made here following physician’s indications, according to physical models simulating the vocal folds, linear and non-linear dynamic theory. Some results concerning two-dimensional projections of the feature space are presented, showing a clear separation between healthy and sick voices with the selected parameters. The robustness of the method is tested through simulations of dysphonic voices and the use of a speech synthetiser.

A way of quantifying the amount of disorder is proposed by means of an healthy index that measures the distance of a voice sample from the centre of mass of both healthy and sick clusters in the feature space. The results obtained show the good performance of the method. The approach can be of clinical interest also as far as the post-operatory evolution (and possible rehabilitation) is concerned, commonly performed on a subjective basis only. Glottal functionality can in fact be analysed by means of objective indexes other than visual inspection of the spectrogram.

The authors would like to thank the Careggi Hospital in Florence, in particular the Phoniatric Section and Prof. Cecilia Salimbeni, for fruitful collaborations.


text:
# Thermoelectric properties of junctions between metal and strongly correlated semiconductor

## Abstract

We propose a junction of metal and rare-earth compound semiconductor as the basis for a possible efficient low-temperature thermoelectric device. If an overlayer of rare earth atoms differing from the bulk is placed at the interface, very high values of the figure of merit $`ZT`$ can be reached at low temperature. This is due to sharp variation of the transmission coefficient of carriers across the junction at a narrow energy range, which is intrinsically linked to the localized character of the overlayer $`f`$-orbital.

New thermoelectric coolers and power generators are attracting increasing interest. Their quality is governed by the dimensionless figure of merit $`ZT`$, a product of transport coefficients to be defined below times the absolute temperature. At present, the best $`ZT`$ obtainable is $``$ 1 at room temperature, while a value about 3 $``$ 4 is considered a real breakthrough.

There are two theoretical ideas for increasing $`ZT`$. One is to utilize the sharp energy features in bulk materials such as strongly correlated semiconductors. Another is to exploit the interface energy structures in metal/superconductor junctions, which have been tested experimentally.

In this Letter, we combine these two ideas in exploring the thermopower behavior of a junction between a metal and a particular class of mixed-valent semiconductors with high dielectric constants, such as SmB6 and Sm2Se3, called the electronic ferroelectrics (FE). Various cases of the junction are considered, including clean and “dirty” interfaces. When a suitable rare-earth impurity layer forms the interface, we find very high values of $`ZT`$ at low temperatures. There is great interest in low temperature thermoelectrics for special applications.

Mixed-valent semiconductors are rare-earth compounds, usually cubic, whose relevant electronic properties may be modeled by a $`f`$-flat band and a broad conduction band, with two electrons per unit cell. Strong correlation between $`d`$-electrons and $`f`$-holes can renormalize the bands and create a temperature dependent small gap \[see Fig. 1(b)\]: we consider this case for the semiconductor on one side of the junction, and describe it with the self-consistent mean field solution (MF) of the Falicov-Kimball model. The ground state of the insulating phase is found to be a coherent condensate of $`d`$-electron and $`f`$-hole pairs, giving a net built-in macroscopic polarization which breaks the crystal inversion symmetry and makes the material ferroelectric.

While previous calculations have dealt with metal/ordinary-semiconductor junctions neglecting the dependence of the transmission coefficient on the carrier energy, for the metal/FE junction this feature turns out to be crucial, requiring a careful treatment.

To this aim, we model the motion along the $`z`$ direction perpendicular to the interface with the one dimensional spinless hamiltonian $``$, given by the sum of three terms describing the left bulk metal, the interface layer, and the right bulk FE, respectively \[see Fig. 1(a)\]:

$$=_{\mathrm{metal}}+_{\mathrm{interface}}+_{\mathrm{FE}}.$$
(1)
$`_{\mathrm{metal}}`$ is a tight-binding hamiltonian for lattice sites at $`z=aj`$, $`j<0`$ ($`a=`$ lattice constant), with energy $`\epsilon _d^{}`$ and hopping parameter $`t`$. $`_{\mathrm{FE}}`$ is the bulk Falicov-Kimball hamiltonian:

$`_{\mathrm{FE}}`$ $`=`$ $`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_d{\displaystyle \underset{j>0}{}}d_j^{}d_j+\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_f{\displaystyle \underset{j>0}{}}f_{j+1/2}^{}f_{j+1/2}t{\displaystyle \underset{j0}{}}d_j^{}d_{j+1}`$ (2)
$`V_{df}`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j0}{}}f_{j+1/2}^{}d_j+V_{df}{\displaystyle \underset{j>0}{}}f_{j1/2}^{}d_j+\mathrm{H}.\mathrm{c}.`$ (3)
$`+U_{df}`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j0}{}}d_j^{}d_jf_{j+1/2}^{}f_{j+1/2}+U_{df}{\displaystyle \underset{j>0}{}}d_j^{}d_jf_{j1/2}^{}f_{j1/2}.`$ (4)
Here, while electrons can tunnel between $`d`$-sites with hopping coefficient $`tt^{}`$, $`f`$-electrons are completely localized \[$`f_{j+1/2}`$ ($`d_j`$) destroys a $`f`$\- ($`d`$-)electron at $`z=(j+1/2)a`$ ($`ja`$) with energy $`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_f`$ ($`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_d`$)\], but interact with $`d`$-electrons via the Coulomb repulsion energy $`U_{df}`$. Moreover, the $`d`$-$`f`$ hybridization $`V_{df}`$ is odd under inversion. On this side of the junction we assume one electron per unit cell. The hamiltonian term

$$_{\mathrm{interface}}=\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_{d0}d_0^{}d_0+\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_{f1/2}f_{1/2}^{}f_{1/2}$$
(5)
accounts for the possibility of impurity atomic layers at the interface, namely one at $`z=0`$ made of $`d`$-like sites with energy $`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_{d0}`$ and another one at $`z=a/2`$ made of $`f`$-sites with localized orbitals of energy $`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_{f1/2}`$. In our model, the electrostatic potential $`V`$ across the junction (by applying an external bias) is constant in the two bulk regions (the small gap FE semiconductor has carriers at finite temperature) and has a sharp step at the interface. We adopt the following strategy to solve the motion across the junction: (i) We apply the MF approximation to the hamiltonian $`^{\mathrm{MF}}`$, introducing the built-in coherence of the FE bulk $`\mathrm{\Delta }=U_{df}<d_j^{}f_{j\pm 1/2}>`$ (the vacuum is the state with no $`f`$-holes), treating renormalized site energies ($`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_d\epsilon _d`$, $`\stackrel{~}{\epsilon }_f\epsilon _f`$) as material parameters, and choosing $`\epsilon _d^{}=\epsilon _d=\epsilon _f=0`$, namely the middle of the $`d`$-band on both sides of the junction and the flat $`f`$-band are aligned \[see Fig. 1(b)\]. (ii) We calculate the site coefficients for the Bogoliubov-Valatin operator

$$\gamma _{ke}^{}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{N_s}}\underset{j}{}\left\{u_k\left(j\right)d_j^{}+v_k\left(j+1/2\right)f_{j+1/2}^{}\right\}$$
(6)
($`N_s=`$ number of $`d`$-sites) which creates elementary electronic excitations of energy $`\omega \left(k\right)>0`$ (referred to the chemical potential $`\mu `$) if applied to the ground state, i.e.

$$\mathrm{i}\mathrm{}\dot{\gamma }_{ke}=[\gamma _{ke},^{\mathrm{MF}}\mu N]=\omega \left(k\right)\gamma _{ke},$$
(7)
where $`N`$ is the number operator, and $`k`$ is a suitable quantum number. Similar expressions occur for holes. From Eqs. (6) and (7) one derives equations for the amplitudes of the quasi-particle excitation $`(u_k(j),v_k(j+1/2))`$.

Solutions are travelling waves partly reflected and partly transmitted at the interface. In particular, the incoming and reflected wave $`(\mathrm{\Psi }_{1L},\mathrm{\Psi }_{2L})`$ is a compatible solution for $`j<0`$ plus $`u_k\left(0\right)=\mathrm{\Psi }_{1L}\left(0\right)`$ if $`\mathrm{\Psi }_{1L}(j)=\mathrm{exp}(\mathrm{i}qaj)R_k\mathrm{exp}(\mathrm{i}qaj)`$, $`\mathrm{\Psi }_{2L}(j+1/2)=0`$, $`\omega \left(q\right)=eV2t^{}\mathrm{cos}\left(qa\right)\mu `$, namely the tight-binding solution of the left side metal. Similarly, the transmitted wave

$$\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{\mathrm{\Psi }_{1R}\left(j\right)}{\mathrm{\Psi }_{2R}\left(j+1/2\right)}\right)=T_k\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{u_k}{v_k\mathrm{e}^{\mathrm{i}ka/2}}\right)\mathrm{e}^{\mathrm{i}kaj}$$
(8)
is a solution of the bulk FE for $`j>0`$ only if $`\omega \left(k\right)=\xi _k+E_k\mu `$, with $`\xi _k=\epsilon _k/2`$, $`\epsilon _k=2t\mathrm{cos}(ka)`$, $`E_k=[\xi _k^2+|\mathrm{\Delta }_k|^2+|V_k|^2]^{1/2}`$, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }_k=2\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{cos}(ka/2)`$ and $`V_k=2\mathrm{i}V_{df}\mathrm{sin}(ka/2)`$ have even and odd parity, respectively, and $`2\left|u_k\right|^2=1+\xi _k/E_k`$, $`\left|u_k\right|^2+\left|v_k\right|^2=1`$. Figure 1(b) shows the quasi-particle band structure on both sides of the junction when $`V_{df}0`$. Note that the FE gap is indirect and that the bottom of conduction band is much flatter than the top of valence band.

We now have to match left and right bulk solutions at the interface. Because quantities $`v_k(1/2)`$, $`T_k`$, and $`R_k`$ are still unknown, the finite-difference equations of motion coming from Eqs. (6) and (7) not yet employed are solved, with the elastic scattering condition $`\omega (q)=\omega (k)`$. The reflection coefficient $`(\omega )`$, defined as the ratio of reflected to incident flux, is simply $`\left|R_k\right|^2`$ ($`q,k>0`$), and the transmission coefficient is $`𝒯\left(\omega \right)=1\left(\omega \right)`$.

Electric and heat density currents are calculated to first order in the differences of $`V`$ and $`T`$ on the two sides of the junction. From these the conductance $`G=2e^2L_0/h`$, the thermal conductance $`G_T=2(L_2L_1^2/L_0)/(Th)`$, and the thermopower $`Q=L_1/(eTL_0)`$ of the interface are derived, where

$$L_n=_{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}dϵ\left\{𝒯\left(ϵ\right)+\overline{𝒯}\left(ϵ\right)\right\}ϵ^n\left[\frac{f\left(ϵ\right)}{ϵ}\right],$$
(9)
$`f\left(x\right)`$ is the Fermi distribution function, and $`𝒯\left(x\right)`$ \[$`\overline{𝒯}\left(x\right)`$\] is the electron (hole) transmission coefficient, non-zero only for positive excitation energies within the band range. The interface figure of merit is $`ZT=Q^2GT/G_T`$.

Figure 2 shows the total transmission coefficient $`𝒯\left(ϵ\right)+\overline{𝒯}\left(ϵ\right)`$ vs energy for different values of impurity levels $`\epsilon _{d0}`$ (left panel) and $`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$ (right panel). We consider a system at $`T=0`$ with the same parameters of Fig. 1(b), i.e. one in which the metal band is much broader than the semiconductor one and the FE band gap is 0.4$`t`$, approximately one tenth of the total bandwidth ($`V_{df}0`$). One sees that the clean interface ($`\epsilon _{d0}=\epsilon _{f1/2}=0`$) already presents a strong electron-hole asymmetry. Hence, from Eq. (9) high values of $`Q`$ follow. The effect of an impurity $`d`$-layer is just to uniformly depress $`𝒯+\overline{𝒯}`$: the greater the impurity level energy, the lower the transmission (left panel). This trend, whose global effect is found to enhance $`ZT`$, has intrinsic physical limitations because $`\epsilon _{d0}`$ must be of the same order of magnitude as bulk energies in realistic systems. The behavior of an $`f`$-impurity is drastically different. We see that (right panel), as we set $`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$ to negative values, $`\overline{𝒯}`$ goes to zero in the neighborhood of the same values, as if the hole were completely backscattered from the interface when resonating with the impurity atom. A similar behavior occurs for $`\epsilon _{f1/2}>0`$. The overall effect is so strong even to change the dominant (electron or hole) character of transport and, hence, the sign of $`Q`$.

The effect of the $`f`$-impurity layer on $`ZT`$ is shown in Fig. 3. We represent the quantity $`ZT/(ZT+1)`$ (due to the huge range of $`ZT`$) as a contour plot in the $`T`$-$`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$ plane. While $`ZT`$ has no upper bound, $`ZT/(ZT+1)1`$. For a fixed value of $`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$, $`ZT`$ goes to zero as $`T`$ approaches the critical temperature $`T_c`$ ($`K_BT_c=0.19t`$ here) at which the gap vanishes and the bulk FE turns into a metal \[$`𝒯\left(ϵ\right)=\overline{𝒯}\left(ϵ\right)`$\]. In the opposite limit $`T0`$, $`ZT`$ can reach very high values (the darkest region enclosed by the inner contour line corresponds to $`ZT>90`$), depending on $`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$. At $`T>T_c`$ $`ZT`$ goes to zero, as $`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$ varies, when $`Q`$ changes sign.

From Fig. 3, there is an optimal value of $`\epsilon _{f1/2}`$ of the interafce layer at each temperature. The corresponding maxmimum figure of merit $`ZT`$ increases with lower temperature. For example, with a gap of 100 meV at $`T=0`$, the best value of $`ZT`$ will be $``$1 at $`T=`$300 K, but already $``$6 at 150 K and $``$100 at 40 K.

In summary, we have made a qualitative theoretical study of the possibility that a junction of metal and FE (as opposed to bulk materials) produces high thermopower. The figure of merit $`ZT`$ attained is very high, especially at low $`T`$. In these regimes, bulk thermal conductivity would be dominated by phonons which would reduce $`ZT`$. However, if we choose two materials with large thermal impedance mismatch, the phonon scatterings at the interface would decrease the junction thermal conductivity. Thus, phonon conductivity would not vitiate the high $`ZT`$ found. In a longer paper, we will consider the role of phonons in greater detail and include a more comprehensive study of junctions with different classes of semiconducting materials.

Work supported by the NSF contract DMR 9721444, INFM PRA99-SSQI, and Progetto Giovani Ricercatori. We thank D. Chemla, M. L. Cohen and S. G. Louie for the hospitality at University of California, Berkeley, where this work was carried out. L. J. S. thanks J. E. Hirsch for helpful discussions.


text:
# The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity.

Abstract

It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify a spacetime in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the “warp drive” of science fiction. However, just as it happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of spacetime like the one discussed here.

Published in: Class. Quantum Grav. 11-5, L73-L77 (1994).

When we study special relativity we learn that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. This fact is still true in general relativity, though in this case one must be somewhat more precise: in general relativity, nothing can travel locally faster than the speed of light.

Since our everyday experience is based on an Euclidean space, it is natural to believe that if nothing can travel locally faster than light then given two places that are separated by a spatial proper distance $`D`$, it is impossible to make a round trip between them in a time less than $`2D/c`$ (where $`c`$ is the speed of light), as measured by an observer that remains always at the place of departure. Of course, from our knowledge of special relativity we know that the time measured by the person making the round trip can be made arbitrarily small if his (or her) speed approaches that of light. However, the fact that within the framework of general relativity and without the need to introduce non-trivial topologies (wormholes), one can actually make such a round trip in an arbitrarily short time as measured by an observer that remained at rest will probably come as a surprise to many people.

Here I wish to discuss a simple example that shows how this can be done. The basic idea can be more easily understood if we think for a moment in the inflationary phase of the early Universe, and consider the relative speed of separation of two comoving observers. It is easy to convince oneself that, if we define this relative speed as the rate of change of proper spatial distance over proper time, we will obtain a value that is much larger than the speed of light. This doesn’t mean that our observers will be travelling faster than light: they always move inside their local light-cones. The enormous speed of separation comes from the expansion of spacetime itself. 111 This superluminal speed is very often a source of confusion. It is also a very good example of how an intuition based on special relativity can be deceiving when one deals with dynamical spacetimes.

The previous example shows how one can use an expansion of spacetime to move away from some object at an arbitrarily large speed. In the same way, one can use a contraction of spacetime to approach an object at any speed. This is the basis of the model for hyper-fast space travel that I wish to present here: create a local distortion of spacetime that will produce an expansion behind the spaceship, and an opposite contraction ahead of it. In this way, the spaceship will be pushed away from the Earth and pulled towards a distant star by spacetime itself. One can then invert the process to come back to Earth, taking an arbitrarily small time to complete the round trip.

I will now introduce a simple metric that has precisely the characteristics mentioned above. I will do this using the language of the 3+1 formalism of general relativity , because it will permit a clear interpretation of the results. In this formalism, spacetime is described by a foliation of spacelike hypersurfaces of constant coordinate time $`t`$. The geometry of spacetime is then given in terms of the following quantities: the 3-metric $`\gamma _{ij}`$ of the hypersurfaces, the lapse function $`\alpha `$ that gives the interval of proper time between nearby hypersurfaces as measured by the “Eulerian” observers (those whose four-velocity is normal to the hypersurfaces), and the shift vector $`\beta ^i`$ that relates the spatial coordinate systems on different hypersurfaces. Using these quantities, the metric of spacetime can be written as: 222 In the following greek indices will take the values (0,1,2,3) and latin indices the values (1,2,3).

$`ds^2`$ $`=`$ $`d\tau ^2=g_{\alpha \beta }dx^\alpha dx^\beta `$ (1)
$`=`$ $`\left(\alpha ^2\beta _i\beta ^i\right)dt^2+\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\beta _idx^idt+\gamma _{ij}dx^idx^j.`$
Notice that as long as the metric $`\gamma _{ij}`$ is positive definite for all values of $`t`$ (as it should in order for it to be a spatial metric), the spacetime is guaranteed to be globally hyperbolic. Any spacetime that can be described in the language of the 3+1 formalism will therefore have no closed causal curves.

Let us now assume that our spaceship moves along the $`x`$ axis of a cartesian coordinate system. We want to find a metric that will “push” the spaceship along a trajectory described by an arbitrary function of time $`x_s(t)`$. A metric that has this property is given by ($`G=c=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$) :

$`\alpha `$ $`=`$ $`1,`$ (2)
$`\beta ^x`$ $`=`$ $`v_s\left(t\right)f\left(r_s\left(t\right)\right),`$ (3)
$`\beta ^y`$ $`=`$ $`\beta ^z=\mathrm{\hspace{0.33em}0},`$ (4)
$`\gamma _{ij}`$ $`=`$ $`\delta _{ij},`$ (5)
where:

$$v_s\left(t\right)=\frac{dx_s\left(t\right)}{dt},r_s\left(t\right)=\left[\left(\text{}xx_s\left(t\right)\right)^2+y^2+z^2\right]^{1/2},$$

and where $`f`$ is the function:

$$f\left(r_s\right)=\frac{\mathrm{tanh}\left(\text{}\sigma \left(r_s+R\right)\right)\mathrm{tanh}\left(\text{}\sigma \left(r_sR\right)\right)}{\text{}2\mathrm{tanh}\left(\sigma R\right)},$$
(6)
with $`R>\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0}`$ and $`\sigma >\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0}`$ arbitrary parameters. Notice that for large $`\sigma `$ the function $`f(r)`$ approaches very rapidly a “top hat” function:

$$\underset{\sigma \mathrm{}}{lim}f\left(r_s\right)=\{\begin{array}{c}1\mathrm{for}r_s[R,R],\hfill \\ 0\mathrm{otherwise}.\hfill \end{array}$$
(7)
With the above definitions, the metric (1) can be rewritten as:

$$ds^2=dt^2+\left(\text{}dxv_sf\left(r_s\right)dt\right)^2+dy^2+dz^2.$$
(8)
It is easy to understand the geometry of our spacetime from the previous expressions. First, from equation (5) we see that the 3-geometry of the hypersurfaces is always flat. Moreover, the fact that the lapse is given by $`\alpha =\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$ implies that the timelike curves normal to these hypersurfaces are geodesics, i.e., the Eulerian observers are in free fall. Spacetime, however, is not flat due to the presence of a non-uniform shift. Nevertheless, since the shift vector vanishes for $`r_sR`$, we see that at any time $`t`$ spacetime will be essentially flat everywhere except within a region with a radius of order $`R`$, centered at the point $`(x_s(t),\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0},\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0})`$.

Since the 3-geometry of the hypersurfaces is flat, the information about the curvature of spacetime will be contained in the extrinsic curvature tensor $`K_{ij}`$. This tensor describes how the three-dimensional hypersurfaces are embedded in four-dimensional spacetime, and is defined as:

$$K_{ij}=\frac{1}{2\alpha }\left(D_i\beta _j+D_j\beta _i\frac{g_{ij}}{t}\right),$$
(9)
where $`D_i`$ denotes covariant differentiation with respect to the 3-metric $`\gamma _{ij}`$. From the form of $`\alpha `$ and $`\gamma _{ij}`$ , is not difficult to see that this expression reduces to:

$$K_{ij}=\frac{1}{2}\left(\text{}_i\beta _j+_j\beta _i\right),$$
(10)
The expansion $`\theta `$ of the volume elements associated with the Eulerian observers is given in terms of $`K_{ij}`$ as:

$$\theta =\alpha \mathrm{Tr}K.$$
(11)
From this expression it is not difficult to show that:

$$\theta =v_s\frac{x_s}{r_s}\frac{df}{dr_s}.$$
(12)
Figure 1 shows a graph of $`\theta `$ as a function of $`x`$ and $`\rho =(y^2+z^2)^{1/2}`$, in the particular case when $`\sigma =\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}8}`$ and $`R=v_s=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$. The center of the perturbation corresponds to the spaceship’s position $`x_s\left(t\right)`$. We clearly see how the volume elements are expanding behind the spaceship, and contracting in front of it.

To prove that the trajectory of the spaceship is indeed a timelike curve, regardless of the value of $`v_s(t)`$ , we substitute $`x=x_s(t)`$ in the metric (8). It is then easy to see that for the spaceship’s trajectory we will have:

$$d\tau =dt.$$
(13)
This implies not only that the spaceship moves on a timelike curve, but also that its proper time is equal to coordinate time. Since coordinate time is also equal to the proper time of distant observers in the flat region, we conclude that the spaceship suffers no time dilation as it moves. It is also straightforward to prove that the spaceship moves on a geodesic. This means that even though the coordinate acceleration can be an arbitrary function of time, the proper acceleration along the spaceship’s path will always be zero. Moreover, it is not difficult to convince oneself that when the parameter $`\sigma `$ is large, the tidal forces in the immediate vicinity of the spaceship are very small (provided that $`R`$ is larger than the size of the spaceship). Of course, in the region where $`r_sR`$ the tidal forces can be very large indeed.

To see how one can use this metric to make a round trip to a distant star in an arbitrary small time, let us consider the following situation: Two stars $`A`$ and $`B`$ are separated by a distance $`D`$ in flat spacetime. At time $`t_0`$ , a spaceship starts to move away from $`A`$ at a speed $`v<1`$ using its rocket engines. The spaceship then stops at a distance $`d`$ away from $`A`$ . I will assume that $`d`$ is such that:

$$RdD.$$
(14)
It is at this point that a disturbance of spacetime of the type described, centered at the spaceship’s position, first appears. This disturbance is such that the spaceship is pushed away from $`A`$ with a coordinate acceleration that changes rapidly from $`0`$ to a constant value $`a`$ . Since the spaceship is initially at rest ($`v_s=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0}`$), the disturbance will develop smoothly from flat spacetime (see equation (8)).

When the spaceship is halfway between $`A`$ and $`B`$ , the disturbance is modified in such a way that the coordinate acceleration changes rapidly from $`a`$ to $`a`$ . If the coordinate acceleration in the second part of the trip is arranged in such a way as to be the opposite to the one we had in the first part, then the spaceship will eventually find itself at rest at a distance $`d`$ away from $`B`$ , at which time the disturbance of spacetime will disappear (since again $`v_s=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0}`$). The journey is now completed by moving again through flat spacetime at a speed $`v`$. 333The two constant-velocity legs at the beginning and end of the journey are not crucial for the argument that I wish to present here. I only introduce them in order to guarantee that the two stars will remain unaffected by the disturbance of spacetime ( $`Rd`$ ), and can therefore be used as unperturbed “clocks” with which to compare the proper time on board the spaceship.

If each of the changes in acceleration are very rapid, the total coordinate time $`T`$ elapsed in the one way trip will be essentially given by:

$$T=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\left[\frac{d}{v}+\sqrt{\frac{D\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}d}{a}}\right].$$
(15)
Since both stars remain in flat space, their proper time is equal to coordinate time. The proper time measured on the spaceship, on the other hand, will be:

$$\tau =\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\left[\frac{d}{\gamma v}+\sqrt{\frac{D\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}d}{a}}\right],$$
(16)
with $`\gamma =\left(\text{}1v^2\right)^{1/2}`$. We see then that the time dilation comes only from the initial and final stages of the trip, when the spaceship moves through flat spacetime. Now, if condition (14) holds, we will have:

$$\tau T\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}\sqrt{\frac{D}{a}}$$
(17)
It is now clear that $`T`$ can be made as small as we want by increasing the value of $`a`$ . Since a round trip will only take twice as long, we find that we can be back in star $`A`$ after an arbitrarily small proper time, both from the point of view of the spaceship and from the point of view of the star. The spaceship will then be able to travel much faster than the speed of light. However, as we have seen, it will always remain on a timelike trajectory, that is, inside its local light-cone: light itself is also being pushed by the distortion of spacetime. A propulsion mechanism based on such a local distortion of spacetime just begs to be given the familiar name of the “warp drive” of science fiction.

The metric I have just described has one important drawback, however: it violates all three energy conditions (weak, dominant and strong ). Both the weak and the dominant energy conditions require the energy density to be positive for all observers. If one calculates the Einstein tensor from the metric (8), and uses the fact that the four-velocity of the Eulerian observers is given by:

$$n^\alpha =\frac{1}{\alpha }(1,\beta ^i),n_\alpha =(\text{}\alpha ,\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0}),$$
(18)
then one can show that these observers will see an energy density given by:

$$T^{\alpha \beta }n_\alpha n_\beta =\alpha ^2T^{\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0\hspace{0.17em}0}}=\frac{1}{8\pi }G^{\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0\hspace{0.17em}0}}=\frac{1}{8\pi }\frac{v_s^2\rho ^2}{4r_{c}^{}{}_{}{}^{2}}\left(\text{}\frac{df}{dr_s}\right)^2.$$
(19)
The fact that this expression is everywhere negative implies that the weak and dominant energy conditions are violated. In a similar way one can show that the strong energy condition is also violated.

We see then that, just as it happens with wormholes, one needs exotic matter to travel faster than the speed of light. However, even if one believes that exotic matter is forbidden classically, it is well known that quantum field theory permits the existence of regions with negative energy densities in some special circumstances (as, for example, in the Casimir effect ). The need of exotic matter therefore doesn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility of using a spacetime distortion like the one described above for hyper-fast interstellar travel.

As a final comment, I will just mention the fact that even though the spacetime described by the metric (8) is globally hyperbolic, and hence contains no closed causal curves, it is probably not very difficult to construct a spacetime that does contain such curves using a similar idea to the one presented here.

The author wishes to thank Bernard F. Schutz and Gareth S. Jones for many useful comments.


text:
# Feynman’s Entropy and Decoherence Mechanism

## I Introduction

According to Feynman, the adventure of our science of physics is a perpetual attempt to recognize that the different aspects of nature are really different aspects of the same thing . Feynman wrote many papers on different subjects of physics, but they are coming from one paper according to him. We are not able to combine all of his papers, but we can consider three of his papers published during the period 1969-72.

In this report, we would like to consider Feynman’s 1969 report on partons , the 1971 paper he published with his students on the quark model based on harmonic oscillators , and the chapter on density matrix in his 1972 book on statistical mechanics . In these three different papers, Feynman deals with three distinct aspects of nature. We shall see whether Feynman was saying the same thing in these papers.

We approach this problem by developing a mathematical instrument which can support Feynman’s physical ideas spelled out in these seemingly different papers. We shall use the mathematics of two coupled harmonic oscillators . The standard procedure for this two-oscillator system is to separate the Hamiltonian using normal coordinates. The transformation to the normal coordinate system becomes very simple if the two oscillators are identical. We shall use this simple mathematics to find a common ground for the above-mentioned articles written by Feynman.

First, let us look at Feynman’s book on statistical mechanics , He makes the following statement about the density matrix. When we solve a quantum-mechanical problem, what we really do is divide the universe into two parts - the system in which we are interested and the rest of the universe. We then usually act as if the system in which we are interested comprised the entire universe. To motivate the use of density matrices, let us see what happens when we include the part of the universe outside the system.

In order to see clearly what Feynman had in mind, we use the above-mentioned couples oscillators. One of the oscillators is the world in which we are interested with the other oscillator as the rest of the universe. There will be no effects on the first oscillator if the system is decoupled. Once coupled, we need a normal coordinate system in order separate the Hamiltonian. Then it is straightforward to write down the wave function of the system.

We shall then observe that the mathematics of this oscillator system is directly applicable to Lorentz-boosted harmonic oscillator wave functions, where one variable is the longitudinal coordinate and the other is the time variable. The system is uncoupled if the oscillator wave function is at rest, but the coupling becomes stronger as the oscillator is boosted to a high-speed Lorentz frame .

We shall then note that for two-body system, such as the hydrogen atom, there is a time-separation variable which is to be linearly mixed with the longitudinal space-separation variable. This space-separation variable is known as the Bohr radius, but we never talk about the time-separation variable in the present form of quantum mechanics, because this time-separation variable belongs to Feynman’s rest of the universe.

If we pretend not to know this time-separation variable, the entropy of the system will increase when the oscillator is boosted to a high-speed system . Does this increase in entropy correspond to decoherence? Not necessarily. However, in 1969, Feynman observed the parton effect in which a rapidly moving hadron appears as a collection of incoherent partons . This is the decoherence mechanism we like to discuss in this report.

In Sec. II, we review the quantum mechanics of coupled harmonic oscillators in which one of them corresponds to the world in which we do physics, and the other in the rest of the universe. In Sec. III, it is shown that the time-separation variable in a two-body bound state belongs to Feynman’s rest of the universe. It is shown also that Feynman’s oscillator formalism includes this time-separation variable. We review in Sec. IV Feynman’s parton picture. Finally, in Sec. V, we discuss why partons appear as incoherent particles.

## II Coupled Oscillators

Two coupled harmonic oscillators serve many different purposes in physics. It is well known that this oscillator problem can be formulated into a problem of a quadratic equation in two variables. To make a long story short, let us consider a system of two identical oscillators coupled together by a spring. The Hamiltonian is

$$H=\frac{1}{2m}\left\{p_1^2+p_2^2\right\}+\frac{1}{2}\left\{K\left(x_1^2+x_2^2\right)+2Cx_1x_2\right\}.$$
(1)
We are now ready to decouple this Hamiltonian by making the coordinate rotation:

$$y_1=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left(x_1x_2\right),y_2=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}\left(x_1+x_2\right).$$
(2)
In terms of this new set of variables, the Hamiltonian can be written as

$$H=\frac{1}{2m}\left\{p_1^2+p_2^2\right\}+\frac{K}{2}\left\{e^{2\eta }y_1^2+e^{2\eta }y_2^2\right\},$$
(3)
with

$$\mathrm{exp}(\eta )=\sqrt{(K+C)/(KC)}.$$
(4)
Thus $`\eta `$ measures the strength of the coupling. If $`y_1`$ and $`y_2`$ are measured in units of $`(mK)^{1/4}`$, the ground-state wave function of this oscillator system is

$$\psi _\eta (x_1,x_2)=\left(\frac{1}{\pi }\right)^{1/2}\mathrm{exp}\left\{\frac{1}{2}(e^\eta y_1^2+e^\eta y_2^2)\right\}.$$
(5)
The wave function is separable in the $`y_1`$ and $`y_2`$ variables. However, for the variables $`x_1`$ and $`x_2`$, the story is quite different.

The key question is how quantum mechanical calculations in the world of the observed variable are affected when we average over the other variable. The $`x_2`$ space in this case corresponds to Feynman’s rest of the universe, if we only consider quantum mechanics in the $`x_1`$ space. As was discussed in the literature for several different purposes , the wave function of Eq.(5) can be expanded as

$$\psi _\eta (x_1,x_2)=\frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}\eta }\underset{k}{}\left(\mathrm{tanh}\frac{\eta }{2}\right)^k\varphi _k(x_1)\varphi _k(x_2).$$
(6)
The question then is what lessons we can learn from the situation in which we average over the $`x_2`$ variable.

In order to study this problem, we use the density matrix. From this wave function, we can construct the pure-state density matrix

$$\rho (x_1,x_2;x_1^{},x_2^{})=\psi _\eta (x_1,x_2)\psi _\eta (x_1^{},x_2^{}),$$
(7)
If we are not able to make observations on the $`x_2`$, we should take the trace of the $`\rho `$ matrix with respect to the $`x_2`$ variable. Then the resulting density matrix is

$$\rho (x,x^{})=\psi _\eta (x,x_2)\left\{\psi _\eta (x^{},x_2)\right\}^{}𝑑x_2.$$
(8)
We have simplicity replaced $`x_1`$ and $`x_1^{}`$ by $`x`$ and $`x^{}`$ respectively. If we perform the integral of Eq.(8), the result is

$$\rho (x,x^{})=\left(\frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}(\eta /2)}\right)^2\underset{k}{}\left(\mathrm{tanh}\frac{\eta }{2}\right)^{2k}\varphi _k(x)\varphi _k^{}(x^{}),$$
(9)
which leads to $`Tr(\rho )=1`$. It is also straightforward to compute the integral for $`Tr(\rho ^2)`$. The calculation leads to

$$Tr\left(\rho ^2\right)=\left(\frac{1}{\mathrm{cosh}(\eta /2)}\right)^4\underset{k}{}\left(\mathrm{tanh}\frac{\eta }{2}\right)^{4k}.$$
(10)
The sum of this series is $`(1/\mathrm{cosh}\eta )`$, which is smaller than one if the parameter $`\eta `$ does not vanish.

This is of course due to the fact that we are averaging over the $`x_2`$ variable which we do not measure. The standard way to measure this ignorance is to calculate the entropy defined as

$$S=Tr\left(\rho \mathrm{ln}(\rho )\right),$$
(11)
where $`S`$ is measured in units of Boltzmann’s constant. If we use the density matrix given in Eq.(9), the entropy becomes

$$S=2\left\{\mathrm{cosh}^2\left(\frac{\eta }{2}\right)\mathrm{ln}\left(\mathrm{cosh}\frac{\eta }{2}\right)\mathrm{sinh}^2\left(\frac{\eta }{2}\right)\mathrm{ln}\left(\mathrm{sinh}\frac{\eta }{2}\right)\right\}.$$
(12)
This expression can be translated into a more familiar form if we use the notation

$$\mathrm{tanh}\frac{\eta }{2}=\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{\mathrm{}\omega }{kT}\right),$$
(13)
where $`\omega `$ is given in Eq.(4.

It is known in the literature that this rise in entropy and temperature causes the Wigner function to spread wide in phase space causing an increase of uncertainty . Certainly, we cannot reach a classical limit by increasing the uncertainty. On the other hand, we are accustomed to think this entropy increase has something to do with decoherence, and we are also accustomed to think the lack of coherence has something to do with a classical limit. Are they compatible? We thus need a new vision in order to define precisely the word “decoherence.”

## III Time-separation Variable in Feynman’s Rest of the Universe

Quantum field theory has been quite successful in terms of perturbation techniques in quantum electrodynamics. However, this formalism is basically based on the S matrix for scattering problems and useful only for physically processes where free a set of particles becomes another set of free particles after interaction. Quantum field theory does not address the question of localized probability distributions and their covariance under Lorentz transformations. The Schrödinger quantum mechanics of the hydrogen atom deals with localized probability distribution. Indeed, the localization condition leads to the discrete energy spectrum. Here, the uncertainty relation is stated in terms of the spatial separation between the proton and the electron. If we believe in Lorentz covariance, there must also be a time separation between the two constituent particles.

Before 1964 , the hydrogen atom was used for illustrating bound states. These days, we use hadrons which are bound states of quarks. Let us use the simplest hadron consisting of two quarks bound together an attractive force, and consider their space-time positions $`x_a`$ and $`x_b`$, and use the variables

$$X=(x_a+x_b)/2,x=(x_ax_b)/2\sqrt{2}.$$
(14)
The four-vector $`X`$ specifies where the hadron is located in space and time, while the variable $`x`$ measures the space-time separation between the quarks. According to Einstein, this space-time separation contains a time-like component which actively participates as can be seen from

$$\left(\begin{array}{c}z^{}\\ t^{}\end{array}\right)=\left(\begin{array}{cc}\mathrm{cosh}\eta & \mathrm{sinh}\eta \\ \mathrm{sinh}\eta & \mathrm{cosh}\eta \end{array}\right)\left(\begin{array}{c}z\\ t\end{array}\right),$$
(15)
when the hadron is boosted along the $`z`$ direction. In terms of the light-cone variables defined as

$$u=(z+t)/\sqrt{2},v=(zt)/\sqrt{2}.$$
(16)
The boost transformation of Eq.(15) takes the form

$$u^{}=e^\eta u,v^{}=e^\eta v.$$
(17)
The $`u`$ variable becomes expanded while the $`v`$ variable becomes contracted.

Does this time-separation variable exist when the hadron is at rest? Yes, according to Einstein. In the present form of quantum mechanics, we pretend not to know anything about this variable. Indeed, this variable belongs to Feynman’s rest of the universe. In this report, we shall see the role of this time-separation variable in decoherence mechanism.

Also in the present form of quantum mechanics, there is an uncertainty relation between the time and energy variables. However, there are no known time-like excitations. Unlike Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation applicable to position and momentum, the time and energy separation variables are c-numbers, and we are not allowed to write down the commutation relation between them. Indeed, the time-energy uncertainty relation is a c-number uncertainty relation .

How does this space-time asymmetry fit into the world of covariance . This question was studied in depth by the present author and his collaborators. The answer is that Wigner’s $`O(3)`$-like little group is not a Lorentz-invariant symmetry, but is a covariant symmetry . It has been shown that the time-energy uncertainty applicable to the time-separation variable fits perfectly into the $`O(3)`$-like symmetry of massive relativistic particles .

The c-number time-energy uncertainty relation allows us to write down a time distribution function without excitations . If we use Gaussian forms for both space and time distributions, we can start with the expression

$$\left(\frac{1}{\pi }\right)^{1/2}\mathrm{exp}\left\{\frac{1}{2}\left(z^2+t^2\right)\right\}$$
(18)
for the ground-state wave function. What do Feynman et al. say about this oscillator wave function?

In his classic 1971 paper , Feynman et al. start with the following Lorentz-invariant differential equation.

$$\frac{1}{2}\left\{x_\mu ^2\frac{^2}{x_\mu ^2}\right\}\psi (x)=\lambda \psi (x).$$
(19)
This partial differential equation has many different solutions depending on the choice of separable variables and boundary conditions. Feynman et al. insist on Lorentz-invariant solutions which are not normalizable. On the other hand, if we insist on normalization, the ground-state wave function takes the form of Eq.(18). It is then possible to construct a representation of the Poincaré group from the solutions of the above differential equation . If the system is boosted, the wave function becomes

$$\psi _\eta (z,t)=\left(\frac{1}{\pi }\right)^{1/2}\mathrm{exp}\left\{\frac{1}{2}\left(e^{2\eta }u^2+e^{2\eta }v^2\right)\right\}.$$
(20)
This wave function becomes Eq.(18) if $`\eta `$ becomes zero. The transition from Eq.(18) to Eq.(20) is a squeeze transformation. The wave function of Eq.(18) is distributed within a circular region in the $`uv`$ plane, and thus in the $`zt`$ plane. On the other hand, the wave function of Eq.(20) is distributed in an elliptic region with the light-cone axes as the major and minor axes respectively. If $`\eta `$ becomes very large, the wave function becomes concentrated along one of the light-cone axes. Indeed, the form given in Eq.(20) is a Lorentz-squeezed wave function.

It is interesting to note that the Lorentz-invariant differential equation of Eq.(19) contains the time-separation variable which belongs to Feynman’s rest of the universe. Furthermore, the wave function of Eq.(18) is identical to that of Eq.(5) for the coupled oscillator system, if the variables $`z`$ and $`t`$ are replaced $`x_1`$ and $`x_2`$ respectively. Thus the entropy increase due to the unobservable $`x_2`$ variable is applicable to the unobserved time-separation variable $`t`$.

## IV Feynman’s Parton Picture

It is a widely accepted view that hadrons are quantum bound states of quarks having localized probability distribution. As in all bound-state cases, this localization condition is responsible for the existence of discrete mass spectra. The most convincing evidence for this bound-state picture is the hadronic mass spectra which are observed in high-energy laboratories . However, this picture of bound states is applicable only to observers in the Lorentz frame in which the hadron is at rest. How would the hadrons appear to observers in other Lorentz frames? To answer this question, can we use the picture of Lorentz-squeezed hadrons discussed in Sec. III.

The radius of the proton is $`10^5`$ of that of the hydrogen atom. Therefore, it is not unnatural to assume that the proton has a point charge in atomic physics. However, while carrying out experiments on electron scattering from proton targets, Hofstadter in 1955 observed that the proton charge is spread out . In this experiment, an electron emits a virtual photon, which then interacts with the proton. If the proton consists of quarks distributed within a finite space-time region, the virtual photon will interact with quarks which carry fractional charges. The scattering amplitude will depend on the way in which quarks are distributed within the proton. The portion of the scattering amplitude which describes the interaction between the virtual photon and the proton is called the form factor.

Although there have been many attempts to explain this phenomenon within the framework of quantum field theory, it is quite natural to expect that the wave function in the quark model will describe the charge distribution. In high-energy experiments, we are dealing with the situation in which the momentum transfer in the scattering process is large. Indeed, the Lorentz-squeezed wave functions lead to the correct behavior of the hadronic form factor for large values of the momentum transfer .

Furthermore, in 1969, Feynman observed that a fast-moving hadron can be regarded as a collection of many “partons” whose properties do not appear to be quite different from those of the quarks . For example, the number of quarks inside a static proton is three, while the number of partons in a rapidly moving proton appears to be infinite. The question then is how the proton looking like a bound state of quarks to one observer can appear different to an observer in a different Lorentz frame? Feynman made the following systematic observations.

* The picture is valid only for hadrons moving with velocity close to that of light.
* The interaction time between the quarks becomes dilated, and partons behave as free independent particles.
* The momentum distribution of partons becomes widespread as the hadron moves fast.
* The number of partons seems to be infinite or much larger than that of quarks.

Because the hadron is believed to be a bound state of two or three quarks, each of the above phenomena appears as a paradox, particularly b) and c) together.

In order to resolve this paradox, let us write down the momentum-energy wave function corresponding to Eq.(20). If the quarks have the four-momenta $`p_a`$ and $`p_b`$, we can construct two independent four-momentum variables

$$P=p_a+p_b,q=\sqrt{2}(p_ap_b).$$
(21)
The four-momentum $`P`$ is the total four-momentum and is thus the hadronic four-momentum. $`q`$ measures the four-momentum separation between the quarks. Their light-cone variables are

$$q_u=(q_0q_z)/\sqrt{2},q_v=(q_0+q_z)/\sqrt{2}.$$
(22)
The resulting momentum-energy wave function is

$$\varphi _\eta (q_z,q_0)=\left(\frac{1}{\pi }\right)^{1/2}\mathrm{exp}\left\{\frac{1}{2}\left(e^{2\eta }q_u^2+e^{2\eta }q_v^2\right)\right\}.$$
(23)
Because we are using here the harmonic oscillator, the mathematical form of the above momentum-energy wave function is identical to that of the space-time wave function. The Lorentz squeeze properties of these wave functions are also the same. This aspect of the squeeze has been exhaustively discussed in the literature .

When the hadron is at rest with $`\eta =0`$, both wave functions behave like those for the static bound state of quarks. As $`\eta `$ increases, the wave functions become continuously squeezed until they become concentrated along their respective positive light-cone axes. Let us look at the z-axis projection of the space-time wave function. Indeed, the width of the quark distribution increases as the hadronic speed approaches that of the speed of light. The position of each quark appears widespread to the observer in the laboratory frame, and the quarks appear like free particles.

The momentum-energy wave function is just like the space-time wave function. The longitudinal momentum distribution becomes wide-spread as the hadronic speed approaches the velocity of light. This is in contradiction with our expectation from nonrelativistic quantum mechanics that the width of the momentum distribution is inversely proportional to that of the position wave function. Our expectation is that if the quarks are free, they must have their sharply defined momenta, not a wide-spread distribution.

However, according to our Lorentz-squeezed space-time and momentum-energy wave functions, the space-time width and the momentum-energy width increase in the same direction as the hadron is boosted. This is of course an effect of Lorentz covariance. This indeed is the key to the resolution of the quark-parton paradox .

## V Decoherence in the Parton Picture

The most puzzling problem in the parton picture is that partons in the hadron appear as incoherent particles, while quarks are coherent when the hadron is at rest. Does this mean that the coherence is destroyed by the Lorentz boost? The answer is NO, and here is the resolution to this puzzle.

When the hadron is boosted, the hadronic matter becomes squeezed and becomes concentrated in the elliptic region along the positive light-cone axis. The length of the major axis becomes expanded by $`e^\eta `$, and the minor axis is contracted by $`e^\eta `$.

This means that the interaction time of the quarks among themselves become dilated. Because the wave function becomes wide-spread, the distance between one end of the harmonic oscillator well and the other end increases. This effect, first noted by Feynman , is universally observed in high-energy hadronic experiments. The period is oscillation is increases like $`e^\eta `$.

On the other hand, the interaction time with the external signal, since it is moving in the direction opposite to the direction of the hadron, it travels along the negative light-cone axis. If the hadron contracts along the negative light-cone axis, the interaction time decreases by $`e^\eta `$. The ratio of the interaction time to the oscillator period becomes $`e^{2\eta }`$. The energy of each proton coming out of the Fermilab accelerator is $`900GeV`$. This leads the ratio to $`10^6`$. This is indeed a small number. The external signal is not able to sense the interaction of the quarks among themselves inside the hadron.

Indeed, Feynman’s parton picture is one concrete physical example where the decoherence effect is observed. As for the entropy, the time-separation variable belongs to the rest of the universe. Because we are not able to observe this variable, the entropy increases as the hadron is boosted to exhibit the parton effect. The decoherence is thus accompanied by an entropy increase.

Let us go back to the coupled-oscillator system. The light-cone variables in Eq.(20) correspond to the normal coordinates in the coupled-oscillator system given in Eq.(2). According to Feynman’s parton picture, the decoherence mechanism is determined by the ratio of widths of the wave function along the two normal coordinates.