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# References

Comment on “Critical State Theory for Nonparallel Flux Line Lattices in Type-II Superconductors”

Recently, Badía and López (BL) proposed a new model relevant to the electrodynamics of hard superconductors in multicomponent situation bad . BL have claimed that using their least action principle with the given constrains on the current density one can solve any critical state problem. They argue that the BL model is equivalent to the set of Maxwell equations with the vertical current-voltage characteristics (CVC). However, for the isotropic case (the only case analyzed in bad ) the BL formalism does not lead to new results in comparison to the Bean critical state model generalized for the multicomponent case. As regards the anisotropic situation, we show here that the BL model is not equivalent to the set of Maxwell equations with the “vertical CVC”. In other words, we call in question the validity of the BL model in a general case.

BL proposed a new formalism for solving the critical state problems and applied it for the analysis of the isotropic situation. For this particular case, the BL formalism is surely adequate and is completely equivalent to the set of Maxwell equations with the CVC in the form, $`\stackrel{}{J}=J_c\stackrel{}{E}/E`$, where $`J_c`$ is the critical current density, $`\stackrel{}{E}`$ is the electric field. This material equation corresponds to the generalized Bean critical state model (GBCSM). The GBCSM is commonly used in the electrodynamics of hard superconductors. Specifically, the analysis of this model allowed us to discover a new interesting phenomenon of the collapse of the transport current col  and of the magnetization buf . Contrary to bad , the GBCSM is useful for clarification the nature of the collapse. Indeed, let us consider a dissipation-free dc critical current $`\stackrel{}{J}_{dc}`$ shielding external dc magnetic field $`\stackrel{}{H}`$ and providing dc magnetization $`M`$ of the superconductor. After switching on ac magnetic field $`\stackrel{}{h}\stackrel{}{H}`$, ac current $`\stackrel{}{J}_{ac}`$ is induced ($`\stackrel{}{J}_{ac}\stackrel{}{J}_{dc}`$). According to GBCSM, the total current should flow along $`\stackrel{}{E}`$. This means that the dissipation-free current $`J_{dc}`$ is suppressed and the collapse of $`M`$ appears to be. It is natural that owing to equivalence of the BL and GBCSM models, simulations concerning the collapse in bad  should coincide with the results obtained previously (see e. g. colnew ).

Although Letter bad  deals with an analysis of the isotropic case, BL declare that “several extensions may be implemented if dictated by the physics of the problem. These include the effect of equilibrium magnetization by means of an appropriate $`B(H)`$ relation, the selection of the model $`J_c(H)`$ and the use of anisotropic control spaces”. It seems to us that the validity of the BL formalism in the anisotropic case is questionable. Although the BL model operates correctly with the region of the dissipation-free current flow, we argue that the set of Maxwell equations with CVC is not equivalent to the BL model for the dissipative region. Indeed, CVC of samples in the critical state contains not only information about a region where the current flow is dissipation-free, but provides the one-to-one correspondence between the directions of the critical current and the electric field within the dissipative region. It should be noted that not only a single CVC but a class of CVC can correspond to the same restriction on the current density. For example, the class of CVC with an arbitrary parameter $`\alpha `$,

$$J_x=J_c\mathrm{cos}(\theta +\alpha ),J_y=J_c\mathrm{sin}(\theta +\alpha ),$$
(1)
corresponds to the isotropic constraint $`|\stackrel{}{J}|J_c`$ but describes the case where the direction of $`\stackrel{}{J}`$ is inclined with respect to $`\stackrel{}{E}`$. Here, $`x`$ and $`y`$ are arbitrary coordinate axes in the sample plane, $`\theta `$ is the angle between the vector $`\stackrel{}{E}`$ and $`x`$ axis. Obviously, the set of Maxwell equations together with these CVC would give different profiles for the field penetration, whereas the BL formalism with the isotropic constraint gives a unique solution of the problem. This means, that the variational procedure chooses only one of CVC from a class, ignoring the real CVC. This choice is defined by the requirement of the minimum of the BL functional. Only for the isotropic case such a requirement predetermines $`\alpha =0`$ in Eq. (1) (i. e. $`\stackrel{}{J}\stackrel{}{E}`$) owing to the symmetry of the problem. In other cases, one cannot be sure that the suggested least action principle chooses the CVC correctly. Of course, if this principle is proved, it would be a very important tool to determine the CVC via the known restriction region. Unfortunately, there is no reason to expect this because the minimum principle for the entropy production rate is not proved for nonlinear unsteady systems.

Thus, the BL formalism being valid for the isotropic case can hardly be correct for more complex situations, in particular, for anisotropic cases.

This work is supported by INTAS and RFBR, projects IR-97-1394 and 00-02-17145.

Leonid M. Fisher1 and Valery A. Yampol’skii2

1All-Russian Electrical Engineering Institute, 12 Krasnokazarmennaya Street, 111250 Moscow, Russia,

2 Institute for Radiophysics and Electronics Ukrainian Academy of Science, 12 Proskura Street, 61085 Kharkov, Ukraine

PACS numbers: 74.25.Ha,74.60.Ec,74.60.Ge


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# Genuine Three-Body Bose-Einstein Correlations and Percolation of Strings

## Abstract

Recent data show a large difference of the genuine three-body Bose-Einstein correlations in S-Pb collisions and in Pb-Pb central collisions being close to zero in the first case and to one in the second one. These results, unexpected from conventional approaches, are naturally explained by the percolation of colour strings produced in the collisions and subsequent incoherent fragmentation of the formed clusters.

The strength of the genuine three-particle Bose-Einstein correlations can be measured by the weight factor $`\omega `$ introduced in :

$$\omega =\frac{\left\{C_3(q)1\right\}\left\{C_2(q_{12})1\right\}\left\{C_2(q_{23})1\right\}\left\{C_2(q_{31})1\right\}}{2\sqrt{\left\{C_2(q_{12})1\right\}\left\{C_2(q_{23})1\right\}\left\{C_2(q_{31})1\right\}}}$$
(1)
Here $`C_2`$ and $`C_3`$ are the two- and three-body correlation functions  and

$$q_{ij}=q_iq_j,q^2=q_{12}^2+q_{23}^2+q_{31}^2$$
(2)
The weight-factor $`\omega `$ has been experimentally studied in e+e- collisions by L3 collaboration, with the result consistent with $`\omega =1`$ . It has also been studied in heavy-ion collisions. NA44 collaboration  has obtained $`\omega =0.20\pm 0.02\pm 0.19`$ for SPb collisions, i.e. compatible with no genuine three-body correlations. On the other hand, the same experiment with the same methodology has found $`\omega =0.85\pm 0.02\pm 0.21`$ for central Pb-Pb collisions. This value is compatible with $`\omega =0.606\pm 0.005\pm 0.178`$ earlier reported by WA98 collaboration .

It has been recently suggested  that an explanation of these data seems to be in line with the behaviour of the chaoticity parameter $`\lambda `$ which measures the strength of the two-body Bose-Einstein correlations

$$\lambda =C_2(q=0)1$$
(3)
The intercept $`\lambda `$ is the most poorly determined parameter due to Coulomb correction, dependence on the shape of correlation functions fits and other uncertainties but experimental data in heavy-ion collisions show that for moderate atomic numbers of colliding nuclei $`\lambda `$ decreases with atomic number, as expected from the corresponding increase of the number of independent incoherent sources . Indeed going from O-C to O-Cu, O-Ag and O-Au, $`\lambda `$ falls from 0.79 to 0.32 . However for heavier nuclei $`\lambda `$ no longer decreases and eventually starts to increase. For S-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions NA44 obtains $`\lambda =0.56`$ and 0.59 respectively . Similar values have been found at RHIC for Au-Au collisions at $`\sqrt{s}=130`$ GeV .

This behaviour can be understood assuming that in a collision colour strings are formed stretched between the projectile and target, which then break due to formation of quark-antiquark pairs. Each colour string is assumed to have a finite transverse dimension of area $`S_1=\pi r_0^2`$ ($`r_00.2`$ fm). As the energy and/or atomic number of the projectile and target increase the number and density of strings grows, so that they start to overlap, forming clusters, which act as new effective sources of particle production. Both the strings and their clusters can be assumed to be totally chaotic sources with $`\lambda =1`$ . Assuming that for particles coming from different strings there are no Bose-Einstein correlations  one then obtains

$$\lambda =\frac{n_S}{n_T}$$
(4)
where $`n_S`$ and $`n_T`$ are the average numbers of particle pairs produced in a given rapidity and transverse momentum range from the same cluster and from all the clusters respectively.

It is clear from (4) that $`\lambda `$ decreases with the number of incoherent sources (clusters). For very large energies and/or atomic numbers the clusterization process will diminish the number of independent sources (asymptotically to unity). As a consequence the chaoticity parameter $`\lambda `$ will grow.

This approach may be realized in the framework of different scenarios depending on the assumed form of the interaction between strings at close distances . If the area of a cluster is formed by the geometrical sum of overlapping strings then a phase transition is observed when the string density $`\eta `$ reaches a critical value $`\eta _c`$ . This percolation phase transition corresponds to the appearance of at least one cluster which spans the whole interaction transverse area. The value of $`\eta _c`$ lies in the interval 1.17-1.5 depending on the form of the profile functions of the colliding nuclei. Staying within this percolation scenario, the dynamics of the string interaction still admits different possibilities. The observed behaviour of $`\lambda `$ favours considering each cluster as a single string with a higher colour given by the vectorial sum of colours of the overlappig strings times a factor which takes into account the degree of overlapping. As a result, the number of particles $`\mu _n`$ produced by a cluster of area $`S_n`$ formed by $`n`$ strings is given by

$$\mu _n=\sqrt{\frac{nS_n}{S_1}}\mu _1$$
(5)
where $`\mu _1`$ is the number of particles produced by a simple string. In the case of total overlapping $`S_n=S_1`$ and $`\mu _n=\sqrt{n}\mu _1`$. In the opposite case when strings just touch each other $`S_n=nS_1`$ and one gets $`\mu _n=n\mu _1`$ as expected.

To calculate $`\omega `$ we have to know

$$\lambda _3=C_3(q=0)1.$$
(6)
Under the above mentioned assumptions, similarly to (3), we have

$$\lambda _3=5\frac{n_S^{}}{n_T^{}}$$
(7)
where now $`n_S^{}`$ and $`n_T^{}`$ are the average numbers of particle triplets produced in a given rapidity and transverse momentum range from the same cluster and from all the clusters respectively.

A completely chaotic cluster of $`n`$ strings will produce $`(1/2)\mu _n^2`$ pairs of particles and $`(1/6)\mu _n^3`$ triplets of particles with $`\mu _n`$ given by (5). Summing over all formed clusters $`i=1,2,\mathrm{}M`$ one obtains $`n_S`$ and $`n_S^{}`$. The total number of particles produced from all clusters is obviously

$$\mu =\underset{i=1}{\overset{M}{}}\mu _{n_i}$$
(8)
The total numbers of pairs and triplets are $`(1/2)\mu ^2`$ and $`(1/6)\mu ^3`$ respectively. Thus we find

$$\lambda =\frac{<_{i=1}^Mn_iS_{n_i}/S_1>}{<\left(_{i=1}^M\sqrt{n_iS_{n_i}/S_1}\right)^2>},\lambda _3=5\frac{<_{i=1}^M\left(n_iS_{n_i}/S_1\right)^{3/2}>}{<\left(_{i=1}^M\sqrt{n_iS_{n_i}/S_1}\right)^3>}$$
(9)
To calculate (9) a Monte-Carlo simulation was performed. We generated $`N`$ discs of radius $`r_0`$ inside a circle of radius $`R`$ corresponding to the interaction area. For sufficiently large number of discs (strings) and large $`R`$ both $`\lambda `$ and $`\lambda _3`$ result depending only on the string density $`\eta `$ determined by

$$\eta =\frac{Nr_0^2}{R^2}$$
(10)
Identifying all the formed clusters and determining their areas we obtained $`\lambda `$ and $`\omega `$ as functions of $`\eta `$. Our results are presented in Figs. 1 and 2. The two experimental points of Fig. 2 correspond to central S-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at SPS energies. The number of strings for these collisions is obtained from a Monte-Carlo code  based on the Quark-Gluon string model with $`r_00.2`$ fm and $`R`$ corresponding to the required centrality.

As to the chaoticity parameter $`\lambda `$, the obtained behaviour for it is similar to our previous calculations in . Note that there a more elaborate approach was chosen in which we took into account energy-momentum conservation. The energy-momentum of each string was determined from that of the partons at its ends, which in its turn was given by the corresponding structure functions. Energy-momentum conservation limits the number of formed strings with energy sufficient to produce particles. As a result, it shifts the minimum of the curve of Fig. 1 to the right and makes its rise somewhat slowlier.

The dependence of $`\omega `$ on $`\eta `$ is found to be stronger than for $`\lambda `$, which was to be expected due to stronger dependence on the number of sources. This explains why the values of $`\omega `$ are measured to be so different for S-Pb and Pb-Pb collisions at the same energy, and this is the reason of the good agreement obtained.

We expect that inclusion of energy-momentum conservation will only slightly modify the shape of the dependence of $`\omega `$ on $`\eta `$, as is the case of $`\lambda `$. Experimental information on $`\omega `$ at lower values of $`\eta `$ (e.g. from light nuclei or peripheral heavy ion collisions) would be most welcome to verify the predicted change of sign of $`\omega `$.

Acknowledgements

This work has been done under contracts AEN99-0589-CO2 of CYCYT of Spain, P61DTOOPX120613PN of Xunta de Galicia and NATO grant PST.CLG.976799. M.A.B thanks the Secretaria de Estado de Educacion y Universidades of Spain for the financial support.


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# Perfect mirrors and the self-accelerating box paradox

## I Introduction

Black hole entropy, Hawking radiation, and the generalized second law of thermodynamics are central foci of modern research in quantum gravity. Indeed, although the details may differ, the existence of these phenomena is one of the few points on which the various approaches to quantum gravity all seem to agree, including the stringy approach SV ; Arev , the causal set approach Dou ; Dou-rds , and the loop approach ABCK ; ABK . Many researchers believe that these phenomena are truly fundamental and that their investigation will reveal further deep laws of nature. Certainly, black hole thermodynamics has provided a fascinating and varied arena for nearly thirty years of research.

One of the most intriguing effects to emerge from this discussion is the experience of thermal radiation by an accelerating object in flat and empty spacetime U . This Unruh radiation has a temperature $`T`$ proportional to the acceleration $`a`$, and it affects accelerating objects as one would expect, setting off particle detectors and exerting pressure. In a discussion UW  of a potential violation (suggested by Bekenstein Bek73 ) of the generalized second law of thermodynamics, Unruh and Wald pointed out that the pressure on an accelerating box will vary with position, and that the pressure difference across the box must grow quickly with the acceleration. For a perfectly reflecting box of unchanging mass there would therefore be a (box-dependent) critical acceleration $`a_c`$ at which the pressure difference would be big enough to maintain the acceleration without the need for any additional force. From the point of view of the box, it experiences a gravitational field of strength $`a_c`$, but the radiation fluid is sufficiently dense that the mirror simply floats. For a wide but thin box, the critical acceleration will depend only on the mass density (per unit volume) of the box.

Despite appearances, the existence of such an effect would be consistent with energy conservation, from both the inertial and accelerated perspectives UW . Nevertheless, it is hard to see how it could fail to lead to a disturbing instability of the vacuum and the possibility111As the box passed $`a=a_c`$, the “push” required to keep it accelerating would change into a “pull” (corresponding to a negative net inertial mass). Thus a box held at some $`a>a_c`$ could deliver an infinite amount of work. of perpetual motion machines. Thus, self-acceleration seems unphysical, and we have referred to this issue in our title as “the self-accelerating box paradox.”

We address this paradox in section II below, where we consider a specific type of mirror that operates through the use of light internal degrees of freedom. For boxes with mirrored walls of this type, we resolve the self-acceleration paradox by showing that the mirrors necessarily heat up and in doing so acquire enough mass to overwhelm the “buoyant force” on the box, no matter how great the acceleration. The danger of vacuum instability and perpetual motion machines from this quarter thus seems to be removed.

However, it was the “floating box” effect that was used in UW  to argue that the generalized second law could hold without the imposition of novel entropy bounds Bek73  on matter fields. We therefore reconsider this issue in section III. Although this section is motivated by our study of the self-accelerating box paradox, it constitutes a logically independent discussion that in no way relies on the results of the earlier sections. We find that a derivation very similar to that of UW  can be carried out up to a point (as long as the other assumptions made there are retained). However, at depths comparable to what would have been the box’s “floating point” the picture changes and one is forced to consider a regime in which “thermal radiation” is dominated by things like box-antibox pairs. This region is a plausible source of effects through which the second law might be maintained, but we are unable to reach a definite conclusion on this question.

## II Why mirrored boxes don’t float – some models and a conjecture

We believe that the key to the self-acceleration paradox lies in a study of the mirrors themselves. If this is so, then physical models of the mirrors are needed. Let us therefore consider a mirror that reflects radiation of a certain type, corresponding to excitations of a specific “bulk” field $`\varphi `$.

One can imagine two mechanisms by which such a mirror could function. The first is that the mirror could represent some sort of fundamental potential for $`\varphi `$. This might happen, for example, if the mirror were itself a domain-wall soliton of the field $`\varphi `$, in which case the mass of the linearized perturbations $`\delta \varphi `$ would in general depend on position relative to the wall. Under certain circumstances, the scattering of $`\delta \varphi `$ off of the resulting potential might be strong, making the domain wall act as a good mirror. For lack of a better term, we shall refer to such mirrors as solitonic mirrors in the discussion below.

Note, however, that the mirrors encountered in daily life are decidedly not of this sort. Instead, a standard silver mirror functions by a rather different mechanism.222Though in the end it might be that the interaction can still be described via an effective, frequency dependent potential. When a light wave is incident on a silver mirror, the mobile electrons in the mirror rapidly adjust their configuration so as to cancel out the incoming electric field. The result is that the motion of the conduction electrons conspires to send radiation back in the direction from whence the original signal arrived. Because the rapid reconfiguration of these electrons is essential, they necessarily represent “Light Internal Degrees Of Freedom” of the mirror, and we will call mirrors that function along these lines LIDOF mirrors.

Of course, one could also imagine mirrors that operate via a combination of these two mechanisms. One might also ask whether there could be some third mechanism through which a mirror could function. While we are not able to rule out this possibility, it is hard to imagine what this third mechanism might be. In the other direction, one could ask whether one might construe the first mechanism as a special case of the second.

In the rest of this section we shall address the familiar category of LIDOF mirrors and show that they necessarily become heavy when placed in contact with a thermal bath. Due to their many internal degrees of freedom, they will absorb a significant quantity of heat from their environment so that their internal energy and their weight in a gravitational field will both increase with temperature. We will see that this effect is strong enough to overcome any buoyancy force from the radiation fluid, whence the mirror cannot float. Thus, self-acceleration of such a mirror will not occur. (While solitonic mirrors are not addressed in this section, they will be the subject of several comments in section IV.) Although our concern in this section will be with self-acceleration in Minkowski spacetime, we note that almost all of our considerations will apply mutatis mutandis to the case of a (small) box suspended in the vicinity of a black hole.

### II.1 A conjecture and some evidence

The basis for our analysis of LIDOF mirrors will be the following conjecture:

> A perfect LIDOF mirror requires at least one internal field degree of freedom for each bulk degree of freedom that it will reflect. Specifically, the internal degrees of freedom of the mirror must be approximately described as a set of fields in a spacetime of one dimension less than that of the bulk, and these internal fields must have a minimum of one helicity state for each helicity state of the bulk fields.

The emphasis here is on the number of internal degrees of freedom required.333The counting here is of effective degrees of freedom. Such degrees of freedom include, for example, those of weakly interacting quasiparticles describing the excitations of an underlying set of fields or particles which themselves could be strongly coupled. While we have no proof of this conjecture, the following gedankenexperiment provides a certain amount of support.

Consider the scattering of an electromagnetic wave by an electron. One description of this process is that the wave excites the electron, after which the electron re-radiates the wave in a different direction. With enough electrons and enough scattering, one can effectively create a mirror. Now if we naively count degrees of freedom we find two velocity components for the electron gas, matching the two helicity states of the reflected photons. Moreover, if we imagine that the electrons reside in a superconductor instead of a normal metal, we trade the velocity vector for a scalar “Higgs” field describing the condensate, but since it is a complex scalar, we again recognize two degrees of freedom per point.

Suppose now that the electron couples not just to a single electromagnetic field but to two such fields, EM1 and EM2, and suppose for simplicity that it has the same charge for both. Then our mirror for EM1 will also act as a mirror for EM2. However, consider what happens when a wave of EM1 and a wave of EM2 reach the electrons at the same time. If we arrange for these waves to be exactly opposite in sign, their effects on the electrons will cancel and the electrons will remain undisturbed. As a result, the electrons will not react back on the fields and the waves will pass through the mirror unhindered. Said differently, since the electrons have the same charge for both fields, they couple only to the symmetric combination of EM1 and EM2. The anti-symmetric combination does not interact with the electrons at all, whence the mirror is transparent to its excitations. This would appear to be a general rule: coupling additional gauge fields to a given set of charges results in the charges decoupling from certain linear combinations of the new set of fields, with the result that no more independent linear combinations couple to the charges than originally. Therefore, one cannot violate the conjecture in this way. However, more subtle effects remain to be ruled out.

### II.2 Weight and buoyancy in thermal equilibrium

We have argued above that a LIDOF mirror must have a significant number of internal degrees of freedom, which can, at least effectively, be described as fields living in the worldvolume of the mirror. Since these mirror fields are responsible for reflecting the bulk fields, they must interact strongly with the latter, and this should be enough to allow them to come into thermal equilibrium with the bulk fields.444For a worked out example of such thermalization in a simple case see caldleg . Notice that no self-coupling of the internal degrees of freedom is involved in this example. Indeed, there is only one such degree of freedom — that of a simple harmonic oscillator — and its self-coupling (nonlinearity) is zero. Thus, when the mirror is placed in a thermal bath, one would expect the relevant internal degrees of freedom to thermalize on a short timescale, with the result that the mirror will absorb heat if initially it was cold.

A possible objection to this conclusion might be that there might exist types of scattering analogous to the Mössbauer effect. However, we will be considering only boxes whose transverse dimensions are much greater than a wavelength $`\lambda `$ of the thermal radiation they are reflecting. In this case, it should be possible to think of the radiation as composed of wave packets much smaller than the box wall reflecting them, and causality forbids such a packet from bouncing off the box as a whole. We would thus expect that localized excitations of the relevant internal field must result. (In the opposite case of boxes much smaller than $`\lambda `$, causality imposes no such restriction, but that case is anyway not amenable to the analysis of this paper, because the fluid approximation we will be using becomes invalid.)

We have argued that the internal degrees of freedom of a perfectly reflecting LIDOF mirror must evolve rapidly to a temperature equal to that of the bath with which they are in contact. We will now use this property to derive a lower bound on the energy density of a perfect mirror in contact with a heat bath. This excess energy is a function of the ambient temperature, and we will show it to be sufficiently great that LIDOF mirrors can never float or self-accelerate.

Given that the mirror helicity states must be in correspondence with the bulk helicity states, it clearly suffices to treat one helicity state at a time, because the full heat absorbed by the mirror is just a sum over mirror helicity states, and the full ambient pressure is a sum over the corresponding bulk helicity states.

In this section we will consider the case of massless fields, though some comments on the massive case will be made in section IV. Moreover, we limit ourselves throughout to free (or almost free) fields, both in the mirror and in the ambient spacetime. (Of course the interaction between bulk and mirror fields is not taken to be weak.) Finally, we work in the adiabatic limit, so that the bulk and mirror fields will always be in equilibrium555More generally our analysis will apply whenever the equilibration time is sufficiently short. If we are right about the rapid thermalization, this is not much of a restriction in practice. In any case, consideration of the adiabatic limit is enough to rule out “floating” self-acceleration, which would be a steady state condition.. Considering a co-dimension one mirror in a $`d+1`$ dimensional bulk spacetime, we are then left with a rather simple calculation involving the statistical mechanics of a $`(d1)+1`$ dimensional massless field and a d+1 dimensional massless field.

Let us first consider the heat absorbed by the mirror. We will take the mirror to be much larger than the ambient thermal wavelength, so that we may use a fluid approximation in computing the energy density of a thermally excited internal field. Notice that, since we are treating this field as a $`(d1)+1`$ dimensional system, the thickness of the mirror will be small compared to the thermal length scale — it is only the lengths along the mirror face that must be large.

In this approximation, the energy density of a $`(d1)+1`$ dimensional massless single-helicity bosonic field is given by the expression (see, e.g. Huang  for the 3+1 case):

$`\rho _{d1}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(2\pi )^{d1}}}{\displaystyle d^{(d1)}k\frac{\omega _k}{e^{\beta \omega _k1}}}`$ (1)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{V_{d2}}{(2\pi )^{d1}\beta ^d}}{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑x{\displaystyle \frac{x^{d1}}{e^x1}},`$ (2)
where $`\beta =1/T`$ and we use units in which Boltzmann’s constant and the speed of light are unity. Here, $`V_{d2}=2\pi ^{(d1)/2}/((d3)/2)!`$ is the volume of the unit $`d2`$ sphere and $`\omega _k`$ is the energy of a particle with wavenumber $`k`$. For our massless field we have, of course, $`\omega _k=|k|`$, and we have used this in the second line above, having also performed the change of variable $`x=\beta k`$.

Suppose that we wish the mirror to have a proper acceleration $`a`$, which is related to the ambient temperature through U  $`a=2\pi /\beta `$. Then the mirror needs to experience a co-moving force per unit area of

$$F/A=a\rho _{d1}=\frac{V_{d2}}{(2\pi )^{d2}\beta ^{d+1}}_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑x\frac{x^{d1}}{e^x1}.$$
(3)
Now, what is the actual “buoyant” force per unit area on the box supplied by the ambient thermal radiation? In discussing this question, we will regard as “downward” the direction of the gravitational force felt by the box in its own rest frame. In the case of a box suspended in the vicinity of a black hole horizon this terminology has a literal meaning, but it is also convenient for the case of concern here — that of a box accelerating in a flat background spacetime. Now, the buoyant force is of course just the difference in pressure between the top and bottom of the box, which is bounded above by the ambient pressure on the mirror forming the bottom of the box.666Since this bound ignores the pressure on the top of the box, our analysis applies not only to a box lowered through a region in thermal equilibrium, but also to upward directed thermal radiation of the sort that is present in the Unruh “vacuum” near a black hole. Strictly speaking, this pressure should be calculated from the renormalized stress energy tensor of a quantum field, with appropriate boundary conditions imposed at the walls of the box. However, since such results are not presently available we shall instead follow the approach of UW  and assume that the ambient pressure is in fact equal to that of a thermal fluid in an enclosure of large volume.

Bekenstein has argued buoy  that the pressure is somewhat less due to inefficiencies in the scattering of finite wavelength radiation by the box. There may also be other “finite size effects” which are missed in the way we approximate the pressure.777Readers concerned about finite size effects LL  due to the fact that, even in flat spacetime, the scale over which the temperature of the Unruh radiation changes is comparable to a thermal wavelength may consult WA , which provides some evidence that such effects may be ignored. In the corresponding black hole case, there might be further “finite size” effects that we have not accounted for arising from the spacetime curvature. However, since our goal is simply to remove an effect deduced in UW , it is consistent to use their fluid description even if this somehow leads to an overestimate of the ambient pressure.

In this approximation, the pressure (for free fields, as always) is given by an integral much like (1) and we have

$`P_d`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{d(2\pi )^d}}{\displaystyle d^dk\frac{\omega _k}{e^{\beta \omega _k1}}}`$ (4)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{V_{d1}}{d(2\pi )^d\beta ^{d+1}}}{\displaystyle _0^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑x{\displaystyle \frac{x^d}{e^x1}}.`$ (5)
Our task is now to compare the buoyant force to the weight of the box. From (3) and (4) their ratio is

$$\frac{1}{(2\pi )^2}\frac{V_{d1}}{V_{d2}}\frac{f(d)}{f(d1)d},$$
(6)
where we have introduced the definition

$$f(d)=_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑x\frac{x^d}{e^x1}.$$
(7)
We claim that this ratio is less than $`1/4\pi `$ for all $`d>1`$, reducing in particular to $`\pi ^2/180\zeta (3)=0.0456`$ for the most important case of $`d=3`$. In other words the buoyancy is more than an order of magnitude smaller than the weight in all dimensions and more than 20 times smaller in $`3+1`$-dimensions.

In fact this is not hard to see, using the known formulas

$$V_d=2\pi ^{\frac{d+1}{2}}/(\frac{d1}{2})!$$

and

$$f(d)=d!\zeta (d+1)$$

where $`\zeta `$ is the Riemann zeta-function:

$$\zeta (s)=\underset{n=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\frac{1}{n^s}.$$

(The formula for $`f(d)`$ can be derived by expanding the denominator in (7) and noting that $`_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑xx^ne^x=n!`$. The formula for $`V_d`$ follows directly from the formula $`\pi ^{d/2}/(d/2)!`$ for the volume of the unit $`d`$-ball (or “disk”), which in turn can be looked up or proven by induction.)

Substituting this formula for $`f(d)`$ converts (6) into

$$\frac{1}{(2\pi )^2}\frac{V_{d1}}{V_{d2}}\frac{\zeta (d+1)}{\zeta (d)}$$

and the claimed bound then follows from the obvious inequality $`\zeta (d)>\zeta (d+1)`$ and the easily checked bound $`V_d/V_{d1}\pi `$ for $`d1`$.

Thus, in all cases we find that the ambient pressure is insufficient to maintain the acceleration of the box.

## III Black Holes and the Generalized Second Law

Given that a LIDOF mirrored box fails to float in any bath of thermal radiation, it seems worthwhile to reconsider the Bekenstein-Unruh-Wald discussion of whether the laws of thermodynamics, as applied to black holes, impose novel entropy bounds on the matter in the universe (say of the form in Bek73 ). In UW , Unruh and Wald used the floating box effect in analyzing the implications of the generalized second law for a process in which a perfectly reflecting box is lowered adiabatically from infinity to some location near the horizon and then dropped into the black hole. They found that the second law was exactly saturated if the box was dropped just at its floating point. With that choice of release point, the mass contributed to the black hole by the box augmented the black hole’s entropy by an amount that exactly offset the disappearance of the entropy contained in the box.

However, since, according to our analysis, the box absorbs heat from the thermal bath and thus increases its weight, one can extract more energy during its descent than in the Unruh-Wald analysis. As a result, by lowering the box adiabatically and releasing it at the point at which the corresponding Unruh-Wald box would float, one might expect to be able to decrease the net entropy of the universe, in contradiction to the generalized second law of thermodynamics.888As usual in these discussions, one means by “entropy of the universe” the sum of all entropy external to the black hole(s) with the entropy belonging to the horizon area of the black holes themselves. In particular, one does not count explicitly the entropy of any object that has fallen through a horizon.

In opposition to any such scenario, reference GW  points out that if the black hole system can be described as a standard state of thermal equilibrium then no violation of the second law can occur, regardless of the detailed behavior of any perfect mirrors. However, this begs the question of whether the posited description is appropriate and, if it is, of whether the usual expressions for black hole entropy are consistent with this description in the absence of novel entropy bounds. Nor does it tell us what prevents the box from being lowered to its erstwhile floating point as envisioned above with the extraction of more energy than the second law can tolerate.

In the following, we explore to what extent the analysis of UW  can be preserved given the failure of boxes to float. Let us first consider the entropy balance while the box is being quasi-statically lowered. In this phase of the process, the only change in entropy is that associated with the heat flow from the thermal atmosphere of the black hole into our mirror. Since heat will flow only in a direction that generates entropy, this should create no difficulties with the second law.

It remains to analyze the second stage in which the box is dropped into the black hole. Just before this occurs, the box has some total energy $`ϵ`$ and the black hole some total mass $`M`$. (Here, the energies $`ϵ`$ and $`M`$ are measured relative to the timelike Killing field with unit normalization at infinity.) We remark that $`M`$ at this stage may be smaller than when the box was far away, due to the energy that flowed from it, through the thermal atmosphere, and into the box during the lowering process. Similarly, $`ϵ`$ includes the heat that flowed into the box while it was being lowered along with any other energy that might have entered the box.

Assuming that the box carries no charge or angular momentum, the first law of black hole mechanics tells us that dropping it into the black hole increases the latter’s entropy by an amount

$$\delta S_{bh}=\frac{ϵ}{T_H}=\frac{E}{T}$$
(8)
where $`T_H`$ is the black hole’s temperature relative to infinity and $`E`$ and $`T`$ are the locally measured energy of the box and locally measured temperature of the thermal radiation. Note that $`E`$ and $`T`$ are related to $`ϵ`$ and $`T_H`$ by the same redshift factor, which therefore cancels in the ratio (8).

The locally measured energy $`E`$ consists of two pieces. The first, which we shall call $`E_{box}`$, is the energy that the particular internal state of the box would possess in isolation. But, since it requires work $`PV`$ to bring a box of volume $`V`$ into the high pressure ($`P`$) environment of the thermal atmosphere, the locally measured energy has a second contribution, and is given in full only by the sum $`E=E_{box}+PV`$.

Taking into account the entropy $`S_{box}`$ that disappears into the black hole, the total change in entropy is thus

$$\delta S=\delta S_{bh}S_{box}=\frac{E}{T}S_{box}=\frac{E_{box}+PV}{T}S_{box}.$$
(9)
We now make use of the Gibbs-Duhem relation, $`PV=E_{rad}+TS_{rad}`$ as in UW , which relates the pressure and volume of thermal radiation to its energy $`E_{rad}`$ and entropy $`S_{rad}`$. Under the assumption that the radiation constitutes a homogeneous and isotropic fluid whose entropy and energy are additive, this relation can be derived by integrating the first law $`PdV=dE_{rad}+TdS_{rad}`$ at constant pressure and temperature.999Near the horizon conditions are far from homogeneous and isotropic. Rather the thermal wavelength of massless radiation is comparable to the scale on which the locally measured temperature varies. For this reason, one may be skeptical of using the Gibbs-Duhem relation in the present context. On the other hand, the results of WA  encourage the belief that the pressure at a certain depth does in fact correspond to that of an unconfined thermal fluid at the appropriately redshifted temperature. As energy conservation relates the density to the change of pressure with depth, the energy density would also be that of an unconfined thermal fluid. This would be enough for the Gibbs-Duhem relation to hold. (One is also assuming that the “chemical potential” is zero in the sense that no conservation law freezes the abundance of any constituent of the fluid.) Substituting this result in the above equation, we find

$$\delta S=\left(\frac{E_{box}}{T}S_{box}\right)\left(\frac{E_{rad}}{T}S_{rad}\right)=\frac{F_{box}F_{rad}}{T},$$
(10)
where $`F_{box}`$ denotes the Helmholtz free energy of the box and $`F_{rad}`$ that of an equal volume of thermal radiation at temperature $`T`$.

We now recall that thermal radiation minimizes the free energy at fixed temperature101010Of course, this remark would be irrelevant if the “thermal atmosphere” of a black hole were not truly described by a thermal ensemble in this sense, i.e. by a density operator of the Gibbs form $`e^{\beta H}`$ which, by the usual arguments of statistical mechanics, is the one that minimizes the free energy at fixed temperature. Evidence that this density operator correctly describes the fields surrounding a black hole comes from the results of e.g. SH ; FH ; rdsse  and especially UW2 ; Ray ; BFZ ; TJ1 ; TJ2 ; TJ3  which indicate that the Hawking radiation is described by this density matrix (for the out-going modes). There is also strong evidence from BisWich , smbhthd  and FH  that any state of the quantum fields in a fixed black hole geometry (and contained in surrounding walls) will evolve toward the Gibbs state possessing the Bekenstein-Hawking temperature of the black hole.. If we assume that the presence of the box does not disturb the free-energy density of the surrounding radiation, and that one can neglect the variation of the latter between the top and bottom of the box, we can conclude that $`F_{rad}<F_{box}`$ and therefore that $`\delta S`$ must be positive.

To obtain a physical picture of how this may happen, it is helpful to recall that the free energy of an object controls its probability to occur in a thermal ensemble. In other words, the effective quantum field that describes boxes such as ours will be thermally excited at temperature $`T`$ just as will any other quantum field near the black hole. When the region of space at temperature $`T`$ is large compared to the size of the box, then $`F_{box}`$ should control the probability for boxes to appear from thermal fluctuations.

What we may conclude from this is not that $`F_{box}`$ is somehow bounded below by some bound set by $`F_{rad}`$. Instead, the implication is that, were $`F_{box}`$ to become sufficiently negative, the thermal radiation would consist primarily of box-antibox pairs (as well as related flotsam like fragments of box walls) rather than ordinary massless quanta. Unfortunately, one’s understanding of such a “fluid” is minimal, and we have no real grounds on which to judge how well the assumptions we have had to make in the above analysis survive into this new regime. In particular it seems an open question whether anything like the Gibbs-Duhem relation would continue to hold. Thus, at this stage we are unable to demonstrate that the second law is maintained without a better understanding of the “fluid of boxes and box fragments.” We will return to these questions in the discussion section.

Notice that the discussion in this section was completely independent of our LIDOF mirror model and should apply to solitonic box walls as well. However, this in itself sheds no light on the extent to which our resolution of the self-acceleration paradox carries over to the case of solitonic mirrors.

## IV Discussion

In this paper, we have addressed two separate but related issues stemming from consideration of classic thought experiments concerning the generalized second law of thermodynamics. The first was the question of whether perfectly reflecting boxes can self-accelerate in flat spacetime (which in essence is equivalent to the question of whether such boxes can float UW  in the thermal atmosphere of a black hole.) Because the existence of such “runaway solutions” would conflict with cherished beliefs like the stability of the vacuum and the impossibility of a “free lunch”, one might expect that they cannot actually occur.

In addressing this paradox, we limited ourselves to mirrors that operate through Light Internal Degrees of Freedom (LIDOF mirrors) and suggested that such mirrors will require a minimum of one internal field degree of freedom (helicity state) for each bulk field degree of freedom (helicity state) to be reflected.111111In addition the box wall should have at least one acoustic mode, and this mode should also come into thermal equilibrium with any ambient heat bath, for the same reasons of causality as for the other modes. Although we did not prove this assertion, we gave a suggestive example along with supporting arguments.

Accepting this conjecture, we demonstrated that the heat-energy absorbed by such mirrors is more than sufficient to prevent any self-acceleration resulting from the coupling to massless fields in flat spacetime. It is interesting to note that our calculation leaves significant margin for error in the conjecture. For example, in 3+1 dimensions our conclusions would survive even if the internal degrees of freedom were down by a factor of 20. (It is also clear that one could weaken the claim by a factor of $`\sqrt{d}`$ and still achieve the desired result. In fact, numerical calculations show that one could weaken the inequality by a factor of the spatial dimension $`d`$ and that the result would still hold up to $`d`$ on the order of a few hundred.)

In addition to the question of the validity of our conjectured bound on the number of internal degrees of freedom of a LIDOF mirror, several other questions are raised by our discussion. One of them concerns the other category of mirrors (“solitonic mirrors”) and whether one can also derive general constraints forbidding their self-acceleration. While we are not certain how this would work, it seems plausible that a soliton which provides a strong reflecting potential for some field must itself incorporate a strong potential which in turn would force it to have a large tension (and therefore a large mass). Another idea is that the effective description of the soliton in terms of an effective potential might be concealing light internal degrees of freedom which come into play in the course of reflecting external fields. A clear first step in investigating either of these ideas would be to study particular model systems.

A second question concerns the case of massive fields, which are significantly harder to excite when placed in contact with a heat bath. How would the buoyancy compare with the weight if massive fields were the only relevant ones (eg because there were no massless fields in nature or because our mirror was transparent to them)? Of course, if the mass is small compared to the thermal energy ($`m\beta 1`$) then such fields will behave as if they were massless. However, for fields with masses higher than the thermal energy scale the situation is rather different. Considering a bulk field of mass $`m`$ and a mirror field of the same mass121212One expects that a mirror field of greater mass would be unable to adjust sufficiently quickly to reflect the bulk field. On the other hand, making the mirror field lighter than the bulk field would only strengthen our case., one finds that for $`m\beta 1`$ the ambient pressure is

$$Pe^{\beta m}\frac{m^{d/2}}{\beta ^{(d+2)/2}},$$
(11)
whereas the heat absorbed by the mirror adds a weight per area of

$$\frac{W}{A}e^{\beta m}\left(\frac{m}{\beta }\right)^{(d+1)/2}P\sqrt{m\beta }P.$$
(12)
We see that, in this case also, the additional weight is more than sufficient to prevent self-acceleration.

Some readers may feel that our analysis does not just place bounds on perfect mirrors, but shows instead that perfect mirrors do not exist at all. They may point out that if the mirror thermalizes with the exterior, it must also radiate thermally into the interior (and vice versa). Thus, the mirror couples the inside with the outside. This is of course true to some extent, but one did not need to count the internal degrees of freedom to make this argument. The relevant question is whether the timescale for this energy flow can be made arbitrarily long. Certainly, our arguments require that a minimum number of degrees of freedom interact with the bulk fields on a short timescale. That they need not interact equally quickly with the interior of the box can be made clear by considering a layered mirror composed of several copies of the simple mirrors studied above. The timescale for transmitting energy between interior and exterior will grow without bound as more and more mirrors are added to the laminate.131313Note, however, that the next few layers of our multi-layer mirror will also interact quickly with the bulk fields and thus absorb even more heat from the thermal bath.

In Section III, we considered the implications of our earlier conclusions for the generalized second law discussions conducted by Bekenstein Bek73  and Unruh-Wald UW , which historically were the source from which the self-accelerating box paradox arose. Since the main point at issue in those discussions was the relative importance of the buoyant force on a mirrored box, one might think that our results would modify the terms of the debate, and in that way perhaps resolve it.

In the event, however, it seems that the former has occurred without the latter. In particular, we constructed a variant of the derivation of UW  which arrives at similar conclusions without assuming that the box will float. Our derivation is independent of section II and therefore applies equally well to solitonic mirrors as to LIDOF mirrors. However, we now recognize that the interesting regime is one in which the boxes themselves become an important constituent of the thermal atmosphere.

Let us reflect in more detail on what we have learned from these latter calculations. Some boxes, such as those satisfying the entropy bound $`S/E<2\pi R`$ of Bek73 , were long ago established to be ‘safe’ in the sense that lowering such a box into a black hole respects the second law even when the thermal atmosphere of the black hole is ignored. In our current language such boxes always have $`F_{box}>0`$ since their large size keeps the box far enough from the horizon that we have $`T(2\pi R)^1`$. Our calculation once again finds that such boxes are safe and, furthermore, that the existence of such boxes is consistent with any additional assumptions about the black hole’s thermal atmosphere so long as $`F_{rad}<0`$ (which in turn is equivalent to positivity of the pressure if the Gibbs-Duhem relation holds). The assumption that the atmosphere (and in particular the contributions of boxes and anti-boxes) can be neglected amounts to taking $`F_{rad}=0`$.

However, if we imagine a box that violates the above entropy bound then, as it descends toward the horizon and the ambient temperature increases, one may indeed enter a region where $`F_{box}<0`$. In this case, neglect of the thermal atmosphere would lead to an apparent violation of the second law. Similarly, suppose one makes some other assumption as to the nature of $`F_{rad}`$. For example, one might assume that $`F_{rad}`$ is dominated by the contributions from a certain class $`𝒞`$ of states, leading to a relation of the form $`F_𝒞=F_{rad}`$. If the Gibbs-Duhem relation holds for this class of states, (10) requires the restriction $`F_{box}>F_𝒞`$ for the generalized second law to hold. However, since the free energy controls the relevance of an object or class of states to a thermal ensemble, the existence of a region with $`F_𝒞>F_{box}`$ implies simply that thermal fluctuations in this region include box anti-box pairs in significant numbers and that the class of states $`𝒞`$ does not in fact dominate their contribution to the free energy.

When a box enters such a region several new occurrences would seem to be possible which might (or might not) intervene to protect the second law. First, there might be a significant probability that our box would be destroyed by collision with an anti-box. If this happened, we could extract no further energy by trying to lower it adiabatically. Second, with boxes being produced thermally we might observe one being emitted from the black hole – and when combined with the destruction of our own box by an anti-box we might well interpret this as our box “bouncing off” the thermal atmosphere.

Of course, such effects would not be needed if the analysis of Section III could be taken over unchanged to the new regime. The key point here is that if boxes now dominate the thermal radiation, we have $`F_{box}=F_{rad}`$ as an identity, whence $`\delta S`$ would vanish identically even if it were somehow meaningful to lower the box to this depth and drop it into the black hole. In this way, one would again maintain the generalized second law without appealing to novel entropy bounds. However, it is an open question141414Most of these uncertainties relate to “finite size effects” in the broad sense of the term. See for example the comments in buoy  about the effects of finite wavelength on the scattering of thermal radiation. And no one who harbored such doubts before is likely to be any happier when they are told that now one is talking about a fluid of box-antibox pairs rather than photons. whether the fluid model we used in Section III could be adequate for computing the “buoyant force” on the box in a domain where boxes (and box fragments) become a dominant component of the thermal radiation.151515More generally, the critical question is whether the thermal atmosphere can provide sufficient buoyancy to insure that the work gained by lowering the box (including its mirrored walls) is not so great as to exceed the box’s initial entropy appropriately weighted by the black hole temperature. We used such a model in at least three ways: to justify the “work” term $`PV`$ in (3.2); to justify using the Gibbs-Duhem relation, which depends on the local homogeneity and isotropy of a fluid; and to justify the assumption that free energy changes are additive when one replaces the box by an equal volume of thermal radiation.161616Notice also that, even for more ordinary thermal radiation, the fact that (in the regimes of interest) the box is never more than one or two thermal wavelengths from the horizon calls into question the adequacy of ignoring the inhomogeneities and anisotropies induced by boundary conditions at the box walls.

The status of entropy bounds (in the sense of universal bounds that would hold in an arbitrary theory) thus remains elusive. There seems to exist neither a conclusive argument that they must hold nor a conclusive argument to the contrary.171717It used to be thought that a world with exponentially many species $`N`$ of particles/fields could serve as a counterexample (eg zhang ), but this also can be questioned, at least in the case of an area bound like $`S<A/G`$, as it neglects the $`N`$-dependent renormalization of Newton’s constant $`1/G`$. As envisioned in connection with entanglement entropy tangle  by lenug  and ted , this correction would, if the arguments of lenug  are correct, more than compensate the contribution of a large $`N`$ to $`S`$. See, however, sol  and kabat  for comments on the ideas of lenug . The main contribution of the above analysis in this connection is probably to demonstrate that the question cannot be decided without consideration of a putative new regime in which thermal “radiation” would no longer be dominated by massless fields.181818Notice that the analysis in Section II of whether a mirrored box can self-accelerate/float would also have to be reopened in such a regime. In opposition to earlier suggestions that (in the context of adiabatic box lowering) the second law necessarily fails in the absence of entropy bounds, we have suggested plausible mechanisms for maintaining the second law in this new regime. On the other hand we certainly have not analyzed these mechanisms fully and it would not seem to be an easy task to do so.

The attentive reader may point out that the discussion in UW  showed the second law to be only marginally satisfied when the box was filled with thermal radiation. Since more energy is removed from the system in our scenario than in that of UW , the energy of the box should be less at any height and, if the box is dropped from the putative floating point, less energy would be transferred to the black hole. Thus, one might wonder how we can avoid second law violations for this case. Clearly, to raise this objection one must tentatively assume that the thermal radiation mentioned above does not include significant numbers of box/anti-box pairs.

However, without the inflow of heat into the walls, our box was chosen to be indistinguishable from thermal radiation at the putative floating point. Thus, without this inflow, it is exactly at this point that $`F_{box}=F_{rad}`$ would first be achieved. The issue just raised may be resolved if the net effect of the heat inflow is to lower the free energy of the box, so that this transition occurs higher in the black hole’s thermal atmosphere.

To see that this is the case, we divide the energy $`E_{box}`$ into $`E_0`$, the locally measured energy of the box before it was lowered toward the black hole and $`Q`$, the total heat that flowed into the box while being lowered. We further write $`Q=q(z)𝑑z`$ where $`q(z)`$ represents the locally measured heat that flowed into the box between depths $`z`$ and $`z+dz`$. Similarly, we divide the entropy of the box into the initial entropy $`S_0`$ present before the box was lowered and the entropy gain $`S_Q`$ resulting from the heat absorbed by the box. The free energy of the box is thus

$$F_{box}=E_0TS_0+QTS_Q.$$
(13)
We wish to show $`TS_Q>Q`$ so that $`F_{box}<E_0TS_0`$. But since the heat flow occurred without work being done (in particular, without changing the volume of the box), a local application of the first law of thermodynamics yields

$$TS_Q=T𝑑z\frac{q(z)}{T(z)}>Q.$$
(14)
In the last step we have merely used the fact that the temperature is greatest at the lowest point yet reached by the box (i.e., the current depth) so that $`T>T(z)`$. Thus we see that for what would have been the marginal case, box/anti-box pairs already dominate the thermal radiation at the would-be floating point.

A final question is whether the results of Section II above might not be germane in analyzing some of the “time machines” that people have tried to imagine. While we know of no direct application, many of the “materials science” issues that arise, for example, in attempts to hold open “wormholes” are similar to those involved in analyzing boxes with impermeable, rigid walls, like those we have been considering in this paper. This suggests that a very general property of such walls, like that conjectured in Section II, could turn out to be important in the “time machine” context as well.

###### Acknowledgements.

Both authors would like to thank Jacob Bekenstein and Bob Wald for extensive helpful comments on an early draft of this paper and Ted Jacobson for input concerning renormalization issues. D.M. would also like to thank Bob Wald and Eanna Flanagan for numerous conversations about black hole thermodynamics and floating boxes over the past few years. He would also like to thank Abhay Ashtekar and Eric Poisson for clarifying discussions. D.M. was supported in part by NSF grants PHY97-22362 and PHY00-98747, the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, and by funds from Syracuse University. He would also like to thank the Aspen Center for Physics for their hospitality during part of this work. R.D.S. was partly supported by NSF grant PHY-0098488, by a grant from the Office of Research and Computing of Syracuse University, and by an EPSRC Senior Fellowship at Queen Mary College, University of London. He would also like to express his warm gratitude to Goodenough College, London for providing a splendid living and working environment which greatly facilitated the writing of this paper.


text:
# Granular and Nano-Elasticity

## 1 Introduction

It is quite surprising that the existing microscopic justification of the time-honored theory of elasticity, which has been thoroughly researched in a variety of disciplines, is limited to lattice atomic configurations . Classical continuum elasticity theory has been applied to a large variety of systems, including granular materials . In recent years the same theory has been applied for the description of elastic properties of micro- and nano-scale systems (e.g., ). It is a-priori unclear whether this theory applies at such small scales.

The study presented below shows that the justification of elastic theory based on a ‘microscopic’ picture is not entirely straightforward. In fact, we show that continuum elasticity is limited to sufficiently large scales. One of the other results presented in this paper is that ‘force chains’ in granular systems, which have been attributed by some authors to non-elastic effects , are reproduced in simulations of elastic systems, in good agreement with experiments.

## 2 Coarse Graining and Constitutive Relations

### 2.1 Preliminaries

Below the term ‘particles’ is taken to mean grains in a granular system or atoms in a solid. Classical mechanics is assumed throughout this paper. Following  define, for a system of particles, the coarse grained mass and momentum densities, at the position $`𝐫`$ and time $`t`$, by $`\rho (𝐫,t)_im_i\varphi [𝐫𝐫_i(t)]`$ and $`𝐩(𝐫,t)_im_i𝐯_i(t)\varphi [𝐫𝐫_i(t)]`$, respectively, where $`\{𝐫_i(t);𝐯_i(t);m_i\}`$ are the positions, velocities and masses of the particles, indexed by $`i`$, and $`\varphi (𝐑)`$ is a normalized non-negative coarse graining function (with a single maximum at $`𝐑=0`$) of width $`\lambda `$, the coarse graining scale. The velocity field is defined by $`𝐕(𝐫,t)𝐩(𝐫,t)/\rho (𝐫,t)`$. Upon taking the time derivatives of these coarse grained fields and performing straightforward algebraic manipulations  one obtains the equation of continuity, as well as the momentum conservation equation: $`\dot{p}_\alpha (𝐫,t)=\frac{}{r_\beta }\left[\rho (𝐫,t)V_\alpha (𝐫,t)V_\beta (𝐫,t)\sigma _{\alpha \beta }(𝐫,t)\right]`$, where Greek indices denote Cartesian coordinates. The stress tensor, $`\sigma _{\alpha \beta }`$, is composed of a kinetic contribution, irrelevant for our purposes (we consider quasi-static deformations), and a “contact” contribution. Neglecting the former, one obtains:

$$\sigma _{\alpha \beta }(𝐫,t)=\frac{1}{2}\underset{i,j;ij}{}f_{ij\alpha }(t)r_{ij\beta }(t)_0^1𝑑s\varphi [𝐫𝐫_i(t)+s𝐫_{ij}(t)].$$
(1)
where $`f_{ij\alpha }(t)`$ is the $`\alpha `$-th component of the force exerted on particle $`i`$ by particle $`j`$ ($`ji`$) at time $`t`$ (assuming pairwise interactions) and $`r_{ij\alpha }r_{i\alpha }r_{j\alpha }`$.

### 2.2 Displacement and Strain

Following elementary continuum mechanics, the velocity of a material particle whose initial (Lagrangian) coordinate is $`𝐑`$ satisfies: $`𝐕^{\mathrm{La}}(𝐑,t)=𝐮^{\mathrm{La}}(𝐑,t)/t`$, where $`𝐮^{\mathrm{La}}(𝐑,t)𝐫(𝐑,t)𝐑`$ is the (Lagrangian) displacement field. Therefore: $`𝐮^{\mathrm{La}}(𝐑,t)=_0^t𝐕^{\mathrm{La}}(𝐑,t^{})𝑑t^{}`$. Using the definitions presented in Sec. 2.1, it follows that:

$$𝐮^{\mathrm{La}}(𝐑,t)_0^t\frac{_im_i𝐯_i(t^{})\varphi [𝐫(𝐑,t^{})𝐫_i(t^{})]}{_jm_j\varphi [𝐫(𝐑,t^{})𝐫_j(t^{})]}𝑑t^{}.$$
(2)
Noting that $`\dot{𝐮}_i=𝐯_i`$, where $`𝐮_i`$ is the displacement of particle $`i`$, and invoking integration by parts in Eq. (2), one obtains:

$$𝐮(𝐫,t)\frac{_im_i𝐮_i(t)\varphi [𝐫𝐫_i(t)]}{_jm_j\varphi [𝐫𝐫_j(t)]}+\text{“non-linear terms”},$$
(3)
where the result has been translated to the Eulerian representation. The correction terms can be shown to beget non-linear terms in the constitutive relations. The linear strain is given by $`ϵ_{\alpha \beta }(𝐫,t)\frac{1}{2}\left[\frac{u_\alpha (𝐫,t)}{r_\beta }+\frac{u_\beta (𝐫,t)}{r_\alpha }\right]`$. Note that the exact displacement and strain obtained here are different from the commonly defined mean field strain, cf. e.g. . Mean field theories are based on the assumption that the relative particle displacements are described by the macroscopic strain, $`u_{ij\alpha }(𝐫,t)=ϵ_{\alpha \beta }R_{ij\beta }`$, where $`𝐮_{ij}𝐮_i𝐮_j`$. A suggested improvement is the “best fit” strain . These mean field approaches are inaccurate and often lead to incorrect constitutive relations .

### 2.3 Stress-Strain Relation

The microscopic expressions for the stress \[Eq. (1)\] and the strain are not manifestly proportional. Therefore elasticity is not a-priori obvious. To see how it still comes about, consider the case of harmonic (and local) pairwise particle potentials $`U_{ij}=\frac{1}{2}K_{ij}\left(|r_{ij}|l_{ij}\right)^2`$. The forces are then given, to linear order in $`\delta 𝐫_{ij}𝐮_{ij}`$, by $`𝐟_{ij}=K_{ij}\left(\widehat{𝐫}_{ij}^0\delta 𝐫_{ij}\right)\widehat{𝐫}_{ij}^0`$. The stress \[Eq. (1)\] is then given by $`\sigma _{\alpha \beta }^{\mathrm{lin}}(𝐫,t)=\frac{1}{2}_{ij}K_{ij}\widehat{r}_{ij\gamma }^0\delta r_{ij\gamma }\widehat{r}_{ij\alpha }^0r_{ij\beta }^0\varphi (𝐫𝐫_i^0)`$, up to nonlinear terms in $`\left\{\delta 𝐫_{ij}\right\}`$. The superscript $`0`$ denotes the reference configuration.

Consider a volume $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ which is much larger than the coarse graining scale, $`\lambda `$, and let $`𝐫`$ be an interior point of $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ which is ‘far’ from its boundary. Let upper case Latin indices denote the particles in the exterior of $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ which interact with particles inside $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$. Since the considered system is linear, there exists a Green’s function $`𝐆`$ such that $`u_{i\alpha }=G_{i\alpha J\beta }u_{J\beta }`$ for $`i\mathrm{\Omega }`$. Hence, $`u_{ij\alpha }=\left(G_{i\alpha J\beta }G_{j\alpha J\beta }\right)u_{J\beta }`$. When all $`𝐮_J`$ are equal (rigid translation), $`𝐮_{ij}=0`$. Hence, $`u_{ij\alpha }=\left(G_{i\alpha J\beta }G_{j\alpha J\beta }\right)\left[u_{J\beta }u_\beta (𝐫)\right]`$. Define $`L_{ij\alpha J\beta }G_{i\alpha J\beta }G_{j\alpha J\beta }`$. One then obtains $`u_{ij\alpha }=L_{ij\alpha J\beta }\left[u_\beta (𝐫_J)u_\beta (𝐫)\right]+L_{ij\alpha J\beta }\left[u_{J\beta }u_\beta (𝐫_J)\right]`$, where $`u_{J\beta }u_\beta (𝐫_J)`$ is a fluctuating displacement. The sum over $`J`$ in the second term can be shown to be subdominant when the linear size of the volume $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ greatly exceeds the coarse graining scale. Furthermore, to lowest order in a gradient expansion, $`u_\beta (𝐫_J)u_\beta (𝐫)\frac{u_\beta (𝐫)}{r_\gamma }\left(r_{J\gamma }r_\gamma \right)`$. Substituting this result in $`𝝈^{\mathrm{lin}}`$, and employing rotational symmetry, one obtains:

$$\sigma _{\alpha \beta }(𝐫)\frac{1}{2}ϵ_{\mu \nu }(𝐫)\underset{ij}{}K_{ij}L_{ij\gamma J\mu }\left(r_{J\nu }^0r_\nu \right)\widehat{r}_{ij\alpha }^0r_{ij\beta }^0\widehat{r}_{ij\gamma }^0\varphi (𝐫𝐫_i^0).$$
(4)
Thus linear elasticity is valid when $`\left|\lambda _\alpha _\beta 𝐮\right|1`$ and $`\mathit{ϵ}1`$. Note that the elastic moduli depend, in principle, on the position as well as the resolution (through the coarse graining function $`\varphi `$).

## 3 Numerical Results

In order to study the crossover from microelasticity to macroelasticity , we have considered a two dimensional (2D) rectangular slab, composed of uniform disks (of diameter $`d`$) whose centers are positioned on a triangular lattice, with nearest neighbors coupled by uniform linear springs (of rest length $`d`$), and a three dimensional (3D) slab, composed of uniform spheres (of diameter $`d`$) with springs coupling nearest-neighbors (spring constant $`K_1`$) and next-nearest-neighbors ($`K_2`$). Both systems can be shown to correspond to isotropic elastic media in the continuum limit  (for the 3D system, only if $`K_1=K_2`$). The particles at the bottom layer are attached to a rigid floor, and a downward force is applied to the central particle in the top layer. This is intended for comparison with 2D  and 3D  granular experiments (even though these models do not directly describe the interaction of granular particles and are primarily intended for studying the crossover between microelasticity and macroelasticity, they closely reproduce some of the experimental results). Fig. 1 presents a comparison between the vertical stress exerted on the floor of the system for different slab heights (numbers of layers of particles) and continuum elastic solutions, for both systems ($`K_1=K_2`$ for the 3D system). The convergence to the appropriate (rough rigid support) elastic stress distribution for a sufficient number of layers is evident.

The observation of “force chains” in experiments  and simulations  has been interpreted as evidence for non-elastic effects . However, in a plot of the interparticle forces in the 2D system described above (Fig. 2, left) one can identify “force chains” though the microscopic interactions are strictly linear, and the large scale behavior corresponds to isotropic elasticity. The corresponding distribution of interparticle forces  closely resembles the experimental findings of Geng et al. . The $`zz`$ component of the stress field, calculated using Eq. (1) with a Gaussian coarse graining function  of width $`d`$ (i.e., with fine resolution), is shown in Fig. 2, on the right. The force chains are not evident any more. The force chains result from the microscopic anisotropy dictated by the fact that a single particle is never subject to an isotropic force distribution. However, even at small, but finite, spatial resolution, the calculation of the stress tensor inherently involves averaging over the forces acting on the particles, so that this anisotropy does not appear in the stress field. Similar results  are obtained for random 2D systems.

A more realistic model with unilateral (“one-sided”) springs, active only upon compression, yields results which are even closer to the experiments . In this case, some of the springs are disconnected (as obtained in  for a pile geometry) when the external force is applied. In particular, the horizontal springs in a triangular region below the point of application of the force are severed, and the corresponding macroscopic properties are anisotropic. The resulting stress distribution  is similar to that predicted by hyperbolic models of force propagation , but it is a result of an elastic model.

Support from the Israel Science Foundation, grants no. 39/98 and 53/01, is gratefully acknowledged.


text:
# Light-year Scale Radio Cores in Four LINER Galaxies

## 1 Introduction

As many as 40% of all nearby galaxies display some level of nuclear activity qualitatively resembling that seen in accretion-powered active nuclei (Ho et al. 1997b; Ho 1999a). The activity manifests itself in objects such as Seyfert nuclei and low-ionization nuclear emission-line regions (LINERs; Heckman 1980). LINERs differ from Seyferts in that they display characteristically stronger low-ionization optical forbidden lines. The source of the ionization responsible for the optical emission in LINERs is still under debate. Models which invoke shock heating (Fosbury et al. 1978; Heckman 1980; Dopita & Sutherland 1995), stellar photoionization (Terlevich & Melnick 1985; Shields 1992; Filippenko & Terlevich 1992; Terlevich et al. 1992; Barth & Shields 2000), and aging starbursts (Alonso-Herrero et al. 2000) have been proposed as possible ionization mechanisms. There is, however, growing evidence that a substantial fraction of the LINER population simply constitute the local low-luminosity equivalent of “classical” active galactic nuclei (AGN) such as quasars and luminous Seyfert galaxies (see review by Ho 2001). This is borne out by the detection of weak radio cores (Heckman 1980; Sadler et al. 1989; Wrobel & Heeschen 1991; Slee et al. 1994; Nagar et al. 2000; Falcke et al. 2000), by the nature of the ultraviolet (Maoz et al. 1995, 1998; Barth et al. 1998) and X-ray radiation (Ptak et al. 1999; Terashima et al. 2000; Halderson et al. 2001; Ho et al. 2001), and by the presence of broad H$`\alpha `$ lines in total (Ho et al. 1997c) as well as polarized flux (Barth et al. Moran 1999). If many LINERs are in fact true AGNs, this would have repercussions on the faint end of the AGN luminosity function, and consequently on galaxy evolution and the cosmic X-ray background.

Here we report on an investigation of the radio morphologies of four LINER galaxies on milliarcsecond (mas) scales. Observations with the European VLBI Network (EVN) were used to obtain images of the light-year scale structure in the radio cores of these four LINERs suspected to be powered by AGNs.

This paper adopts a Hubble constant of $`H_0`$ = 75 km s-1 Mpc-1 and defines the spectral index, $`\alpha `$, such that the flux density $`F_\nu \nu ^\alpha `$.

## 2 Sample Selection

The four LINER galaxies studied here (Table 1) were taken from the Palomar spectroscopic survey of bright, northern galaxies (Filippenko & Sargent 1985; Ho et al. 1995, 1997a, b, c). They were selected as having fairly bright radio emission, with significant contributions from an unresolved component on arcsecond (VLA) scales. Optical images of NGC 2911, NGC 3079 and NGC 3998 can be seen in the Sandage & Bedke (1994) Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies, and an image of NGC 6500 is available in González Delgado & Pérez (1996). Various lines of evidence, to be discussed below, suggest that accretion-driven power plays a role in the nuclei of these four galaxies.

Early VLBI experiments conducted on these sources have yielded some correlated flux densities on M$`\lambda `$ baselines (van Breugel et al. 1981; Jones et al. 1981; Hummel et al. 1982). However, images permitting assessment of morphological properties and brightness temperatures had not been obtained. We therefore conducted EVN observations to obtain such images and to quantify the contribution of the radio emission arising from the AGN and the starburst components. In addition, it was hoped that mas-scale structure could be traced out to large (kpc) scales. We note, in passing, that a typical EVN 5 GHz resolving beam of 5 mas translates to 1.5–3 light years for the sources under study.

## 3 Observations and Data Reduction

The observations of NGC 3998 and NGC 6500 were performed on 1997 June 5–6, while NGC 2911 and NGC 3079 were observed on 1997 June 9, all with the EVN Mark III system at 5 GHz. We combined 14 channels of 4 MHz each to achieve a total bandwidth of 56 MHz. The requested antennas were Effelsberg, Jodrell Bank Mk 2, Medicina, Noto, Torun, Westerbork, and Onsala, but unfortunately only the first five yielded useful data. Total integration time, aiming for optimal $`uv`$-coverage, was about 4 hours per galaxy. Cross-correlation employed the Bonn (MPIfR) Mark III correlator.

All of the Onsala data were lost, and the data from the Westerbork array were also lost due to wrong polarization observation. The loss of these two antennas was equivalent to losing 47$`\%`$ of our data. Furthermore, more than half of the 14 Torun channels were lost during the observations of NGC 3998 and NGC 6500. Following cross correlation, subsequent data reduction was performed at JIVE in Dwingeloo. After minor flagging, the data were calibrated, fringe fitted, and Fourier transformed using standard tools in AIPS (van Moorsel et al. 1996). Typical angular resolution achieved was 5–8 mas (Gaussian FWHM). The uncertainty of the absolute amplitude calibration, mainly due to data noise and uncertainties in the primary flux density calibrator, is estimated to be 5%–10% (1 $`\sigma `$).

## 4 Results

All four LINERs were detected at 5 GHz and found to display strong ($``$20–80 mJy) point sources. Table 2 lists the properties of the maps and the main measured quantities, while Table 3 summarizes the derived quantities. Weak extended emission, at a few percent of the peak level, is observed in NGC 3079, NGC 3998, and NGC 6500; this will be discussed below. The deconvolved images are not shown because they suffer from sidelobe remnants and noise peaks. Because our maps are dominated by a highly compact central core, and because we are not confident about the robustness of the faint extended emission, we have chosen not to perform detailed fits to obtain deconvolved source sizes.

Peak brightness temperatures were computed as

$$T_\mathrm{B}=\frac{F_{\mathrm{peak}}c^2}{2k_\mathrm{B}\nu ^2\mathrm{\Omega }^2}(\mathrm{K}),$$

where $`F_{\mathrm{peak}}`$ is the peak 5 GHz flux density, $`c`$ is the speed of light, $`k_\mathrm{B}`$ is Boltzmann’s constant, $`\nu `$ is the observing frequency, and $`\mathrm{\Omega }^2`$ is the upper limit to the source size. We conservatively regard all the cores to be unresolved and give upper limits to their sizes, equivalent to half of the Gaussian FWHM of the synthesized beam. Given that the resolution effects are at a few percent level at most, the combined use of peak flux density and the adopted $`\mathrm{\Omega }^2`$ yields lower limits to the brightness temperature figures.

The next section discusses the EVN imaging results within the framework of other properties known for these galaxies.

## 5 Individual Galaxies

### 5.1 NGC 2911

The dominant radio core in NGC 2911 shows pronounced variability (Jones et al. 1982; Wrobel & Heeschen 1984; Condon et al. 1991; Slee et al. 1994). From arcminute- and arcsecond-resolution observations it appears that about 10 mJy of low-surface brightness radio emission is present along the major axis of the galaxy (Wrobel & Heeschen 1984; Condon et al. 1991). Weak mas structure at PA $``$ $``$30 was claimed to have been detected in an early 1.7 GHz VLBI experiment (Jones et al. 1981), but was not confirmed with 5 GHz VLBI observations (Jones et al. 1982; Schilizzi et al. 1983).

We do not detect mas-scale extended emission. Our results show an unresolved, high-brightness temperature ($`T_\mathrm{B}>10^8`$ K) core with a flux density of $``$20 mJy. Long-baseline PTI (Parkes-Tindinbilla interferometer) measurements in the late 1980s by Slee et al. (1994) yielded a relatively flat radio spectrum for the core; $`\alpha `$ = 0.21 between 2.3 and 8.4 GHz. Interpolating the PTI flux densities to 5 GHz yields a value of 43 mJy, which, compared to the 163 mJy measured in 1980 with the VLA (Wrobel & Heeschen 1984) and to our 1997 result, confirms the presence of strong variability. The presence of a variable, unresolved, flat-spectrum, high-brightness temperature radio core constitutes compelling evidence for an AGN-type source in this LINER galaxy.

### 5.2 NGC 3079

Arcsecond-resolution images of this well-known active galaxy show large-scale radio structure. Emission along the galactic disk and two 15-kpc nonthermal lobes emanate from the nucleus along the minor axis (de Bruyn 1977; Seaquist et al. 1978; Duric et al. 1983; Hummel et al. 1983; Duric & Seaquist 1988; Baan & Irwin 1995). This morphology, which is also seen in the X-rays (Fabbiano et al. 1992; Dahlem et al. Heckman 1998; Pietsch et al. Volger 1998) and in optical line emission (Ford et al. 1986) has been interpreted as an outflow from a compact central engine that interacts with the dense gas in the nuclear environment (see discussion in Filippenko & Sargent 1992). The hypothesis that this outflow may be driven by accretion onto a supermassive black hole is reinforced by high-resolution VLA and global VLBI observations (e.g., Irwin & Seaquist 1988; Trotter et al. 1998; Sawada-Satoh et al. 2000) that reveal several aligned sources thought to be features of a nuclear jet.

Our EVN observations detect a slightly resolved, $``$15 mJy radio core, in addition to a weak ($``$2 mJy) extension 17 mas toward the Southeast. From its flux density and position relative to the extended emission, we identify the core with the peaked-spectrum component “B” observed in the radio maps of Irwin & Seaquist (1988), Trotter et al. (1998), and Sawada-Satoh et al. (2000). From comparison with the above-mentioned data, the 5 GHz flux density of component B has been constant, within the errors, from 1986 through 1997. On the other hand, the 8 GHz values of Trotter et al. (1998) and Sawada-Satoh et al. (2000) suggest variability at shorter wavelengths. Based on the probable variability and the high brightness temperature measured in this paper, we identify component B with the core of NGC 3079. The weak extended emission that we observe Southeast of B, but which is not well constrained by our data, may be associated with components “A” and “C” as seen in the previous studies. Based on their spectra, the multi-component nature, and the position of the extended structure, Trotter et al. (1998) and Sawada-Satoh et al. (2000) argue that A and C can be identified with the fading and/or expanding components in a radio jet.

### 5.3 NGC 3998

Low-resolution radio observations reveal arcminute-scale emission in NGC 3998: a structure consisting of a core and double lobes ($``$4$``$  or 20 kpc) was detected with an overall PA of $``$0 to $``$15 (Hummel 1980; Wrobel & Heeschen 1984; Wrobel 1991), slightly misaligned relative to the galaxy minor axis. The radio core is variable and has a flat spectrum (e.g., Hummel et al. 1984).

Our high-resolution EVN observations detect a strong ($``$83 mJy), slightly resolved core, consistent with the VLBI measurement (86 mJy) obtained by Hummel et al. (1982). The core displays a weak northern extension, which we suspect is the innermost part of the postulated kpc-scale outflow (Hummel 1980). The presence of a compact, variable, flat-spectrum, high-brightness temperature radio core associated with a jetlike extension constitutes compelling evidence for an AGN-type source in this LINER. This evidence is further strengthened by the detection of an X-ray (Roberts & Warwick 2000; Terashima et al. 2000; Pellegrini et al. 2000) and ultraviolet (Fabbiano et al. 1994) point source, by the presence of a broad H$`\alpha `$ emission line (Ho et al. 1997c), and by the inferred presence of a 108 M black hole (Dressel et al. 2000).

### 5.4 NGC 6500

Arcsecond-scale radio emission has been detected in this source by Unger et al. (1989), who find two-sided extended emission up to 5$``$ $``$  from the nucleus at PA=140, roughly perpendicular to the galaxy major axis. Unlike the highly collimated jet emission seen in radio galaxies, this arcsecond-scale emission has a wide opening angle of $``$60. The radio morphology has been interpreted as evidence for an outflow along the minor axis of the galaxy (Unger et al. 1989), similar to that seen in NGC 3079 (see Sect. 5.2). On the other hand, the central 1$``$ $``$ .3 extended emission seen in the 408 MHz and 1.7 GHz MERLIN maps (Unger et al. 1989) is roughly aligned with the major axis of the galaxy, at PA = 55 and 70, respectively, consistent with early VLBI experiments by Jones et al. (1981, 1982). More recently, the 5 GHz VLBA observations of Falcke et al. (2000) show a core straddled by two-sided emission (overall size 20 mas, PA = 39), aligned to within 9 of the extended optical emission-line gas detected by Gonzaléz Delgado & Pérez (1996). The misalignment between the small and large scales may be due to projection effects, or, alternatively, the jet may be disrupted and redirected very near the core. NGC 6500 is also known to be variable in the radio (e.g., Hummel et al. 1984) and has a flat radio spectrum (e.g., Falcke et al. 2000).

Our high-resolution observations show a strong ($``$84 mJy), marginally resolved core consistent with the VLBA (Falcke et al. 2000) and VLA (Nagar et al. 2000) measurements. We do not detect the extended emission reported by Falcke et al. (2000), most likely because of the high noise level in our EVN data. The presence of an unresolved, variable, flat-spectrum, high-brightness temperature radio core associated with jetlike emission again provide compelling evidence for an AGN-type source, especially when considered in conjunction with the X-ray (Barth et al. 1997) and ultraviolet (Barth et al. 1997, 1998; Maoz et al. 1998) detections.

## 6 Discussion and Summary

The physical origin of LINERs has been a controversial topic since Heckman (1980) identified them as a major constituent of the galaxy population. In recent years, high-resolution, multiwavelength observations have contributed greatly to elucidating the nature of these enigmatic objects. As discussed recently by Barth (2001) and Ho (2001), there is now little doubt that “type 1” LINERs (those with detectable broad emission lines) are genuine low-luminosity AGNs.

An outstanding issue yet to be resolved is the AGN fraction among narrow-lined, “type 2” LINERs and so-called transition objects. The traditional optical diagnostic emission lines are largely degenerate with respect to a number of the ionization mechanisms that have been proposed (see Sect. 1). While the ultraviolet region can be advantageous compared to the optical, the detection rate in this band is low (Maoz et al. 1995; Barth et al. 1998), most likely due to a combination of dust extinction (Barth et al. 1998; Pogge et al. 2000) and the intrinsic weakness of LINERs in this spectral region (Ho 1999b, 2001). In the few cases where ultraviolet spectroscopy is available, the evidence for AGNs has been mixed (Maoz et al. 1998; Shields et al. 2001).

A method widely used to discriminate AGNs from starburst-dominated sources compares the relative strength of the far-infrared flux to the radio flux. For “normal” or star-forming galaxies, Condon & Broderick (1988) find that the distribution of the $`u`$ parameter, defined as the logarithmic ratio of the flux densities at 60 $`\mu `$m and 1.4 GHz, peaks at $`u\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2.0}`$, with a tail toward lower values of $`u`$ (excess radio emission) due to galaxies containing prominent AGNs. AGNs also generally have “warmer” far-infrared spectra compared to star-forming galaxies (e.g., de Grijp et al. 1985), which are characterized by $`\alpha _{\mathrm{IR}}2.33.0`$ between 25 and 60 $`\mu `$m (Condon & Broderick 1988; Condon et al. 1991). We have calculated $`u`$ and $`\alpha _{\mathrm{IR}}`$ for our sample (Table 3) using the far-infrared measurements tabulated in Ho et al. (1997a) and the integrated 1.4 GHz flux densities from the NVSS (see Table 1). Indeed, all three galaxies with a dominant nuclear radio component (NGC 2911, NGC 3998, and NGC 6500) do have a low value of the $`u`$ parameter ($`<1`$) and a relatively flat infrared spectrum ($`\alpha _{\mathrm{IR}}`$ $`<`$2). (NGC 3079 is more ambiguous, but this is not surprising in view of the circumstantial evidence for strong star formation suggested by its optical morphology.) However, the application of these infrared diagnostics depends on the relative strength of the nuclear radio emission.

The X-ray band, especially for energies above 2 keV, provides a more promising tool to probe the central source in LINERs. However, until the recent advent of Chandra (Ho et al. 2001), previous hard X-ray observations of these sources (e.g., Ptak et al. 1999; Terashima et al. 2000) relied on the coarse beam presented by ASCA. Given the complexity of the X-ray structure in the central regions of nearby galaxies (e.g., Ho et al. 2001), the low-resolution ASCA data also can yield ambiguous results for the less prominent nuclei that usually characterize type 2 LINERs.

This paper illustrates that radio VLBI observations can be added to the arsenal of tools to tackle the LINER problem, and, moreover, that the radio data alone can give meaningful physical constraints. We have obtained mas-resolution 5 GHz observations of a small, but representative, sample of LINERs. The radio maps enable us to pinpoint highly compact central cores with sizes $`<`$1.5 light year, which in turn place stringent lower limits on brightness temperatures ($`>`$$`10^8`$ K) that definitively rule out a thermal origin for the radio emission. The nonthermal, AGN-like nature of the radio sources is further suggested by other radio characteristics found in previous observations. These include the detection of source variability, flat or inverted spectra111The spectral indices summarized in Table 2 derive from non-simultaneous observations, and therefore should be interpreted with some caution in light of the variable nature of the sources. Ulvestad & Ho (2001) found flat-spectrum cores in three LINERs that were observed simultaneously at four frequencies with the VLBA., and in three out of the four cases, morphological evidence for jetlike features or outflows. All of the above are hallmark features of “classical” AGNs, the distinction being that the luminosities of our sources are several orders of magnitude lower than those observed in traditional radio galaxies.

## 7 Acknowledgments

M. E. F. acknowledges support from the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, Portugal through the grant PRAXIS XXI/BD/15830/98. M. E. F. would like to thank Denise Gabuzda and Lorant Sjouwerman at JIVE (Joint Institute for VLBI) for their help on the data reduction. We also thank the staff of the EVN observatories and the MkIII VLBI Correlator at MPIfR, Bonn. The work of L. C. H. is partly funded by NASA grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute (operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555). This research has made extensive use of NED (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Tecnology, under contract with NASA.