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# Memory Effects in Electron Transport in Si Inversion Layers in the Dilute Regime: Individuality versus Universality

## Abstract

In order to separate the universal and sample-specific effects in the conductivity of high-mobility Si inversion layers, we studied the electron transport in the same device after cooling it down to 4 K at different fixed values of the gate voltage $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$. Different $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$ did not modify significantly either the momentum relaxation rate or the strength of electron-electron interactions. However, the temperature dependences of the resistance and the magnetoresistance in parallel magnetic fields, measured in the vicinity of the metal-insulator transition in 2D, carry a strong imprint of individuality of the quenched disorder determined by $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$. This demonstrates that the observed transition between “metallic” and insulating regimes involves both universal effects of electron-electron interaction and sample-specific effects. Far away from the transition, at lower carrier densities and lower resistivities $`\rho <0.1h/e^2`$, the transport and magnetotransport become nearly universal.

After almost a decade of intensive research, the apparent metal-insulator transition (MIT) in two-dimensional (2D) systems remains a rapidly evolving field . The central problem in this field is whether the anomalous low-temperature behavior of the conductivity, observed in high-mobility structures in the dilute limit, signifies a novel quantum ground state in strongly-correlated systems, or this is a semiclassical effect of disorder on electron transport. Indeed, a great body of experimental data demonstrates that, at least at sufficiently large carrier densities (consequently, weak interactions), the low-temperature behavior of disordered systems is governed by the universal quantum corrections to the conductivity . On the other hand, there are also observations that near the apparent 2D MIT, the behavior of dilute systems is very rich, and does not necessarily follow the same pattern (e. g., even for the same system, as Si MOSFETs, the ”critical” resistance and the high-field magnetoresistance vary significantly for different samples ). This duality (universality versus individuality) is reflected in two approaches to the theoretical description of the ”metallic” regime: some models, based on strong electron-electron interactions, treat the transition as a universal phenomenon , whereas the others emphasize the role of a sample-specific disorder (traps, localized spins, potential fluctuations, etc.) .

In order to find a definite experimental answer to this problem and to separate universal and non-universal (“individuality”) effects in the vicinity of the 2D MIT, we have studied the electron transport in the same Si MOS structure, which was slowly cooled down from room temperature to $`T=`$4 K at different fixed values of the gate voltage $`V_g=V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$ . Changing the cooling conditions allowed us to vary the confining potential and the density of quenched localized states without affecting the main parameters which control electron-electron interactions in the system of mobile electrons: the momentum relaxation rate and the interaction constants. By tuning $`V_g`$ at low temperatures, we varied the electron density $`n`$ over the range $`n=(0.73)\times 10^{11}`$cm-2 in a system with a snapshot disorder pattern. Two key features of the 2D MIT, strong dependences of the resistivity on the temperature and parallel magnetic field, have been studied.

We have observed two distinct regimes as a function of the electron density. At relatively high densities (resistivity $`\rho 0.1h/e^2`$), the dependences $`R(T)`$ and $`R(B_{})`$ in weak parallel magnetic fields $`B_{}`$ are similar for different cooldowns; the similarity indicates ‘universal’ behavior. In contrast, at low densities ($`\rho (0.11)h/e^2`$), or in moderate and strong parallel fields $`g\mu _BB_{}E_Fk_BT`$, the cooling conditions affect dramatically the electron transport. This observation provides direct experimental evidence that the behavior of dilute systems becomes sample-specific near the apparent 2D MIT no matter how one approaches the transition (either by decreasing the electron density, or by increasing the parallel magnetic field).

The resistivity measurements were performed on a high mobility Si-MOSFET sample  at the bath temperatures $`0.051.2`$ K. The crossed magnetic field system allowed to accurately align the magnetic field parallel to the plane of the 2DEG . The carrier density, found from the period of Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations, varies linearly with $`V_g`$: $`nC\times (V_gV_{\mathrm{th}})`$, where $`C`$ ($`=1.103\times 10^{11}`$ /Vcm2 for the studied sample) is determined by the oxide thickness. The ‘threshold’ voltage $`V_{\mathrm{th}}`$ varied little (within 0.15 V) for different cool-downs and remained fixed as long as the sample was maintained at low temperatures (up to a few months).

Figure 1 shows the mobility $`\mu `$ versus $`V_g`$ for five different cool-downs with $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}=0,5,10,18`$, and 25 V. The peak mobility for different cool-downs varies by less than $`7\%`$); this demonstrates that the momentum relaxation time $`\tau `$ is not strongly affected by the cooling conditions. We also observed that the amplitudes of the SdH oscillations are similar for different cool-downs, as shown in the inset to Fig. 1. These two observations are consistent with each other, since the quantum lifetime $`\tau _q`$ is nearly equal to $`\tau `$ for Si-MOSFETs.

Figure 2 a shows the dependences $`\rho (T)`$ for two cool-downs in the vicinity of the 2D MIT. Far from the transition, where $`\rho h/e^2`$, the dependences $`\rho (T)`$ are cooldown-independent. However, in the vicinity of the transition ($`\rho h/e^2`$), a dramatically different behavior is observed. The irreproducibility of $`\rho (T)`$ for different cool-downs is clearly seen for the curves in Fig. 2 which correspond to the same $`\rho `$ at the lowest $`T`$: these curves, being different at higher temperatures, converge with decreasing $`T`$. The sample-specific memory effects vanish also at sufficiently low temperatures: this suggests that the underlying mechanism is related to the finite-temperature effects in a system which retains a quenched disorder. These results suggest that, in addition to universal effects, a finite-temperature and sample-specific mechanism, which strongly affects the resistivity, comes into play.

The ‘critical’ density $`n_c`$, which corresponds to the transition, was found from a linear extrapolation to zero of the density dependence of the activation energy $`\mathrm{\Delta }(n)`$ in the insulating regime $`\rho (T)\mathrm{exp}(\mathrm{\Delta }/T)`$ . The dependences $`\rho (T)`$, which corresponded to $`n=n_c`$ for two cool-downs shown in Fig. 2a, are highlighted in bold. It is clear that (i) the ‘critical’ densities and ‘critical’ resistivities depend on the cooling conditions, and (ii) the ‘critical’ dependences $`\rho (T,n=n_c)`$ are non-monotonic (see also Refs. ). Observation of the non-monotonic critical dependences $`\rho _c(T)`$ suggests that a) saturation of the temperature dependences at $`n=n_c`$, reported in , is not a universal effect, and b) the critical density is not necessarily associated with the sign change of $`d\rho /dT(n)`$ .

We now turn to the magnetoresistance (MR) in parallel fields; the data are shown in Figs. 3 and 4. This MR is usually associated with the spin effects . In the theoretical models of the parallel-field MR, based on electron-electron interactions, the MR is controlled by the effective $`g^{}`$-factor and the momentum relaxation time $`\tau `$ . An important advantage of our method is that cooling of the same sample at different $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$ does not affect these parameters. Thus, one might expect to observe a sample-independent behavior if the MR is controlled solely by the universal interaction effects.

Firstly, let us consider the range of fields much weaker than the field of complete spin polarization ($`g^{}\mu _BB_{}E_F`$). The insets to Figs. 3 a and 3 b show that the MR is proportional to $`B_{}^2`$ at $`g^{}\mu _BB_{}/k_BT1`$. We found that the slope $`d\rho /dB^2`$ is nearly cooldown-independent (i.e. universal) only for the densities $`n>1.3\times 10^{11}`$cm-2 (which are by 30% greater than the critical density $`n_c`$), or for the resistivities $`\rho <0.16h/e^2`$ (compare insets to Figs. 3 a and 3 b). With approaching $`n_c`$, this universality vanishes: Figure 3 a shows that even when the zero-field resistivity is as small as $`0.22h/e^2`$, the slope varies by a factor of 1.3 for different $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$.

For the intermediate fields, $`k_BT<g^{}\mu _BB_{}<E_F`$, the $`\rho (B_{})`$ behavior is not universal over the whole density range $`n=(13)\times 10^{11}`$cm-2 (Figs. 3a,b). As $`n`$ decreases and approaches $`n_c`$, the cooldown-dependent variations of $`R(B_{})`$ increase progressively. Observation of large ($`50\%`$) non-universal variations of the MR at intermediate fields makes the scaling analysis  of the MR in this field range dubious.

The influence of cooldown conditions becomes even more dramatic in strong fields, $`BE_F/g^{}\mu _B`$. Despite the fact that the dependences $`\mu (n)`$ for different cool-downs are very similar (Fig. 1), we observed very large variations in the strong-field MR. Figures 4 a and 4 b show $`R(B_{})`$ for different cool-downs at two values of $`n`$. The cooldown conditions cause factor-of-five changes in $`\rho (B)`$ in high fields and factor-of-two changes in the values of $`B_{}=B_{\mathrm{sat}}`$ at which the MR ‘saturates’ at a given carrier density. The latter quantity was determined from the intercept of the tangents at fields below and above MR saturation .

Figure 4 c shows the dependences $`B_{\mathrm{sat}}(n)`$ for different cool-downs. We also plotted here the density dependence of the field $`B_{\mathrm{pol}}=2E_F^{}/g^{}\mu _B=n\pi \mathrm{}^2/m^{}g^{}\mu _B`$, for the complete spin polarization of mobile electrons ($`m^{}`$ is the renormalized effective mass). The dependence $`B_{\mathrm{pol}}(n)`$ was calculated using sample-independent (universal) $`g^{}m^{}`$ values . Comparison between $`B_{\mathrm{sat}}`$ and $`B_{\mathrm{pol}}`$ shows that $`B_{\mathrm{sat}}`$ does not necessarily manifest the complete spin polarization, and that the coincidence of $`B_{\mathrm{sat}}`$ with $`B_{\mathrm{pol}}`$ reported in Ref.  may be rather accidental. This non-universal, sample-dependent behavior of $`B_{sat}`$ agrees with earlier observations made on different samples . We emphasize that the curves for different $`V^{\mathrm{cool}}`$ (in each of Figs. 4 a and b) correspond to the same density, as follows from Hall voltage and/or SdH oscillations measurements. The fact that $`B_{\mathrm{sat}}`$ is a cooldown-dependent parameter, suggests that the MR in strong parallel fields is not solely related to spin-polarization of mobile electrons; we speculate that it also reflects the spin polarization of the sample-specific localized electron states, which might have the effective g-factor quite different from that for the mobile electrons .

It is worth mentioning that the influence of variable disorder on transport and magnetotransport in Si-MOSFETs has been observed earlier. Both the temperature dependence $`\rho (T)`$ and magnetoresistance $`\rho (B_{})`$ were found to be different in samples with different mobility  and in samples cooled down with different values of substrate bias voltage . In these studies, however, the sample mobility was changed significantly. In contrast, in our studies we kept constant the sample mobility and all parameters relevant to electron-electron interaction.

To summarize, by cooling the same high-mobility Si-MOS sample from room temperature down to $`T=4`$K at different fixed values of the gate voltage, we tested universality of the temperature and magnetic-field dependences of the resistivity near the 2D MIT. An important advantage of this approach is that the different cooldown procedures do not affect the parameters which control the contribution of the interaction effects to the resistivity. It has been found that in the vicinity of the transition ($`\rho h/e^2`$), the sample-specific effects strongly affect $`\rho (T)`$; these effects vanish only when $`\rho `$ decreases below $`0.1h/e^2`$ with increasing electron density. Non-universal behavior has been also observed for the magnetoresistance in parallel magnetic fields. The effect is especially dramatic in moderate ($`E_F^{}>g^{}\mu _BB>T`$) and strong ($`g^{}\mu _BBE_F^{}`$) fields: it extends to much higher electron densities (we observed pronounced non-universality of $`R(B_{})`$ over a wide range $`n=(13)\times 10^{11}`$cm-2). Our results clearly demonstrate that the apparent metal-insulator transition in 2D involves both universal and sample-specific effects. These results also help to establish the borderline between the regimes where the electron transport in high-mobility Si MOS-structures is either universal or sample-specific. Understanding of the non-universal regime requires detailed knowledge of the interface disorder at low temperatures.

Authors acknowledge fruitful discussions with E. Abrahams, B. L. Altshuler and D. L. Maslov.

The work was partially supported by the NSF, INTAS, NATO, NWO, and Russian Programs RFBR, ‘Statistical physics’, ‘Integration’, and ‘The State support of the leading scientific schools’.


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# Complex and Non-Complex Phase Structures in Models of Spin Glasses and Information Processing

## 1 Introduction

The mean-field theory of spin glasses is well established . There exists a low-temperature spin glass phase with complex structure of the phase space with such characteristics as replica symmetry breaking, many valleys and slow dynamics. In contrast, investigations of realistic finite-dimensional systems have been hampered by difficulties of analytic treatment, and numerical methods have been the predominant tool of research. An interesting exception is the gauge theory which exploits gauge symmetry of the system to derive many exact/rigorous results such as the exact expression of the internal energy, a bound on the specific heat and various identities for correlation functions .

It may be a little bit surprising that this gauge theory is closely related with some problems of information processing such as error-correcting codes and image restoration. Suppose that one transmits digital information (a bit sequence) through a noisy channel. An important goal of error-correcting codes is to devise an efficient way to encode and decode the information in order to remove as much noise as possible from the output of the channel. This problem can be rewritten as an Ising spin glass : A bit sequence is naturally expressed as an Ising spin configuration, and noise corresponds to randomness in exchange interactions. Then the statistical inference of the original information, given the noisy output of the channel, is found to be equivalent to the statistical mechanics of an Ising spin glass.

A similar analogy exists between image restoration, in which one tries to remove noise from a given digital image, and the statistical mechanics of a spin system in random fields. It is the purpose of this contribution to review the gauge theory of spin glasses and information processing problems, error-correcting codes in particular, with emphasis on the similarities between these superficially quite different fields .

The gauge theory of spin glasses and error-correcting codes are reviewed in sections 2 and 3, respectively, with a few new results and viewpoints. Summary is given in section 4.

## 2 Gauge theory of spin glasses

The gauge theory of spin glasses is a powerful theoretical framework to derive a number of exact/rigorous results on models of spin glasses using gauge symmetry of the system. It does not answer directly the question of the existence or absence of the spin glass phase in finite dimensions. Nevertheless this theory leads to various results which set strong constraints on the possibilities of the existence region of the spin glass phase in the phase diagram and other non-trivial conclusions .

### 2.1 System and its symmetry

Let us consider the $`\pm J`$ Ising model with the Hamiltonian

$$H=\underset{ij}{}J_{ij}S_iS_j,$$
(1)
where $`J_{ij}`$, a quenched random variable, is either $`J`$ (with probability $`p`$) or $`J`$ (with probability $`1p`$). The sum over $`ij`$ runs over appropriate pairs of sites, such as (but not restricted to) nearest neighbours on a regular lattice. This probability distribution can be written in a compact form as

$$P(J_{ij})=\frac{e^{K_p\tau _{ij}}}{2\mathrm{cosh}K_p},$$
(2)
where $`\tau _{ij}(=\pm 1)`$ is the sign of $`J_{ij}`$. It is easy to check that (2) is equal to $`p`$ if $`\tau _{ij}=1`$ and is $`1p`$ when $`\tau _{ij}=1`$ if we define the parameter $`K_p`$ by $`e^{2K_p}=(1p)/p`$.

The Hamiltonian (1) is invariant under the gauge transformation

$$S_iS_i\sigma _i,J_{ij}J_{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j,$$
(3)
where $`\{\sigma _i\}`$ is a set of Ising variables fixed arbitrarily at each site.

### 2.2 Exact energy

It is possible to derive the exact expression of the internal energy, averaged over the probability (2), under a simple condition between the temperature and the probability $`p`$. The definition of the internal energy is

$$[E]=\underset{\{\tau _{ij}\}}{}\underset{ij}{}P(J_{ij})\frac{_{\{S_i\}}He^{\beta H}}{_{\{S_i\}}e^{\beta H}},$$
(4)
where the square brackets $`[\mathrm{}]`$ denote the configurational average. The gauge transformation (3) just redefines the running variables $`\{\tau _{ij}\}`$ and $`\{S_i\}`$ and therefore does not affect the value of the internal energy. Thus (4) is rewritten as

$$[E]=\underset{\tau }{}\frac{e^{K_p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}}{(2\mathrm{cosh}K_p)^{N_B}}\frac{_SHe^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}}{_Se^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}},$$
(5)
where $`N_B`$ is the number of bonds in the system and $`K=\beta J`$. Since the value of (5) is independent of the choice of $`\{\sigma _i\}`$, we may sum the right hand side of (5) over all possible values of $`\{\sigma _i\}`$ and divide the result by $`2^N`$ without changing the value of $`[E]`$:

$$[E]=\frac{1}{(2\mathrm{cosh}K_p)^{N_B}2^N}\underset{\tau }{}\underset{\sigma }{}e^{K_p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}\frac{_SHe^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}}{_Se^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}}.$$
(6)
It is clear here that the denominator on the right hand side cancels with the sum over $`\sigma `$ if $`K=K_p`$, which makes it possible to evaluate the energy explicitly:

$`[E]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(2\mathrm{cosh}K_p)^{N_B}2^N}}{\displaystyle \underset{\tau }{}}{\displaystyle \underset{S}{}}He^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}`$ (7)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(2\mathrm{cosh}K_p)^{N_B}2^N}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{}{\beta }}\right){\displaystyle \underset{\tau }{}}{\displaystyle \underset{S}{}}e^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}`$
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(2\mathrm{cosh}K_p)^{N_B}2^N}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{}{\beta }}\right){\displaystyle \underset{S}{}}(2\mathrm{cosh}K)^{N_B}`$
$`=`$ $`N_BJ\mathrm{tanh}K.`$
The only condition for the above manipulations to be valid is the relation $`K=K_p`$ to relate the temperature with the probability, defining a line in the phase diagram, the Nishimori line shown dashed in Fig. 1.

Note that the lattice structure, range of interaction, or the spatial dimension are all arbitrary. So the present exact solution (7) is very generic.

Similar arguments lead to an upper bound on the specific heat and various identities for static correlation functions under the condition $`K=K_p`$.

### 2.3 Absence of slow dynamics

An interesting relation can be established for dynamical correlation functions using the gauge theory :

$$\left[S_i(t_w)S_i(t+t_w)_{K_p}^\mathrm{F}\right]=\left[S_i(0)S_i(t)_{K_p}^{\mathrm{eq}}\right].$$
(8)
The right hand side is the equilibrium autocorrelation function at temperature $`K=K_p`$. The left hand side is a non-equilibrium correlation function starting from the completely ferromagnetic state at time 0. The first measurement is performed after waiting time $`t_w`$ and the second at $`t_w+t`$ (Fig. 2).

If the systems shows anomalously slow dynamics, the non-equilibrium correlation function, the left hand side, will depend on the measurement starting time (the waiting time $`t_w`$) as it actually happens in the spin glass phase of the mean-field model. Otherwise, the system relaxes quickly to equilibrium, implying time-translation invariance, or equivalently, independence of the left hand side of $`t_w`$. The identity (8) proves that the latter possibility is the case since the right hand side does not depend on $`t_w`$. Therefore, any spin glass system does not show slow dynamics on the line $`K=K_p`$. The proof of (8) requires some background of the kinetic Ising model and we refer the reader to the original papers.

Note that the above argument is not a proof of the absence of a spin glass phase in general. What has been shown is that a phase with slow dynamics should exist, if it does at all, away from the Nishimori line.

### 2.4 Distribution functions of order parameters

An interesting functional identity $`P_m(x)=P_q(x)`$ can be proved under the same condition $`K=K_p`$ . Here, $`P_m(x)`$ is the distribution function of magnetization and $`P_q(x)`$ is the distribution of spin glass order parameter,

$$P_m(x)=\left[\frac{_S\delta \left(x\frac{1}{N}_iS_i\right)e^{\beta H}}{_Se^{\beta H}}\right]$$
(9)
and

$$P_q(x)=\left[\frac{_S_\sigma \delta \left(x\frac{1}{N}_iS_i\sigma _i\right)e^{\beta H(S)\beta H(\sigma )}}{_S_\sigma e^{\beta H(S)\beta H(\sigma )}}\right].$$
(10)
The proof of the identity $`P_m(x)=P_q(x)`$ is relatively straightforward if we apply the gauge transformation to the expression (9) and use the condition $`K=K_p`$. After the gauge transformation, (9) is expressed as

$`P_m(x)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(2\mathrm{cosh}K_p)^{N_B}2^N}}{\displaystyle \underset{\tau }{}}{\displaystyle \underset{\sigma }{}}e^{K_p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}`$ (11)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{_\sigma _S\delta \left(x\frac{1}{N}_iS_i\sigma _i\right)e^{K_p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}e^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}}{_\sigma e^{K_p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}_Se^{K{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}S_iS_j}}}}.`$
The last expression is equivalent to (10) if $`K=K_p`$.

Since the distribution function of magnetization $`P_m(x)`$ is always composed of at most two simple delta functions located at $`\pm m`$, the identity $`P_m(x)=P_q(x)`$ implies that the distribution of spin glass order parameter $`P_q(x)`$ also has the same simple structure. This excludes the possibility that a complex structure of the phase space, which should be reflected in a non-trivial functional form of $`P_q(x)`$, exists on the line $`K=K_p`$. Thus a spin glass (or mixed ferromagnetic) phase of the mean-field type, if it exists, should lie away from the line in the phase diagram. This observation reinforces the conclusion of the previous subsection on dynamics that there is no mean-field type spin glass phase on the Nishimori line.

## 3 Error-correcting codes

The arguments in the previous section on the gauge theory of spin glasses are in close formal similarity to some problems of information processing. We demonstrate it with error-correcting codes as a typical example .

### 3.1 Transmission of information

The goal of the theory of error-correcting codes is to find efficient methods to infer the original information (bit sequence) from the output of a noisy transmission channel. For this purpose it is known to be necessary to introduce redundancy before sending the information through the channel, a process called encoding (or coding), see Fig. 3. At the receiving end of the channel, one decodes the signal to retrieve the original information making full use of the redundancy. Shannon’s channel coding theorem sets a lower limit on the redundancy in order to retrieve the original information without errors, given the noise strength of the channel.

### 3.2 Ising representation

It is convenient to formulate the problem in terms of Ising spins as natural correspondences exist between a bit and an Ising spin (0 and 1 corresponds to $`S_i=(1)^0=1`$ and $`S_i=(1)^1=1`$, respectively) and between the mod-two addition and the multiplication (e.g., 1+1=0 is equivalent to $`(1)^1\times (1)^1=(1)^0=1`$) . Suppose that the original information one wishes to send is an Ising spin configuration $`\{\xi _i\}`$. Redundancy can be introduced by generating a set of many-body Mattis-type interactions  from the spin configuration, $`J_{ijk\mathrm{}}^0=\xi _i\xi _j\xi _k\mathrm{}`$. Clearly the number of interactions $`N_B`$ is larger than the number of Ising spins $`N`$, implying redundancy. A specific choice of the set of sites to form interactions $`\{ijk\mathrm{}\}`$ corresponds to a specific code. A search for a good code is one of the main targets of coding theory, but we do not review this problem here and continue the argument without specifying the set $`\{ijk\mathrm{}\}`$.

The encoded information $`𝑱^0\{J_{ijk\mathrm{}}^0\}`$ is transmitted through the noisy channel. Let us focus our attention on a binary symmetric channel in which the input $`J_{ijk\mathrm{}}^0`$ is flipped to the opposite sign $`J_{ijk\mathrm{}}=J_{ijk\mathrm{}}^0`$ with error probability $`p`$. The task is to infer (decode) the original information $`\{\xi _i\}`$ from the noisy output of the channel $`𝑱\{J_{ijk\mathrm{}}\}`$. Note that frustration exists in the set of interactions $`𝑱`$ although $`𝑱^0`$ (which was generated by the Mattis rule) is not frustrated. Finite-temperature statistical mechanics of the Ising spin glass with interactions $`𝑱`$ serves as a useful theoretical platform to decode the message as shown in the following .

### 3.3 Bayesian formulation

The first step is to express the noise characteristics using the conditional probability as

$$P(J_{ijk\mathrm{}}|J_{ijk\mathrm{}}^0)=P(J_{ijk\mathrm{}}|\xi _i\xi _j\xi _k\mathrm{})=\frac{e^{\beta _pJ_{ijk\mathrm{}}\xi _i\xi _j\xi _k\mathrm{}}}{2\mathrm{cosh}\beta _p}$$
(12)
which is equal to $`p`$ if $`J_{ijk\mathrm{}}=J_{ijk\mathrm{}}^0`$ and $`1p`$ otherwise if we define $`\beta _p`$ as

$$e^{2\beta _p}=\frac{1p}{p}.$$
(13)
Note that $`\beta _p`$ is essentially equivalent to $`K_p`$ appeared in the previous section, the only difference being that $`p`$ and $`1p`$ are exchanged. Assuming a memoryless channel, in which each bit is affected by noise independently of other bits, the conditional probability of the whole spin configuration is

$$P(𝑱|𝝃)=\underset{\{ijk\mathrm{}\}}{}P(J_{ijk\mathrm{}}|\xi _i\xi _j\xi _k\mathrm{})=\frac{\mathrm{exp}(\beta _p_{\{ijk\mathrm{}\}}J_{ijk\mathrm{}}\xi _i\xi _j\xi _k\mathrm{})}{(2\mathrm{cosh}\beta _p)^{N_B}},$$
(14)
where $`N_B`$ is the size of the set $`𝑱`$.

Equation (14) represents the conditional probability of the output $`𝑱`$ given the input $`𝝃`$. To infer the original information, we need the conditional probability of the input $`𝝃`$ given the output $`𝑱`$. The Bayes formula is useful for this purpose:

$$P(𝝈|𝑱)=\frac{P(𝑱|𝝈)P(𝝈)}{_\sigma P(𝑱|𝝈)P(𝝈)},$$
(15)
where $`𝝈`$ is a set of dynamical variables used to infer $`𝝃`$.

We need the explicit form of the distribution function of the original information $`P(𝝈)`$, called the prior, to use the Bayes formula (15) to infer $`𝝈`$ given $`𝑱`$. It can reasonably assumed that $`P(𝝈)`$ is a constant, a uniform prior, because one often compresses information before encoding, which usually generates a very uniform distribution of 0s and 1s. Then the $`𝝈`$-dependence of the right hand side comes only from $`P(𝑱|𝝈)`$, and thus we find

$$P(𝝈|𝑱)P(𝑱|𝝈)\mathrm{exp}(\beta _p\underset{\{ijk\mathrm{}\}}{}J_{ijk\mathrm{}}\sigma _i\sigma _j\sigma _k\mathrm{}).$$
(16)
The right hand side is the Boltzmann factor of the Ising spin glass with many body interactions which are quenched since $`𝑱`$ is given and fixed. Therefore the problem has been reduced to the statistical mechanics of the Ising spin glass with the effective coupling $`\beta _p`$.

### 3.4 Statistical inference

There are two typical methods to infer the original information (spin configuration) from the conditional probability (16) called the posterior. One is the MAP (maximum a posteriori probability) method in which one chooses the configuration $`𝝈`$ that maximizes $`P(𝝈|𝑱)`$. This is equivalent to the ground-state search of the Ising spin glass

$$H=\underset{\{ijk\mathrm{}\}}{}J_{ijk\mathrm{}}\sigma _i\sigma _j\sigma _k\mathrm{}$$
(17)
according to (16). Another is the MPM (maximizer of posterior marginals) method; one first marginalizes the posterior with respect to $`\sigma _i`$

$$P(\sigma _i|𝑱)=\underset{\sigma _j(ji)}{}P(𝝈|𝑱)$$
(18)
and chooses $`\sigma _i`$ to maximize this marginal probability. If we write the inferred value as $`\widehat{\xi }_i`$, we have $`\widehat{\xi }_i=\mathrm{arg}\mathrm{max}_{\sigma _i}P(\sigma _i|𝑱)`$. Such a process is carried out at each $`i`$. The MPM is equivalent to looking at the sign of the local magnetization $`\widehat{\xi }_i=\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i`$, where the thermal average is taken using the Boltzmann factor (16) of the Ising spin system with effective coupling $`\beta _p`$. The MAP may be regarded as the same method $`\widehat{\xi }_i=\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i`$, the only difference being that the thermal average is now evaluated at the ground state. Thus these two methods may be called the ground-state decoding (MAP) and finite temperature decoding (MPM), respectively.

An important measure of decoding performance is the overlap of the decoded information (spin configuration) $`\{\widehat{\xi }_i\}`$ and the original true information $`\{\xi _i\}`$,

$$M=\frac{1}{N}\left[\underset{i}{}\xi _i\widehat{\xi }_i\right],$$
(19)
where the square brackets denote the configurational average with respect to the distribution of noise (or equivalently, quenched randomness in interactions). Perfect decoding result gives $`M=1`$ whereas a random result yields $`M=0`$. A larger $`M`$ represents a better result.

It is useful to replace the parameter $`\beta _p`$ in (16) with a general $`\beta `$ because, first, the MAP ($`\beta \mathrm{}`$) and the MPM ($`\beta =\beta _p`$) can be treated within the same framework and, second, one sometimes does not know the correct error rate $`p`$ (and its function $`\beta _p`$) in applying the MPM. The overlap is then a function of $`\beta `$ and $`p`$. It turns out that the overlap $`M(\beta ,p)`$ as a function of $`\beta `$ is not monotonic but reaches the maximum at $`\beta _p`$ (Fig. 4) :

$$M(\beta ,p)M(\beta _p,p).$$
(20)
This non-monotonicity is not surprising intuitively because the overlap has been defined as a measure of average bitwise performance (19) and the MPM has been designed to maximize the bitwise posterior (18). The proof of the inequality (20) will be given in the next subsection.

### 3.5 Interpretation as the Ising spin glass

The inequality (20) has the following interesting interpretation in the context of spin glasses. Let us consider the problem in terms of the ferromagnetic gauge, $`\xi _i=1(i)`$. Generality is not lost by this restriction because the prior has been assumed to be uniform, $`P(𝝈)=`$const, and thus all the original configurations have the same statistical properties, leading to the same average decoding performance $`M(\beta ,p)`$ for any choice of $`\{\xi _i\}`$.

In the ferromagnetic gauge the overlap $`M(\beta ,p)`$ represents the average of the difference between the numbers of up spins and down spins:

$$M(\beta ,p)=\frac{1}{N}\left[\underset{i}{}\widehat{\xi }_i\right]=\left[\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i\right].$$
(21)
It should also be noticed that (16) is equivalent to the Boltzmann factor of the $`\pm J`$ Ising model with many body interactions only for the ferromagnetic gauge, strictly speaking. The reason is that the interaction $`J_{ijk\mathrm{}}(=\xi _i\xi _j\xi _k\mathrm{})`$ is equal to $`+1`$ with probability $`1p`$ and to $`1`$ with probability $`p`$ only in the ferromagnetic gauge. Thus the effective inverse temperature $`\beta _p`$ in (16) represents the condition that the system is on the Nishimori line $`\beta _p=\beta `$ in the ferromagnetic gauge (with $`p`$ and $`1p`$ exchanged from the notation of section 2).

To prove (20) in the ferromagnetic gauge, we first write (21) explicitly:

$$\left[\frac{\sigma _i}{|\sigma _i|}\right]=\frac{1}{(2\mathrm{cosh}\beta _p)^{N_B}}\underset{\tau }{}e^{\beta _p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}}}\frac{_\sigma \sigma _ie^{\beta {\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}}{|_\sigma \sigma _ie^{\beta {\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j}}|}.$$
(22)
Then, by applying the gauge transformation (with gauge variable $`\eta _i`$) and evaluating the upper bound by taking the absolute value of the summand, we find

$`\left[{\displaystyle \frac{\sigma _i}{|\sigma _i|}}\right]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2^N(2\mathrm{cosh}\beta _p)^{N_B}}}{\displaystyle \underset{\eta }{}}{\displaystyle \underset{\sigma }{}}e^{\beta _p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\eta _i\eta _j}}\eta _i_{\beta _p}{\displaystyle \frac{\sigma _i_\beta }{|\sigma _i_\beta |}}`$ (23)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2^N(2\mathrm{cosh}\beta _p)^{N_B}}}{\displaystyle \underset{\eta }{}}{\displaystyle \underset{\sigma }{}}e^{\beta _p{\scriptscriptstyle \tau _{ij}\eta _i\eta _j}}|\eta _i_{\beta _p}|.`$
The last expression is easily seen to be equal to $`[\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i_{\beta _p}]=M(\beta _p,p)`$ if we apply the gauge transformation to $`[\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i_{\beta _p}]`$.

The inequality (20) is interpreted that the number of up spins, relative to the number of down spins, is a non-monotonic function of the temperature. The number of up spins reaches its maximum on the Nishimori line and then decreases as one further lowers the temperature (Fig. 4). In this sense, the spin state on the Nishimori line is more ordered than the states at any other temperature with the same $`p`$.

This is a highly non-trivial result. As one lowers the temperature from the paramagnetic phase, the number of up spins becomes to exceed that of down spins as soon as the system enters the ferromagnetic phase (point A in Fig. 5) if one imposes the boundary condition such that the overall inversion symmetry is broken for the system with two-body interactions. <sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1 Note that the argument in the present section applies to the usual case of two-body interactions as well.

The number of up spins reaches the maximum on the Nishimori line, where, in some sense, thermal fluctuations are balanced with geometrical frustration (point B). Then, as one further lowers the temperature, the spin states start to capture the detailed structure of bond configurations, which were masked by thermal fluctuations above the Nishimori line, and the number of up spins starts to decrease at lowering the temperatures (point C).

It should be remembered here that the magnetization $`m(\beta ,p)=[\sigma _i_\beta ]`$, not the overlap $`M(\beta ,p)=[\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i_\beta ]`$, is of course expected to be a monotonic function of the temperature. Only the number of up spins $`M(\beta ,p)`$, which ignores the spin-size reduction due to thermal fluctuations ($`|\sigma _i|<|\mathrm{sgn}\sigma _i|=1`$), is non-monotonic. We may therefore conclude that the Nishimori line marks the crossover between the purely ferromagnetic region (where $`M`$ increases as the temperature is decreased) and a randomness-dominated region (where $`M`$ decreases). This observation is reinforced by the fact that the ferromagnetic order parameter $`m`$ is equal to the spin glass order $`q`$ on the Nishimori line as can be derived from the functional identity $`P_m(x)=P_q(x)`$ mentioned in section 2: We reasonably expect that the ferromagnetic order dominates $`m>q`$ above the Nishimori line and the opposite is true $`m<q`$ below.

Another interesting and useful aspect concerning the relation (or equivalence) between the Ising spin glass and error-correcting codes is the simplicity of phase space and the absence of slow dynamics on the Nishimori line discussed in section 2. Practical algorithms of decoding are generally implemented as iterative solutions of TAP-like equations for local magnetizations. Such iterations can be regarded as discrete-time dynamics of the Ising spin glass. And the iteration is often carried out on the Nishimori line to achieve the best performance in the sense of maximum overlap $`M`$. Then, if the system shows slow dynamics, the iteration may not converge to the desired result in a reasonable amount of time. The results in section 2 guarantee that this does not happen. <sup>2</sup><sup>2</sup>2 There still exists a problem of appropriate choice of the initial condition in practice .

## 4 Summary

Exact/rigorous results have been presented on static and dynamical properties of the Ising spin glass using the gauge theory. These results have been shown to restrict the possibilities of complex structure of the phase space and slow dynamics of the mean-field type. We have presented a Baysian formulation of error-correcting codes that has a very close formal similarity to the Ising spin glass. The best bitwise inference of the original information has been shown to be achieved by a finite-temperature decoding corresponding to the Nishimori line derived in the gauge theory of spin glasses. We have seen that an inequality on the overlap, which is a measure of decoding performance of error-correcting codes, has an interesting interpretation under the context of spin glasses that the average spin orientation is not a monotonic function of the temperature. The spin ordering, in the sense of the number of up spins (ignoring the spin reduction due to thermal fluctuations), takes its maximum value not at $`T=0`$ but at a finite temperature corresponding to the Nishimori line. Thus the system of Ising spin glass is most ferromagnetically-ordered not in the ground state but at this finite temperature even within the ferromagnetic phase.


text:
# Holographic Discreteness of Inflationary Perturbations

## I Introduction

The origin of cosmological perturbations now appears to be well understood from the quantum theory of fields in curved spacetime . They originate during inflation as zero point fluctuations of the quantum modes of various fields— the inflaton giving rise to scalar perturbations, the graviton to tensor perturbations. The field quanta in the original fluctuations convert to classical perturbations as they pass through the de Sitter-like event horizon; they are then parametrically amplified by an exponential factor during the many subsequent e-foldings of inflation, creating an enormous number of coherent quanta in phase with the original quantum seed perturbation. From the classical point of view, the quantum fluctuations create perturbations in the classical gravitational gauge-invariant potential $`\varphi _m`$, leading to observable background anisotropy and large scale structure. All stages of this process are under good calculational control, even the conversion of quantum to classical regimes . The phase and amplitude of the large-scale classical perturbation modes observed today are a direct result of the quantum field activity during inflation; indeed, the pattern of microwave anisotropy on the largest scales corresponds to a faithfully amplified image of microscopic field configurations as they froze out during inflation. Roughly speaking, each hot or cold patch on the sky derives originally from about one quantum.

The standard calculation of these processes uses a semiclassical approximation: spacetime is assumed to be classical (not quantized), and the perturbed fields (the inflaton and graviton) are described using relativistic quantum field theory, essentially (in the limit of free massless fields) an infinite collection of quantized harmonic oscillators. The Hilbert space of this system is infinite, so although the fields are quantized, they are continuously variable functions that can assume any values. The creation of the particles can be viewed as an effect of the nonadiabatic expansion, and the “collapse of the wavefunction” (in this case, “freezing out”) can be described as a unitary quantum process of state squeezing. The theory generically predicts random-phase gaussian noise with a continuous spectrum determined by the parameters of the inflaton potential. In this approximation, there is no telltale signature of quantum discreteness in the observable classical remnant— the anisotropy of the background radiation. Although sky maps contain images of “single quanta,” their spectrum is continuous and the amount of information is in principle infinite.

It has always been acknowledged that this description is incomplete, and will be modified by including a proper account of spacetime quantization. Although the fundamental theory of such quantization is not known, a “holographic entropy bound” already constrains with remarkable precision the total number of fundamental quantum degrees of freedom. The complete Hilbert space of a bounded volume is finite and discrete rather than infinite and continuous, limiting the range of accessible configurations in any region to a definite, calculable number. In particular this limit applies to inflaton quanta collapsing into classical metric perturbations. This paper uses the holographic entropy bound to estimate where field theory breaks down in the inflationary analysis, the effective dimension of the Hilbert space for the observable perturbations when they freeze out, the maximum amount of information contained in the perturbations, and the level at which quantum-gravitational discreteness appears in cosmic background anisotropy. The main result is that in fundamental theories where the holographic entropy bound arises from discrete fundamental eigenstates, the amount of information in the anisotropy is remarkably limited: it can be described with only about $`10^5`$ bits per sky-harmonic mode, implying that the perturbations should be pixelated in some way. In principle, this effect may be observable, and provide concrete data on the discrete elements or eigenstates of quantum gravity.

## II Holographic Bound on Information Content

Quantitative insights into the Hilbert space of inflationary spacetimes come from the thermodynamics of black holes  and de Sitter spacetimes . The black hole entropy derived from thermodynamic reasoning appears to be complete, in the sense that it includes all possible degrees of freedom of mass-energy that make up the hole. If we insist that black holes are quantum mechanical objects that obey unitary evolution, they must somehow encode all the information counted in this entropy, then radiate it to spatial infinity as Hawking quanta as they evaporate . Such considerations led ’t Hooft and Susskind to propose  a “holographic principle” for physical systems: the total entropy $`S`$ within any surface is bounded by one quarter of the area $`A`$ of the surface in Planck units. (Unless otherwise indicated, throughout this paper we adopt $`\mathrm{}=c=G=1`$, with Planck mass $`m_{Planck}=(\mathrm{}c/G)^{1/2}=1.22\times 10^{19}`$ GeV.) This is an “absolute” entropy; the dimension $`N`$ of the Hilbert space is given by $`e^S`$, and the total number of distinguishable quantum states available to the system is given by a binary number with $`n=S/\mathrm{ln}2=A/4\mathrm{ln}2`$ digits .

Bousso has collected and reviewed these arguments, and proposed a more rigorous formulation called the “covariant entropy bound”: the area of a surface gives a bound on total entropy, not of the enclosed spacelike 3-volume but of the 3-volume defined by certain lightsheets propagated from the surface. This bound is apparently universal in nature; at least, no counterexamples to it have been found. Although the bound seems to hold in all physical situations we can imagine, there does not seem to be any way to derive why this should be so, given only the physics we have. The fact that it always works presumably reflects a deep structure in quantum gravity.

Although a true derivation of the covariant entropy bound is not yet known, its seems to originate from a fundamental theory that incorporates discrete elements or eigenstates. Recent examples of theories that display this property explicitly include loop quantum gravity (where discrete eigenstates appear at a very early stage and appear to be a fundamental feature) and M-theory, where it is demonstrated in particular situations where discrete degrees of freedom can be explicitly traced via holography (such as AdS5/CfT) to discrete symmetries of projective, dual field theories. These types of fundamental structures would also impose a logarithmically finite constraint on the number of possible solutions of fields during inflation— that is, jumps between possible configurations correspond to changes “in the exponent” of the number of states, in the same way that adding just one more discrete element (e.g., a spin-1/2 particle) to a system of $`n`$ binary spins discontinuously grows the Hilbert space from dimension $`2^n`$ to $`2^{n+1}`$.

This property is the most important assumption made in the quantitative estimates of observable discreteness of background radiation anisotropy derived below. It is probably general enough to apply across a broad class of theories, including those now receiving the most theoretical attention. Indeed, the main point is that anisotropy data may provide our first direct view of the underlying, basic elements or eigenstates of the fundamental theory.

The holographic conjecture has been analyzed in a variety of relativistic cosmologies, including de Sitter and anti-de Sitter space . The cosmological version of the holographic bound is  that the “observable entropy”***The observable entropy corresponds to the information contained in a “causal diamond”, a spacetime volume bounded by two intersecting light cones, one open in the future direction of the beginning of an experiment and one in the past direction of the end of the experiment. of any universe cannot exceed $`S_{max}=3\pi /\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, where $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ is the cosmological constant in Planck units. In a de Sitter universe, as in a black hole, this corresponds to one quarter of the area of the event horizon in Planck units, but the bound is conjectured to hold for any spacetime, even Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universes with matter as well as $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$. In the de Sitter case, which we will adopt as a local model for the inflationary spacetime, $`S_{max}=\pi /H^2`$, where $`H`$ is the expansion rate.

The bound includes all degrees of freedom of all matter fields as well as all quantum degrees of freedom of the spacetime itself. It implies for example, that a number with $`\pi /H^2\mathrm{ln}2`$ bits is sufficient to specify everything that is going on in a causal diamond of an inflationary universe. We consider the constraints imposed by the entropy bound on a particular experiment conducted by nature during inflation: the formation of classical perturbations from quantum fluctuations— or equivalently, nonadiabatic particle production and phase wrapping of a highly squeezed field state.

## III Information constraints on field modes during inflation

We adopt as an idealized model of the inflationary period a portion of de Sitter spacetime . Figures 1 and 2 illustrate different views of de Sitter spacetime, each showing two different ways of laying down time and space coordinates. Usually, the field theory analysis of inflationary perturbations is done with the FRW-like slicing of de Sitter spacetime, since these space slices map directly onto the usual spacelike hypersurfaces of the postinflationary FRW metric. The metric in this slicing, which covers half of the full de Sitter solution, appears to have flat spatial slices:

$$ds^2=d\tau ^2+\mathrm{exp}[2H\tau ]dx^idx_i.$$
(1)
The comoving modes have fixed lengths in the Euclidean spatial coordinates $`x_i`$.

The Penrose diagram for a whole inflationary spacetime, including the FRW part at late times, is shown in figure (3). This diagram shows the route by which information flows and by which observable patterns are imprinted on the background radiation by quantum perturbations. For completeness, figure (3) includes not only the causal path for creating microwave background perturbations, but also the trajectories for gravitons in a possible high-frequency gravitational wave background, such as might be detected directly by interferometers such as LIGO, LISA or their successors at frequencies $`10^{\pm 3}`$ Hz. It can be produced by quantum graviton fluctuations during inflation, and also classically by mescoscopic mass motions at later times from e.g. symmetry breaking, dimensional reduction, or reheating. Holographic discreteness might manifest itself in the directly measured classical metric perturbation of the inflationary waves, but that effect is beyond the scope of this paper.

Another slicing of the de Sitter spacetime (which resembles an inside-out version of a black hole spacetime in Schwarzschild coordinates) is described by the metric

$$ds^2=U(r)dt^2+U^1(r)dr^2+r^2d\mathrm{\Omega }_2^2,$$
(2)
where

$$U(r)=1\frac{r^2}{r_0^2},$$
(3)
and $`d\mathrm{\Omega }_2`$ is the (2D) angular interval. The event horizon stands at radius $`r_0=H^1`$, the Bekenstein-Hawking temperature is $`T_{BH}=(2\pi r_0)^1`$, and the event horizon area is

$$A=\frac{4\pi }{H^2}=\frac{12\pi }{\mathrm{\Lambda }}.$$
(4)
These coordinates cover the entire “causal diamond” accessible to any actual observation by an observer at the origin, comprising a finite spatial region (as opposed to the infinite volume of the FRW slicing) subject to the holographic entropy bound. Figure 1 shows a spacetime embedding diagram of this volume with the two slicings in physical units, and figure 2 compares their Penrose diagrams.

It has been established that holography is not consistent with independent field modes, and this can be seen from considering the flow of information in these figures. A spacelike hypersurface in the coordinates (2) extends into the distant, highly redshifted past and gets very close to the event horizon. The bulk of the information from a typical small 3-volume near such a surface in the distant past ended up getting advected out of the horizon. (The full information of a 3-volume only survives from the Planck scale to the horizon scale for a single Planck-sized patch in the very center of the volume at $`r=0`$). Following one of the hypersurfaces (2) back to where it lies within a Planck wavelength of the horizon corresponds to a redshift of only $`\sqrt{2/H}`$ relative to where it intersects the origin (rather than $`H^1`$ which takes a horizon-scale mode to the Planck length). Since this is the regime where we expect quantum-gravitational information mixing among modes, the vacua of the modes will be affected by quantum gravity at a physical mode wavelength much larger than the Planck scale. The “stretched event horizon” of the de Sitter space acts like the event horizon of a black hole, thermalizing the system by allowing (strong gravitational) interactions between modes of different wavelength, so that unitary evolution is not independent for each comoving-wavelength mode; instead their information is mixed.

Consider the holographic constraints on the propagation of physical influences from above the Planck scale. Note that for realistic inflation models with $`H`$ well below the Planck scale, the maximum observable entropy $`S_{max}=\pi /H^2`$ is always much less than the 3-D de Sitter volume, $`4\pi /3H^3`$. This means that the holographic bound precludes information from the super-Planck regime from directly propagating to observable scales: there isn’t enough information available in the de Sitter volume to specify the state of every mode on the Planck scale at any given time. Conversely, when any given mode has expanded to the de Sitter scale, much less than one bit of information per de Sitter volume survives from “its own” Planck epoch. Holography allows at most on average only one bit per mode at a scale $`\lambda _{hol}(\lambda _{Planck}^2/H)^{1/3}`$; below this scale holography tells us that it is inconsistent to assume that the states of each mode can be specified independently, because there is not enough information available to do so. (Incidentally, this scale is about a fermi today, based on the current estimates of $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$; however this has no effect on any local experiment.)

While the effects of super-Planckian physics have been a subject of debate within the field theory framework , these information-counting arguments suggests that in these models, any field theory omits an important constraint of spacetime quantization on the fluctuations even well below the Planck scale. Of course, counting arguments do not inform us by what mechanism the holographic constraint intervenes.

## IV discreteness of cosmic background anisotropy

### A Minimal discreteness: spacetimes quantized in discrete steps of $`N`$

The holographic constraint clearly imposes some discreteness on the behavior of an inflationary spacetime. At the very least, if the classical $`H`$ adjusts itself in such a way that the Hilbert space dimension $`N`$ (as the fundamental quantity ) is to come out to be an integer, $`H`$ proceeds through a series of discrete steps with

$$H_i=\sqrt{\frac{\pi }{\mathrm{ln}N_i}}$$
(5)
where $`N_i`$ are integers. For example, nearly exact Planck-scale inflation $`H=\sqrt{\pi /\mathrm{ln}(23)}=1.000972\mathrm{}`$ occurs for $`N=23`$.

In principle, this property is observable. The pattern of microwave anisotropy on the sky on large scales includes direct images, created by the Sachs-Wolfe effect, of the inflaton perturbations in about $`\mathrm{}_{rec}^210^4`$ independent de Sitter volumes, where $`\mathrm{}_{rec}`$ is the angular wavenumber corresponding to the horizon at last scattering. (Below this scale the observed anisotropy is strongly affected by plasma oscillations and propagating modes, so the primordial information is less directly visible). Thus in this example we can observe $`10^4`$ samplings of a process that originally only yielded 23 distinguishable outcomes, and we should be able to discern repeated patterns.

Of course, we cannot yet predict what those patterns are, since we don’t know what the states of quantum gravity look like (although Bekenstein has made quantitative conjectures about quantum states of black hole spacetimes). The quantum gravitational discreteness could manifest itself in a very simple way, such as a discrete component to the spectrum of spherical harmonics instead of the continuous gaussian random phase distribution predicted by the field theory approximation; or in a more subtle way, as repeated patterns of sky pixel amplitudes. In this case the discreteness may be more conspicuous in the phase information (as opposed to the power spectrum amplitude) of anisotropy.

The number of distinguishable states grows exponentially, $`N=\mathrm{exp}[\pi H^2]`$. If this corresponds to the number of possible options for the horizon-scale fluctuations in a de Sitter spacetime, the holographic discreteness is only observable if $`H`$ lies within a factor of a few of the Planck scale. Even in principle, the largest number of independent inflationary horizons on the sky (observable in principle in an inflationary gravitational-wave background) is “only” $`10^{58}`$ (the inverse solid angle of a comoving Planck patch); therefore if $`\pi /H^2\mathrm{ln}(10)58`$, the discrete system becomes indistinguishable from a continuum. Thus we certainly need $`H0.15`$ for an observable effect.

We know that $`H`$ during inflation is not nearly this large. Quantum graviton fluctuations lead to classical tensor-mode perturbations of amplitude $`h_{rms}H`$. This leads to a general upper bound (discussed in more detail below) on the Hubble constant during inflation, from observations of large angular scale background anisotropy, of about $`H10^5`$. The maximum observable de Sitter entropy exceeds $`S_{max}10^{10}`$, which means that the total number of quantum states exceeds $`\mathrm{exp}[10^{10}]`$. If the number of distinguishable states accessible to an inflaton mode when its wavefunction collapses were this large, the usual continuum approximation would be a good one for all conceivable microwave background observations on large scales.

However, this estimate does not apply in many theories. Holographic discreteness in string theory and loop quantum gravity, like discreteness in the Hilbert spaces of more familiar quantum systems such as collections of spinning particles, probably derives ultimately from discrete elements in the fundamental theory. In the remainder of this paper we assume that it is these elements, and not the states, which can only be added “one at a time”. In this case, fluctuations are quantized in discrete steps of $`n`$ (or $`S`$) rather than $`N`$.

### B Fluctuations quantized in discrete steps of $`S`$

Holography tells us that the maximum observable total entropy and the de Sitter expansion rate are connected by $`S_{max}=\pi /H^2`$. We assume that this connection arises from fundamental discrete elements so that $`S`$ (or $`n=S/\mathrm{ln}2`$) occurs in integer steps, fixing a finite set of discrete values for $`H`$. Scalar perturbations, which appear today as observable temperature perturbations, are determined classically by the dynamics of the inflaton field $`\varphi `$; the inflaton perturbations originate as quantum states, and when they freeze, they in turn directly fix $`H`$, so that their configurations are also constrained to a finite discrete set of options. We now proceed to estimate observable discreteness— characterized by the number of options available, or the amount of information contained in the classical scalar perturbations— following these connections.

To estimate the graininess associated with holographic constraints on inflaton fluctuations, we consider a very simple toy model, where observable regions of quasi-de Sitter spaces occur in a discrete set of eigenstates of $`H`$ with splitting $`\mathrm{\Delta }H`$ between adjacent levels:

$$\mathrm{}|H_0+\mathrm{\Delta }H>|H_0>|H_0\mathrm{\Delta }H>|H_02\mathrm{\Delta }H>|H_03\mathrm{\Delta }H>\mathrm{},$$
(6)
where $`|H_0>`$ denotes a reference de Sitter space of with expansion rate $`H_0`$. The secular classical evolution of an inflationary spacetime represents a steady rightward flow, and quantum fluctuations can go in either direction (although the field-theory fluctuations are in general coherent over many of these transitions). This leads to discreteness in observable anisotropy with steps of some amplitude $`\mathrm{\Delta }T/T`$.

The key assumption of the toy model is that the background spacetime and horizon-scale fluctuations occur through a sequence of transitions between discrete states, each of which adds (or subtracts) one bit of information to the total maximum observable entropy. That is, instead of the $`H`$ coming in discrete steps of $`N`$ as in Eq. (5), it comes in discrete steps of $`n`$:

$$H_i=\sqrt{\frac{\pi }{n_i\mathrm{ln}2}}$$
(7)
where $`n_i`$ are integers. Once we have assumed discrete steps in $`H`$, this ansatz represents a plausible lower bound on the step size required for consistency: if $`\mathrm{\Delta }H`$ were smaller, the total entropy increment (in all modes of all fields) would be less than one bit, which is not enough even to include the degree of freedom represented just by the jump in $`H`$.

The final state is the product of transition operators, the final information the sum of that in the transitions. The change in the dimension of the total Hilbert space for the cumulative effect— including the change in the set of all possible field fluctuations— is still very large, $`\delta N=\mathrm{exp}[S_{max}]\delta S_{max}`$; this reflects the cumulative effect of choices made in each new bit. The holographic bound indicates that the Hilbert space is the same size as a collection of $`n`$ spins; in this model, spacetimes are assumed to exhibit the same discreteness as a discrete integer number of such spins.

To estimate the observable consequences of the toy model, we use the classical dynamics of the inflaton, the bulk of which forms a nearly homogeneous zero-momentum condensate. The classical expectation value $`\varphi _c`$ of the inflaton field has a unique connection to the entropy through its effect on the spacetime geometry: the effective potential $`V(\varphi _c)`$ and de Sitter rate $`H`$ that controls the total entropy are related via the Friedmann equation,

$$H^2=\frac{8\pi }{3}\left[V(\varphi _c)+\dot{\varphi }_c^2/2\right].$$
(8)
Therefore, large-scale classical perturbations in the inflaton field are directly mapped onto total observable entropy and also, in the toy model, come in discrete steps. We assume that in the discrete sequence of de Sitter eigenstates, eigenstates of $`H`$ are also eigenstates of $`\varphi _c`$.

The background (unperturbed, continuous, classical) evolution of a homogeneous noninteracting scalar field $`\varphi _c`$, is controlled by the classical dynamical equation

$$\ddot{\varphi }_c+3H\dot{\varphi }_c+V^{}(\varphi _c)=0,$$
(9)
where $`V^{}dV/d\varphi _c`$. We assume for simplicity that the observed modes crossed the inflationary horizon during a standard so-called “slow roll” or Hubble-viscosity-limited phase of inflation, corresponding to $`V^{}/V\sqrt{48\pi }`$ and $`V^{\prime \prime }/V24\pi `$, during which $`\dot{\varphi }_cV^{}/3H`$. The rate of the roll is much slower than the expansion rate $`H`$, so the kinetic term in Eq. (8) can be ignored in the mean evolution. The slow-roll phase of inflation creates approximately scale-invariant curvature perturbations.

We define a combination of inflationary parameters by

$$Q_S\frac{H^3}{|V^{}|}\left(\frac{V^3}{V^2}\right)^{1/2}\left(\frac{8\pi }{3}\right)^{3/2}.$$
(10)
This combination controls the Hilbert space attached to the perturbations. It also happens that it can be estimated fairly accurately, since it also controls the amplitude of the scalar perturbations observed in the microwave background anisotropy. Adopting the notation of , the anisotropy can be decomposed into scalar and tensor components,

$$\frac{Q^2}{T_\gamma ^2}=S_Q+T_Q,$$
(11)
where $`Q`$ denotes the (global) mean quadrupole anisotropy amplitude, $`T_\gamma =2.725\pm 0.002`$ the mean temperature, and the scalar and tensor contributions $`S_Q`$ and $`T_Q`$ to the mean quadrupole $`C_2`$ are given by

$$S_Q=\frac{5C_2^S}{4\pi }2.9\frac{V^3}{V^2}$$
(12)
and

$$T_Q=\frac{5C_2^T}{4\pi }0.56V,$$
(13)
using numerical factors for a slow-roll, flat $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ model. The best fit to the four-year COBE/DMR data, assuming scale invariance ($`n=1`$, and $`T_Q=0`$), yields  $`Q=18\pm 1.6\mu `$K, and hence combining the above,

$$Q_S=9.4\pm 0.84\times 10^5.$$
(14)
(Note that if we instead assume $`S_Q=0`$, these formulae also yield the upper bound $`H2\times 10^5`$ discussed above, from the tensor modes alone.)

During slow-roll inflation, there is a steady increase in observable entropy at a rate

$$\dot{S}_{max}=\frac{8\pi ^2}{9}\frac{V^2}{H^5}=8\pi ^2HQ_S^2.$$
(15)
Every inflationary $`e`$-folding, $`S_{max}`$ increases by an amount of order $`10^{10}`$ due just to the classical evolution of the system. (In a time $`10^{10}/H`$, the total observable entropy changes by about one bit.) The important point, which we will now elaborate, is that the information attached to the observable quantity— the horizon-scale perturbation in the inflaton— is much smaller than this, of order $`10^5`$. The basic reason is that the horizon-scale perturbations contribute only a small fraction $`10^5`$ of the total change in observable entropy; consequently, we conjecture that a typical perturbation can be completely characterized by $`10^5`$ bits per Hubble volume. The framework for this argument is illustrated in figure (4).

Consider a spatially uniform change $`\delta \varphi _c`$ in the classical inflaton condensate, extending over a volume greater than $`(4\pi /3)H^3`$. This changes the total observable de Sitter entropy in the affected volume by an amount

$$\delta S_{tot}=\frac{2\pi }{H^3}\delta H=\frac{2\pi }{H^3}\frac{4\pi }{3H}V^{}\delta \varphi _c.$$
(16)
Now consider the effect of a quantum perturbation in the inflaton field of amplitude $`\delta \varphi `$, assuming that it behaves like a “frozen in” classical spacetime background. Substituting from the classical slow-roll formulae above, an estimate for the jump in total entropy associated with a horizon-scale perturbation $`\delta \varphi `$ can be directly expressed in terms of the observable quantity $`Q_S`$,

$$\delta S_{tot}=\frac{8\pi ^2}{3}\left[\frac{\delta \varphi }{H}\right]Q_S^1.$$
(17)
The standard field theory analysis for the horizon-size perturbations predicts that as they are frozen in (or squeezed) into a classical state, the quantity $`[\delta \varphi /H]`$ is statistically determined, with a continuous gaussian statistical distribution of order unit width. The corresponding increment $`\delta S_{qft}(8\pi ^2/3)Q_S^1`$ then is roughly the jump in the total observable cosmological entropy associated with the creation or destruction of a single horizon-scale inflaton quantum.

Therefore, the standard quantum transition corresponding to a typical perturbation yields a total change of no more than about $`\delta S_{qft}(8\pi ^2/3)Q_S^110^5`$ in the maximum observable entropy. This is much less than the increase given by Eq. (15) in the total information during an expansion time. Thus the amount of information $`\delta S_{qft}`$ attached to the perturbation in the horizon-size inflaton quantum $`\delta \varphi `$ as it freezes into a classical state is much less than the total growth of information of the spacetime during the same time, of order $`Q_S^1`$ rather than $`Q_S^2`$. This may be enough to produce a detectable level of discreteness.

Is this story consistent with the more general ideas that motivated holography in the first place? The naiive assumption in our toy model is that the dimension of the observable Hilbert space changes in steps of one bit in the exponent, with each binary choice corresponding to a transition to a new quasi- de Sitter eigenstate. This does not mesh trivially with the idea of preserving overall unitary evolution so this cannot be quite the whole story; but indeed it is not a trivial matter to even define unitarity rigorously in deSitter spacetime. Another comment is that modes much smaller than the horizon have their accessible Hilbert space changed due to a quantum fluctuation on the horizon scale. From the point of view of an observer at rest in the center of a “$`\delta \varphi `$ patch,” much of the incremental information attached to $`\delta \varphi `$ appears in modes much smaller than $`H^1`$— the short-wavelength modes close to the stretched event horizon that are still having their vacuum initial states formed, and only later expand to the horizon scale. Much of the “new” information represented by $`\delta S_{tot}`$ must be available to modes near the stretched event horizon as viewed by any given observer— modes which are much smaller than $`H^1`$. Thus it makes sense that the information available to the configurations of horizon-scale fluctuations is much smaller than $`S_{max}`$.

### C Toy Model of Anisotropy with Discrete Levels of $`T`$

It is useful to delve into some more detail with a more concrete, albeit unrealistic, toy model for discreteness in the perturbations. Suppose that the possible values of the horizon-size inflaton perturbation $`\delta \varphi `$ are selected from a discrete set of levels separated by some step size $`\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi `$. The incremental observable information made available by the transition between levels is

$$\mathrm{\Delta }S_{tot}=\frac{8\pi ^2}{3}\left[\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi }{H}\right]Q_S^1,$$
(18)
including all the degrees of freedom of all the fields, not just the inflaton. We now assert that jumps in $`\delta \varphi `$ occur in steps of at least a certain minimum size $`\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi `$, such that $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_{tot}\mathrm{ln}2`$ (that is, a change of at least one bit in total observable entropy). This leads to a definite minimum step size,

$$\left[\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi }{H}\right]Q_S(3\mathrm{ln}2/8\pi ^2)=2.5\times 10^6.$$
(19)
As above, this ansatz seems necessary for consistency: a step at least this large is needed just to specify the degree of freedom represented by the $`\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi `$ transition itself.

Taking this model literally and assuming subsequent linear classical evolution, this discreteness of the field amplitudes leads to a discrete set of values for the curvature perturbation (e.g., Bardeen’s $`\varphi _m`$), and therefore the observed temperature perturbation $`\delta T`$, which is largely determined by this quantity via the Sachs-Wolfe effect. The discrete jumps are smaller than the total standard predicted perturbation amplitude by about the factor

$$\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }T}{\delta T}\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi }{\delta \varphi }.$$
(20)
That is, the amplitude of the anisotropy on the sky, instead of coming from a continuous distribution (with variance $`Q^2`$ contributed by fluctuations in each octave of angular wavenumber), comes from a discrete distribution, with values of $`T`$ formed by a sum of discrete increments of order $`\mathrm{\Delta }T`$, where

$$\left[\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }T}{Q}\right]\left[\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi }{H}\right].$$
(21)
The amplitude difference at which the discreteness appears is about

$$\mathrm{\Delta }T\left[\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi }{H}\right]Q10^{10}\mathrm{K}.$$
(22)
## V Observations?

The toy-model results should not be taken as a literal physical prediction of the character of the discreteness; such a prediction would require understanding of the true eigenmodes of the system. We do not know from these arguments what their detailed character is, or how they might be manifested in the $`A_\mathrm{}m`$ spectrum of the anisotropy. (For this reason, we have also glossed over the facts that observed anisotropy is a superposition of modes from different comoving scales, and that these are increasingly affected, on scales smaller than the quadrupole, by propagation effects before, during and after recombination that modify the primordial signal).

The analysis above does however highlight several new and unexpected features that might apply to the real-world discreteness: (1) The characteristic fractional amplitude of the inflaton perturbation discreteness is not exponentially small, but is comparable to the overall scalar perturbation amplitude. (2) The information in a typical horizon-scale perturbation does not depend explicitly on unknown parameters such as the values of $`H`$ or $`V^{}`$, except through the observable combination $`Q_S`$. (3) The holographic counting arguments suggest that an inflaton perturbation at the time it freezes out has a Hilbert space equivalent to only about $`10^5`$ binary spins. We therefore conjecture that the theory incorporating the true eigenmodes may predict some (unspecified) kind of discreteness corresponding to less than about $`10^5`$ bits of information per mode.

The observability of discreteness depends greatly on how it is manifested. To choose a somewhat silly example, suppose that rather than occuring in $`10^5`$ discrete levels of amplitude, a perturbation is composed of $`10^5`$ discrete binary pixels on the sky. This level of pixelation in the quadrupole modes (say) would not be completely erased by transport effects at recombination, which propagate on an angular scale comparable to this pixel size (for example, the angular wavenumber of the first “acoustic peak” in the angular power spectrum $`C_{\mathrm{}}^2`$ is at $`\mathrm{}200`$, corresponding to $`\mathrm{}^24\times 10^4`$ pixels). With discreteness encoded this way, each pixel might be either hot or cold, $`\delta T/T=\pm 1\times 10^5`$ (say). Intermediate gray levels would appear as a checkerboard pattern of alternating hot and cold pixels on a scale of about a degree of arc. Such a pattern would be very conspicuous in the current data, even allowing for the complication that it would be superimposed on approximately gaussian noise from smaller scale modes of comparable overall amplitude.

Thus, for some kinds of eigenmodes, observations of holographic discretness may be practical. The possibility of finding such a qualitatively new effect motivates a search in the microwave background data for discrete behavior, in either the amplitudes or the multipole phases. Some tests are straightforward; for example, a histogram of $`A_\mathrm{}m`$ amplitudes normalized to a best-fit smooth $`C_{\mathrm{}}`$ spectrum might show statistically significant departures from a gaussian distribution. These discreteness effects are qualititively different from (and have a more distinctively quantum character than) other possible new effects, for example string-theory-inspired predictions of departures from standard inflationary theory for the tensor and scalar power spectra. However, if the level of discreteness is as small as $`\mathrm{\Delta }T/T10^{10}`$, and appears only as discrete levels of Sachs-Wolfe perturbation amplitude (say), plasma motions during recombination, as well as nonlinear couplings, are likely to smear out all the observable traces of primordial discreteness even on the largest scales.

###### Acknowledgements.

I am grateful for useful conversations with J. Bardeen, R. Bousso, and R. Brandenberger. This work was supported by NSF grant AST-0098557 at the University of Washington.


text:
# On the association of G343.1-2.3 and PSR 1706-44

## 1 Introduction

The pulsar PSR B1706-44 is one of only seven that are known to emit gamma-rays in the GeV energy range (Thompson et al., 1992) and one of only three that have been detected in the TeV range (Kifune et al., 1995; Chadwick et al., 1998). Becker et al. (1995) reported that the power law spectrum from the compact source at the site of the pulsar was best explained by synchrotron origin, presumably a nebula around the pulsar. Finley et al. (1998) found that PSR B1706-44 is surrounded by a compact X-ray nebula of radius $`0.3`$ pc using ASCA data. This is also true of the other two TeV emitters, the Crab and Vela pulsars. The TeV gamma-rays, which appear to be unpulsed, can be explained as resulting from the Inverse Compton interaction of the high energy electrons, which produce the X-ray synchrotron emission, with ambient photons (Aharonian et al., 1997).

The original discovery that the COS-B gamma-ray source was a pulsar was made by Johnston et al. (1992). The spin down luminosity is high, $`3.4\times 10^{36}`$ ergs, as would be expected. McAdam et al. (1993) published a map made by the MOST telescope at 843 MHz of the area around the gamma-ray source. It showed a semicircular arc of emission, which has subsequently been denoted as the supernova remnant (SNR) G343.1-2.3, with the pulsar seemingly embedded in a small feature at its south eastern extremity. It was argued that the approximate distance of 3 kpc for the remnant, derived from the surface brightness-diameter relationship ($`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$-D) was compatible with the pulsar’s dispersion measure, although the distance indicated by the widely used interstellar electron density model of Taylor & Cordes (1993) would be only 1.8 kpc. The $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$-D relationship was based on the flux density values from single dish observations, as both the VLA and the MOST integrated flux fell short of what would be expected, implying that the broad structure was being resolved (McAdam et al., 1993).

If the association of the pulsar and the supernova remnant is real, a transverse velocity of $`900`$ kms-1 is required for the pulsar to have moved from the approximate geometric centre of the SNR arc in the characteristic spin down time of 17 kyr. This is high, but not the highest measured value for a pulsar, nor as high as that implied for some seemingly well-established pulsar-SNR associations (Manchester et al., 1991; Frail & Kulkarni, 1991).

Frail et al. (1994) imaged the area around the pulsar at 20 cm and 90 cm with the VLA and cast doubt on its association with G343.1-2.3. These arguments were based on the morphology, and the fact that the dispersion measure (DM) and $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$-D distance were discrepant. The latter was subsequently countered by a 21 cm hydrogen line absorption measurement of the pulsar by Koribalski et al. (1995) which gives a distance range of 2.4 to 3.2 kpc. Most recently the region has been imaged in more detail by Giacani et al. (2001) at 20, 6 and 3.6 cm and they concurred with Frail et al. (1994) description of a nebula size of $`3.5^{}\times 2.5^{}`$.

Nicastro et al. (1996) also argue against the association. They report a maximum value of only 27 kms-1 for the magnitude of the transverse velocity of the pulsar calculated from the interstellar scintillation. However in their later paper (Johnston et al., 1998), this estimate was revised up to 100 kms-1. The possibility of a direct determination of the proper motion of PSR B1706-44 has been investigated, but no phase reference sufficiently strong for the current Australian VLBI network (the LBA) could be found.

We have made a number of high sensitivity, low surface brightness images of the remnant to determine its full extent. Furthermore we have used CHANDRA archived data to search for a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) to provide evidence for the pulsar interaction with the interstellar medium (ISM).

## 2 Results from the Compact Array

The Australia Telescope Compact Array has been used to re-observe G343.1-2.3, with a nineteen pointing mosaic. Mosaicing was required both to cover the extent of the source and also to assist in the recovery of the flux on the shortest uv spacings, which were missed in the MOST and the VLA observations. Primary calibration was against PKS1934-638 which has an integrated flux of 16.4 Jy at 1.384 GHz. The mean observing epoch was September 1998. Deconvolution used the mosaic version of the standard MIRIAD maximum entropy methods for polarised images; PMOSMEM. The RMS noise in the final total intensity image is 0.6 mJy.

Figure 1 shows the total intensity images of the whole remnant (Figure 1 a) and of the region around the PSR (Figure 1 b). The pulsar region is overlaid with the polarisation vectors. The full image is very similar to those from MOST (McAdam et al., 1993), and indeed has very similar resolution ($`70^{\prime \prime }\times 47^{\prime \prime }`$) (the longer baselines, to the 6km antenna, were not used due to the uv poor coverage). We have included as a constraint in the deconvolution the observed total flux for the SNR, 30 Jy, observed with the University of Tasmania’s 26m antenna.

When the total flux from single dish measurements is included, the images obtained are in agreement with the other observations, i.e. the extent agrees with the very low frequency images from the VLA (Frail et al., 1994) and MRT (Dodson, 1997; Golap, 1998), and the spectral index has a simple monotonic spectrum of -0.5 (Dodson et al., 1999).

Figure 2 shows the polarisation angle overlaid on the polarised intensity. The polarised fraction is typically about 20 percent with a randomly orientated polarisation angle which changes rapidly around the bright ring. Wisps of polarised emission can be seen to extend beyond the originally defined ring, and throughout the region with broadscale emission. This confirms that the broadscale emission is associated with the synchrotron emission from the SNR.

The pulsar is a point source with a flux density of 10 mJy, in line with that found in the scintillation fluctuation observations of Johnston et al. (1998), and is 70 per cent linearly polarised, and 25 per cent circularly polarised. The mean pulsar position is 17:09:42.71 -44:29:08.1 with an RMS of 0.5 arc seconds between epochs, within the errors estimates of Wang et al. (2000), but is slightly south of the VLA observations; that is -44:29:06.6.

It is instructive to compare the VLA images of Frail et al. (1994, figure 4) with the image in Figure 1 b). The pulsar lies on a spur of emission which is clearly a continuous feature covering more than $`30^{}`$. Thus it is extremely unlikely to be a cometary tail from the pulsar. Furthermore the width of the spur, $`4^{}`$, is too broad to be due to ram pressure of a moving pulsar. It is intriguing that this is approximately the size that would be expected from a static pulsar wind, derived from the Sedov equations with a continuous input of energy, and with the $`\dot{E}`$ of PSR1706-44 (Rees & Gunn, 1974). Taking the expressions from Frail & Scharringhausen (1997), the equation of the static shock radius ($`R_s`$) is;

$$R_s=(\frac{\dot{E}}{4\pi \rho _0})^{1/5}t^{3/5}\mathrm{pc}3.6\dot{E}_{34}^{1/5}t_5^{3/5}n_0^{1/5}D_{kpc}^1\mathrm{arc}\mathrm{min}$$
(1)
Where $`\dot{E}_{34}`$ is the spin down energy in unit of $`10^{43}`$ ergs s-1, $`n_0`$ is the number density, $`t_5`$ is the age in $`10^5`$ years and $`D_{kpc}`$ is the distance in kpc. Using the standard values gives $`1.7^{}n_0^{1/5}`$ using the lower limit on the distance.

The formula for a ram pressure shock driven PWN ($`R_w`$) is;

$$R_w=(\frac{\dot{E}}{4\pi c\rho \nu _{PSR}^2})^{1/2}0.475\dot{E}_{34}^{1/2}n_0^{1/2}\nu _{150}^1D_{kpc}^1\mathrm{arc}\mathrm{sec}$$
(2)
or $`3.7^{\prime \prime }n_0^{1/2}\nu _{150}^1`$. $`\nu _{150}`$ is the velocity in units of 150 kms-1.

It is clear that the radius of the feature seen in the radio band cannot be due to the ram pressure shock unless the density is extremely low ($`2\times 10^4`$). It is consistent with the size expected for a static PWN, with a number density of the order suggested by the analysis of the ROSAT data, i.e. 0.09 cm-3 (Dodson, 1997; Dodson et al., 1999; Becker et al., 1995). These observations are contaminated by the nearby low mass X-ray binary, LMXB 1705-44, but a best fit of a thermal spectrum to the X-ray emission from the SNR gives a distance of 3.1 kpc, and an age of 8.9 kyrs. These values are derived using the X-ray luminosity to distance model of Kassim et al. (1994). The local density based on the pulsar age is 0.09 cm-3, whilst that from the Sedov model age is 0.02 cm-3.

## 3 Observations with the CHANDRA X-ray telescope

We took 48 ksecs of HRC data and 17 ksecs of ACIS data from the CHANDRA X-ray observatory archive and imaged the region around the pulsar. These observations were made in August and February 2000, with roll angles 180o apart. A similar low surface brightness extended feature is clearly visible in both the HRC and the ACIS data, as first reported by Finley et al. (1998). Their ASCA observations, complicated by contamination from the bright LMXB 1705-44, saw evidence for a 14–33′′ compact nebula in the radial surface brightness. The feature as seen by CHANDRA as it is visible in both data sets, can not be due to the space craft dither, nor due to a soft proton flare or any other random and unrelated event.

We have found the peak energy of the pulsar emission to be around 1 keV from the ACIS data, and have ‘CLEANed’ the HRC data (smoothed to 0.3′′) with the PSF for that energy. CLEAN is a standard deconvolution technique where a small fraction of the PSF is subtracted interatively from the image, until a conversion condition is met (Högbom, 1974). Our convergence criterion was satisfied when the peak emission was more than half the PSF width from the pulsar position. Significant emission (10 percent of peak) remained at this point. It was perfectly feasible to clean this feature iteratively as well, but equally good results were obtained by fitting a Gaussian model around the pulsar position. Figure 3 shows the emission after the cleaning the point source with the PSF; its position is marked with a cross. This confirms the object seen by Finley et al. (1998), but finds a two dimensional structure and a smaller extent which can be explained by the degree of contamination in the ASCA image. The object has a very compact nebula (but much greater than the PSF) around the pulsar which is best fitted by a Gaussian of about 1.1$`\pm 0.1^{\prime \prime }`$, and a more tenuous trail pointing nor-north west, and extending about 5′′ back from the pulsar. The angle of symmetry of this tail is $`15^o`$, toward the SNR centre. The brightness of the tenuous nebula is about 10 times greater than that of the point spread function of the CHANDRA mirrors; i.e. 1 percent of the pulsar peak, whereas the PSF would be 0.1 percent. The most likely, and most natural, physical model of such a structure is a bow shock, with the more tenuous tail left behind in the wake.

The pulsar to bow shock distance at the closest approach ($`1.1^{\prime \prime }`$), at 2.4 kpc, is just 0.05 pc. If the scintillation velocity limit found by Johnston et al. (1998) is correct then the density is required to be greater than 25 cm-3, or, if the densities are those found from the ROSAT observations (Dodson, 1997; Dodson et al., 1999; Becker et al., 1995), the velocities are in the range 1000–2000 kms-1, greater than that required to move from the centre of the SNR to the current position. More typical densities imply reasonable velocities (500 kms-1 implies a density of unity). These are obviously much higher that those seen by the scintillation velocity, but we stress that this is an indirect measurement with a large intrinsic scatter, and only a VLBI observation will settle the question, for which the LBA will need to be upgraded.

From the HRC image we cleaned out 294 counts for the pulsar before the convergence criterion was reached. The integrated X-ray flux from the compact nebula is 390 counts and the tenuous tail is 120 counts. We fitted a number of models to the ACIS data in SHERPA 2.2. The best fit to the source spectrum was found with joint fitting of the two sources; the region around the pulsar as a black body plus a power law portion and the PWN as an independent power law. These were attenuated with the usual column density absorption. The fact that the same spectrum could not be fitted to both features confirms that it is not the result of incorrectly removed spacecraft dither. The model fits for the black body can be used to calculate the diameter of the emission region from the normalisation constant ($`228.5_{138}^{+525}R_{km}^2D_{10kpc}^2`$). Using the Hi distance limits gives the radius of the emitting region as $`3.6_{1.3}^{+3}`$$`4.8_{1.8}^{+4}`$ km. The unabsorbed X-ray flux gives the range of intrinsic luminosities to be 5.4–7.1 $`\times 10^{32}`$ ergs s-1 from the black body (presumably the pulsar) and 7.6–9.9 $`\times 10^{32}`$ ergs s-1 from the power law regions (the PWN). The fits are shown in figure 4. The reduced Chi-squared is 0.6 and a Q-statistic of 99%, implying that the errors have been underestimated. The column densities agree with those from the ROSAT observations (Becker et al., 1995).

The fitted model parameters are;

| $`n_H/10^{21}`$ | TBB/keV | $`\gamma _{psr}`$ | $`\gamma _{pwn}`$ | reduced $`\chi ^2`$ |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| $`5.3\pm 0.8`$ | $`0.15\pm 0.02`$ | $`1.7\pm 0.5`$ | $`1.5\pm 0.2`$ | 31/53 |

The integrated X-ray flux between 0.5 and 10 keV for each component in ergs cm-2s-1 is;

|  | Black Body | Power Lawpsr | Power Lawpwn |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Received | $`0.7\times 10^{13}`$ | $`1.6\times 10^{13}`$ | $`4.6\times 10^{13}`$ |
| Unabsorbed | $`5.8\times 10^{13}`$ | $`2.2\times 10^{13}`$ | $`5.9\times 10^{13}`$ |

## 4 Conclusion

Initially the arguments against the association were based on Kaspi’s criteria (Kaspi, 1996). These can be summarised in order of ease of observability as; same position, same distance, same age, velocity reasonable and proper motion correct. It was felt that the pulsar DM distance and the SNR $`\mathrm{\Sigma }`$-D distance did not match, and the pulsar was at the edge of the SNR and had too low a velocity to have travelled from the geometric centre of the SNR. Also there was no morphological evidence to imply a velocity direction, and the scintillation velocity was too low. Since then work (Koribalski et al., 1995) has shown that the DM distance was incorrect, and our ATCA observations have found that the extent of the SNR has been underestimated. The Chandra data shows a morphological signature best interpreted as the path of the pulsar. The proper motion of the pulsar is the remaining question, and work is under way to attempt to answer that.

It is clear from both the low total flux values found by the MOST and VLA maps that there is a smooth broad component to this SNR. The ATCA observations confirm the extent of the broad emission, and that this is non-thermal in character. Taking this smooth component as the true limits of the SNR enlarges the extent and moves it southwards. This places the pulsar PSR1706-44 within the SNR shell, rather than on the rim, thus satisfying Kaspi’s first criteria.

The X-ray PWN observed by CHANDRA is consistent with the pulsar travelling from the general direction of the SNR centre, with either a very slow velocity (which would agree with the scintillation results) or a low local density (in agreement with the ROSAT results).

We expect a SNR to be associated with PSR1706-44 because of its youth. The association with G343.1-2.3 was rejected in the past, but we have shown that the grounds for the rejection are not compelling. The question of the pulsar velocity could be resolved by finding a phase reference for VLBI observation, with either the SKA or an upgrade to the current LBA. We will be able to rule out the upper velocity limits with the ATCA within the next few years but will not be able to measure the lower limits for a few decades.

Finally the result stresses the importance of improving the ROSAT observations of this SNR with a mosaic over the whole area of the radio emission using either CHANDRA or XMM.

## 5 acknowledgments

During the writing of this paper K.R. Anantharamaiah of the RRI passed away. Both of us trained as astronomers there, and wish to acknowledge his friendly encouragement and interest that persuaded us that radio astronomy is a rewarding and exciting field.

Also we wish to thank B. Gaensler for discussion of the spectral fits.

The X-ray data for the Chandra observations were downloaded from the public access site, the Chandra Data Archive (CDA). This is part of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Science Center (CXC) which is operated for NASA by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The Australia Telescope Compact Array, funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility, is managed by CSIRO. This research made use of NASA’s Astrophysical Data System Abstract Service.