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# Fast Parallel I/O on Cluster Computers

## 1 Introduction

Within the past years commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) clusters have evolved towards cost-effective general-purpose HPC devices. Such systems, self-made and commonly denoted as Beowulf computers , show up increasingly on the TOP500 list . While gigabit network technology (Gigabit-Ethernet, Myrinet) along with error-correcting zero-copy-communication software  have boosted communication-intensive number-crunching tasks, I/O-intensive computations have not benefited from cluster computers to the same extent. The reason was the relatively slow I/O capability of clusters.

Today, a promising approach to achieve fast I/O on cluster computers is to utilize distributed disks and their aggregate bandwidth by means of a parallel file system (PFS). A PFS is designed to make the entire disk capacity of the I/O-nodes available to all the compute-nodes and to allow the parallel file access of the compute nodes to be translated into real parallel disk access. Physically, files are stored on a given partition of cluster nodes by distributing the data of the given file, for instance in a round robin fashion. In contrast to standard network file systems, a PFS provides concurrent parallel access to store or read the file from all nodes of a parallel application. In a typical implementation, a set of compute-nodes reads and writes data to another set of I/O-nodes that host the physical resources of the PFS. The two sets of nodes may be identical, may partly overlap or may even be distinct. In principle this concept allows for scalability of the I/O-rate with the number of I/O-nodes, provided that *(i)* the number of compute-nodes is large enough to saturate the capacity of the I/O-nodes—this is usually the case as soon as the number of compute-nodes equals the number of I/O-nodes—and *(ii)* the network delivers full bi-sectional bandwidth—this is, for instance, the case for crossbar or multi-stage crossbar topologies.

Distributed file systems like NFS or AFS are not suited for concurrent high-bandwidth file-access as required in I/O-intensive cluster computing applications. In these systems, parallel data accesses of compute nodes are serialized by file servers. Therefore, they can not be called ”parallel” file systems. There exist commercially available parallel file systems (sometimes platform dependent), for example the General Parallel File System GPFS (IBM ). Currently, the only known open source parallel file system, working in a stable manner, and freely available for Linux under the GNU General Public License, is the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) developed at Clemson University and Argonne National Laboratory . PVFS is devised as a truly parallel file system for use on cluster computers. The communication back-end of the standard distribution of PVFS is based on the TCP/IP protocol. Therefore, PVFS can readily be operated on top of any network supporting TCP/IP.

In this paper we consider PVFS boosted by the Myrinet communication network  of the Alpha Linux Cluster Engine (ALiCE) located at Wuppertal University, Germany . There are several error-correcting and package-loss-safe communication sub-systems available, designed to drive Myrinet: e.g. the vendor-provided GM software , SCore , and the ParaStation system , developed at Karlsruhe University. On ALiCE, we are using ParaStation.

ParaStation implements the concept of virtual nodes, operating in close interaction with queuing systems like PBS . The communication system provides safe multi-user operation and outstanding stability, not to mention the comfortable single-point-of-administration management by means of the ParaStation-daemons. System crashes are tidily cleaned-up without any user interference. Most important in our context is however the communication bandwidth under ParaStation. A special kernel module routes TCP/IP via the ParaStation communication system and renders Myrinet an additional IP-network with full bi-sectional bandwidth. In this manner, the superior bandwidth from ParaStation as Myrinet driver can be exploited.

Combining parallel file systems like PVFS with ParaStation perfectly meets the demands of an application from the post-simulation phase of a large scale Monte Carlo project in lattice-quantum chromodynamics (LQCD). We are evaluating giant eigenproblems , which are very data-intensive, on cluster computers. The eigenvectors are required for the construction of correlations between two quark loops. Such creation and annihilation of quarks originate from the quantum fluctuations of the QCD vacuum, according to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. They are considered affectual to the unusually large mass of the $`\eta ^{}`$-meson . In our simulations, we have to compute $`𝒪(1000)`$ low eigenvectors of the fermionic matrix, which describes the dynamics of the quarks. The size of each vector is $`𝒪(10^6)`$.

Typically, about 10 GB of I/O is carried out in data-intensive production steps of about 10 minutes compute time on 16 to 64 processors; actually several thousands of such runs are performed. Without parallel I/O, reading or writing lasts between 10 and 30 minutes. PVFS helps cut down the read and write times to about 20 seconds.

The paper is organized as follows: in Section 2 we present the new TCP/IP kernel module included in ParaStation and describe the connectivity of ALiCE and its specific PVFS implementation. Section 3 gives benchmarks for the components of the I/O-machinery, including disk-speed and TCP/IP node-to-node rates. The results of the PVFS benchmarks are shown in Section 4 along with a comparison with Ref. . We are in the position to test PVFS/ParaStation within a large-scale application from lattice quantum chromodynamics, described in Section 5. Finally we summarize and give a short outlook on the novel parallel file system ClusterFile that is currently under development at the IPD, University of Karlsruhe .

## 2 Technical Background

For cluster applications based on IP-communication to benefit from ParaStation’s performance, a TCP/IP kernel module has been introduced on top of the ParaStation communication system. In this manner, stable communication with gigabyte bandwidth is provided for the parallel virtual file system (PVFS) as implemented on the 128-node Alpha-Linux-Cluster-Engine ALiCE.

### 2.1 TCP/IP kernel module with ParaStation

Many cluster applications neither use MPI nor the low-level communication API as for instance provided by ParaStation. To benefit from ParaStation’s performance for such applications, an additional TCP/IP module was developed at the Institute for Programs and Data Structures, University of Karlsruhe.

This module provides a network driver interface to the Linux kernel, just as any other Ethernet card driver does. This way, virtually any Ethernet protocol that is supported by the kernel can be transported over Myrinet. In practice, most applications will use the TCP (or UDP) over IP protocol111The intended use is the reason for the somewhat misleading name of the module. It should better be called Ethernet driver for ParaStation..

Internally, the module uses the kernel variant of the ParaStation low-level communication interface to send raw Ethernet datagrams to any other host in the cluster. This interface supports a set of basic communication operations, since at this level we don’t need more functionality. Packet (dis)assembling for instance is done by the kernel. Upon startup, a so-called kernel-context is obtained from the ParaStation module. This reserves a certain number of communication buffers in the memory of the Myrinet network adapter card and instructs the driver to listen for messages addressed to the TCP/IP module. Secondly, a call-back mechanism is established: whenever such a message arrives, an interrupt is risen and the ParaStation interrupt handler calls a method of the TCP/IP module which in turn hands the message to the Linux network stack. If a message is to be sent, the network stack functions call a method of the module that was registered upon initialization, handing the message over to the ParaStation module.

In order to address other nodes in the cluster, the TCP/IP driver module (in fact an Ethernet driver) maps the ParaStation node identification number (ParaStation ID) onto Ethernet hardware addresses. The administrator can set up static ARP tables that map IP addresses to these hardware addresses. This is necessary, as the driver does not support broadcast messages that would be required to enable automatic ARP functionality. However, if IP addresses are chosen such that the ParaStation ID (the node number counted from 0) equals the IP address minus one, the static ARP tables can be omitted. In this case, any driver module in the cluster can guess ParaStation IDs from IP addresses and thus generate fake ARP reply messages.

### 2.2 ALiCE setup

The Alpha-Linux-Cluster-Engine ALiCE is an assembly of 128 Compaq DS10 workstations . ALiCE, located at the University of Wuppertal (Germany), is fully operational since the end of 2000. The machine is equipped with Alpha 21264 EV67 processors, with 2 MB cache, operating at a frequency of 616 MHz. With 256 MB ECC memory for each processor, the total amount of memory is 32 GB. The disk space of 10 GB per node adds up to about 1.3 TB in total. The nodes are interconnected by a 2 $`\times `$ 1.28 Gbit/s Myrinet network configured as a multi-stage crossbar with full bi-sectional bandwidth. The M2M-PCI64A-2 Myrinet cards utilize a 64 bit/33 MHz PCI bus.

Figure 1 shows the hardware plan of the inter-node connection of ALiCE. A full crossbar is realized by three switch-stages (where each octal switch actually consists of two stages) employing the $`2\times 4`$ Myrinet M2M-oct-SW8 switches and 8 Myrinet M2M-dual-SW8 switches. The hardware latency is about 100 ns per switch stage, far below the total latency (software and hardware) of 17.1 $`\mu `$s.

We have extended the network in order to incorporate an external file and archive server as well as to provide gigabit links to external machines for the purpose of fast on-line visualization. To this end, we have exchanged two of the 8 M2M-dual-SW8 switches by two M2M-SW16 switches, as sketched in Figure 2. This way, we could avoid an inhomogeneous number of hardware stages of the multi-stage crossbar network.

### 2.3 PVFS partitioning

On ALiCE, we run 4 different PVFS partitions with 32-nodes each. This partitioning fits well with the compute-partitions, chosen such as to optimize the compute performances of our applications. Each PVFS partition (/pvfs1 to /pvfs4) is represented by a mount point on each node and on the file server. Mounting PVFS on the file server enables us to copy UNIX files with ParaStation TCP/IP speed from the external RAID to PVFS. For each partition, the last node plays the rôle of the management node. The entire set-up is displayed in Figure 3.

## 3 Performance of Basic I/O-Devices

The proper interpretation of the benchmark results presented in Section 4 requires some background knowledge about the features of ALiCE’s basic I/O-components, i.e., file system performance, TCP/IP and MPI data rates.

### 3.1 Local file system performances

The ALiCE DS10 nodes are equipped with 10 GB Maxtor IDE disks2225400 rpm versions.. We have carried out tests on local file systems, formatted with ReiserFS, by means of bonnie++ . Write and read-performances are determined for a series of file sizes, from 10 MB up to 2 GB. In order to reveal buffer-cache effects, we have adjusted the “dirty buffer” parameter333The standard behavior of the Linux kernel is to start flushing buffer pages as soon as the given percentage of memory available for buffer cache is “dirty”. A buffer page is called dirty if it changed in memory but has not yet been written to disk. to two different values, 40 % and 70 %. Our results are given in Figure 4.

The bonnie++ benchmark works as follows: the given file is written and read back immediately. We observe the write performance to buffer cache of 60 MB/s to fall to about 23 MB/s at a file size of 100 and 200 MB, for 40 and 70 % dirty buffers, respectively. Asymptotically, the performance is decreasing to about 19 MB/s. Being able to read from the buffer cache, the subsequent read operation shows a bandwidth of more than 280 MB/s for small files. At a file size of about 200 MB, the speed drops down to 24 MB/s.

### 3.2 TCP/IP performance via ParaStation

On ALiCE, we can choose TCP packages to be routed via Fast Ethernet or alternatively—using the new TCP/IP kernel module described in Section 2.1—via ParaStation/Myrinet. The ttcp benchmark issues TCP/IP packets over a point-to-point connection to determine the uni-directional TCP/IP speed, cf. Figure 5. The performance is seen to saturate at 93 MB/s.

It is instructive to compare these results with the outcome of the Pallas send-receive MPI benchmark , see Figure 6.

For the send-receive case (i.e. the bi-directional situation), the performance levels off at a total bandwidth of about 175 MB/s (adding up the data rates of both directions). As the PALLAS benchmark does not provide uni-directional measurements, we have prepared corresponding send and receive programs and found a saturation of the uni-directional MPI-performance at about 140 MB/s, cf. Figure 7. The data rate via TCP/IP is only about 34 % smaller than via MPI, in spite of the overheads of the full-fledged TCP/IP implementation. Still this leaves room for improvement, since on a cluster there exists a priori knowledge of the paths to all IP destinations, therefore one could try to set up a slim TCP/IP protocol. Moreover, a double error checking is carried out, one on the ParaStation level, and a second one on the TCP/IP level.

## 4 File System Benchmarks

Our benchmarks follow Ref. , where performance results on 60 nodes of the Chiba-City cluster at Argonne National Laboratory have been reported. This cluster is equipped with the same Myrinet version as ALiCE. This will enable us to compare our results using TCP/IP over ParaStation on an Alpha system with TCP/IP over the Myrinet/GM software on a Pentium cluster. Since loading and discharging large amounts of data to the cluster constitute a crucial bottleneck for data-intensive production runs on clusters, we include performances with respect to reading from and writing to UNIX files located on an external RAID.

### 4.1 Concurrent read/write performance

Our test code works as follows: a new PVFS file, common to $`P`$ compute processes, is opened on $`N`$ I/O-nodes. Concurrently the same amount of data $`S`$ is written from each of the $`P`$ processes (virtual partitioning) to disjoint parts of the file. PVFS stripes the data onto the $`N`$ I/O-nodes (physical partitioning) with a stripe size of 64 kB.

After the data is written, we close the file and reopen it again in order to reshuffle the same data back to the compute-nodes. The bandwidth for write and read operations is computed from the maximum of the wall clock execution times achieved on all the $`P`$ compute-nodes.

We vary $`P`$ in the range $`P=1\mathrm{}64`$, and repeat each measurement for $`N=4`$, $`N=16`$ and $`N=32`$ I/O-nodes. The amount of data $`S`$ written and read per compute-node is chosen proportional to the number $`N`$ of I/O-nodes, $`S/N=\text{const}`$ (here we follow closely the benchmark of Ref. ). The reasoning is that although we vary the number of I/O-nodes, the buffer-cache will be saturated for one and the same number of compute-nodes. Indeed this behavior is borne out in Figure 8, which shows the cumulative throughput for the write operation.

We followed Ref.  and have carried out 5 measurements in each case. The smallest and the largest results were discarded and the remaining ones have been averaged. Actually, the five values did not differ by more than 2 % in any of the measurements.

As we see from Figure 8, the performance quickly reaches a plateau for each I/O-partition. There is no visible impact from the number of compute-nodes as long as the buffer-cache of the I/O-nodes is not saturated. This occurs when the number of compute-nodes is greater than 50. The amount of data written and read on every I/O-node is $`PS/N`$, so it is greater than 100 MB for $`P>50`$ and $`S/N=2\text{MB}`$444In fact the buffer-cache itself is not saturated, but at this point the amount of “dirty buffers” has reached 40 % of the whole buffer-cache, see Section 3.1. With no other program running at the same time, almost all of the main memory is used for the buffer-cache, and 40 % of 256 MB yield 100 MB, as observed..

The write performance reaches between 29 and 35 MB/s for each I/O-node, not exhausting the bonnie++ figures of Section 3.1 or the TCP/IP speed, see Figure 5. However, we achieve about 30 % faster write performances than reported in Ref. . Visually comparing the Figure 6 in Ref.  with Figure 8 we recognize the substantially improved stability of our curves, a well known feature of the communication sub-system ParaStation.

After buffer-cache saturation, the performance drops down to a value which is about 18 % smaller than expected from the hard disk performance benchmarks displayed in Figure 4.

As the read operation is carried out directly after the write, with only a synchronizing barrier in between, the read process can draw the data directly from buffer-cache. As explained above, dirty buffers are written to disk if their size exhausts the limit of 100 MB. However, they remain in memory and can be read back at a rate limited only by the memory bandwidth. Thus, Figure 9 shows no loss of performance throughout the test range.

It is gratifying to find that each I/O-node can send with a speed varying between 56 MB/s and 75 MB/s, since several sockets are served simultaneously. This performance is just 20 % slower than the measured point-to-point performance via TCP/IP, but still about 45 % slower than the actual capabilities of ParaStation as seen in MPI applications, see Figure 6. The maximal performance reaches more than 1800 MB/s for 32 I/O-nodes.

We should remark, that the read test seems to be rather artificial. Actually, it would be more meaningful given a hard disk with a read performance faster than 75 MB/s. In general, a real application reads data from disk and not from buffer-cache. In that case, one expects a saturation below hard disk read performance, as demonstrated in Section 5.

In order to test the raw throughput of the disk, i.e. without utilizing the buffer cache, a modified benchmark was used. Now, a huge amount of data (multiple times the size of the buffer cache) is created and written to several files. After writing and closing the last file, it is very unlikely that any data from the first files is still present in the buffer cache. A subsequent read operation will therefore be forced to read directly from hard-disk. Figure 10 shows the result of this benchmark.

Obviously the throughput for read operations from PVFS drops dramatically within such realistic setup. In the case of 4 I/O-nodes the read performance drops to about 13 MB/s per I/O-node. Nevertheless a total read performance of 300 MB/s can be achieved if all 32 I/O-nodes are utilized.

The results presented so far have used a stripe size of 64 kB, the default value of PVFS. Taking a stripe size as large as the amount of data a given compute-node has to write, we achieve about 920 MB/s writing from 32 compute-nodes to 32 I/O-nodes. The corresponding read-operation achieves up to 2200 MB/s using the cache. Without a full cache, performance is lower.

A second important feature—as far as data-intensive computations on clusters are concerned—is the speed for charging and discharging the system. A high throughput is is crucial for the success of computer experiments that work on data sets much larger than the PVFS disk space available. In this case one has to retrieve (store) data from (to) an external TB-size repository.

Distributing UNIX files onto PVFS from the archive in principle could proceed with the TCP/IP performance of about 92 MB/s. Actually, the limiting factor is the disk performance of the file server. Our RAID delivers or stores at about 25 MB/s. In practice this limitation poses no real problem, since data staging can be carried out asynchronously to the parallel applications on the cluster.

## 5 Fast I/O for Giant Eigenproblems in Lattice Field Theory

In the following, we demonstrate how PVFS/ParaStation enables us to compute huge eigensystems on cluster computers. Such computational problems arise in the post simulation phase of Monte Carlo simulations of lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD). We aim at computing $`𝒪(1000)`$ low eigenvectors of the so-called fermionic matrix, which describes the dynamics of quarks in the gluon background field. The size of each vector is $`𝒪(10^6)`$. Typically about 10 GB I/O is carried out in production runs of length $``$30 minutes on 32 processors of ALiCE. In practice, we have to perform thousands of such runs.

### 5.1 Physical problem

Non-perturbative lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) deals with the determination of hadronic properties and interactions . Particularly important observables are given by the mass spectrum of bound quark states, as for instance the masses of hadrons like the $`\pi `$-Meson and the rho $`p`$-Meson. Among these particles, hadronic states that can be classified as singlet representation of the flavor-SU(3) group play a special rôle. They are characterized by contributions of so-called non-valence objects. More precisely, their correlation functions, $`C_\eta ^{}(t_1t_2)`$, the quantities which allow to extract the physical properties of the hadrons by exploring their decay in time, $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=t_1t_2`$, contain contributions from correlators between closed virtual quark-gluon loops. These “non-valence” objects are nothing but a manifestation of quantum mechanical vacuum fluctuations, which follow from Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as applied to relativistic field theory. From a physical point of view, flavor singlet objects are particularly intriguing, as they are sensitive to (and thus allow to explore) the topological structure of the QCD vacuum.

The reliable determination of disconnected diagrams has been a long-standing issue ever since the early days of LQCD. It can be traced back to the numerical problem of getting information about functionals of the complete inverse fermionic matrix $`M^1`$.555In contrast to flavor singlet observables, non-singlet masses are far simpler to compute: they imply the solution of a few systems of linear equations of type $`Mx=b`$, the discrete analogue of Dirac’s equation with source term.

First attempts in this direction started only a few years ago, using the so-called stochastic estimator method (SE)  for the computation of the trace of $`M^1`$. This approach requires to solve a linear system $`Mx=\xi `$ on hundreds of source vectors $`\xi `$, with $`\xi `$ being noise vectors that are Z2 of Gaussian distributed.

In Ref. , we have shown how to estimate the mass of the $`\eta ^{}`$ meson just using a set of low-lying eigenmodes of $`M`$. Strictly speaking, our approach deals with the matrix $`Q`$, the hermitian form of $`M`$, the eigenvectors of which form an orthogonal base :

$$Q=\gamma _5M.$$
(1)
The Wilson-Dirac matrix is given by

$`M_{𝗑,𝗒}=\mathrm{𝟏}_{cs}\delta _{𝗑,𝗒}\kappa {\displaystyle \underset{\mu =1}{\overset{4}{}}}`$ $`(\mathrm{𝟏}_s\gamma _\mu )U_\mu (𝗑)\delta _{𝗑,𝗒\mu }`$
$`+`$ $`(\mathrm{𝟏}_s+\gamma _\mu )U_\mu ^{}(𝗑\mu )\delta _{𝗑,𝗒+\mu }.`$ (2)
The symbols $`\gamma _\mu `$ stand for the $`4\times 4`$ Dirac spin matrices. The $`3\times 3`$ matrices $`U_\mu `$ color-SU(3) represent the gluonic vector field, thus $`\mathrm{𝟏}_{cs}`$ is a $`12\times 12`$ unit-matrix in color and spin space. $`M`$ is a sparse matrix in 4-dimensional Euclidean space-time with matrix valued stochastically distributed coefficient functions of type $`(\mathrm{𝟏}_s\pm \gamma _\mu )U_\mu (𝗑)`$ at site $`𝗑`$.

Once the low-lying modes are computed, it is possible to approximate the full inverse matrix $`Q^1`$ and those matrix functionals or functions of $`Q`$ which are sensitive to small eigenvalues, i.e. long-range physics.

### 5.2 Numerical procedure

In LQCD, hadronic masses are extracted from the large-time behavior of correlation functions. The correlator of the flavor non-singlet $`\pi `$-meson is defined as

$$C_\pi (t=t_1t_2)=\underset{\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y}}{}\text{Tr}\left[Q^1(\stackrel{}{x},t_1;\stackrel{}{y},t_2)Q^1(\stackrel{}{y},t_2;\stackrel{}{x},t_1)\right]_U,$$
(3)
while the flavor singlet $`\eta ^{}`$ meson correlator is composed of two terms, the first corresponding to the propagation of a quark-antiquark-pair from $`\stackrel{}{x}`$ to $`\stackrel{}{y}`$ without annihilation in between and the second one being characterized by intermediate pair annihilation:

$`C_\eta ^{}(t_1t_2)`$ $`=`$ $`C_\pi (t_1t_2)`$ (4)
$``$ $`2{\displaystyle \underset{\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y}}{}}\text{Tr}\left[Q^1(\stackrel{}{x},t_1;\stackrel{}{x},t_1)\right]\text{Tr}\left[Q^1(\stackrel{}{y},t_2;\stackrel{}{y},t_2)\right]_U.`$
The brackets $`\mathrm{}_U`$ indicate the average over a canonical ensemble of gauge field configurations. For large time separations $`t`$, the respective correlation functions are dominated by the ground state, because the higher excitations die out and therefore become proportional to $`\mathrm{exp}(m_0t)`$. $`m_0`$ is the mass of the particle associated to the correlation function.

As already mentioned, the $`\pi `$-correlator (3), equivalent to the first term of the $`\eta ^{}`$-correlator, is obtained by solving the linear system

$$M(\stackrel{}{x},t_1;\stackrel{}{y},t_2)c(\stackrel{}{y},t_2)=\delta (\stackrel{}{1},1;\stackrel{}{x},t_1);$$
(5)
on 12 source vectors (here located at site $`(\stackrel{}{1},1)`$). Of course, the statistics could be improved by averaging over many sources; however this becomes prohibitively expensive as the effort increases with the number of sources.

The second term in eq. (4),

$$\underset{\stackrel{}{x},\stackrel{}{y}}{}\text{Tr}\left[Q^1(\stackrel{}{x},t_1;\stackrel{}{x},t_1)\right]\text{Tr}\left[Q^1(\stackrel{}{y},t_2;\stackrel{}{y},t_2)\right],$$
(6)
depends on the diagonal elements of $`Q^1`$. The inverse can be expanded in terms of the eigenmodes weighted by the inverse eigenvalues:

$$Q^1(\stackrel{}{x},t_1;\stackrel{}{y},t_2)=\underset{i}{}\frac{1}{\lambda _i}\frac{|\psi _i(\stackrel{}{x},t_1)\psi _i(\stackrel{}{y},t_2)|}{\psi _i|\psi _i},$$
(7)
where $`\lambda _i`$ and $`\psi _i`$ are the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors of $`Q`$ respectively. We found that we can approximate the sum on the right hand side by restriction to $`𝒪(300)`$ lowest-lying eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors. Due to the factor $`1/\lambda _i`$, one expects that the low-lying eigenmodes will tend to dominate the sum. Our procedure is called truncated eigenmode approximation (TEA).

We compute the eigensystem by means of the implicitly restarted Arnoldi method, a generalization of the standard Lanczos procedure. A crucial ingredient of our approach is a Chebyshev acceleration technique. The spectrum is transformed such that the Arnoldi eigenvalue determination becomes uniformly accurate for the entire part of the spectrum we aim for. A comfortable parallel implementation of IRAM is provided by the PARPACK package .

We work on a space-time lattice of size $`16^3\times 32`$. Taking into account the Dirac and color indices, the Dirac matrix acts on a $`12\times 16^3\times 32=\mathrm{1.572.864}`$ dimensional vector space. This explains why the inversion of the entire Dirac matrix is not feasible since this would need about 40 TB memory space, whereas the determination of 300 low-lying eigenvectors leads to about 7.5 GB memory space only. Our computations are based on canonical ensembles of 200 field configurations with $`n_f=2`$ flavors of dynamical sea quarks. Such kind of ensembles have been generated at 5 different dynamical quark masses in the framework of the SESAM full QCD project . It takes us about 3.5 Tflops-hours to solve for 300 low-lying modes per ensemble for each quark mass. Altogether we aim at $`𝒪(30)`$ valence mass/coupling combinations. First physical results of our computations can be found in Refs. .

### 5.3 Benchmarks

The typical compute partitions used for the TEA on ALiCE range from 16 to 64 nodes, depending on the number of eigenmodes required for the approximation as well as on the memory available. Each node reads its specific portion of a given eigenmode corresponding to the sub-lattice assigned to this node. In our case, a simple regular space decomposition of the $`16^3\times 32`$ lattice in $`z`$ and $`t`$ directions is applied.

Physically, the 300 eigenmodes for each field configuration are stored as a single large file in round-robin manner. In case of a stripe-size that corresponds to the size of an entire time-slice of the lattice, each time-slice will be assigned to exactly one processor by PVFS.

In our application we use MPI-IO calls (MPI\_File\_read\_at()) instead of standard I/O to read from the PVFS. In Table 1 performance averages over four measurements are presented. The results fluctuate only marginally.

As to be expected from Figure 10 the throughput for read-operations is as high as 13 MB/s, which is the actual hard-disk performance. The effective throughput for write-operations is about 10 % less than achieved in Figure 8, most likely a remaining MPI-IO overhead.

### 5.4 Gain

A production step includes reading eigenmodes and computing observables. Typically the computation takes about 10 minutes. Another 10 minutes are needed for loading all 300 modes from the local disk. Loading the data from an external archive (which is the usual procedure since local disks do not provide enough capacity for an entire ensemble of field configurations and eigenmodes) lasts about 30 minutes. This large mismatch between compute time and I/O time (where the processors are idling) renders standard clusters very inefficent for such type of computational problems, denoted as data-intensive.

PVFS via ParaStation/Myrinet cuts down the I/O-times to less than 20 seconds for both reading and writing. This is a substantial acceleration compared to local or remote disk I/O. With these improvements we were able to enter large-scale productions with thousands of read-compute-write sequences to be carried out. After several months of continuous heavy duty we find the I/O system to behave remarkably reliable and stable, with no failure encountered so far.

## 6 Future Perspectives: ClusterFile

Most parallel file systems, including PVFS, distribute the files stripe-wise over the I/O-nodes. However, parallel applications provide their specific data structures that are often accessed in form of regular patterns called the “virtual” or “logical” partitioning of the data. The access pattern studies  have shown that the performance and scalability of parallel scientific applications with intensive parallel I/O-activity suffer significantly from the mismatch between virtual partitioning and physical placement of file data. This may result in an under-utilization of disk and network bandwidths and in a decreased parallel exploitation of independent disk capacity—among other effects.

For the above mentioned reasons, it is important that a parallel file system offers support for flexible physical partitioning. On one hand one would wish a fully developed PFS to be able to “translate” efficiently from any physical partitioning of the files on the I/O-nodes of the PFS to any virtual partitioning and vice versa, on the other hand one would like to control the physical data layout on the PFS. So far, this goal is only partly realized by PVFS. Therefore, we decided to develop a novel parallel file system, called ClusterFile , that addresses these issues.

In its present state, ClusterFile presents architectural similarities with PVFS, in so far that several I/O-daemons are responsible for storing the data on I/O-nodes with one central meta-data manager. The clients must link to a library that provides transparent file system access.

Unlike PVFS, ClusterFile employs a file partitioning model, that allows the arbitrary distribution of data over a cluster, in regular or irregular patterns. The model is optimized for regular patterns, since most frequently used data structures of parallel scientific applications are multidimensional arrays , partitioned into chunks among parallel processes.

The file model of ClusterFile is used for both physical and logical partitioning. A file is physically partitioned into sub-files. As an example, it is possible to spread a file over several disks using a block-cyclic distribution or any other regular and irregular distribution as for instance supported by High Performance Fortran .

A file may be logically partitioned between several processors by means of views. A view is a sequential window to an eventually non-contiguous subset of a file and can be used exactly in the same way as a file. An important advantage of using views is that it relieves the programmer from complex index computation. Additionally, it also provides hints on potential future access patterns and can be used for matching the physical to the logical distribution. For instance, if a file is striped in round-robin manner over the disks while the parallel processes of an application set block-cyclic views, it could be better for performance to convert the physical layout into a conforming block-cyclic distribution.

The processes of a parallel application access a shared file in many cases at nearly equal times. This observation suggests the design of collective I/O operations. Their main goal is to coalesce many small I/O requests of several cooperating processes into a few large requests. The two main categories of collective I/O are two-phase  and disk-directed  operations. The two-phase I/O consists of a file access step that is independent of the virtual partitioning, and a shuffle-phase in which the access data is distributed according to the access pattern. The MPI-IO library, which is implemented on top of PVFS and ClusterFile utilizes the two-phase method since it is not aware of the physical file partitioning. ClusterFile implements a version of the disk-directed method, in which the requests are gathered at I/O nodes, coalesced, before access is performed, and the result is returned to the compute nodes. This approach has the advantage that it can exploit the relationship between physical and logical partitionings, whereas the two-phase method separates the operation into two distinct steps.

In the future we plan to test ClusterFile on ALiCE and to perform a detailed comparison with PVFS. We expect the collective I/O implementation of ClusterFile to perform better than that of MPI-IO, due to the above mentioned reasons.

Another important step will be the incorporation of cooperative caching policies  that allow the buffer-caches of I/O- and compute-nodes to interact. The goal is to provide a global caching policy that provides a better utilization of buffer-caches and avoids unnecessary disk requests.

## 7 Summary

We have demonstrated that the ParaStation3 communication system speeds up the performance of parallel I/O on cluster computers such as ALiCE. I/O-benchmarks with PVFS using Parastation over Myrinet achieve a throughput for write-operations of up to 1 GB/s from a 32-processor compute-partition, given a 32-processor PVFS I/O-partition. These results out-perform known benchmark results for PVFS on 1.28 Gbit Myrinet by more than a factor of 2, a fact that is mainly due to the superior communication features of ParaStation. Read-performance from buffer-cache reaches up to 2.2 GB/s, while reading from hard-disk saturates at the cumulative hard-disk performance. The I/O-performance achieved with PVFS using ParaStation enables us to carry out extremely data-intensive eigenmode computations on ALiCE in the framework of lattice quantum chromodynamics. In the future the I/O-system will be utilized for storing and processing mass data in high energy physics data analysis on clusters.

## Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as twinning project “Alpha-Linux-Cluster” (Ti264/6-1 & Li701/3-1). Physics related work was supported under Li701/4-1 (RESH Forschergruppe FOR 240/4-1), and by the EU Research and Training Network HPRN-CT-2000-00145 “Hadron Properties from Lattice QCD”. We thank Guido Arnold and Boris Orth for their help with the cluster computer ALiCE.


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# Evidence for a T Tauri Phase in Young Brown Dwarfs

## 1 Introduction

Brown dwarfs, which straddle the mass range between stars and planets, appear to be common both in the field and in star-forming regions. Their ubiquity makes the question of their origin an important one, both for our understanding of brown dwarfs themselves as well as for theories on the formation of stars and planets.

In the standard framework, a low-mass star forms out of a collapsing cloud fragment, and goes through a “T Tauri phase”, during which it accretes material from a surrounding disk, before arriving on the main sequence. There is ample observational evidence now to support many key aspects of this picture for young solar-mass stars. One of the defining characteristics of the T Tauri phase is a rich array of emission lines in the spectra, of which H$`\alpha `$ is usually the most prominent (Joy 1945). The broad, asymmetric H$`\alpha `$ line profiles, seen in “classical” T Tauri stars, are now thought to arise in the infall region, as are many of the metallic emission lines (Muzerolle, Hartmann & Calvet 1998 and references therein).

Whether the same scenario holds for objects at and below the sub-stellar limit is an open question. It has been suggested, most recently by Padoan & Nordlund (2003), that brown dwarfs form in the same way as more massive stars, via ‘turbulent fragmentation’. Reipurth & Clarke (2001) proposed an alternate scenario, which has been further explored through numerical simulations by Bate et al. (2002; 2003): in their model, brown dwarfs (and presumably isolated planetary mass objects or “planemos”) are stellar embryos, ejected from newborn multiple systems before they can accrete sufficient mass to eventually fuse hydrogen. In this scenario, a stellar embryo competes with its siblings in order to accrete infalling matter, and the one that grows slowest is most likely to be ejected through dynamical interactions. A key prediction of Reipurth & Clarke (2001) is that “sub-stellar equivalents to the classical T Tauri stars should be rather short-lived” because the ejection process limits the amount of gas brought along in a disk.

Studies of young sub-stellar objects could provide valuable clues to distinguish between these formation mechanisms. Therefore, we have undertaken a multi-faceted study of very low mass (VLM) objects in star-forming regions and their immediate circumstellar environment. One of our key goals is to investigate whether some or all young brown dwarfs undergo a T Tauri-like phase, and if so how long that phase lasts.

This paper reports on a search for accretion signatures in high-resolution spectra of 14 objects near and below the sub-stellar boundary in IC 348 ($``$ 320 pc) and Taurus ($``$ 150 pc). Our targets consist of M5–M8 sources in IC 348 from Luhman (1999) and the recently identified M7–M8 brown dwarfs in Taurus from Martín et al. (2001)111The spectral classification of the Taurus targets by Martín et al. (2001) has been modified by Briceño et al. (2002). We adopt the latter authors’ types, which are consistent with Luhman’s (1999) typing scheme for the IC 348 targets.. Combined with the spectra of 15 additional sources in the Upper Scorpius and $`\rho `$ Ophiuchus star-forming regions (Jayawardhana, Mohanty & Basri 2002), we now have a substantial sample to characterize disk accretion in young brown dwarfs.

In a subsequent paper, we will use these optical spectra to derive temperatures, gravities and masses for the current sample, as we did for Upper Sco and $`\rho `$ Oph (Mohanty et al. 2003a, 2003b). For now, we assume an age of $``$ 1–2 Myr for IC 348 (Luhman et al. 2000) and $``$ 3 Myr for Taurus (White & Ghez 2001). If we further adopt the Luhman (1999) spectral type-temperature scale for low-mass pre-main sequence objects, then theoretical evolutionary models (Baraffe et al. 1998) imply masses of $``$ 0.1 – 0.02 $`M_{}`$ for our M5-M8 objects. Thus, our sample spans a mass range from the stellar/sub-stellar boundary well into the brown dwarf domain (and possibly even into the planetary mass regime; Mohanty et al. 2003b).

## 2 Observations and Analysis

We obtained optical spectra of the target sample using the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES; Vogt et al. 1994) on the Keck I telescope on 2001 October 27 UT (CFHT-BD-Tau-2, 3 and 4) and on 2002 October 31 UT (the rest, plus a second spectrum of CFHT-3). With the 1.15” slit, the two-pixel-binned spectral resolution is R $``$ 33,000. The instrument yielded 15 spectral orders in the 6390 – 8700 Å wavelength range, with gaps between the orders, providing a variety of features related to youth and accretion activity. For comparison to our targets and to derive v sin i, we used M dwarf and M giant spectroscopic standards observed with the same HIRES set up. The data were reduced in a standard manner using IDL routines, as described in Basri et al. (2000).

We derived rotational velocities ($`v`$ sin $`i`$) of the targets by cross-correlating with a ‘spun-up’ template of a slowly rotating standard. Multiple spectral orders ($``$ 6), selected on the basis of an absence of strong telluric features, strong gravity-sensitive features, and stellar emission lines, were used in the cross-correlation analysis. Following White & Basri (2003), we used a combination of giant and dwarf spectra for the template (see detailed discussion in Mohanty & Basri 2003 and Mohanty et al. 2003a).

## 3 Results and Discussion

Table 1 lists the derived $`v`$ sin $`i`$, H$`\alpha `$ equivalent widths, and H$`\alpha `$ full widths at 10% of the peak flux for our sample. Figure 1 shows H$`\alpha `$ line profiles in our sample. Of the ten IC 348 objects, five show broad, asymmetric H$`\alpha `$ lines; three of those five also exhibit strong emission in OI (8446Å) and CaII (8662Å) (Fig. 2). Of the four Taurus targets, CFHT-BD-Tau-3 and CFHT-BD-Tau-4 show very strong but relatively narrow H$`\alpha `$. We have clear detections of Li (6708 Å) absorption in IC348-256, 286 and 353, and marginal detections in CFHT-BD-Tau-2 and 3. The other spectra are too noisy in this region for unambiguous detection (not surprising for these very faint, red objects).

### 3.1 Disk Accretion

The shape and width of the H$`\alpha `$ emission profile is commonly used to discriminate between accretors and non-accretors among T Tauri stars (TTS). Stars exhibiting broad, asymmetric H$`\alpha `$ lines with equivalent width larger than 10 Å are generally categorized as classical TTS (CTTS), although this threshold value varies with spectral type (e.g., Martín 1998). Recently White & Basri (2003; hereafter WB) have suggested that a full-width $`>`$ 270 kms-1, at 10% of the peak emission, is a better empirical indicator of accretion, independent of spectral type.

By the latter criterion, two of our targets are accretors: IC348-165 (M5.25) and IC348-205 (M6), with 10% full-width $`>`$ 300 kms-1. Moreover, both objects show broad (FWHM $`>`$ 100 kms-1) emission in OI (8446Å) and CaII (8662Å); IC348-165 also exhibits broad emission in HeI (6678Å). In CTTS, the presence of a broad component in these metallic emission lines is associated with moderate to high accretion rates ($`\dot{M}`$$``$ 10-8 M/yr), such as in DG Tau and DR Tau (Hessman & Guenther 1997). WB detected these lines in CIDA-1 (M5.5) and GM Tau (M6.5), two Taurus objects at the sub-stellar boundary that also exhibit broad H$`\alpha `$ profiles and veiling, and inferred accretion rates ($``$ 10-8.5 M/yr) similar to CTTS. In fact, Muzerolle, Hartmann, & Calvet (1998; hereafter MHC) found a correlation between the accretion rates and the line fluxes in CaII, OI and HeI for their sample of CTTS, and argued that the broad components of these lines originate in magnetospheric infall regions. MHC also found that the OI (8446Å) line appears in emission only for those CTTS with accretion rates higher than a certain threshold value ($``$ 10-8 M/yr). Thus, our detection of broad OI and CaII emission in IC348-165 and IC348-205 (as well as broad HeI in the former) is significant, and implies that some VLM objects are accreting in a fashion analogous to CTTS.

We also find broad OI and CaII emission in a third object, IC348-415 (M6.5) (Fig.2). The results of MHC quoted above then indicate that accretion is very likely in this object as well. It is thus noteworthy that its H$`\alpha `$ 10% full -width ($``$ 213 kms-1) is somewhat below the accretion cutoff (270 kms-1) defined by WB. We suggest that the latter cutoff may need revision for VLM objects, for the following reason. The broad component of the H$`\alpha `$ line is believed to arise in a nearly free-falling flow between the inner edge of the disk and the stellar surface (e.g., Hartmann, Hewett, & Calvet 1994); the lower limit on the line-broadening is then set by the free-fall velocity ($`v_{ff}`$). For ages 1–3 Myr and substellar masses ($`M`$ $``$ 0.08 M), evolutionary models (Baraffe et al. 1998) yield $`v_{ff}`$ $``$ 75–125 kms-1, implying H$`\alpha `$ full-widths of order 150–250 kms-1, significantly less than the WB cutoff of $``$ 270 kms-1. Muzerolle et al. (2001) argue that Stark broadening can increase the H$`\alpha `$ width beyond that expected from infall alone. However, this effect does not appear important at rates below $``$ 10-9 M/yr; thus in mildly accreting brown dwarfs, the H$`\alpha `$ line-width is likely to be set by $`v_{ff}`$ alone. For instance, in V410 Anon 13 (a Taurus M6 object with $`\dot{M}`$$``$ 5$`\times `$10-12 M/yr), Muzerolle et al. (2000) adequately model H$`\alpha `$ with no recourse to Stark broadening. These authors also show that accretion rates $``$ 10-9 M/yr are not expected to produce any optical veiling arising from the accretion shock. The WB cutoff, however, is defined in terms of optical veiling: only objects with veiling are adopted as accretors, and it is these that have H$`\alpha `$ full-widths $`>`$ 270 kms-1. Our foregoing discussion suggests that VLM objects with very low accretion rates can fail the WB accretion test: their H$`\alpha `$ profiles are unlikely to be Stark-broadened beyond the $`v_{ff}`$ full-widths, which are less than 270 kms-1; furthermore, they will also not exhibit any veiling indicative of accretion. A case in point is V410 Anon 13 itself: its H$`\alpha `$ 10% full-width is $``$ 250 kms-1 (slightly below the WB limit), and it shows no veiling (and no CaII or OI emission either), yet is an accretor. Similarly IC348-415, which does show CaII and OI but has an H$`\alpha `$ full-width somewhat below the WB limit, is very likely to be accreting.

Consequently, we adopt a 10% full-width $``$ 200 kms-1 as our accretion cutoff. Given the rotational velocities in our sample (all $`v`$ sin $`i`$ $`<`$ 50kms-1), such a width is hard to explain by rotational broadening and/or flaring, but is in agreement with the expected $`v_{ff}`$. In that case, at least two other targets in our sample – IC348-382 (M5.5) and IC348-355 (M8) – are accretors as well, albeit with low accretion rates. Both show broad asymmetric H$`\alpha `$ profiles (10% full-width $`>`$ 200kms-1) associated with infall, even though the 10% width is somewhat below the WB limit and no CaII or OI emission is noticeable. If so, IC348-355 is the latest spectral type (lowest mass) accretor known to date.

Putting together now all the young objects near or below the substellar boundary ($``$ M5 and later) with published high-resolution optical spectra, we have 4 objects in $`\rho `$ Ophiuchus, 10 in IC 348, 14 in Taurus and 11 in Upper Scorpius222Most from this paper and Jayawardhana, Mohanty & Basri (2002); 9 in Taurus from WB and 1 from Muzerolle et al. (2000).. Of these, optical spectral signatures of accretion are found in 1 object in $`\rho `$ Oph (GY 5), 5 in IC 348 (discussed above), 3 in Taurus (CIDA-1, GM Tau, V410 Anon 13) and 1 in Upper Sco (USco 75 (M6), adopting an accretion cutoff of $``$ 200 kms-1 in 10% width). The vast majority of $`\rho `$ Oph VLM objects were inaccessible to our optical spectroscopy because of significant extinction, presumably due to circumstellar as well as interstellar material. Thus, our (small) $`\rho `$ Oph sample is heavily biased against possible accretors, and should not be used to estimate the accreting fraction. Considering the other three clusters, which are much less affected by this bias, we find that $``$50% of the VLM objects show disk accretion at an age $``$ 2 Myr (IC 348), $``$ 20% at age $``$ 3 Myr (Taurus), and $``$10% by $``$ 5 Myr (Upper Sco). While there are uncertainties in the cluster ages, IC 348 is likely to be younger than Taurus and Upper Sco. Thus, we appear to be seeing a decrease in the fraction of accreting young sub-stellar objects with increasing age.

A decrease in brown dwarf disk frequency with age is also seen in measurements of infrared excess. While a large fraction –$``$60–80%– of brown dwarfs in the $``$ 3 Myr-old $`\rho `$ Oph, IC 348, and Trapezium clusters show near-infrared excess indicative of disks, the fraction appears to be lower in the somewhat older $`\sigma `$ Orionis ($``$5-8 Myr) and TW Hydrae ($``$10 Myr) groups (Jayawardhana et al. 2003; Jayawardhana, Ardila & Stelzer 2002; Muench et al. 2001, Liu et al. 2003). The disk fractions as measured by near-infrared excess are roughly comparable between TTS and sub-stellar objects in the same cluster. The evidence to date is consistent with similar timescales for inner disk dissipation in young brown dwarfs and low-mass stars (Jayawardhana et al. 1999; 2001; Haisch, Lada & Lada 2001).

### 3.2 Rotation and Activity

In field $``$ M5–M8 dwarfs, a saturation-type rotation-activity connection is seen: stars rotating above a threshold velocity ($``$ 5 kms-1) exhibit a saturated level of chromospheric H$`\alpha `$ flux, while slower rotators show a range of (smaller) fluxes (Mohanty & Basri 2003). We will explore this issue for our young VLM objects in a future paper, after deriving effective temperatures so that observed H$`\alpha `$ equivalent widths can be converted to fluxes. However, we note here that the H$`\alpha `$ widths in our sample of non-accretors are at least as large as in saturated field dwarfs of similar spectral type ($``$ 3-10Å). Indeed, in three cases – IC348-256 and CFHT-BD-Tau-3 and 4 – the equivalent widths are many times higher than usually seen in quiescent M dwarfs, and are reminiscent of intense chromospheric flaring. Interestingly, CFHT-BD-3 shows very strong H$`\alpha `$ emission in two observations separated by a year. All these facts indicate that chromospheric activity levels in young VLM objects are at least as high as, and possibly significantly higher than, in older field dwarfs of similar spectral type.

## 4 Concluding Remarks

Our high-resolution optical spectra provide the most compelling evidence yet for a T Tauri-like accretion phase in many sub-stellar objects, qualitatively similar to that of their stellar counterparts. The lifetimes of inner disks around brown dwarfs do not appear to be vastly different from those of T Tauri disks. Thus, the observational evidence to date favors a similar mechanism for the formation of stellar and sub-stellar objects.

While it is too early to rule out the ejected embryo hypothesis for the origin of at least some brown dwarfs, our results do not support it: the naive expectation of signficantly shorter lifetimes for sub-stellar disks is not borne out by the data. However, current numerical simulations do not have sufficient resolution to determine whether a sub-stellar object with a small, truncated disk should be an accretor at a few million years (Bate et al. 2003). Future simulations should clarify this issue. On the observational front, longer-wavelength measurements with the Space InfraRed Telescope Facility and/or the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy could constrain the sizes of brown dwarf disks and thus determine if they are truncated as expected in the ejection scenario. Other important insights could come from investigating even younger objects, namely embedded (proto-) brown dwarfs, with high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy.

We would like to acknowledge the great cultural significance of Mauna Kea for native Hawaiians, and express our gratitude for permission to observe from its summit. We also thank the Keck Observatory staff for their outstanding assistance over the past several years. This work was supported in part by NSF grants AST-0205130 to R.J. and AST-0098468 to G.B. S.M. acknowledges the support of a SIM-YSO postdoctoral fellowship.


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# Anisotropy and inflation in Bianchi I brane worlds

## I Introduction

The main stream approach to try and solve the problems arising from the break down of Einstein’s theory at high energies is that of considering it a particular limit of a more general theory, as happened with Newton’s theory in relation to that of Einstein’s. One of this schemes is the brane gravity picture Horava ; Randall , according to which matter fields are confined to a hypersurface (the brane) with three spatial dimensions embedded in a higher dimensional space (the bulk) on which gravity can act also.

Considerable efforts in this area of research have been directed to testing that scheme by deducing cosmological implications from it. The usual framework for these studies is the geometric approach of Shiromizu , which provides the gravitational field equations induced on the brane along with conservation equations for bulk degrees of freedom. Reviews on this topic can be found, for instance, in Maartens-rev ; Langlois ; Brax .

Studies concerning FRW universes Binetruy  hinted that the dynamics of the early Universe in this new scenario is rather peculiar because of the modifications in the Friedmann equation. Then, when anisotropic models were considered Campos , it was shown that discrepancies with respect to the standard scenario extended to the shear dynamics as well.

In the set-up of general relativity, Wald Wald  showed that a positive cosmological constant leads to the isotropization of expanding homogeneous cosmological models . The anisotropy dissipation in brane world inflation in the absence of effective cosmological constant was analyzed by Maartens, Sahni and Saini Maartens . Taking into account the cosmological constant, Santos, Vernizzi and Ferreira derived a set of sufficient conditions that allow extending Wald’s result to the brane world scenario Santos  (see also Paul  for an alternative view on the same problem). The last three works were done directly on the brane, where an additional hypothesis has to be done for the nonlocal anisotropic stresses induced by the bulk, for they are not given by any evolution equation on the brane. This naturally raises the question of to what extent the results depend on the aforementioned hypothesis.

The goal of this work is to extend the results in Maartens ; Santos  by considering a more general additional hypothesis. We will analyse, as done in those works, a Bianchi I brane embedded in a 5-dimensional bulk. We assume that the nonlocal stresses satisfy a condition which reduces to the one considered in Refs. Maartens ; Santos  in particular cases. We will show that the evolution equations on the brane can be integrated and conclude that, generically, we have exponential inflation or an asymptotic power law for the mean radius, but the models do not isotropize unless they belong to the class considered in the aforementioned works.

## II Bianchi I brane models

Let us consider a Bianchi I brane with the induced metric

$$ds^2=dt^2+a_1^2(t)dx^2+a_2^2(t)dy^2+a_3^2(t)dz^2$$
(1)
when the matter on the brane is a perfect fluid of density $`\rho `$ and pressure $`p`$. We define as usual the mean radius $`a(a_1a_2a_3)^{1/3}`$ and the mean Hubble parameter $`H\dot{a}/a=\frac{1}{3}_iH_i`$, with $`H_i=\dot{a}_i/a_i`$.

We will be using the equations induced on the brane derived by Shiromizu, Maeda and Sasaki Shiromizu  but follow the notation of Maartens ; Santos . For the metric (1), the dynamics of the mean radius $`a`$ in this model can be described by the following equations on the brane:

$`3H^2`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{6}{\kappa ^2\lambda }}𝒰+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}\sigma ^2+\mathrm{\Lambda }+\kappa ^2\rho \left(1+{\displaystyle \frac{\rho }{2\lambda }}\right),`$ (2)
$`3\dot{H}+3H^2+\sigma ^2+{\displaystyle \frac{6}{\kappa ^2\lambda }}𝒰`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{\Lambda }{\displaystyle \frac{\kappa ^2}{2}}(\rho +3p){\displaystyle \frac{\kappa ^2}{2}}(2\rho +3p){\displaystyle \frac{\rho }{\lambda }},`$ (3)
$`\dot{\sigma }_{\mu \nu }+3H\sigma _{\mu \nu }`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{6}{\kappa ^2\lambda }}𝒫_{\mu \nu },`$ (4)
$`\dot{𝒰}+4H𝒰+\sigma ^{\mu \nu }𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ $`=`$ $`0,,`$ (5)
where a dot denotes $`u^\mu _\mu `$, with $`u^\mu =/t`$. Throughout the paper $`\kappa ^2/8\pi `$ and $`\stackrel{~}{\kappa }^2/8\pi `$ will, respectively, be the effective Newton constant on the brane and in the bulk ; $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ will be the effective 4D cosmological constant, and the tension on the brane will be $`\lambda 6\kappa ^2/\stackrel{~}{\kappa }^4`$. On the other hand, $`𝒰`$ stands for the effective nonlocal energy density, and $`\sigma _{\mu \nu }`$ denotes the shear scalar, which satisfies (4) and

$$\sigma ^2\sigma ^{\mu \nu }\sigma _{\mu \nu }=\underset{i=1}{\overset{3}{}}\left(H_iH\right)^2.$$
(6)
In addition, if $`u^\mu `$ is the four velocity of an observer on the brane comoving with matter, then $`h_{\mu \nu }=g_{\mu \nu }+u_\mu u_\nu `$ projects into the comoving rest-space, and $`𝒰`$ and $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ will be related to $`_{\mu \nu }`$, which is the projection on the brane of the 5D Weyl tensor, through

$`𝒰`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\kappa ^2\lambda }{6}}_{\mu \nu }u^\mu u^\nu ,`$ (7)
$`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\kappa ^2\lambda }{6}}\left(h_\mu ^\alpha h_\nu ^\beta {\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}h^{\alpha \beta }h_{\mu \nu }\right)_{\alpha \beta }.`$ (8)
There is also, in principle, the constraint that the projected spatial covariant derivative of $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ vanishes:

$$\mathrm{D}^\nu 𝒫_{\mu \nu }=0,$$
(9)
but this result holds identically for the metric (1). On the other hand, as a consequence of system (2)–(5), we get the conservation law

$$\dot{\rho }+3H(\rho +p)=0.$$
(10)
## III Exact examples and asymptotic behavior

Since there is no evolution equation on the brane for the nonlocal anisotropic stress $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$, but only the constraint (9), which in this case does not provide any information, some additional hypothesis is necessary to integrate the system (2)–(5).

In order to get some insight on the problem, we will restrict ourselves for a moment to the vacuum case $`\rho =p=0`$, where we get from (2)–(3)

$$𝒰=\frac{\kappa ^2\lambda }{2}\left(\dot{H}+3H^2\mathrm{\Lambda }\right).$$
(11)
Let us consider under which conditions the stable asymptotic behavior may approach a power law $`at^k`$, ($`k>0`$). In such a case $`\dot{H},H0`$, $`𝒰\kappa ^2\lambda \mathrm{\Lambda }/2`$ and, because of (5),

$$\sigma ^{\mu \nu }𝒫_{\mu \nu }2\kappa ^2\lambda \mathrm{\Lambda }H.$$
(12)
We will show in the following that, if one chooses the unknown $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ so that this condition is satisfied, the asymptotic behavior described by a power law is stable. Furthermore, this will happen even in the presence of a fluid.

So as to integrate the system (2)–(5) one often Maartens  assumes $`𝒰=0`$ or the more general $`\sigma ^{\mu \nu }𝒫_{\mu \nu }=0`$, which has been used in Santos  to discuss the stability of the de Sitter spacetime. It has been proved Hoogen  that spatial homogeneity follows from the integrability conditions for vanishing non-local anisotropic stress and energy flux, which are two of the three bulk degrees of freedom. Therefore, the considerable simplification arising from switching off those quantities is consistent with having a Bianchi I metric on the brane.

It must be pointed out that other choices can be found in the literature; Barrow and Maartens Barrow , in an investigation of early times shear anisotropy in an inhomogeneous universe, assumed that $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ behaves qualitatively like a general 4D anisotropic stress, in particular they chose $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ to be proportional to the energy density of the anisotropic source (which we will denote with $`\stackrel{~}{\rho }`$) so that $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }=\stackrel{~}{\rho }C_{\mu \nu }`$ with $`\dot{C}_{\mu \nu }=0`$, $`\sqrt{C_{\mu \nu }C^{\mu \nu }}=𝒪(1)`$, and $`\stackrel{~}{\rho }\rho `$.

Although the asymptotic behavior (12) may happen with many choices of $`\sigma ^{\mu \nu }𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$, we will consider only a simple family of models. In the following, we will assume that $`\sigma ^{\mu \nu }𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ is proportional to the Hubble parameter, so that it can be written as

$$\sigma ^{\mu \nu }𝒫_{\mu \nu }=2\kappa ^2\lambda \mathrm{\Gamma }(a)H,$$
(13)
which reduces to the cases discussed in Maartens ; Santos  when the function $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)`$ vanishes. By making this hypothesis, we use a less restrictive assumption to check whether the conclusions reached in Maartens ; Santos  hold in a more general context, while still being able to integrate the evolution equations. Note that (12) is recovered, even before the asymptotic behavior is reached, provided $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=\mathrm{\Lambda }`$.

Exactly as happens with the restrictive $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0`$ case often used in the bibliography, it remains an open problem whether the more general assumption we make is compatible with a full 5D solution (see Matravers  for a recent attempt at tackling the 5D problem). Judging on the suitability of such guesses is, therefore, not possible for the time being, but they definitely help unveiling possible unexpected consequences of the interference between bulk and brane.

The nonlocal energy density $`𝒰`$ is given by the conservation equation (5), which is easily solved under the assumption (13):

$$𝒰=\frac{\kappa ^2\lambda u_0}{a^4}\frac{2\kappa ^2\lambda }{a^4}a^3\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)𝑑a,$$
(14)
where $`u_0`$ is an arbitrary integration constant. We see here that, for expanding universes,

$$\underset{a\mathrm{}}{lim}𝒰=\frac{1}{2}\kappa ^2\lambda \underset{a\mathrm{}}{lim}\mathrm{\Gamma }(a),$$
(15)
(provided the limit on the right side exists or is infinite) so that it does not always vanish asymptotically, although it will go to zero in the special cases in which $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)0`$ (which of course include the choice $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=0`$ of Refs. Maartens ; Santos ), where it reduces to the result by Toporensky Toporensky . Expression (15) suggests there is the possibility that, as a consequence of the interaction of the brane with the bulk through $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$, the asymptotic vanishing of $`𝒰`$ arising in the cases studied in Santos  might be evitable.

By contracting (4) with $`\sigma ^{\mu \nu }`$ and using (13), one readily gets

$$\sigma ^2=\frac{\sigma _0^2}{a^6}+\frac{24}{a^6}a^5\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)𝑑a,$$
(16)
for any constant $`\sigma _0`$, so that

$$\underset{a\mathrm{}}{lim}\sigma ^2=4\underset{a\mathrm{}}{lim}\mathrm{\Gamma }(a).$$
(17)
Then, it is clear that asymptotically $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ must be non-negative. If $`\mathrm{\Gamma }0`$ the brane world isotropizes as $`a\mathrm{}`$, as described in Maartens ; Santos , but, for all other asymptotic behaviours of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$, there will be a remaining anisotropy induced by the nonlocal anisotropic stresses. Note that there is also the possibility that the anisotropy grows with $`a`$, which would correspond to $`𝒰<0`$ at late times. Models which do not isotropize in a recollapsing situation, unlike ours, were found in Sopuerta , and they were characterized by $`𝒫_{\mu \nu }`$ and $`𝒰<0`$.

Clearly, our work and many others suggest that the interplay between the bulk degrees of freedom and the dynamics on the brane is rather non-trivial. An interesting illustration of this is a recent work Savchenko  which investigated the dynamics of a flat isotropic brane world with a perfect fluid with equation of state $`p=(\gamma 1)\rho `$ and a scalar field with a power-law potential. There it was found that the number and the stability of fixed points of the system describing the dynamics of the model would depend not only on whether $`𝒰`$ vanishes or not, but also on its sign.

If we assume the equation of state $`p=(\gamma 1)\rho `$, the conservation law (10) is equivalent to

$$\rho =\frac{\rho _0}{\kappa ^2a^{3\gamma }},$$
(18)
with an arbitrary constant $`\rho _0`$.

If we insert (14), (16) and (18) in (2), we get the generalized Friedmann equation

$$3H^2=\frac{6u_0}{a^4}+\frac{\sigma _0^2}{2a^6}+\frac{\rho _0}{a^{3\gamma }}+\frac{\rho _0^2}{2\kappa ^2\lambda a^{6\gamma }}+\mathrm{\Lambda }\frac{24}{a^6}\left[aa^3\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)𝑑a\right]𝑑a.$$
(19)
The orbits $`(H(𝒰),\sigma (𝒰))`$ were found in Santos  for the special case $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0`$, but we can see that, for any $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)`$, the problem for $`a(t)`$, $`\sigma (t)`$ and $`𝒰(t)`$ may be completely solved from equation (19) by means of a quadrature and a function inversion. The integrals may be explicitly computed (in terms of elementary or elliptic functions) for different choices for the constants $`u_0`$, $`\sigma _0`$, $`\rho _0`$, $`\gamma `$ and $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ and the function $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)`$. The simplest cases are solutions with no fluid ($`\rho _0=0`$). If $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, by using the parameter $`0<w<\mathrm{}`$ one may write the solution as

$`t`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sigma _0^2}{48\sqrt{2u_0^3}}}\left(\mathrm{sinh}ww\right),`$ (20)
$`a`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sigma _0}{2\sqrt{3u_0}}}\mathrm{sinh}{\displaystyle \frac{w}{2}},`$ (21)
which at late time corresponds to $`at^{1/2}`$.

In contrast, if $`u_0=\rho _0=0`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=\alpha `$ for a constant $`\alpha <\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, we get

$`a^6`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\sigma _0^2}{2(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}}\mathrm{sinh}^2\sqrt{3(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}t.`$ (22)
Other exact solutions with $`u_0=0`$ can obtained with dust ($`\gamma =1`$) or a stiff fluid ($`\gamma =2`$). Let us look first at the dust cases, which, arguably, are very interesting from the observational point of view Dabrowski . For $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=\alpha `$ we have

$$a^3=\frac{\rho _0}{\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha }\mathrm{sinh}^2\frac{\sqrt{3(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}t}{2}+\sqrt{\frac{\rho _0^2+\kappa ^2\lambda \sigma _0^2}{2\kappa ^2\lambda (\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}}\mathrm{sinh}\sqrt{3(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}t.$$
(23)
The latter is a generalization of the Heckmann-Shucking metric Heckmann ; Khalatnikov  that has not been discussed in the literature so far. Clearly, the $`\alpha \mathrm{\Lambda }`$ limit of the solution (23) is regular, with the form of a second-order polynomial in $`t`$. The effects of the shear and the quadratic corrections are of the same order, they dominate at early times, and $`at^{1/3}`$. In contrast, at late times the model is neither aware of the anisotropy nor of the extra dimensional ingredients, and $`\mathrm{log}at`$, or $`at^{2/3}`$ if $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=\alpha `$. On the other hand, for a stiff fluid ($`\gamma =2`$), and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=\alpha `$, we have

$$a^6=\frac{2\rho _0+\sigma _0^2}{2(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}\mathrm{sinh}^2\sqrt{3(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}t+\frac{\rho _0}{\sqrt{2\kappa ^2\lambda (\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}}\mathrm{sinh}2\sqrt{3(\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha )}t.$$
(24)
This solution too has a regular $`\alpha \mathrm{\Lambda }`$ limit in the form of a second-order polynomial in $`t`$. Like in the dust solution above, the effects of the shear and the quadratic corrections are equally important, but they dominate at late times, instead; in that regime we either have $`\mathrm{log}at`$, or $`at^{1/3}`$ if $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=\alpha `$. On the contrary, at early times the model becomes isotropic and relativistic, and $`at^{1/6}`$.

We can also obtain directly from (19) some general late-time results of interest. If asymptotically $`\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)\alpha `$ is constant, then for $`\mathrm{\Lambda }\alpha >0`$, the brane inflates exponentially when $`a\mathrm{}`$, as happened for $`\alpha =0`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }>0`$ Santos . But now there is another interesting possibility: the repulsion due to the cosmological constant may be neutralized by the bulk influence in which case the asymptotic behavior of $`a`$ is a power law. For simplicity we show this in vacuum and write (11) in terms of the variable $`\mu =2\dot{H}/3H^2`$, which becomes a constant $`\mu _0`$ for the power-law solutions $`at^{2/3\mu _0}`$, so

$$\dot{\mu }+\left[3H\mu \frac{8H𝒰+2\sigma ^{\mu \nu }P_{\mu \nu }}{2𝒰+\kappa ^2\lambda \mathrm{\Lambda }}\right](2\mu )=0.$$
(25)
The existence of the constant solution, $`\mu =\mu _0`$, in the last equation requires that

$$\sigma ^{\mu \nu }P_{\mu \nu }=3H\left[\mu _0\left(𝒰+\frac{\kappa ^2\lambda \mathrm{\Lambda }}{2}\right)\frac{4}{3}𝒰\right],$$
(26)
this means that, for any solution of (11) which asymptotically approaches to a power law, then the quantity $`\sigma ^{\mu \nu }P_{\mu \nu }`$ asymptotically behaves as (26). Now, inserting (26) in (5) and (4), we get the asymptotic expression for the effective nonlocal energy density

$$𝒰=\frac{\kappa ^2\lambda \alpha }{a^{3\mu _0}}\frac{1}{2}\kappa ^2\lambda \mathrm{\Lambda },$$
(27)
and the shear scalar

$$\sigma ^2=\frac{\sigma _0^2}{a^6}+\frac{12\alpha (\mu _04/3)}{(2\mu _0)a^{3\mu _0}}+4\mathrm{\Lambda },$$
(28)
where $`\alpha `$ and $`\sigma _0^2`$ are arbitrary constants. In addition, introducing (26) into (25), it reads as

$$\dot{\mu }=3H\left(\mu \mu _0\right)(2\mu ).$$
(29)
It is easy to see that, for ordinary fluids, $`\mu _0<2`$, the solutions of Eq. (29) converge, respectively, to the stable fixed point $`\mu =\mu _0`$, which describes the asymptotic power-law solutions $`a=t^{2/3\mu _0}`$. For instance, if we additionally assume a perfect fluid source, after using (18), (27) and (28), the Einstein equation (2) becomes

$$3H^2=\frac{6\alpha }{a^{3\mu _0}}+\frac{\sigma _0^2}{2a^6}+\frac{4\alpha }{(2\mu _0)a^{3\mu _0}}+\frac{\rho _0}{a^{3\gamma }}+\frac{\rho _0^2}{2\kappa ^2\lambda a^{6\gamma }}.$$
(30)
Hence, for $`\gamma >\mu _0`$, asymptotically the brane will remain anisotropic ($`\sigma ^24\mathrm{\Lambda }`$) and expand as $`at^{2/3\mu _0}`$ or expand as $`at^{2/3\gamma }`$ for $`\gamma <\mu _0`$. Note that, the exact solution given by (20) and (21) for a model with no fluid, is also the approximated late time solution when $`\mu _0=4/3\gamma `$ or $`\gamma =4/3\mu _0`$. In both cases asymptotically the scale factor behaves a $`at^{1/2}`$.

In (26) we assumed that $`\sigma ^{\mu \nu }P_{\mu \nu }`$ depends on $`a`$ and $`𝒰`$. We could instead assume that it depends only on $`a`$ so that asymptotically (13) holds with

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }(a)=\mathrm{\Lambda }+\frac{\beta }{a^{3\delta }},$$
(31)
for some constants $`\beta `$ and $`\delta >0`$. It is easy to see that in this case also the asymptotic behavior of $`a`$ is a power law. For instance, if we additionally assume that $`\gamma >4/3`$ (or that there is no fluid), asymptotically the brane will remain anisotropic ($`\sigma ^24\mathrm{\Lambda }`$) and expand as $`at^{2/3\delta }`$ for $`\delta <4/3`$ and as $`at^{1/2}`$ for $`\delta 4/3`$ (or $`\beta =0`$). For $`\gamma <4/3`$, one would have $`at^{2/3\nu }`$, with $`\nu =\mathrm{min}(\gamma ,\delta )`$.

## IV Conclusions

By making the more general assumption (13) on the (unknown) influence of the bulk on the brane, we have shown that some conclusions on the asymptotic behavior of Bianchi I brane worlds in Refs. Maartens ; Santos  can be generalized. Due to the nonlocal stresses, in most of our models, the nonlocal energy does not vanish in the limit $`a\mathrm{}`$, and the brane does not isotropize. We have also found that, although nearly all our models inflate, there also exist the possibility that the inflation due to the cosmological constant might be prevented by the interaction with the bulk. Finally, we have shown that the problem for the mean radius $`a`$ (as well as for $`\sigma ^2`$ and $`𝒰`$) can be completely solved in our models, which include as particular cases the Bianchi I branes for which the orbits and stability were analyzed in Santos .

## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by the University of Buenos Aires under Project X223, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology jointly with FEDER funds through research grant BFM2001-0988, and the University of the Basque Country through research grant UPV00172.310-14456/2002. Ruth Lazkoz’s work is also supported by the Basque Government through fellowship BFI01.412.


text:
# Generation of entangled states of two three-level atoms in cavity QED

## Abstract

We present a scheme to generate maximally entangled states of two three-level atoms with a nonresonant cavity by cavity-assisted collisions. Since the cavity field is only virtually excited no quantum information will be transferred from the atoms to the cavity.

Entangled states of quantum particles give the possibility to test quantum mechanics against a local hidden variable theory EPR ; bell ; ghz . They also have practical applications in quantum cryptography cry , quantum dense coding qua  and quantum teleportation tele . Most of the research in quantum information processing is based on entanglement generation of quantum two-level systems (Qubits), which represent the information. Recently, there is much interest in $`N`$-level quantum systems ($`N3`$) to represent information. It was demonstrated that key distributions based on three-level quantum systems are more secure against eavesdropping than those based on two-level systems mo . Key distribution protocols based on entangled three-level systems were also proposed cerf . The security of these protocols is related to the violation of the Bell inequality. Recently, it was shown that the quantum prediction differs more radically from classical physics in the case of three-level systems than in the case of two-level systems. The three-level system provides in this context a much smaller level of noise kp . The proof of Bell’s theorem without the inequalities by Greenberger, Horne, and Zeilinger (GHZ) was extended to multiparticle multi-level systems cab . One way to generate multiqubit entanglement of $`N`$-level quantum systems is to use higher order parametric down conversion three . A more direct way is to use multilevel quantum systems. In this context entanglement generation of $`N`$-level quantum systems was reported three1 ; three2 . Rydberg atoms which cross superconductive cavities are an almost ideal system to generate entangled states and to perform small scale quantum information processing qed . A number of schemes were proposed in the context of cavity QED. In particular EPR pairs epr  and GHZ states ghz1  were successfully generated by a successive interaction of a series of atoms in a cavity field. In these schemes cavities act as memories, which store the information of an electric system and transfer it back to the electric system. Thus, the decoherence of the cavity field becomes one of the main obstacles for the implementation of quantum information in cavity QED. Recently, significant progress was made by proposals for atoms, which interact with a nonresonant cavity zhang . In this theoretical scheme it is suggested to use a dynamic, which involves a virtual exchange of a photon with the field. To the first order of the approximation the scheme is insensitive to cavity losses or to the presence of a stray of a thermal field in the mode. Recently, this process was also suggested to generate GHZ states state  and to implement the quantum search algorithm algo . Following the proposal of Refzhang  an experiment was performed in which two Rydberg atoms cross a nonresonant cavity. These atoms became entangled in a controllable way by cavity-assisted collisions bbb .

In this paper we show that cavity-assisted collisions of two Rydberg atoms can be used to entangle their electronic states $`|f`$, $`|e`$ and $`|g`$ in the related three-level modell (see Fig.1(a)). The experimental setup is shown in Fig.1(b). The Fabry-Perot resonator, which is denoted by cavity $`C`$, sustains a resonant cavity mode of frequency $`\omega _a`$. The $`|e|g`$ and $`|f|g`$ transitions are at $`51.1`$ and $`54.3`$ GHz, respectively. The cavity mode is shifted in the frequency from the transitions $`|e|g`$ and $`|f|g`$ by detunings $`\delta _{eg}`$ and $`\delta _{gf}=\delta _{eg}+\delta _{det}`$. The value $`\delta _{det}=3.2`$ GHz is the frequency difference of the transitions $`|e|g`$ and $`|f|g`$. The experimental values, which are given in Refqed  show $`\delta _{eg}\delta _{gf}`$. Thus, we can choose the cavity frequency in a way that only the levels $`|e`$ and $`|g`$ are appropriately affected by the nonresonant atom-field coupling. The quantum state $`|f`$ will in a good approximation not be affected during the atom-cavity interaction.

We write the interaction Hamiltonian inside of the cavity in the interaction picture

$$H=g[e^{i\delta _{eg}t}a^{}(\sigma _1+\sigma _2)+e^{i\delta _{eg}t}a(\sigma _{1+}+\sigma _{2+})].$$
(1)
Where $`\sigma _j=|g_je_j|`$ and $`\sigma _{j+}=|e_jg_j|`$, $`a`$ and $`a^{}`$ are the annihilation and creation operator of the cavity field. The atom-cavity coupling strength is denoted by $`g`$. In the large detuning case of $`\delta _{eg}g`$ no energy exchange between the atoms and the cavity will happen. The effective Hamiltonian is given by zhang

$$H=\lambda \underset{i,j=1}{\overset{2}{}}(\sigma _{i+}\sigma _jaa^{}\sigma _i\sigma _{j+}a^{}a),$$
(2)
where $`\lambda =g^2/\delta _{eg}`$. If the cavity field is at the beginning in the vacuum state the effective Hamiltonian (2) reduces to

$$H=\lambda (\sigma _{1+}\sigma _1+\sigma _{2+}\sigma _2+\sigma _{1+}\sigma _2+\sigma _{2+}\sigma _1).$$
(3)
The first two terms describe the Stark shift in the vacuum cavity. The dipole coupling between the two atoms, which is induced by the cavity, are considered by the other terms. In order to generate maximally entangled states of two three-level atoms, we assume that two atoms are initially prepared in the state $`|e_1|e_2`$. The atom $`1`$ crosses two classical fields, which are tuned to the transitions $`|e|g`$ and $`|g|f`$, respectively. By choosing the amplitudes and phases of the classical fields appropriately this atom becomes prepared in the state $`\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}|f_1\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}}|g_1`$. Then both atoms are simultaneously sent into the cavity $`C`$, which is in the vacuum state. The interaction is described by the effective Hamiltonian (3), which causes no effect on the state $`|f_1|e_2`$. After the interaction time $`t_1`$ the quantum state

$$\mathrm{\Psi }(t_1)=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}|f_1|e_2\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}}e^{i\lambda t_1}[\mathrm{cos}(\lambda t_1)|g_1|e_2i\mathrm{sin}(\lambda t_1)|e_1|g_2]$$
(4)
is obtained. With the choice of $`\lambda t_1=\pi /2`$ the state (4) becomes

$$\mathrm{\Psi }(\pi /2\lambda )=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}|f_1|e_2+\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}}|e_1|g_2.$$
(5)
The atom $`2`$ is then addressed by a classical microwave pulse, which is tuned to the transition $`|e|f`$. This step requires separate addressing of the atoms. Since microwave field can not be focused narrow enough to address atom $`2`$ without affecting atom $`1`$ a method should be used, which makes the atomic transitions of the two atoms slightly different. An appropriate method was proposed by Yamaguchi et al. algo , which is based on the Stark effect. The authors suggest to use a set of electrodes in the cavity, which create an inhomogeneous electric field. Since the two atoms are located in space regions with different electric field strength their frequencies become independently controllable. The amplitudes and phases of the classical fields have to be chosen appropriately in order to let the atom $`2`$ undergo the transition $`|e_2|f_2,|f_2|e_2`$. Here we assume that the classical microwave field is strong enough so that the nonlinear interaction between atoms can be neglected during this stage. After this operation the state (5) becomes

$$\mathrm{\Psi }^{}(\pi /2\lambda )=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}|f_1|f_2+\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}}|e_1|g_2.$$
(6)
Then the classical microwave field is switched off and the evolution of the system is determined by the interaction (3). After another interaction time $`t_2`$ the system’s time evolution has transformed the state (6) to the state

$$\mathrm{\Psi }(t_1+t_2)=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}|f_1|f_2+\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}}e^{i\lambda t_2}[\mathrm{cos}(\lambda t_2)|e_1|g_2i\mathrm{sin}(\lambda t_2)|g_1|e_2].$$
(7)
If we choose $`\lambda t_2=\pi /4`$ the quantum state

$$\mathrm{\Psi }(3\pi /4\lambda )=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}(|f_1|f_2+e^{i\pi /4}|e_1|g_2ie^{i\pi /4}|g_1|e_2)$$
(8)
will be obtained. After the two atoms left the cavity $`C`$ the atom $`2`$ crosses a classical field, which is tuned to the transition $`|e|g`$. If the amplitude and the phase of the classical field is chosen appropriately the atom $`2`$ will undergo the transition $`|e_2e^{i\pi /4}|g_2,|g_2e^{i\pi /4}|e_2`$. Thus, the state (8) becomes

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_{bell}=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}(|f_1|f_2+|e_1|e_2+|g_1|g_2).$$
(9)
This is the maximally entangled state of a two three-level system, which is discussed in Refkp .
One of the difficulties of this scheme is the requirement to sent two atoms simultaneously through the cavity, otherwise an error will result. In the following, we discuss the case, that the second atom enters the cavity in the excited state before the first atom. This deviation from the ideal case shall be considered with the time difference $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau `$, which denotes a fraction of the Rabi frequency $`\tau =\pi /\lambda =\pi \delta _{eg}/g^2`$ of the Hamiltonian (2). Then the quantum state

$$\mathrm{\Psi }=\sqrt{\frac{1}{3}}|f_1|f_2+\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}}e^{i\mathrm{\Delta }\pi }[\mathrm{cos}(\frac{\pi }{4}\mathrm{\Delta }\pi )|e_1|e_2+\mathrm{sin}(\frac{\pi }{4}\mathrm{\Delta }\pi )|g_1|g_2]$$
(10)
will be generated. The difference of the state (10) to the state (9) can be characterized in terms of the fidelity $`F=|\mathrm{\Psi }_{bell}|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2`$:

$$F=\frac{5+4\mathrm{cos}2\mathrm{\Delta }\pi }{9}.$$
(11)
If $`\mathrm{\Delta }=0.01`$ holds, we have $`F=0.999`$. In this case the operation is only slightly affected.

It is necessary to give a brief discussion on the experimental realization of the proposed scheme. It was reported that the cavity can have a photon storage time of $`T=1`$ms (corresponding to $`Q=3\times 10^8`$). The radiative time of the Rydberg atoms with the principle quantum numbers $`49`$, $`50`$ and $`51`$ is about $`3\times 10^2`$s qed . The coupling constant of the atoms to the cavity field is $`g/2\pi =25`$kHz bbb . In order to achieve a good entanglement in the cavity-assisted collision process, the detuning $`\delta _{eg}`$ should be much bigger than $`g`$. With the choice $`\delta _{eg}=10g`$ the interaction time between the atom and the cavity field is in the order $`3\pi \delta _{eg}/4g^21.5\times 10^4`$s. The time needed for the classical field pulse is at this scale negligible. Thus, the interaction time needed to complement the total procedure is much shorter than the radiative time and the photon lifetime $`1ms`$ in the present cavity. For the interaction time $`1.5\times 10^4`$s the velocity of the prepared atoms should be $`v_p0.7\times 10^4L`$, where $`L`$ is the length of the cavity. If we choose $`L=2.75cm`$ the velocity of the atoms should be of the order of $`192m/s`$, which is in the range of present experiments. Based on cavity QED techniques the present scheme seems to become realizable in a near future.

In summary, we have proposed a scheme to generate maximally entangled states of two three-level atoms. During the passage of the atoms through the cavity field they are only virtually excited. No transfer of quantum information will happen between the atoms and the cavity. The experimental implementation of the scheme demonstrates the power of cavity QED to manipulate complex entangled states for quantum information processing.

Figure Captions

Figure 1.(a) This figure shows the electronic levels of the three-level atom modell in the energy representation.

Figure 1.(b) This figure shows the experimental apparatus. The atoms $`1`$ and $`2`$ cross the cavity with the same velocity but at different positions with a different electric field strength. This makes an individual manipulation of each atom by a classical field possible. Inside the cavity atom $`2`$ is manipulated by the classical field $`S`$. Outside the cavity both atoms are manipulated by the classical fields $`R_1`$ and $`R_2`$, respectively.


text:
# Search for Antimatter with the AMS Cosmic Ray Detector

## 1 Introduction

The Dirac theory of elementary interactions states that to each particle corresponds an antiparticle with all additive quantum numbers inverted in sign, and of each reaction involving particles, the symmetric can occur. An experimental confirmation was provided by the discovery of the positron in cosmic rays  and later by the production of antiprotons at accelerators . However we do not observed this symmetry in our macroscopic surrounding which is composed of photons and matter particles. Indeed, there is no undisputed experimental evidence up to now which proves the presence of antimatter in our Universe.

Based on the evidence that in weak interactions parity ($`P`$) is not conserved  nor is the product of charge conjugation and parity ($`CP`$) in the very specific case of the neutral $`K`$ system , Sakharov  pointed out that three ingredients are necessary for a baryon symmetric Universe to evolve to an asymmetric one:

* violation of the baryon number ($`B`$);
* violation of $`C`$ and $`CP`$;
* departure from thermal equilibrium.

There is no compelling reason for the baryon number to be strictly conserved and there is no evidence of a force associated with baryonic charge. In fact, GUT theories predict $`B`$ violating interactions. There are several experiments which are testing $`B`$ nonconservation by searching for neutron-antineutron oscillations or proton decays, none of them having detected a significant signal so far. The present world limit on the proton lifetime, determined by the partial width of the decay $`pe^+\pi `$, is $`\tau _p>1.6\times 10^{33}\mathrm{yrs}`$ . The strength of the observed $`CP`$ violation is far too small to account for the baryon asymmetry of the Universe.

Antimatter does not exist on Earth in macroscopic amounts: it would have been annihilated releasing tremendous amounts of energy. The solar wind, the constant flux of charged particles emitted by the Sun and propagated throughout the solar system, allows us to exclude antimatter planets, which otherwise would appear as very bright $`\gamma `$-ray emitters. Photons emitted by other stars do not probe directly the sign of the baryon number of the object they are emitted from. Fortunately cosmic rays do and we can therefore expect to learn about the baryon content of the Galaxy and the Universe by studying their composition.

## 2 Summary of previous measurements

Balloon-borne experiments started to search for signatures of antinuclei in their instruments since 40 years. A summary of the most stringent limits on the antihelium flux as a function of the observed rigidity range can be found in reference . The BESS collaboration deploy their detector, whose central part is made out of a drift chamber enclosed by a thin superconducting magnet, on balloon flights from a high latitude location on an annual basis since 1993. The latest limit on the antihelium-to-helium flux ratio reported by the BESS collaboration is $`7\times 10^7`$  up to a maximum rigidity of $`14\mathrm{GV}`$.

A comprehensive compilation of limits on the antimatter-to-matter flux ratio is shown in fig. 1.

A stack of photographic emulsions was used in 1961  to detect annihilation topologies with a maximum detectable energy of $`E_{\mathrm{max}}=700\mathrm{MeV}/\mathrm{n}`$. Greenhill and collaborators  employed a gas Čerenkov detector and scintillators for the $`|\beta |`$ and $`dE/dx`$ determination in 1971. The traversal direction could not be directly measured but was derived by considerations on the different dependence of the cutoff rigidity for negative and positive charged particles for a given orientation of the instrument with respect to zenith. Because of the higher Čerenkov threshold it was possible to exclude the presence of antimatter up to energy values of $`E=9\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{n}`$. The first magnetic spectrograph with spark chambers and emulsion plates recorded a relatively small amount of events, while Golden et al. in 1974  and Smoot et al. in 1975  used a superconducting magnet with a bending power of $`BL=0.43\mathrm{Tm}`$. With an acceptance of $`0.066\mathrm{m}^2\mathrm{sr}`$ a total of $`10^4`$ events were collected up to rigidity values of $`R=100\mathrm{GV}`$. This measurement yielded the most stringent limit for the presence of antinuclei ($`Z<2`$) before AMS.

## 3 The AMS apparatus

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)  is scheduled for a high energy physics program on the International Space Station. The primary goal of the AMS experiment is the search for antimatter in cosmic rays. The unambiguous signature which is looked for are nuclei with $`|Z|>1`$. The physical quantities which are measured by the AMS detector include the particle charge and mass for its identification, its energy or equivalently its rigidity, and the sense and direction of traversal.

The AMS-01  version of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is schematically shown in fig. 2. It was flown on the space shuttle Discovery on flight STS–91 in June 1998 for a ten days test flight. The cylindrical permanent magnet encloses a multilayer silicon tracker which measures the trajectory of charged particles traversing the volume. Four scintillator planes and an Aerogel Threshold Čerenkov counter complete the detector by measuring the particle velocity. The energy loss is recorded by the tracker and the scintillators. In order to reject particles outside the magnet aperture the inner wall of the magnet is covered by an anticoincidence counter. To minimize dead time a “Low Energy Particle Shield” absorbs low energy particles above the scintillator planes. For particles arriving from above, the amount of material at normal incidence was $`1.5\mathrm{g}/\mathrm{cm}^2`$ in front of the TOF system, and $`3.5\mathrm{g}/\mathrm{cm}^2`$ in front of the tracker.

## 4 Search for antinuclei

A detailed description of the search for antihelium is given in reference .
The goal of the analysis is to find a small amount of antimatter in a large background of matter. A total of 270905 events are identified as particles traversing the detector with $`|Z|>2`$, out of which about 6% are initially reconstructed as antimatter candidates:

* Number of events with $`Z>2`$: 255321
* Number of events with $`Z<2`$: 15584.

In fig. 3 rigidity distributions are shown before and after all selection cuts. The measured parameter is the track’s sagitta, i.e. the deflection, which is proportional to the inverse rigidity $`1/R`$. The candidate antimatter events are uniformly distributed as a function of $`1/R`$, which immediately suggests that they predominantly arise from misreconstruction. The event selected with the lowest rigidity has a value $`1/R=1.59\mathrm{GV}^1`$ or $`R=630\mathrm{MV}`$. At lower values a background level of $`100`$ events/bin is reached.

A matter nucleus may in principle mimic an antimatter nucleus flying in opposite direction if the time-of-flight is determined with the wrong sign. Due to the good time resolution of the TOF system the $`\beta `$ measurement is sufficiently accurate not to mix the two particle populations coming from the top and from the bottom of the detector. A misidentification is therefore excluded.

The dynamic range of the silicon tracker allows a good separation of nuclei at least up to oxygen ($`\mathrm{Z}=8`$). Up to six measurements are available for the same particle. The energy lost inside each silicon detector is measured twice (“S” and “K” side). Fig. 4 shows the obtained separation capability.

A set of cuts has been developed  to ensure the selection of clean events. Special care has to be taken to eliminate events which have a poor determination of the track parameters. For example, the rigidity estimations obtained using the upper and lower three tracking points are required to agree.

The last cut is applied to ensure the overall consistence of the velocity, rigidity and charge measurements. Fig. 5 shows the distribution of 1/$`\beta `$ versus rigidity together with the cuts applied for $`|Z|>2`$ events. True $`|Z|>2`$ events should be concentrated along the line $`1/\beta =\sqrt{1+(AM_n/ZR)^2}`$, where A is the atomic number and $`M_n`$ the nucleon mass. Measurement errors in $`\beta `$, $`Z`$ or $`R`$ cause scattering around this line. The shown cuts reject all remaining $`Z<2`$ antimatter candidates and keep nearly all the $`Z>2`$ events.

Corrections to the measured spectrum take into account the rigidity resolution function, the detector livetime and rigidity cutoff dependence on the latitude, and the different cross section of nuclei and antinuclei hitting the detector material.

## 5 Limits on the antimatter-to-matter flux ratio

Since no antimatter nucleus was found at any rigidity, one can provide an upper limit on the flux ratio of antimatter to matter $`N_{\overline{Z}}/N_Z`$ which is evaluated by summing up the contents of all the bins

$$\left[\frac{N_{\overline{Z}}}{N_Z}\right]=\frac{N_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)}{N_Z(R_i)}.$$

It should be noted that the experimental result of detecting no antimatter nucleus corresponds to $`N_{\overline{Z}}^{}(R_i)=0`$, where $`N^{}`$ denotes the measured spectrum.

Following the unified approach of confidence belts construction proposed in  which ensures correct coverage avoiding unphysical confidence intervals and is based on classical statistics, we can put $`N_{\overline{Z}}^{}(R_i)<3.09`$ at a $`95\%`$ confidence level.

Three different priors can be assumed for the unknown antimatter distribution, $`N_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)`$:

* the same spectrum as matter, $`N_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)/N_Z(R_i)=\mathrm{const}`$;
* a flat spectrum, $`N_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)=\mathrm{const}`$;
* no a priori spectrum (worst case), $`N_{\overline{Z}}(R_j)=N_{\overline{Z}}`$, where j is the bin with the lowest efficiency and $`N_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)=0`$ otherwise.

Limits for the three approaches are calculated as follows (see reference  for details):

$$\left[\frac{N_{\overline{Z}}}{N_Z}\right]_{\mathrm{same}}<\frac{3.09}{N_Z^{}(R_i)\frac{ϵ_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)}{ϵ_Z(R_i)}},$$

$$\left[\frac{N_{\overline{Z}}}{N_Z}\right]_{\mathrm{unif}}<\frac{3.09/<ϵ_{\overline{Z}}>}{N_Z^{}(R_i)/ϵ_Z(R_i)},$$

$$\left[\frac{N_{\overline{Z}}}{N_Z}\right]_{\mathrm{cons}}<\frac{3.09/ϵ_{\mathrm{min}}}{N_Z^{}(R_i)/ϵ_Z(R_i)}.$$

where $`ϵ_Z(R_i)`$ and $`ϵ_{\overline{Z}}(R_i)`$ are the detector efficiencies for matter and antimatter, the average efficiency is defined as $`<ϵ_{\overline{Z}}>(ϵ_Z(R_i))/n`$, and $`ϵ_{\mathrm{min}}`$ is the worst efficiency in a given rigidity interval.

Under the same spectrum assumption $`\left[N_{\overline{Z}}/N_Z\right]_{\mathrm{same}}<2.00\times 10^5`$ for all nuclei. This result is compared to previous measurements in fig. 1. A more stringent limit could be given due to the amount of events collected and the good rigidity resolution. The rigidity range extends from $`1\mathrm{GV}`$ to $`100\mathrm{GV}`$.

In the second case, the upper limit on the anticarbon/carbon ratio, for example, is $`6.55\times 10^5`$ in the rigidity range $`1\mathrm{GV}`$ to $`10\mathrm{GV}`$ and $`1.46\times 10^4`$ in the range $`1\mathrm{GV}`$ to $`50\mathrm{GV}`$.

The upper limit determined under the most conservative assumption is shown in fig. 6 for all matter/antimatter nuclei ($`3|Z|8`$) and for carbon/anticarbon. Starting from a minimum rigidity of $`R_{\mathrm{min}}=1.6\mathrm{GV}`$ the upper limit is shown as a function of the maximum rigidity. With increasing $`R_{\mathrm{max}}`$ the limits decrease as a consequence of the increasing statistics. The rise above $`R_{\mathrm{max}}4\mathrm{GV}`$ is due to the detection efficiency which gets worse with increasing rigidity. The corresponding result for antihelium can be found in .

With the AMS-01 test flight a never before obtained sensitivity for antimatter searches has been reached. The AMS-02 version of the detector which will include a superconducting magnet and will be installed on the International Space Station is foreseen to further improve this sensitivity up to TV rigidities .