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# Angular momentum distribution of hot gas and implications for disk galaxy formation

## 1 Introduction

Angular momentum is one of the most important quantities that determine the structure of disk galaxies. In the popular hierarchical structure formation framework (White & Rees, 1978), dark matter halos grow by means of gravitational instability and acquire angular momentum from tidal torques, and galaxies form through cooling of baryons within dark matter halos. In order to derive a density profile of the cooled gas, one needs three assumptions: (I) the specific angular momentum of gas is conserved during the collapse, (II) gas has the same initial angular momentum distribution as dark matter in a halo, (III) either the disk density profile is assumed to be exponential as observed or the angular momentum profile of dark matter halos is assumed. (e.g., Fall & Efstathiou, 1980; Blumenthal et al., 1986; Dalcanton et al., 1997; Jimenez et al., 1997; Mo, Mao, & White, 1998; van den Bosch, 1998; Avila-Reese & Firmani, 2000)

The angular momentum of a halo is often parameterized by the dimensionless spin parameter

$$\lambda \frac{|𝐉||E|^{1/2}}{GM^{5/2}}$$
(1)
where $`G`$ is the gravitational constant, and $`𝐉`$ ,$`E`$, and $`M`$ are the total angular momentum, energy and mass of the halo, respectively (Peebles, 1969). With the first two assumptions, it is clear that the disk scale length $`R_d\lambda R_{vir}`$. The angular momentum of a halo is presumably acquired through tidal interactions with neighboring objects (Doroshkevich 1970; White 1984; Catelan & Theuns 1996; Lee & Pen 2000, Porciani, Dekel, & Hoffman 2002) . In particular, with help of N-body simulations, the distribution of the halo spin parameter is found to be approximately log normal with a median value of $`\lambda 0.05`$ (Barnes & Efstathiou, 1987). The implied distribution of disk scale length agrees reasonably well with observations (Mo, Mao, & White, 1998; Cole et al., 2000; de Jong & Lacey, 2000; van den Bosch et al., 2002).

Recently, Bullock et al. (2001; hereafter B2001) have determined the angular momentum distribution for individual dark matter halos in a concordance Cold Dark Matter model. Their results imply that the dark halos have too much low angular momentum material to account for the observed typical exponential profiles of disk galaxies (Bullock et al., 2001; van den Bosch, 2001; van den Bosch, Burkert, & Swaters, 2001), if the gas follows dark matter in the angular momentum distribution. It had been expected that Warm Dark Matter assumption may resolve this problem, but recent studies (Chen & Jing, 2002; Bullock, Kravtsov, & Colín, 2002; Knebe et al., 2002) have not found any significant difference in the angular momentum profile between the two types of dark matter models. Chen & Jing (2002) and van den Bosch et al. (2002) also demonstrated that angular momentum of dark matter within a halo does not align well, and a significant fraction of dark matter is in counter-rotation relative to the global spin of the halo. This implies that one should be cautious when the angular momentum of disk galaxies is compared with the angular momentum profile of Bullock et al. (2001) for dark matter halos. After the matter of negative angular momentum $`j`$ is excluded ($`j`$ is the angular momentum projected on the halo spin axis), Chen & Jing (2002) showed that the angular momentum distribution is reasonably described by the “Universal” profile suggested by B2001,

$$M(<j)=\frac{M(j>0)\mu j}{j_0+j}$$
(2)
where $`M(j>0)`$ is the total mass of positive angular momentum in the halo (the virial mass was in the original formula of B2001), $`j_0=(\mu 1)j_{\mathrm{max}}`$, and $`j_{\mathrm{max}}`$ is the maximum specific angular momentum. The parameter $`\mu `$ indicates the shape of the profile, and a smaller $`\mu `$ means there is more mass of low angular momentum. Unless the material of low positive angular momentum is consumed in combination with that of negative angular momentum to form bulge component as van den Bosch et al. (2002) suggested, it appears difficult to reconcile the exponential disk of spiral galaxies with CDM models.

Considering the above angular momentum problem, the first and second assumptions, which are essential ingredients of the standard paradigm for disk galaxy formation appear to be questionable. van den Bosch et al. (2002) studied the angular momentum distribution of the gas in galactic dark halos at $`z=3`$ in a non-radiative cosmological hydrodynamics simulation. They found that on average the gas and dark matter have the same distribution of the spin parameter and that their detailed angular momentum distributions in individual halos are very similar. Because the simulation box is only $`10h^1`$ comoving Mpc on each side, they cannot evolve the simulation to the redshift $`z=0`$.

Because of its utmost importance, we analyze here the angular momentum distribution of halos in a set of three cosmological hydrodynamics simulations performed with a $`\mathrm{P}^3\mathrm{M}`$/SPH code (Yoshikawa et al. (2001)). One simulation is non-radiative (or adiabatic ), and the other two adopt different metallicities for gas and allow the gas to cool radiatively. From the two radiative cooling models we can get information about the distribution of angular momentum in gas components with different temperatures. Since the disk formation is related to the distribution of hot gas before cooling, our division of gas into two components (hot gas and cold gas) becomes increasingly essential. The simulations were performed in a box of $`75h^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$, so most halos analyzed here are of mass of rich groups. Fortunately, it is generally believed that the angular momentum profile and spin parameter of halos depend on the halo mass very weakly (as dark matter simulations have shown, Lemson & Kauffmann 1999), so most results obtained here would also be applicable to galactic halos and disk formation. Our study here differs from that of van den Bosch et al. (2002) in several important aspects. First of all, in addition to one non-radiative simulation, we have two simulations with radiative cooling that enable us to do analysis for hot gas and cold gas separately. We do analysis for halos at redshift $`z=0`$ and at group mass, and our simulations are generated with an independent code.

As will be seen, we find that the spin parameter of the hot gas component is nearly $`20\%`$ larger than that of dark matter counterpart in all the three models, including the non-radiative model. The hot gas component has much less mass with negative angular momentum $`j`$ than dark matter component, that is, the angular momentum of the hot gas is significantly more aligned than that of dark matter. Since disk formation is related to the distribution of hot gas that will cool, these results will have interesting implications for galactic disk formation.

We present our methods for computing the angular momentum in Section 2. In Section 3, the results of our analysis are presented. We give our conclusions and discussion in Section 4.

## 2 Method

### 2.1 Numerical simulations

The cosmological simulations were generated with a $`\mathrm{P}^3\mathrm{M}`$/SPH code. A description of the code is presented in Yoshikawa, Jing, & Suto (2000). All the present runs employ $`N_{dm}=128^3`$ dark matter particles and the same number of gas particles. The model is derived from a spatially flat low-density cold dark matter universe with the cosmological density parameter $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0.3`$, the cosmological constant $`\lambda _0=0.7`$, and the Hubble constant, in units of $`100\mathrm{k}\mathrm{m}\mathrm{s}^1\mathrm{Mpc}^1`$, $`h=0.7`$. The power-law index of the primordial density fluctuation is set to $`n=1`$. The baryon density parameter is $`\mathrm{\Omega }_b=0.015h^2`$ and the amplitude $`\sigma _8`$ (the rms top-hat density fluctuation of radius $`8h^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$ at the present time) of the linear density power spectrum is $`1.0`$. The simulation box is $`75h^1\mathrm{Mpc}`$ wide, the initial condition is created at redshift $`z=36`$, and the simulations are evolved to $`z=0`$. The gas component is treated as an ideal gas with an adiabatic index $`\gamma =5/3`$, and is either non-radiative or allowed to cool, radiatively. The non-radiative simulation is also called adiabatic simulation according to conventions in literature. For the two cooling runs, the cooling rate of Sutherland & Dopita (1993) is adopted with the metallicity \[Fe/H\]$`=0.5`$ and \[Fe/H\]$`=1.5`$ respectively. The cooling run with \[Fe/H\]$`=0.5`$ is used by Yoshikawa et al. (2001) to study the clustering properties of galaxies.

In Figure 1, we give the histogram for the percentage of cold gas (i.e. gas with temperature below $`10^6`$ K) within halos as a function of the halo gas mass. Here we use the number of gas particles $`N_{Gas}`$ to denote the gas mass. The upper panel is for the \[Fe/H\]$`=1.5`$ model, while the lower panel is for the \[Fe/H\]$`=0.5`$ model. The higher metallicity means a higher cooling rate, thus more cold gas particles, as the figure shows. For halos of $`3000`$ particles, there are nearly $`60\%`$ of their gas particles cooled in the \[Fe/H\]$`=1.5`$ model, and this percentage becomes $`70\%`$ in the metal-richer \[Fe/H\]$`=0.5`$ model. For halos of $`10^4`$ particles, there are approximately $`55\%`$ and $`45\%`$ of gas particles cooled in the \[Fe/H\]$`=0.5`$ and \[Fe/H\]$`=1.5`$ models, respectively. For the most massive halos (about $`2\times 10^4`$ particles), these percentages become $`39\%`$ and $`23\%`$ respectively. Because the hot gas percentages are different in the two cooling models, we will test if our conclusions with regard to the angular momentum distribution are sensitive to the cooling rate (or the fraction of hot gas).

### 2.2 Identification of dark halos

The halos are identified from the simulations using the potential minimum method as described in Jing & Suto (2002). The method uses the spherical over-density criterion to define a halo, thus the halos have an over-density $`\mathrm{\Delta }_c(z)`$ according to Kitayama & Suto (1996) and Bryan & Norman (1998). For the cosmological model in this paper, $`\mathrm{\Delta }_c(z)=101`$ at $`z=0`$.

In order to study the angular momentum distribution accurately, we select halos that at least have $`3000`$ gas particles and $`3000`$ dark matter particles. There are $`48`$, $`47`$, and $`46`$ halos in the non-radiative model, \[Fe/H\]$`=0.5`$ model, and \[Fe/H\]$`=1.5`$ model, respectively. The halos are ordered according to their dark matter mass. Since the initial density perturbation is the same in the three simulations, we can find the correspondence among the halos in different simulations. The ordering number of the “same” halo may vary slightly in the three models, because the cooling process can affect the distribution of dark matter. We will compare the angular momentum distribution for the corresponding halos in different cooling models.

### 2.3 Angular momentum

The aim of the paper is to study the angular momentum distribution of gas and dark matter in halos. We first determine the global angular momentum $`𝐉`$ for each matter component (e.g. dark matter, gas, or hot gas) in a halo, and define the z-axis for this matter component as pointing to the direction of $`𝐉`$. The global angular momenta are measured as follows,

$$𝐉_{\mathrm{gas},\mathrm{DM}}=\underset{i=1}{\overset{N_{\mathrm{gas},\mathrm{DM}}}{}}m_\mathrm{i}𝐫_\mathrm{i}\times 𝐯_\mathrm{i}$$
(3)
where $`𝐫_\mathrm{i}`$ and $`𝐯_\mathrm{i}`$ are the position and velocity of the i-th gas or dark matter particle with respect to the halo center of mass. Following Mo, Mao, & White (1998; see also B2001), we measure the spin parameter $`\lambda `$ for the gas and dark matter components using,

$$\lambda _{\mathrm{gas},\mathrm{DM}}=\frac{J_{\mathrm{gas},\mathrm{DM}}}{\sqrt{2}M_{\mathrm{gas},\mathrm{DM}}V_\mathrm{c}r_\mathrm{v}}$$
(4)
where $`V_\mathrm{c}`$ is the circular velocity at the virial radius $`r_\mathrm{v}`$.

To quantify the misalignment between the angular momenta of the gas and dark matter components, we compute the angle

$$\theta =\mathrm{arccos}(\frac{𝐉_{\mathrm{gas}}𝐉_{\mathrm{DM}}}{|𝐉_{\mathrm{gas}}||𝐉_{\mathrm{DM}}|})$$
(5)
between their angular momentum vectors. The same formula has been adopted by van den Bosch et al. (2002), so our measurement results for the $`\theta `$ distribution in the non-radiative model can be compared with theirs.

The angular momentum distribution measures the fraction of the mass in a halo that has specific angular momentum greater than $`j`$. Although it seems straightforward to determine this quantity from velocity and position of particles, the interpretation of such a measured result is far less straightforward in the framework of disk galaxy formation. The main reason is that dark matter is collisionless, so dark matter particles move rapidly and randomly in addition to a slow global rotation. The random motion of gas particles should be much reduced by the shocks, but may not be completely suppressed if the shocks still exists.

The “cell” method for measuring the angular momentum distribution, proposed by B2001, intends to eliminate the effect of random motion of the particles \[see also Chen & Jing (2002)\]. They divide each halo in the spherical coordinates ($`r`$, $`\theta `$, $`\varphi `$). Each halo is first divided into $`10`$ shells such that there are approximately the same number of particles in each shell. Then each shell is divided into $`6`$ azimuthal cells of equal volume. The two cells with the same $`r`$ and $`\mathrm{sin}\theta `$ above and below the equatorial plane are merged, therefore there are 30 cells in each halo. We will adopt this cell division method for our analysis, and call it as $`10\times 3\times 1`$ cell method. The cells thus defined are not contiguous. In view of this possible problem and in order to see whether a special “cell” division of a halo can have impacts on our result, we adopt two additional “cell” divisions. One is the so called “$`10\times 6\times 1`$” method. The difference of this division from the $`10\times 3\times 1`$ cell method is that the two cells above and below the equatorial plane are not merged, so the cells are contiguous. The other is the $`5\times 6\times 1`$ cell method, which is the same as the “$`10\times 6\times 1`$” method except that the halo is divided into only 5 shells in radius.

We estimate the error of the special angular momentum $`j`$ in the same way as in Chen & Jing (2002),

$$\sigma _\mathrm{j}=\frac{rv_\mathrm{c}(r)}{\sqrt{N}_\mathrm{c}}$$
(6)
where $`N_\mathrm{c}`$ is the particle number in the cell, and $`r`$ is the mean distance of the cell from the halo center. The error estimated above is likely an upper limit on the scatter because the motion of particles is not completely random.

As we mentioned earlier, van den Bosch et al. (2002) have analyzed the angular momentum distribution for a non-radiative SPH/N-body simulation. Considering that the gas particles are collisional, they computed the angular momentum distribution for gas based on the velocity of individual gas particles. To distinguish their method with the cell method, we will call their method as the particle method. For a uniformly rotating sphere of gas, one would expect that both methods yield the same angular momentum distribution. But for a halo that is in continuous merger in the hierarchical clustering, the two methods may produce different results. For example, in the particle method, the shocks generated during an merger may lead to a certain degree of local misalignment of the angular momentum. Such local misalignment may not be wanted to show up in the present analysis, as it will probably be shocked away later. The cell method can avoid this complication to a large extent, but the results may depend on the way of dividing halos. It is therefore difficult to assess which method is superior. We adopt both methods in order to make proper comparisons with those of B2001 and van den Bosch et al. (2002). Since we do not add a random motion to the motion of gas particles, our results for the angular momentum distribution should be compared with those without superscript $`v`$ in van den Bosch et al. (2002) .

## 3 Results

### 3.1 The global angular momentum

Figure 2 shows the distribution of the angle $`\theta `$ between the global angular momentum vectors of dark matter and gas components. The first column is for our cooling model with metallicity \[Fe/H\]=$`0.5`$. Among the three panels in the column, the lower one is for cold gas, the middle one for hot gas, and the upper one for hot and cold gas together. The mean value of $`\theta `$ is $`40.5^{}`$, $`21.0^{}`$, and $`25.0^{}`$ for the three components, respectively. The middle column has the same layout as the left one, but for the \[Fe/H\]=$`1.5`$ model, with the mean $`22.8^{}`$, $`20.9^{}`$, and $`38.9^{}`$ from top to bottom. Since there is no cooling in the non-radiative model, the right column only plots for hot gas, and the mean $`\theta `$ is $`23.5^{}`$. Our results can be compared with Fig 3 of van den Bosch et al. (2002). Their mean value of $`\theta `$ for non-radiative model is about $`36^{}`$, a bit larger than ours. This is expected, because they included all halos with more than 100 dark matter particles in their analysis, thus the discreteness effect of particles is more pronounced in their sample. They showed that the angle $`\theta `$ increases with decreasing halo mass $`M_{vir}`$, and the $`\theta `$ at the low end of halo mass may have been affected by the discreteness effect. We do not find any relation between $`\theta `$ and $`M_{vir}`$ in our sample (Fig.4), because we include only very massive halos. However, the mean misalignment angle is found to decrease with increasing spin parameter (see Figure 3), in agreement with van den Bosch et al. (2002). This relation may partly be attributed to the particle discreteness again, for the discreteness has relatively less effect on high spin halos. Overall, our results for the non-radiative model are in good agreement with those of van den Bosch et al. (2002), in spite of the difference in many aspects between the simulations used in the two studies. The misalignment angle is affected very slightly by the cooling process, though the hot component aligns slightly better with dark matter in angular momentum than the cold component. A straightforward conclusion is that the angular momentum vector of gas or hot gas lies in an angle of $`20^{}`$ with that of dark matter, and this misalignment should be considered in interpreting observations, e.g. the alignment correlation of disk galaxies (Lee & Pen (2001)).

Figure 5 plots the histogram of the spin parameter $`\lambda `$ separately for each matter component. The distributions are well fitted by the log-normal function,

$$p(\lambda )d\lambda =\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi }\sigma _\lambda }\mathrm{exp}(\frac{\mathrm{ln}^2(\lambda /\lambda _0)}{2\sigma _\lambda ^2})\frac{d\lambda }{\lambda }$$
(7)
The $`\sigma _\lambda `$ and $`\lambda _0`$ for each component are given in the figure. The top panels are for the non-radiative model, which can be compared with Figure 1 of van den Bosch et al. (2002). We get a bit smaller $`\lambda _0`$ for our dark matter component than its non-radiative gas counterpart (i.e. $`0.032`$ vs.$`0.038`$). The middle row of panels is for the \[Fe/H\]=$`0.5`$ model, but with a more detailed classification for the gas components. We note that the total gas component shares approximately the same $`\lambda _0`$ and $`\sigma _\lambda `$ as dark matter for this cooling model, while hot gas presents a larger $`\lambda _0`$ than both total gas and dark matter components. Just as one would expect, cold gas has the smallest $`\lambda _0`$. Qualitatively the same results have been found for the \[Fe/H\]=$`1.5`$ model, as shown in the bottom panels.

Figure 6 presents a one-to-one comparison of the spin parameter $`\lambda `$ between gas and dark matter. The left column is for total gas and dark matter, and from top to bottom panels are the non-radiative, \[Fe/H\]=$`1.5`$, \[Fe/H\]=$`0.5`$ models, respectively. We could arrive at conclusion that on average, the gas component hosts a larger spin parameter than its dark matter counterpart for the non-radiative model (as upper panel of Figure 5). But this tendency becomes weaker when the cooling enhances. For the model with the highest cooling rate (i.e. the \[Fe/H\]=$`0.5`$ model, the bottom panel), the gas and dark matter share nearly the same spin. From the right column, however, we see that the hot gas generally processes a higher spin than dark matter, while the cold gas has a lower spin. On average, the spin parameter of the hot gas component is 20% to 30 % higher than that of dark matter. The difference between these two components is significant at a confidence level of $`80\pm 10\%`$ in the three models, as the Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests show (see Table 1). The $`\lambda `$ distributions of dark matter and gas in the cooling models are consistent with being drawn from the same parent distribution (see also Figure 5 and Table 1).

### 3.2 Angular momentum distribution

Now we measure the angular momentum distribution based on the cell division method. Figure 7 shows the results for six halos randomly selected from the non-radiative model. The left two columns present the angular momentum distribution for dark matter (the left one) and gas (the right one) using $`5\times 6\times 1`$ cell method. While the middle two and the right two columns are for $`10\times 6\times 1`$ and $`10\times 3\times 1`$ cell divisions, respectively. The basic properties of these six halos are listed in Table 3. Column (7) and (8) of Table 4 list the shape parameter $`\mu `$ for each halo which is obtained by fitting the data with equation (2). For a small fraction of halos (e.g. halo 06 in Table 4), the fitted parameter $`\mu `$ shows a significant variation among different cell divisions, while for most halos, the measured shape parameter $`\mu `$ changes only slightly when the different cell divisions are applied (e.g. column (7) in Table 4). Especially, relative values of the parameter $`\mu `$ among the halos nearly do not change with cell divisions, indicating that the results are quite robust to the cell divisions.

We have measured the shape parameter $`\mu `$ for all halos in the three simulations, using the three division methods. For the gas, we also consider the hot and cold components separately. Since there is a considerable amount of misalignment in the angular momentum of cold gas (see below) and its angular momentum profile often can not be described by eq.(2), we do not measure the $`\mu `$ parameter for the cold gas. Our measured results for the hot gas and dark matter are presented in Figure 8. Generally speaking, either gas in the non-radiative model or hot gas in the cooling models has a much larger $`\mu `$ value than their dark matter counterpart, indicating that there is relatively less mass of low angular momentum in hot gas than in dark matter. The median value of $`\mu `$ is around 2 for hot gas in the two cooling models, compared to 1.3 for dark matter. The difference of the angular momentum profiles between the two components is significant according the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (Table 2). This conclusion does little depend on the cell divisions. We will discuss its implications for disk galaxy formation in next section.

In order to quantify how much mass in halos is contained in negative $`j`$ cells and to see whether there exits any relation between the negative $`j`$ mass fraction and the spin parameter $`\lambda `$, we measure the fraction of negative $`j`$ mass, $`f`$, as a function of the spin parameter $`\lambda `$. The results based on the $`5\times 6\times 1`$ cell method are presented in the lower panel of Figure 9. It is interesting to note that while dark matter and gas in halos have a similar fraction of mass contained in negative $`j`$ cells, the hot gas component contains much less negative $`j`$ mass. The median value of $`f`$ for the hot gas in the two cooling models is smaller than 0.1, i.e. there is very little hot gas that is in counter-rotation in the cooling models. For the non-radiative model, we also see a much smaller fraction of negative $`j`$ mass in the hot gas than in dark matter, though the fraction is slightly higher than that in the cooling models. These results again are robust to the cell divisions, as shown by Figure 10.

## 4 Conclusions and Discussion

We have presented a detailed study of the specific angular momentum ($`j`$) profile for dark matter and for gas components within dark halos, using a set of cosmological N-body hydrodynamics simulations. We have used the cell division method to measure the angular momentum profile. Three simulations have been analyzed, one is the “non-radiative” simulation, and the other two have radiative cooling. We find that the gas component on average has a larger spin and contains less mass with negative angular momentum than its dark matter counterpart in the non-radiative model. As to the cooling models, the gas component shares approximately the same spin value as its dark matter counterpart, but the hot gas has a higher spin parameter and is more aligned in angular momentum than the dark matter, while the opposite holds for the cold gas. After the mass of negative angular momentum is excluded, the angular momentum profile of the hot gas component approximately follows the universal function proposed by Bullock et al., though the shape parameter $`\mu `$ is around 2 for hot gas, compared to the typical value $`1.25`$ for dark matter. Our results are quite robust to the variation of cell divisions. It is interesting to note that $`\mu 2`$ is needed to explain the observed disk exponential profiles of late type galaxies (Bullock et al., 2001; van den Bosch, 2001).

Our result has interesting implications for the formation of galactic disks. In the framework of hierarchical clustering, halos are formed through mergers of smaller halos and accretion of surrounding material. As Wechsler et al. (2002) and Zhao et al. (2002) recently showed, the growth of a galactic halo can be generally divided into two phases, major merger phase ($`z>2.5`$) and slow accretion phase ($`z<2.5`$). In the major merger phase, the halo merges are very frequent and violent, thus galactic disks are not expected to form in this phase. In the slow accretion phase, halos grow much more quietly, and disks are expected to form in this phase if there is hot gas within the halos that can cool down gradually. Cold gas might exist in the halos before the slow accretion phase, but this cold gas likely forms the bulge component during the major merge phase, therefore the galactic disk formation is related to the distribution of hot gas that will cool during the slow accretion phase. The halos studied in this work are typically in the slow accretion phase according to Zhao et al. (2002), thus the hot gas may correspond to that forming galactic disks.

If the hot gas in halos of galactic mass follows the angular momentum profile of the hot gas of group halos in our cooling models, the formed disk would look like what observed in disk galaxies. This is demonstrated by Figure 11, which presents the fraction $`p(l)dl`$ of the hot gas (in all gas) that has angular momentum in $`ll+dl`$, where $`l=j/j_{\mathrm{tot}}`$ and $`j_{\mathrm{tot}}`$ is the mean specific angular momentum of the hot gas. The halos are selected from the simulations randomly from the three models. This figure can be compared with the observation of disk galaxies in van den Bosch (2002, his Figure 1). The distributions of hot gas in the two cooling models look much like those of disk galaxies of van den Bosch et al. (2002). The dotted lines denote the Bullock profile of $`\mu =1.25`$, a typical profile for dark matter. This profile was found to contain too much low angular momentum mass compared with the observations of disk galaxies (Bullock et al., 2001; van den Bosch, 2001), and does not describe well the hot gas in our cooling simulations either. The solid lines represent the Bullock profile of $`\mu =1.8`$ multiplied by the typical hot gas fractions (of all gas) $`1`$, $`0.65`$ and $`0.55`$ respectively from the top to bottom panels, respectively, and the hot gas in our cooling models is approximately described by these profiles. We note that the observations of disk galaxies do require a typical $`\mu =1.8`$ (Bullock et al., 2001; van den Bosch, 2001). Our results indicate that the global rotation of hot gas is slightly faster than that of dark matter. This may also have an interesting consequence on the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect measurement of massive clusters (Cooray & Chen, 2002).

We realize that the mechanism for keeping hot gas in our cooling simulations must be different from that is operating in galactic halos in the Universe. In our simulations, because the halos are more massive than galaxy groups, around 50 percent of gas naturally remains in the hot gas phase. However, for galactic halos, because they were formed earlier and thus have higher density, only certain feedback mechanisms can prevent all gas from cooling down (e.g., Mo & Mao, 2002). The hot gas in the galactic halos can either be that heated up by supernovae explosions or that (re-)accreted during the accretion phase. The angular momentum of the hot gas may depend on the feedback mechanisms, but it is unknown how the feedback mechanism is operating in the Universe. Nevertheless, our results clearly indicate that the angular momentum distribution of hot gas can be significantly different from that of dark matter, and some simple heating mechanisms, that prevent a fraction of gas from cooling down, may successfully solve the angular momentum problem of disk galaxies.

Our above results appear to be inconsistent with a recent study of van den Bosch et al. (2002) who stress that the angular momentum distribution of hot gas is very similar to that of dark matter in their non-radiative simulation. As pointed out in section 2, they used the particle method to analyze the angular momentum distribution. In order to compare with their results, we have also carried out the same analysis as theirs. Examples of the angular momentum distributions $`p(l)`$ obtained in the particle method are shown in Figure 12, and the left column can be compared with Fig. 6 of van den Bosch et al. (2002), where $`l`$ is the scaled specific angular momentum $`l=j/(R_{\mathrm{vir}}V_{\mathrm{vir}})`$ as defined by van den Bosch et al. (2002) and $`p(l)dl`$ is the fraction of the particles that have the specific angular momentum in $`ll+dl`$. From the figure, we see that $`p(l)`$ of gas component extends less to negative specific angular momentum than dark matter and embodies a sharper peak near zero. We also find a high fraction of mass, between $`5\%`$ and $`50\%`$, that has negative specific momentum for all matter components, though this fraction is the lowest for hot gas component. Compared with the results of van den Bosch et al. (2002), we find that our results are quantitatively in good agreement with theirs. This indicates that in spite of many differences between their simulation and our simulations (simulation box, halo mass, analysis epoch, simulation codes etc.), the angular momentum distributions are quite insensible to the simulation details. The difference in the results between this study and their study must stem from the methods for computing the angular momentum profile. We adopt the cell method, and they adopt the particle method. When the cell method is employed, the fraction of mass in counter-rotation and the fraction of small $`j`$ mass are significantly reduced at least for the hot gas. The reason might be that some local irregularities in the gas motion are smoothed out when the cell method is used. If these local irregularities, for example, correspond to the local shock motions, we believe that it is more appropriate to use the cell method to measure the angular momentum profile, because these irregularities will be later shocked away. But this point would certainly be worthy of a further investigation.

We would like to thank Gerhard Börner, Houjun Mo, Donghai Zhao, especially Joel Primack for very helpful discussion, and an anonymous referee for a detailed report that clarified many important points to us. The numerical simulations used in this paper were carried out at ADAC (the Astronomical Data Analysis Center) of the National Astronomical Observatory, Japan. The work is supported in part by NKBRSF (G19990754), and by NSFC (No.10043004).


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# Coherent Electromagnetic Processes in Ultra-Peripheral Heavy-Ion Collisions

## $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}e^+e^{}`$

Exclusive $`e^+e^{}`$ pair production in UPC has a distinctive experimental signature: the lepton pair is observed in an otherwise ’empty’ spectrometer. The tracks are approximately back-to-back in the transverse plane due to the small $`p_T`$ of the pair. For the analysis of $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}e^+e^{}`$ we use a 800.000 event sample at $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200`$ GeV with the $`0.25`$ T magnetic field setting. These events were selected by the ’minimum bias trigger’ which requires coincident neutron signals in the East and West ZDCs, i.e. mutual nuclear excitation.

We select events with two oppositely charged tracks, emerging from the interaction region. At momenta below $`125`$ MeV/c, $`e^+e^{}`$ pairs are identified by their energy loss in the TPC as shown in Fig. 3. To reconstruct a track with at least $`90\%`$ efficiency requires a minimum track momentum at mid-rapidity ($`|\eta ^{track}|<1.15`$) of $`p_T^{track}>65`$ MeV/c at $`0.25`$ T. These requirements limit the observed $`e^+e^{}`$pairs to the kinematic range of pair invariant mass $`130\mathrm{MeV}<W_{e^+e^{}}<265\mathrm{MeV}`$, pair rapidity $`|Y|<1.15`$ and $`\mathrm{cos}(\theta ^{})<0.7`$. Here, $`\theta ^{}`$ is the angle between $`e^+`$ and the photon momentum in the $`\gamma \gamma `$ center-of-mass frame (approximately the beam axis).

We have identified 61 $`e^+e^{}`$ ultra–peripheral pairs in the event sample collected with the minimum bias trigger at 0.25T. The efficiency corrected $`p_T^{ee}`$ spectrum in Figure 4 (dots) shows a clear peak at $`p_T<20`$ MeV/c identifying the process $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}e^+e^{}`$.

We have developed a Monte Carlo simulation of the $`e^+e^{}`$pair production with mutual nuclear excitation . The photon fluxes from the $`\mathrm{Au}`$ ions are calculated according to the Weizsäcker–Williams equivalent photon approximation. The simulation uses the lowest–order QED approximation for the $`\gamma \gamma e^+e^{}`$ annihilation and assumes that the pair production is independent of electromagnetic excitation of the $`\mathrm{Au}`$ ions. Except for the lowest $`p_T`$ bin, the data in Figure 4 are in good agreement with a normalized Monte Carlo simulation (histogram).

The integrated luminosity for the minimum bias data is determined from the number of hadronic interactions, assuming a total gold-gold hadronic cross section of $`7.2`$ b . The differential cross–section $`d\sigma ^{ee}/dW`$ is presented in Figure 5, compared to Monte Carlo simulations. Within the limited kinematic range quoted above the integrated cross–section for coherent electron pair production was found to be $`6.0`$ mb$`\pm 17\%\pm 19\%`$ which agrees well with the Monte Carlo prediction of $`7.8`$ mb. The major contributions for the systematic uncertainty come from the luminosity determination, efficiency corrections for tracking and vertex finding, and acceptance correction.

The cross section $`d\sigma (AuAue^+e^{})/dW_{\gamma \gamma }`$ is maximal at low invariant mass $`W_{\gamma \gamma }2m_e`$ and falls rapidly as $`1/W_{\gamma \gamma }^4`$; the pair production is peaked at small forward angles $`\theta ^{}1/\gamma `$. Including the requirement of nuclear breakup, only a small ($`10^6`$) fraction of the total cross section for coherent lepton pair production is observable. Even at the $`0.25`$ T field, low momentum electrons do not reach the central trigger barrel, and triggering is limited to the minimum bias trigger, i.e. $`e^+e^{}`$ pair production with mutual nuclear excitation. A larger kinematic acceptance for $`e^+e^{}`$ pair production could be accomplished by lowering the field of the STAR magnet. In the limited kinematic range and limited by the available statistics, our measurement agrees with leading order QED calculations. Extending these measurements to lower values of $`W_{\gamma \gamma }`$ would allow to access the kinematic region, where the contributions of higher order effects are expected to become sizable.

## $`AuAuAuAu\rho ^0`$ and $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}\rho ^0`$

Two different triggers are used for the $`\rho ^0`$ analysis. For $`AuAuAuAu\rho ^0`$, about 30,000 (2000) and 1.5 M(2001) events were collected using a low-multiplicity ‘topology’ trigger. The CTB was divided in four azimuthal quadrants. Single hits were required in the opposite side quadrants; the top and bottom quadrants acted as vetoes to suppress cosmic rays. A fast on-line reconstruction removed events without reconstructible tracks from the data stream. To study $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}\rho ^0`$, about 0.8 M(2000) and 2.5 M(2001) ‘minimum bias’ events, which required coincident detection of neutrons from nuclear break-up in both ZDCs as a trigger, are used for the analysis.

Events are selected with exactly two oppositely charged tracks forming a common vertex within the interaction region. The specific energy loss $`dE/dx`$ in the TPC shows that the event sample is dominated by pion pairs. In the topology triggered data sets, without the ZDC requirement, cosmic rays are a major background. They are removed by requiring that the two pion tracks have an opening angle of less than 3 radians. Figure 6 shows kinematic distributions for the selected 2-track events in the $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200`$ GeV minimum bias data; these distributions are similar for the other data sets.

Figure 6a) shows the transverse momentum spectrum of oppositely charged pion–pairs (points). A clear peak, the signature for coherent coupling, can be observed at $`p_T<150`$ MeV/c. Those events are compatible with coherently produced $`\rho ^0`$ candidates. A background model from like-sign combination pairs (shaded histogram), which is normalized to the signal at $`p_T>`$ 250 MeV/c, does not show such a peak. The open histogram is a Monte Carlo simulation  for coherent $`\rho ^0`$ production accompanied by nuclear break-up superimposed onto the background. The $`dN^\rho /dp_T`$ (i.e. the $`dN^\rho /dtdN^\rho /dp_T^2`$) spectrum reflects not only the nuclear form factor, but also the photon $`p_T`$ distribution and the interference of production amplitudes from both gold nuclei. The interference arises since both nuclei can be either the photon source or the scattering target . A detailed analysis of the $`p_T`$ distribution is in progress.

The rapidity distribution in Fig. 6b) is well described by the reconstructed events from the Monte Carlo simulation. The generated rapidity distribution is also shown. The acceptance for exclusive $`\rho ^0`$ is about $`40\%`$ at $`|y_\rho |<1`$. At $`|y_\rho |>1`$, the acceptance is small and this region is excluded from the analysis; the cross sections are extrapolated to the full $`4\pi `$ acceptance with the Monte Carlo simulation. Using the energy deposits in the ZDCs (Fig. 6c), we select events with at least one neutron (xn,xn), exactly one neutron (1n,1n), or no neutrons (0n,0n) in each ZDC; the latter occurs only in the topology trigger.

Figure 6d) shows the $`d\sigma /dM_{\pi \pi }`$ spectrum for events with pair-$`p_T<150`$ MeV/c (points). The fit (solid) is the sum of a relativistic Breit-Wigner for $`\rho ^0`$ production and a Söding interference term for direct $`\pi ^+\pi ^{}`$ production  (both dashed). A second order polynomial (dash-dotted) describes the combinatorial background (shaded histogram) from grazing nuclear collisions and incoherent photon-nucleon interactions. The $`\rho ^0`$ mass and width are consistent with accepted values . Alternative parameterizations like a modified Söding parametrization  and a phenomenological Ross-Stodolsky parametrization  yield similar results. Incoherent $`\rho ^0`$ production, where a photon interacts with a single nucleon, yields high $`p_T`$ $`\rho ^0`$s, which are suppressed by the low pair $`p_T`$ requirement; the remaining small contribution is indistinguishable from the coherent process. A coherently produced background arises from the two-photon process $`AuAuAu^{()}Au^{()}l^+l^{}`$. It contributes mainly at low invariant mass $`M_{\pi \pi }<0.5`$ GeV/c2. The small contribution from $`\omega `$ decays is neglected.

Figure 7 compares our results on cross sections for coherent $`\rho ^0`$ production at $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130`$ GeV to the calculations of Ref. . Preliminary results for $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200`$ GeV are also shown in the plot. The cross sections are obtained from the integral of the Breit-Wigner fit, extrapolated to full rapidity. For coherent $`\rho ^0`$ production accompanied by mutual nuclear break-up (xn,xn), we measure a cross section of $`\sigma (AuAuAu_{xn}^{}Au_{xn}^{}\rho ^0)=39.7\pm 2.8\pm 9.7`$ mb. By selecting single neutron signals in both ZDCs, we obtain $`\sigma (AuAuAu_{1n}^{}Au_{1n}^{}\rho ^0)=2.8\pm 0.5\pm 0.7`$ mb. The systematic uncertainties are dominated by the uncertainties of the luminosity determination and the $`4\pi `$ extrapolation. The absolute efficiency of the topology trigger is poorly known and does not allow a direct cross section measurement. From $`\sigma (AuAuAu_{xn}^{}Au_{xn}^{}\rho ^0)`$ and the ratio $`\sigma _{xn,xn}^\rho /\sigma _{0n,0n}^\rho `$ we estimate $`\sigma (AuAuAuAu\rho ^0)=370\pm 170\pm 80`$ mb and the total cross section for coherent $`\rho ^0`$ production $`\sigma (AuAuAu^{()}Au^{()}\rho ^0)=460\pm 220\pm 110`$ mb. From a fit to the differential cross section $`d\sigma (\gamma Au\rho Au)/dtd\sigma (\gamma Au\rho Au)/dp_T^2e^{bt}`$ for the (xn,xn) events we obtain a forward cross section $`d\sigma ^{\rho A}/dt|_{t=0}=965\pm 140\pm 230`$ mb/GeV2 and an approximate gold radius of $`R_{Au}=\sqrt{4b}=7.5\pm 2`$ fm, comparable to previous results .

In the year 2003, STAR recorded deuterium-gold (dAu) collisions. In $`dAu`$ collisions two processes compete, where either gold or the deuterium are the photon emitter: $`Au\gamma Au;\gamma dd\rho `$ and $`d\gamma d;\gamma AuAu\rho `$. About 1M $`dAu`$ collisions where recorded using the low multiplicity topology trigger, with a sub-sample that included a requirement on a neutron signal in the ZDC, i.e. deuterium break up. Fig. 8 shows a clear $`\rho ^0`$ signal in a preliminary $`M\pi \pi `$ invariant mass spectrum.

In summary, ultra-peripheral heavy-ion collisions are a new laboratory to study purely electromagnetic and diffractive interactions. The cross section for the two-photon process $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}+e^+e^{}`$agrees with leading order QED calculations in the limited kinematic range presently experimentally accessible. The first measurements of coherent $`\rho ^0`$ production with and without accompanying nuclear excitation, $`AuAuAu^{}Au^{}\rho ^0`$ and $`AuAuAuAu\rho ^0`$, confirm the existence of vector meson production in ultra-peripheral heavy ion collisions. The cross sections at $`\sqrt{s_{NN}}=130`$ and $`200`$ GeV are in agreement with theoretical calculations. The calculations for both, coherent $`e^+e^{}`$ and $`\rho ^0`$ production treat nuclear excitation as independent process.


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# Equilibrium current temperature quasi-oscillations in a ferromagnetic loop

## 1 INTRODUCTION

An equilibrium persistent current arising in a static magnetic field in a single normal-metal loop results in a magnetic response, which periodically oscillates with the magnetic flux $`\varphi `$ threading the loop . These oscillations have a fundamental period given by the flux quantum $`\varphi _0=hc/e`$ and exist if the electron phase coherence is preserved. The Josephson-type magnetic response of an isolated normal-metal loop subjected to a static external magnetic field was predicted theoretically  and studied experimentally for a variety of mesoscopic systems: an array of about $`10^7`$ isolated mesoscopic cooper rings ; a single, isolated micron-size gold loop ; a GaAs-AlGaAs single mesoscopic ring ; an array of about $`10^5`$ GaAs-AlGaAs single mesoscopic rings ; and an array of 30 gold mesoscopic rings .

In this paper we consider an equilibrium persistent current carried by an isolated ferromagnet-metal ring in the absence of an external magnetic field. We show that at low temperatures this persistent current is quasi-periodic in temperature. The quasi-period $`\delta T`$ is determined mainly by the temperature dependence of the equilibrium magnetization of the ferromagnet.

## 2 FERROMAGNET-METAL RING

Consider a ferromagnet-metal ring at a certain temperature $`TT_c`$, where $`T_c`$ is the Courie temperature. Suppose that the external magnetic field is equal to zero. In this case the electrons of a ferromagnet metal are subjected to the internal magnetic field $`𝐁=4\pi 𝐌`$, where $`𝐌`$ is the magnetization. In a small ferromagnet sample $`𝐌`$ is uniform as the formation of magnetic domains increases the free energy . Therefore, a magnetic flux $`\varphi `$ is threading a small ferromagnet-metal ring even in the absence of an external magnetic field.

A monotonic variation of the magnetic field $`4\pi 𝐌`$ results in a periodic in the flux $`\varphi `$ equilibrium persistent current oscillations in a ferromagnet-metal ring. This effect is similar to the oscillations in a normal-metal ring subjected to an external magnetic field. The flux $`\varphi `$ induced by the field $`𝐁=4\pi 𝐌`$ can be presented as $`\varphi =4\pi MA_{\mathrm{eff}},`$ where $`A_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ is an effective area of the ring. The value of $`A_{\mathrm{eff}}`$ depends on the orientation of the magnetization $`𝐌`$ and the specific geometry of the ring. In particular, if M is parallel to the axis of symmetry, then $`A_{\mathrm{eff}}\pi dD`$, where $`d`$ is the thickness and $`D`$ is the diameter of the ring.

The magnetization $`M(T)`$ of a ferromagnet is a nonlinear function of the temperature $`T`$. A small variation of the temperature $`\mathrm{\Delta }TT`$ results in a flux variation $`\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi =4\pi A_{\mathrm{eff}}|dM/dT|\mathrm{\Delta }T`$. The equilibrium persistent current is periodic in $`\varphi `$ with the period $`\varphi _0`$. Therefore, the nonlinear dependence $`M(T)`$ results in an equilibrium current quasi-periodic in temperature. The quasi-period $`\delta T`$ follows from the relation $`\mathrm{\Delta }\varphi =\varphi _0`$, which leads to the following expression

$$\delta T=\frac{\varphi _0}{4\pi A_{\mathrm{eff}}\left|\frac{dM}{dT}\right|}.$$
(1)
It is worth noting that Eq. (1) is valid if $`\delta TT`$.

At low temperatures the dependence $`M(T)`$ is given by the Bloch law:

$$M=M_0\left[1\alpha \left(\frac{T}{T_c}\right)^{3/2}\right],$$
(2)
where $`M_0`$ is the saturation magnetization and the constant $`\alpha =0.20.5`$ depending on the ferromagnet. It follows from the Eq. (2) that

$$\left|\frac{dM}{dT}\right|=\frac{3\alpha M_0}{2T_c}\left(\frac{T}{T_c}\right)^{1/2}.$$
(3)
Combining the Eqs. (1) and (3) we find for the quasi-period $`\delta T`$ the final expression

$$\delta T=\frac{\varphi _0T_c}{6\pi \alpha A_{\mathrm{eff}}M_0}\left(\frac{T_c}{T}\right)^{1/2}.$$
(4)
## 3 SUMMARY

To summarize, we demonstrate that the magnetic response of a single one-domain ring of a ferromagnet-metal is quasi-periodic in temperature even in the absence of an applied magnetic field. To estimate the quasi-period $`\delta T`$ let us consider a small dysprosium ring. Suppose the temperature $`T=4.2`$K and effective area $`A_{\mathrm{eff}}=3\times 10^8`$cm2. Using for dysprosium  the data $`T_c=89`$K and $`M_0=0.29`$T and estimating $`\alpha 0.3`$ we find $`\delta T=0.3`$K. This value seems to be reasonable for an experimental observation.

## 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank M. Azbel, D. Khmelnitskii and A. Larkin for useful discussions. This research is supported by grant No. 2000-011 from the United States - Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), Jerusalem, Israel.


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# Enhanced Nonlinear Generation in a Three-Level Medium with Spatially Dependent Coherence

## I List of Figure Captions

Fig.1. Schematic diagram of the system studied. The excited state $`|0`$ is coupled by two coherent laser pulses to the lower states $`|1`$ and $`|2`$. In the calculations presented in Fig. 2 $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1(\zeta ,\tau )`$ is the Rabi frequency of the incoming pulse and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_2(\zeta ,\tau )`$ is the Rabi frequency of the generated pulse.

Fig.2. The normalized field intensities $`|\mathrm{\Omega }_1(\zeta ,\tau )|^2/|\mathrm{\Omega }_1|^2`$ for (a), and $`|\mathrm{\Omega }_2(\zeta ,\tau )|^2/|\mathrm{\Omega }_1|^2`$ for (b) as a function of $`\tau `$ for different values of $`\zeta `$, with $`\zeta =0`$ (solid curves), $`\zeta =100`$ (dashed curves) and $`\zeta =200`$ (dot-dashed curves). In figure (c), we present the maximum of the normalized field intensities as a function of $`\zeta `$ for the incoming field (dashed curve) and the generated field (solid curve). The incident pulse is $`\mathrm{\Omega }(\tau )`$ = $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1\mathrm{sin}^2(\tau \pi /\tau _p)`$, with $`0\tau \tau _p`$. The parameters used in the calculations are $`a_1`$ = $`a_2`$ = $`1000`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_1=0.01`$, $`\tau _p=50`$, $`\delta =0`$, $`\gamma =100`$, $`\zeta _0=100`$ and $`\overline{\zeta }=5`$. All quantities are in arbitrary units.


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# A weak lensing analysis of a STIS dark-lens candidatebased on observations with FORS2@VLT operated by ESO

## 1 Introduction

In the last 5 years, the weak lensing technique has provided us with important insights into the dark matter distribution of known low- and high-redshift galaxy clusters \[see e.g. Clowe et al. (2000); Hoekstra et al. (1998, 2000)\]. One of the advantages of this technique over others is that it does not rely on the relation between the light emission of an object and its mass, but as Kaiser & Squires (1993) showed, the surface mass density of massive objects can be reconstructed from the distortion induced by its tidal gravitational field on background galaxies.

We can turn around the argument and use this technique to blindly search for new, hitherto unknown mass concentrations. So far, 9 candidates for such mass concentrations detected by weak lensing techniques have been reported in the literature (Erben et al. 2000; Umetsu & Futamase 2000; Mellier et al. 2000; Wittman et al. 2001; Miralles et al. 2002; Wittman et al. 2002; Dahle et al. 2003). Five of them (Wittman et al. 2001, 2002; Mellier et al. 2000, and two of the three candidates in Dahle et al. 2003) have been confirmed as galaxy clusters. The other four candidates lack optical counterparts and are thus potentially dark clusters with an unusually high $`M/L`$ ratio. As the firm confirmation of only one such dark cluster would already have severe consequences for current cluster formation scenarios and for the nature of dark matter (Verde et al. 2000; Weinberg & Kamionkowski 2002), careful and independent analyses with follow-up observations have to be done on such candidates to either reject or strengthen the cluster hypothesis and to reveal possible, hitherto unknown systematics in weak lensing analyses.

In this paper we present a weak lensing analysis of ground-based images of the lens candidate detected in an HST/STIS parallel field (Miralles et al. 2002, MEH henceforth). The high-resolution STIS image yielded the strong visual impression of a gravitational lens system. It showed several extended objects aligned tangentially to the field centre, as well as a pair of galaxies with similar morphologies and surface brightness which seemed to be a potential strong lensing, double-image candidate, thus indicating lensing by a massive structure. We show in this work that, despite the first indications, the observed object configurations in this field most probably do not originate from gravitational lensing. The paper is organised as follows: First we present the new VLT-observations. Thereafter, we make theoretical predictions about the detectability of a massive galaxy cluster with our data. We continue by presenting our weak lensing analysis and finish with our conclusions.

## 2 The data

The VLT-data for the current work were obtained in an ESO Director’s Discretionary Time Proposal (269.A-5064). The set was observed in the nights of 05-06/10/2002 with the newly installed FORS2@UT4 camera having a field-of-view of approximately $`7\mathrm{}\times 7\mathrm{}`$. The camera consists of two $`2\text{K}\times 4\text{K}`$ CCDs with a gap of about $`5\mathrm{}`$ oriented in the West-East direction. We obtained 3120s $`I`$-band observations in unbinned mode (pixel scale $`0.^{\prime \prime }126`$) as our primary weak lensing science band. Furthermore, we obtained exposures of 1560s in $`V`$ and 6380s in $`B`$ in the standard binned mode (pixel scale $`0.^{\prime \prime }252`$) for detecting a possible red-cluster sequence and to study the strong-lensing hypothesis of a double-image candidate. The data in each band were centered on the position of the STIS field and we applied a dithering pattern between each individual exposure in order to minimise the effects of the gap and other defects (hot pixels, bad columns) of the detectors in the final coadded images.

The data processing was carried out with a pipeline developed specifically for the reduction of multi-chip cameras that is described in Schirmer et al. (2003). In the following we only describe the astrometric calibration, whose accuracy is essential for weak lensing studies, in some more detail.

After preprocessing, the individual images were astrometrically calibrated by comparing object positions with those from the USNO-A2 astrometric catalogue (Monet et al. 1996) having 80 sources in our field. We used Mario Radovich’s ASTROMETRIX111see http://www.na.astro.it/$``$radovich/wifix.htm to fit image distortions by a third-order, two-dimensional polynomial for every individual chip. Hereby, distances from objects to the standard star catalogue and to overlap sources in other chips are minimised in the $`\chi ^2`$ sense. This procedure gave us positional rms residuals of $`0.^{\prime \prime }150.^{\prime \prime }28`$ (this is approximately the positional accuracy of the USNO-A2 catalogue) for the standard stars and $`0.^{\prime \prime }0050.^{\prime \prime }01`$ for the overlap sources in the $`I`$ band. Hence, we are able to align the images with an internal accuracy of 1/20-1/10 of a pixel; see also Fig.1. The final coaddition was performed with the drizzle package (Fruchter & Hook 2002). All the data have been obtained in photometric conditions and photometric zeropoints were provided by ESO. The measured seeing in the final coadded $`I`$ image is about $`0.^{\prime \prime }7`$.

A first object catalogue was created with SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996), where we considered all detections with 5 contiguous pixels with 2.5$`\sigma `$ over the sky background noise. With these parameters we reached a completeness level of $`I24`$ in our primary science frame. All magnitudes quoted in this paper are in the Vega system.

## 3 Detectability of massive structures in our data

In the following we use standard lensing notation. For a broader introduction to the topic, see for instance Bartelmann & Schneider (2001). To estimate the detectability of a galaxy cluster in our current data, we use the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistic introduced by Schneider (1996). It is defined as

$$M_{\mathrm{ap}}=_0^\theta \mathrm{d}^2\mathit{\vartheta }\kappa (\mathit{\vartheta },z_\mathrm{d},z_\mathrm{s})U(\vartheta ),$$
(1)
where $`_0^\theta 𝑑\vartheta U(\vartheta )=0`$, i.e. $`U(\vartheta )`$ is a compensated filter and $`z_\mathrm{d}`$, $`z_\mathrm{s}`$ are the redshifts of lens and source, respectively. Throughout this work we use $`U(\vartheta )=u(\vartheta /\theta )/\theta ^2;u(\rho )=(9/\pi )(1\rho ^2)(1/3\rho ^2)`$. $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ represents a filtered integral over the surface mass distribution $`\kappa `$ and can be related to the tangential shear $`\gamma _\mathrm{t}`$ via

$$M_{\mathrm{ap}}=_0^\theta \mathrm{d}^2\mathit{\vartheta }\gamma _\mathrm{t}(\mathit{\vartheta })Q(\vartheta )$$
(2)
with

$$Q(\vartheta )=\frac{2}{\vartheta ^2}_0^\vartheta d\vartheta ^{}\vartheta ^{}U(\vartheta ^{})U(\vartheta ).$$
(3)
For the application to data, it is straightforward to construct an unbiased estimate $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}^{}`$ for the integral by a discrete sum over observed galaxy ellipticities $`ϵ_\mathrm{t}`$ and considering the coordinate origin being at the center of the aperture:

$$M_{\mathrm{ap}}^{}=\frac{\pi \theta ^2}{N}\underset{i}{}ϵ_\mathrm{t}(\mathit{\vartheta }_i)Q(\vartheta _i).$$
(4)
As $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ is a scalar quantity, expectation values for the noise $`\sigma _{\mathrm{Map}}`$ of a measurement are easily evaluated:

$$\sigma _{\mathrm{Map}}^2=\frac{\pi \sigma _ϵ^2}{n}_0^\theta d\vartheta \vartheta Q^2(\vartheta )\frac{\sigma _ϵ^2}{2n^2}\underset{i}{}Q^2(\vartheta _i),$$
(5)
where $`\sigma _ϵ`$ is the ellipticity dispersion and $`n`$ the number density of galaxies.

For obtaining predictions for expected signal-to-noise $`(S/N)`$ ratios for halos with a mass $`M`$ at a redshift $`z_\mathrm{d}`$, we have to specify a mass model $`\kappa (\mathit{\vartheta },z_\mathrm{d},z_\mathrm{s})`$ and a distribution for the source redshifts $`p(z_\mathrm{s})`$. The expected signal $`S`$ is then given by

$$S=_0^\theta \mathrm{d}^2\mathit{\vartheta }_{z_\mathrm{d}}^{\mathrm{}}dz_\mathrm{s}\kappa (\mathit{\vartheta },z_\mathrm{d},z_\mathrm{s})U(\vartheta )p(z_\mathrm{s}).$$
(6)
The noise is given by $`\sigma _{\mathrm{Map}}`$ in (5). For the mass profile we consider the universal density profile proposed by Navarro et al. (1996). The details, how the surface mass density $`\kappa (\mathit{\vartheta },z_\mathrm{d},z_\mathrm{s})`$ is obtained for this profile when fixing the halo mass $`M`$, are given in (Bartelmann 1996; Kruse & Schneider 1999) and will not be repeated here. For the source redshifts we consider the normalised distribution:

$$p(z_\mathrm{s})=\frac{3}{2z_0}\left(\frac{z_\mathrm{s}}{z_0}\right)^2\mathrm{exp}\left[\left(\frac{z_\mathrm{s}}{z_0}\right)^{1.5}\right]$$
(7)
which was proposed in Brainerd et al. (1996). To fix $`z_0`$, we considered the redshift distribution from $`UBVRI`$ photometry around the galaxy cluster RXJ1347$``$1145. The data for this cluster will be described elsewhere (Erben et al., in preparation). They have been obtained with FORS1 around the cluster center (field-of-view $`3\mathrm{}\times 3\mathrm{}`$). As for the current data set, the $`I`$ band of these observations is used as the primary science band for a weak lensing study of the cluster. As the two observations reach about the same depth ($`I24`$), we expect that the source galaxies trace comparable redshift distributions. The redshift distribution for the cluster field is shown in Fig. 2. We estimate from this figure that $`z_0=0.7`$ (and thus $`z_s=1.05`$) provides a fair redshift description for the source distribution in our current data. As the lens magnification effect of the massive cluster might significantly push the redshift distribution to higher values we also investigate the case of $`z_0=0.6`$; $`z_s=0.9`$.

Fig. 3 shows our predictions for $`S/N`$ ratios from the described model. We conclude that we are insensitive to structures below $`10^{14}M_{}`$ and can marginally detect, at the $`3\sigma `$ level, clusters of about $`3\times 10^{14}M_{}`$ up to a redshift of $`z0.6`$.

## 4 Weak lensing analysis of the VLT-data

To cross-check our weak lensing results, we performed two independent analyses of the data.
Analysis 1:
Starting from the initial SExtractor catalogue we determined, for all the objects, the quantities necessary to obtain shear estimates according to the KSB (Kaiser et al. 1995) algorithm. To correct all galaxies for PSF anisotropy and PSF smearing effects we closely follow the procedures described in Erben et al. (2001). There we introduced a weighting scheme for individual galaxies based on the ellipticity distribution of the corrected ellipticities. Since in the current paper we were looking for a potential strong lensing cluster, high ellipticities could be caused by lensing and do not necessarily reflect the true noise properties. Hence, we did not use this weighting scheme for the current work but conservatively rejected all galaxies having a corrected ellipticity larger than 0.8. The final catalogue for the lensing analysis contains 1200 objects, i.e. around 25 per square arcmin.

Figs. 4 and 5 show the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistics result for our data. As can be seen we do not recover any significant mass concentration at the position of our original lens candidate when the filter scale becomes larger than the size of the original STIS image. We can recover a $`3\sigma `$ peak with a filter scale of $`30\mathrm{}`$ which is consistent with the $`2.5\sigma `$ detection reported on the original STIS data. The light distribution also shows no overdensity in the region under consideration.

Analysis 2:
For the second analysis, we used SExtractor to create a catalogue of all objects in the $`I`$-band image which had at least three pixels with flux greater than the $`1\sigma `$ sky level noise. This catalogue, which contained mostly noise peaks, was then analysed by convolving each object in the image with progressively larger Mexican-hat filters until a maximum in signal-to-noise $`\nu `$, for the filtered object was found. The background galaxy catalogue was then selected from objects with SExtractor isophotal magnitude $`I>22`$, $`\nu >10`$, having a Mexican-hat filter radius at maximum $`\nu `$ which was larger than that measured for stars, and not having a neighboring object within $`2\stackrel{}{.}5`$. The resulting catalogue contained 1838 objects, with 954 in common with the catalogue from the first analysis. Objects were detected as faint as $`I=27`$, although the completeness limit, as judged by where the number counts depart from a powerlaw, is at $`I24.8`$.

The background galaxy ellipticities were also corrected for PSF smearing to obtain shear estimates using the KSB formalism, but the methods used to reduce the noise in the shear and smear polarizabilities were different from those employed in the first analysis. The method was that given in Clowe & Schneider (2001), using fifth-order two-dimensional polynomials to fit the stellar ellipticity and shear and smear polarizabilites as a function of position in the image. A direct comparison of the catalogues for the two analyses results in the same mean shear across the objects and an rms shear difference of $`0.16`$ for the objects in common, while the rms shear of the objects is about $`0.4`$.

A mass reconstruction from direct Fourier transform of the shear field (Kaiser & Squires 1993) is shown in Fig. 6. The large peak in the NNW portion of the image is signficant at $`2.5\sigma `$, while all of the other peaks are less than $`2\sigma `$. There is a detected overdensity in the vicinity of the dark lens candidate, but at only a $`1\sigma `$ significance. In the next section we analyse the implications of the current null result by taking a closer look at the galaxy populations used in this and the original analysis.

## 5 Interpretation

The original STIS data gave a striking visual impression of a strong gravitational lens manifesting itself in several highly elongated arclet candidates showing a coherent alignment towards the brightest galaxy in the field (see Fig. 2 of MEH and the publicly available data under http://www.stecf.org/projects/shear/slens/slens.fits). If the features present in this field indeed originate from gravitational lensing and hence from a mass concentration of the order of a massive galaxy cluster, we should expect to detect a significant $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ signal with a filter scale of about $`2\mathrm{}`$ (see Sect. 3) or a significant peak in a weak lensing mass reconstruction. Also, a larger scale overdensity in the light distribution should be detected for a massive galaxy cluster with a typical mass-to-light ratio. With the available VLT data covering the surroundings of the candidate on a field of about $`7\mathrm{}\times 7\mathrm{}`$, we fail to find both signatures of a possible massive structure at the STIS image position.

As was shown in Sect. 3, we should be able to detect either a massive galaxy cluster up to a redshift of $`z0.6`$ with the data at hand, or a medium-sized cluster up to a redshift of $`z0.3`$.

Hence, upholding the lensing hypothesis would imply that the massive structure is at substantially higher redshift that we cannot probe with our VLT data. Since we reach a significantly deeper source population with our STIS data (see also Fig. 8), we have to investigate this possibility further. In the following we try to test this hypothesis by considering common objects in the STIS and VLT analysis and their photometric properties. In the original analysis we split the detected sources in the STIS image into two samples. The first sample consists of 52 objects which represents the catalogue for our weak lensing analysis using the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistics. This analysis yields a peak at the $`2.4\sigma `$ level. In the following, we regard the position of this peak as the center of our lens candidate. A second, independent object sample with 11 objects consists of all highly elongated and well resolved objects having a SExtractor axis ratio larger than 2. Most of them were rejected from the weak lensing catalogue for various reasons (for instance because of difficulties in determining an exact object center or having a too large corrected ellipticity) and we regard them as lensed arclet candidates. Considering the position angle distribution, we found that the probability for the observed tangential alignment of these objects with respect to the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ center was only $`0.3\%`$ when assuming a random angle distribution. In this way we ended up with two independent lensing signatures of a massive object at the 2.5$`\sigma `$ level. Moreover, two of these arclet candidates were considered as a multiple images candidate because of their morphological similarity and nearly identical surface brightness in the STIS Clear filter. On these issues, our VLT data shed new, important light.

First, they reveal that the two objects of our double image candidate (G1 and G2 of Fig. 2 in MEH) are different sources and cannot be due to a single, lensed object because of their colours. Object G1 has $`BV=1.53`$ and $`VI=2.32`$, while G2 has $`BV=1.12`$ and $`VI=1.30`$. Fig. 7 summarises the situation for these two objects.

Next, we investigate in more detail whether the candidate arclets can still be considered as such. If their ellipticities are indeed caused by a massive structure at high redshift ($`z0.6`$) they must be located at even substantially higher redshift. The three bands in hand do not permit the estimate of accurate photometric redshifts (Bolzonella et al. 2000) for these objects, but do permit us to test whether high redshifts (larger than $`z1`$) would be compatible with their colours. Adding a prior about the luminosity function of the galaxies helps to constrain the permitted redshift ranges with only three bands \[see e.g. Benitez (2000)\]. We choose to consider only solutions for photometric redshifts which are compatible with an absolute magnitude range $`M_{}2<M<M_{}+3`$ for the $`I`$-band. This band is rather insensitive to evolution effects since it probes the old stellar population, and we choose to use the local $`M_{}=21.26`$ (Blanton et al. 2000) deduced from the SDSS early data release. In Table 1 we present our deduced redshift constraints for the original arclet candidates (objects G1, G2 and A1-A8 in Fig. 2 of MEH).

We note that the colours of the brightest and most prominent candidates (G1, G2, A1, A2 and A4) are compatible mostly with redshifts considerably lower than unity. All the other faint objects in the sample have indeed a high probability of being placed at $`z1.4`$.

However, with the most prominent arclet candidates being probably at low redshift and without the multiple image candidate, the strong lensing hypothesis for these fainter sources by a high-redshift cluster looses much of its strength.

Finally, we take a closer look at the original weak lensing signal of our STIS field. The $`2.4\sigma `$ $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ signal has been very robust against the analysis of various subsamples of the 52 objects. We still could recover peaks close to the original signal when removing randomly either 30% and 50% of the sources or repeating the procedure with the most elliptical sources. Fig. 8 shows that only 5 of these objects that are also amongst the brightest in the whole STIS field are also used in the first VLT analysis (not considering the arclet candidates). Considering the allowed redshift ranges as we did with the arclet candidates (see Table 1) indicates that these sources probably lie at low redshift. These sources lie at the faint end of the VLT sources but only at the bright end of the STIS galaxy population used in the initial analysis. Hence, as we are not able to use most of the original, faint STIS galaxy population in our current weak lensing analysis, no conclusive answers on the origin of the initial weak lensing signal can be given at this stage.

## 6 Conclusions and Outlook

In MEH we reported on the conspicious tangential alignment of 63 galaxies in a $`52\mathrm{}\times 52\mathrm{}`$ high resolution STIS field. The maximum of the weak lensing $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ signal of 52 objects defined a formal mass peak close to the brightest elliptical galaxy in the field. Eleven other independent and elongated objects show a coherent tangential alignment towards the center defined by $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$. In addition, two of those objects have very similar morphologies and surface brightnesses in the original STIS data suggesting a multiple lensed image. Hence, the discovery of a new, massive galaxy cluster acting as a strong gravitational lens had to be taken seriously into account and to be further investigated with optical follow-up observations covering a larger field-of-view. With new, high-quality VLT data in three bands covering $`7\mathrm{}\times 7\mathrm{}`$ around the original cluster candidate, we now arrive at the following conclusions:

* The light distribution in the VLT field shows that the brightest galaxy in the STIS field is an isolated early type galaxy and not part of an optically rich galaxy cluster. There is no indication for an overdensity of the light distribution in or very close to the STIS field.
* With the data at hand we should detect, with $`3\sigma `$ significance, a matter concentration of about $`3\times 10^{14}M_{}`$ up to a redshift of $`z0.6`$ with weak lensing techniques. We fail to find such a lensing signature in two independent analyses.
* We can exclude the initial double image hypothesis for two of the very elongated objects we regarded as strongly lensed arclet candidates. Moreover, the colours of the brightest and most prominent of these candidates are only compatible with redshifts up to about 0.7. This makes it impossible that their large elongations originate from lensing by a high-redshift cluster.

Regarding the origin of the original weak lensing signal in the STIS data, no progress could be made with the new VLT data at hand. Besides the brighter arclet candidates, only 5 additional objects are used in common in the original STIS and the new VLT weak lensing analysis. Those represent the faint end of the VLT but only the bright end in the STIS galaxy population. The remaining 47 STIS sources are too small and too faint in the high-quality VLT images to be usable for a weak lensing study. Hence, we cannot exclude that those sources represent a high redshift galaxy population and their very robust alignment is indeed caused by lensing by a mass concentration at high redshift.

With the negative conclusions regarding the initial strong lensing arguments, especially the loss of the double image candidate, a chance alignment of 52 objects on a $`52^{\prime \prime }\times 52^{\prime \prime }`$ field causing a signal on the $`2.5\sigma `$ level is the most plausible explanation for the initial signal at this point.

The past has shown that deep HST exposures are likely to reveal highly elongated and well resolved galaxies with lens-like morphologies. Also, for the Hubble Deep Field North, a possible strong lensing configuration has been found (Hogg et al. 1996) but the lensing hypothesis has later been falsified with Keck spectroscopy (Zeff et al. 1997). Most of these strong-lens candidates found in HST data can be resolved by follow-up observations on ground-based facilities, either by spectroscopy or multi-colour observations.

In contrast to clarifying these strong lens candidates, it is more difficult to confirm or discard potential discoveries of mass concentrations found with weak lensing techniques on HST images on small angular scales, as in the current case, or that presented in Umetsu & Futamase (2000). The small field-of-view and limited number of galaxies increase the probability for chance-alignments compared with wide-field ground-based observations. On the other hand, as was shown by this and previous studies \[see e.g. Hoekstra et al. (2000)\], current state of the art ground based facilities are not able to probe the faint galaxy population of deep HST exposures with a resolution sufficient for weak lensing studies. Currently, only new space-based observations with ACS, having a large enough field-of-view to probe a sufficiently large area around these candidates, could finally close these cases.

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank the ESO Director General, C. Cesarsky for approval of the DDT proposal and the service observing team at Paranal for providing us with this excellent data set. We are grateful to L. King and to the referee, J. D. Rhodes for a careful reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by the German Ministry for Science and Education (BMBF) through the DLR under the project 50 OR 0106, by the German Ministry for Science and Education (BMBF) through DESY under the project 05AE2PDA/8, and by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under the project SCHN 342/3–1.


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# A peculiar type-I X-ray burst from GRS 1747-312

## 1 Introduction

GRS 1747-312 is a transient X-ray source that is located in the core of the 9.5 kpc distant globular cluster Terzan 6 (Predehl et al. 1991; Pavlinsky et al. 1994; Verbunt et al. 1995; In ’t Zand et al. 2003). The heart of the source is a neutron star in a binary system with a low-mass, Roche lobe filling star. X-ray outbursts occur every 4.5 months and last 1 month; the neutron star is completely eclipsed by the companion star every 12.4 hrs (In ’t Zand et al. 2000, 2003). The neutron star nature was established through the detection of seven type-I X-ray bursts. Such bursts are clear markers of thermonuclear runaway processes on the surfaces of neutron stars (for reviews, see Lewin et al. 1993 and Strohmayer & Bildsten 2003). All bursts were short-lived and occurred while the source was otherwise X-ray active. In April 2002 GRS 1747-312 happened to be in the field of view of the Proportional Counter Array (PCA) on the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) while it was pointed at another target, and a long type-I X-ray burst was detected with peculiar features that may add to the understanding of unstable nuclear burning on neutron star surfaces. Here we discuss this event.

## 2 Observations

The PCA (for a detailed description, see Jahoda et al. 1996) on RXTE comprises 5 co-aligned Proportional Counter Units (PCUs) that are sensitive to 2 to 60 keV photons. The total collecting area is 6500 cm2. The spectral resolution is 18% full-width at half maximum (FWHM) at 6 keV and the field of view is 1o FWHM. During April 4 through 30, 2002, the PCA was employed in a target-of-opportunity (ToO) program on the newly discovered accreting millisecond pulsar and transient source XTE J1751-305 (Markwardt et al. 2002) which is located 40′ from GRS 1747-312. The program accumulated 398 ks of net exposure time. GRS 1747-312 was not in outburst during these serendipitous observations. On the very last day of observations an X-ray burst was detected. Figure 1 shows the result of the localization of this burst following a method (Strohmayer et al. 1997) that employs the small misalignments of the three PCUs that were active during the burst (PCUs 0, 2 and 3). While XTE J1751-305 is excluded as the origin of the burst at the $`>90`$% confidence level, the error region is consistent with GRS 1747-312 being the origin. Furthermore, no other X-ray burster is known within the 90% confidence contour. It should be mentioned that the light curve of XTE J1751-305 (see Fig. 1 in Markwardt et al. 2002) shows a small outburst to a level of 0.3 mCrab starting three days before the burst. Given the collimator response to GRS 1747-312 in these observations, this translates to a level of 1.1 mCrab if the outburst would have been due to GRS 1747-312. Since this level is excluded by independent observations of GRS 1747-312 (see Fig. 5 in which 1.1 mCrab is equivalent to 12 phot s-1 per 5 PCUs), GRS 1747-312 is ruled out as the source of the outburst.

## 3 Time-resolved spectroscopy and timing analysis

Figure 2 shows the light curve of the burst in various bandpasses. It is characterized by a duration of 320$`\pm 10`$ s and a rise time of 3 s. The full-bandpass light curve shows a plateau for the first $``$70 s strongly suggesting that the Eddington limit is reached. There is one particularly peculiar feature about this burst: from 18 to 27 s after burst onset, the $`>`$10 keV intensity shows a sharp drop, indicating a strong softening of the spectrum.

We generated time-resolved spectra for the burst, from event mode data that have a resolution of 2-13 sec, 64 energy channels, and no layer resolution. The time resolution of the spectra was chosen to vary over the burst, in order to keep the statistical quality of the spectra at an approximately constant level. The time resolution varied from 0.5 to 4.0 s. A background spectrum was determined from data preceding the burst from $`40`$ to $`440`$ s, and a correction was applied for the deadtime. The spectra were, between 3 and 20 keV, fitted with an absorbed single-temperature black body model with varying temperature and normalization. The absorption was modeled following Morrison & McCammon (1983), leaving free one value for the hydrogen column density $`N_\mathrm{H}`$ for all spectra. Furthermore, spectral channels were combined so that each spectral bin contained at least 15 photons, to ensure Gaussian statistics and the applicability of the $`\chi ^2`$ statistic. The fitted model is satisfactory for all time intervals, except during the brief episode of strong softening. The fit results are presented in Fig. 3. The residuals of the data with respect to the model are shown in Fig. 4 for the two time intervals specified in Fig. 2. In these intervals there is a strong hint of a feature peaking at 5 keV. The residual may be fitted by a broad Gaussian function ($`\chi _\nu ^2`$ reduces from 11.6 \[22 dof\] to 1.9 \[19 dof\]). The model fits to a centroid of 4.9$`\pm 0.1`$ keV, a FWHM of 1.2$`\pm 0.2`$ keV, and an intensity of 0.18$`\pm 0.03`$ phot s-1cm-2. At its peak, approximately 30% of the bolometric flux is predicted to be due to this component. The sudden increase of the $`<10`$keV photon rate at 23 s (see panel (c) in Fig. 2) can be explained by a sudden temperature rise from $`0.57\pm 0.03`$ to $`0.71\pm 0.02`$ keV. Although the Gaussian fit is best, considerable improvement may also be achieved by allowing $`N_\mathrm{H}`$ to vary; $`\chi _\nu ^2`$ reduces to 2.9 (21 dof) and $`N_\mathrm{H}`$ goes to $`(45)\times 10^{23}`$ cm-2. However, the inferred radius then becomes excessively large at 1.7$`\times 10^3`$ km at 9.5 kpc.

The fit results show a strongly varying blackbody radius, with a peak-to-peak variation of at least a factor of 40, that is anti-correlated with the temperature variation. During the first $``$70 s this is accompanied by a fairly constant luminosity. This is a clear detection of photospheric radius expansion (PRE) due to near-Eddington luminosities. The radius increase beyond 70 s goes with a decay in luminosity. This is often seen in PRE bursts and is assumed to be related to non-Planckian spectra (e.g., Kaptein et al. 2000, van Straaten et al. 2001). It is not thought to be related to true radius expansion. At the end of the burst, the radius decreases to a similar level as in the bursts that have been detected with the PCA when GRS 1747-312 was active (In ’t Zand et al. 2003).

During the brief episode of strong softening, the expansion is strongest. Given the fact that this appears to be an isolated event, the suggestion is strong that in fact we are dealing with two different phases of radius expansion: the slow 70 s lasting expansion with a factor of a few, and the fast 8 s lasting expansion with a factor of a few tens.

During the fast radius expansion, the temperature drops significantly below the low-energy threshold of the instrument and a significant fraction of blackbody radiation escapes detection. Consequently, measurements of the radius and bolometric flux become rather inaccurate, particularly if one would chose to leave free $`N_\mathrm{H}`$ (which was not done in the analysis shown in Fig. 3). The bolometric flux saturates during the first 70 s of the burst at a level of about 2.5$`\times 10^8`$ erg cm-2s-1 (bolometric), disregarding the fast radius expansion phase during which bolometric corrections are too inaccurate.

We note that no burst oscillations were detected during this burst. The upper limit to the amplitude is 16% on a timescale of 4 s (combining the data from PCUs 0, 2 and 3; for details on the method, see In ’t Zand et al. 2003).

The burst lasted at least ten times longer ($`320\pm 10`$ s to reach the background level) than the other four bursts that were detected from GRS 1747-312 with the PCA (durations between 10 and 32 s; In ’t Zand et al. 2003). However, the peak flux is, within 20%, identical to the brightest PRE burst of the other four. This supports the association of the burst with GRS 1747-312, as does the fact that its longevity is expected for low accretion rates from hydrogen-rich donors (e.g., Fujimoto et al. 1981). GRS 1747-312 was not in outburst during the burst. The prior outburst was last detected above 1 mCrab 26 days earlier and the following outburst started 28 days afterwards (see Fig. 5). The accretion rate is suggested to have been a factor of at least 40 smaller than during the peak of the outbursts. Similar behavior was observed in other bursters as well, for instance SAX J1808.4-3658 (In ’t Zand et al. 2001) and 2S 1711-339 (Cornelisse et al. 2002).

## 4 Discussion

The burst has a relatively strong photospheric radius expansion. Such bursts, with forty-fold or more expansion, are rather rare. We are aware of four other bursters that exhibit such strong radius expansion and, remarkably, three are located in globular clusters: 2S 1715-321 (Hoffman et al. 1978; Tawara et al. 1984), 4U 2129+11 in M15 (Van Paradijs et al. 1990; Smale 2001), 4U 1724-307 in Terzan 2 (Molkov et al. 2000) and 4U 1820-303 in NGC 6624 (Strohmayer & Brown 2002). The bursts from 4U 1724-307 occur much more frequently than in the other sources, about once every 4 days (Kuulkers et al. 2003). Additionally, one burst with a strong expansion was observed from an ill-determined position and identification with a particular source was impossible (Hoffman et al. 1978; Lewin et al. 1984). The expansions seen with the PCA in 4U 1724-307 and 4U 1820-303 were so strong that no radiation remained in the bandpass, not even the persistent emission otherwise present for these sources.

What sets the burst from GRS 1747-312 apart from the other aforementioned bursts is that the strong expansion phase did not occur at the start of the burst, but is delayed by 20 s. It lasted less than 10 s while (Eddington-limited) fluxes appear to remain at the same level within 30% from 20 s before to 35 s after the strong radius expansion. Thus, the suggestion is strong that there must have been an extra radiation pulse for $``$10 s whose energy was immediately transformed to kinetic energy of a quickly expanding photosphere. We propose that this extra energy is due to a thermonuclear flash which occurred in a separate and deeper layer than the one where the long flash originated. The duration suggests that this separate layer consisted of hydrogen-poor material. The layer may have formed either through stable hydrogen burning during the previous outburst or (invisible) unstable hydrogen burning after that (Fujimoto et al. 1981). In the latter case, low-level accretion must have been going on after the outburst.

What physical process or circumstance is responsible for the unprecedented delay? A strong hint is provided by one characteristic which sets GRS 1747-312 apart from the others: GRS 1747-312 is in quiescence, while the other sources are persistently bright. The difference in luminosity is at least a factor of 10 (ranging from an upper limit of $`6\times 10^{35}`$ erg s-1 in GRS 1747-312, see Fig. 5, through $`7\times 10^{36}`$ erg s-1 for 4U 1724-307 \[Molkov et al. 2000\] and 4U 2129+11 \[Van Paradijs et al. 1990\] to $`2\times 10^{37}`$ erg s-1 for 4U 1820-303 \[Strohmayer & Brown 2002\]). The lower accretion rate in GRS 1747-312 implies that the temperature in the upper neutron star layers is lower. This may delay the ignition conditions for the helium layer. Perhaps this is related to a relatively slow onset of the second convection stage that is predicted to occur in these types of X-ray bursts following the growth of 3$`\alpha `$ reactions in the accreted layer (Hanawa & Fujimoto 1986).

The results on GRS 1747-312 put the other bursts with strong expansion phases into a new perspective. The strong radius expansion phases that were detected in 4U 2129+11 (Van Paradijs et al. 1990) and 4U 1724-307 (Molkov et al. 2000) are accompanied by a prolonged but smaller expansion afterwards. Thus, there is the suggestion that also in these bursts two separate layers may be ignited. This was perhaps not recognized previously in the literature, because in those cases the two layers ignited near-to simultaneously.

We note that long flashes (i.e., longer than 2 min) without strong radius expansion have been observed in several low-luminosity systems (e.g., Kaptein et al. 2000, In ’t Zand et al. 2002). Perhaps in these systems the accretion rate never becomes high enough to induce stable hydrogen burning in the upper layers. Thus, a pure helium layer is less likely to be present in these systems, precluding the potential of a strong radius expansion.

The burst from GRS 1747-312 is fundamentally different from another peculiar burst from 4U 1636-536 which was observed in August 1985 (Van Paradijs et al. 1986). This 1-min long burst was triple peaked with the third peak occurring 13 s after the first peak and the peak fluxes of similar magnitude but at least a factor of four below the Eddington limit. No photospheric radius expansion was detected. Van Paradijs et al. speculate that this behavior is due to recurrent energy release in quick succession at different locations on the surface of the neutron star.

Another interesting detail about this burst is that it apparently exhibited broad line emission. The nature of this feature is unclear; the centroid energy of 4.8 keV is not coincident with that of any known transition of an abundant element, Also, it requires unexplainable redshifts from the Fe-K complex, particularly since the photosphere radius is large when this feature was present, and we are apprehensive to attribute it to Fe-K emission although such emission was occasionally seen in other bursts (e.g., in the superburst of 4U 1820-303, see Strohmayer & Brown 2002). Interestingly, this is not the first time that such a broad emission feature has been seen in a burst at this energy. The analysis by Van Paradijs et al. (1990) of the burst from 4U 2129+11 in M15 showed severe expansion of at least a factor of 80 and during the strongest phase of the expansion, a broad emission feature was apparent that extended from 4 to 8 keV. They exclude explanations that involve a broad emission line, reflection and Comptonization.

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank Ed Brown and Walter Lewin for useful discussions.


text: # Correction to ‘𝐾-theory of virtually poly-surface groups’