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# Configurational Temperature of Charge-Stabilized Colloidal Monolayers

## Abstract

Recent theoretical advances show that the temperature of a system in equilibrium can be measured from static snapshots of its constituents’ instantaneous configurations, without regard to their dynamics. We report the first measurements of the configurational temperature in an experimental system. In particular, we introduce a hierarchy of hyperconfigurational temperature definitions, which we use to analyze monolayers of charge-stabilized colloidal spheres. Equality of the hyperconfigurational and bulk thermodynamic temperatures provides previously lacking thermodynamic self-consistency checks for the measured colloidal pair potentials, and thereby casts new light on anomalous like-charge colloidal attractions induced by geometric confinement.

The temperature of an equilibrium ensemble of particles is defined conventionally in terms of the particles’ mean kinetic energy, without regard for their instantaneous positions. In 1997, Rugh pointed out that the temperature can also emerge from other ensemble averages over geometrical and dynamical quantities rugh97 . This notion is expressed more generally jepps00 ; rickayzen01  as

$$k_BT=\frac{𝐁(𝚪)}{𝐁(𝚪)},$$
(1)
where angle brackets indicate an ensemble (or time) average, $`𝚪=\{q_1,\mathrm{},q_{3N},p_1,\mathrm{},p_{3N}\}`$ is the instantaneous set of $`3N`$ generalized coordinates $`q_j`$ and their conjugate momenta $`p_j`$ for an $`N`$-particle system, $`=_{j=1}^{3N}p_j^2/(2m)+V(\{q_j\})`$ is the Hamiltonian associated with the conservative $`N`$-particle potential $`V(\{q_j\})`$, and $`𝐁(𝚪)`$ is an *arbitrary* vector field selected so that both the numerator and denominator of Eq. (1) are finite and the numerator grows more slowly than $`e^N`$ in the thermodynamic limit. Choosing $`𝐁(𝚪)=\{0,\mathrm{},0,p_1,\mathrm{}p_{3N}\}`$ yields the usual kinetic definition of temperature. Choosing instead $`𝐁(𝚪)=V(\{q_i\})`$ yields a formally equivalent result,

$$k_BT_{\text{config}}=\frac{\left|V\right|^2}{^2V},$$
(2)
which depends only on the particles’ instantaneous configuration, and not on their momenta. Variants of Eq. (2) have been widely adopted in molecular dynamics simulations butler98 ; delhommelle02 , but have not previously been applied to experiments.

In this Letter, we use the configurational temperature formalism to probe macroionic interactions in monolayers of charged colloidal spheres dispersed in water and confined between parallel glass plates. These measurements provide sensitive self-consistency tests for the measured inter-particle pair potentials, and thereby provide new insights into the long-standing conundrum of anomalous attractions in geometrically confined charge-stabilized dispersions.

Directly applying Eq. (2) requires the full $`N`$-particle free energy, which is rarely available. Simplified forms emerge for systems satisfying certain conditions. For example, if $`V(\{q_i\})`$ is the linear superposition of pair potentials, $`u(r)`$, then Eq. (2) reduces to butler98 ,

$$k_BT_{\text{conF}}=\frac{_{i=1}^NF_i^2}{_{i=1}^N_i𝐅_i},$$
(3)
where $`𝐅_i=_{ji}_iu(r_{ij})`$ is the total force on particle $`i`$ due to its interactions with other particles, $`_i`$ is the gradient with respect to the $`i`$-th particle’s position, $`𝐫_i`$, and $`r_{ij}=|𝐫_i𝐫_j|`$ is the center-to-center separation between particles $`i`$ and $`j`$. The temperature is reflected in the instantaneous distribution of forces because objects explore more of their potential energy landscape as the temperature increases.

Equation (3) may be generalized into a hierarchy of *hyperconfigurational* temperatures by choosing $`𝐁(𝚪)=\{F_i^s\}`$:

$$k_BT_\text{h}^{(s)}=\frac{_{i=1}^NF_i^{s+1}}{s_{i=1}^NF_i^{s1}_i𝐅_i},$$
(4)
for $`s>0`$. These higher moments are more sensitive to the input potential’s detailed structure than $`T_{\text{conF}}=T_\text{h}^{(1)}`$. They also can be applied to three-dimensional systems with long-ranged $`1/r`$ potentials, for which $`T_{\text{conF}}`$ is ill-defined.

The same hierarchy also may be derived from the classical hypervirial theorem hirschfelder60 , $`\{f,\}=0`$, where $`\{\mathrm{}\}`$ is the Poisson bracket, by selecting $`f(𝚪)=_{j=1}^Np_jF_j^s.`$ More generally, $`f(𝚪)`$ can be any finite-valued function that does not explicitly depend on time.

For systems with short-ranged potentials, dropping additional terms of $`𝒪(1/N)`$ from Eq. (1) yields jepps00 :

$`k_BT_{\text{con1}}`$ $`={\displaystyle \frac{_{i=1}^NF_i^2}{_{i=1}^N_i𝐅_i}},\text{and}`$ (5)
$`k_BT_{\text{con2}}`$ $`={\displaystyle \frac{_{i=1}^N_i𝐅_i}{_{i=1}^NF_i^2}}^1,`$ (6)
the second of which is proposed here for the first time. These definitions’ different dependences on sample size $`N`$ are useful for comparison with $`T_\text{h}^{(s)}`$.

Temperature definitions based on configurational information are ideal for studying colloidal spheres dispersed in viscous fluids such as water. The fluid acts as a heat bath at temperature $`T`$. It also randomizes the particles’ motions over intervals longer than the viscous relaxation time, typically measured in microseconds. As a result, the colloids’ instantaneous momenta are not easily accessible. Their positions, however, are readily measured using standard methods of digital video microscopy crocker96 . Calculating the temperature from the resulting positional data then requires accurate knowledge of the colloids’ interactions.

The mean-field theory for macroionic interactions russel89  predicts that charge-stabilized colloidal spheres should repel each other through a screened-Coulomb potential:

$$\beta u(r)=Z^2\lambda _B\frac{\mathrm{exp}(\kappa \sigma )}{\left(1+\frac{\kappa \sigma }{2}\right)^2}\frac{\mathrm{exp}(\kappa r)}{r},$$
(7)
where $`\beta ^1=k_BT`$ is the heat bath’s thermal energy scale, $`\sigma `$ is the spheres’ diameter, $`r`$ is their center-to-center separation, $`Z`$ is the effective charge number on each sphere and $`\lambda _B=e^2/(4\pi ϵk_BT)`$ is the Bjerrum length in a medium of dielectric constant $`ϵ`$. The Debye-Hückel screening length $`\kappa ^1`$ sets the range of the effective electrostatic interaction and depends on the concentration $`c`$ of (monovalent) ions through $`\kappa ^2=4\pi c\lambda _B`$.

Despite its success at explaining bulk colloidal phenomena russel89 , mean-field theory qualitatively fails meanfield  to explain the strong and long-ranged attractions observed when charged spheres are confined between parallel glass walls kepler94 ; crocker96 ; carbajaltinoco96 ; han03a . The crossover from monotonic repulsion to long-ranged attraction with increasing confinement is demonstrated in Fig. 1. Efforts to explain this anomaly through non-mean-field mechanisms so far have not yielded the experimentally observed effect gopinathan02 . Given the apparent difficulty of explaining anomalous attractions on the basis of colloidal electrostatics or electrodynamics, various other explanations have been proposed, most of which focus on possible experimental artifacts. For example, nonequilibrium hydrodynamic coupling has been shown squires00  to explain one measurement based on optical tweezer manipulation larsen97 , but cannot be relevant for measurements based on video microscopy of colloid in equilibrium kepler94 ; carbajaltinoco96 ; vondermassen94 ; behrens01a ; han03a . Concern also has been raised that such imaging measurements can fall victim to correlated artifacts due to statistical fluctuations behrens01a . We have shown, however, that anomalous attractions still are clearly resolved given adequate statistics han03a . A still greater concern is that uncorrected many-body artifacts could mimic attractions in purely repulsive dispersions. Such artifacts certainly can arise at high densities, as has been demonstrated experimentally brunner02 . Evidence for pairwise additivity at lower densities has relied principally on comparisons over a range of concentrations, for which variations in chemical environment could mask other effects.

We resolve all such ambiguities by exploiting the configurational temperatures’ sensitivity to inaccuracies in the input potential as self-consistency tests for colloidal interaction measurements. In particular, we use pair potentials measured according to Refs. crocker96 , han03a  and behrens01a  to compute the configurational temperature of geometrically confined colloidal monolayers and compare the results with the bulk thermodynamic temperature, with $`T_\text{h}^{(s)}=T`$ signaling thermodynamic self-consistency. Deviations could result from a breakdown of pairwise additivity in a system with non-trivial many-body interactions, a departure from equilibrium in a system subjected to hydrodynamic forces, or simply inaccuracy in $`u(r)`$.

Our samples consist of uniform silica spheres $`\sigma =1.58\pm 0.03\mu \mathrm{m}`$ in diameter (Duke Scientific Lot 24169) dispersed in deionized water and loaded into hermetically sealed sample volumes formed by bonding the edges of glass #1.5 coverslips to the surfaces of glass microscope slides. The separation $`H`$ between these surfaces is set during construction and establishes the degree of confinement. Reservoirs of mixed bed ion exchange resin maintain the ionic strength below $`c10\mu \mathrm{M}`$, corresponding to a Debye-Hückel screening length $`\kappa ^1150\mathrm{nm}`$. Under these conditions, both the silica spheres and the glass walls develop negative surface charge densities of roughly $`10^3e_0\mu \mathrm{m}^2`$, where $`e_0`$ is the electron charge behrens01b . Samples are mounted on the stage of a Zeiss Axiovert 100 STV microscope, after which the dense silica spheres rapidly sediment into a monolayer roughly $`h=900\mathrm{nm}`$ above the coverslip with out-of-plane fluctuations smaller than 300 nm. The bright-field imaging system provides a magnification of 212 nm/pixel on a Hitachi TI-11A monochrome CCD camera. The resulting video stream is recorded and digitized into 60 deinterlaced video fields per second, each of which is analyzed to yield the instantaneous distribution

$$\rho (𝐫)=\underset{i=1}{\overset{N(t)}{}}\delta (𝐫𝐫_i(t))$$
(8)
of $`N(t)`$ spheres at locations $`𝐫_i(t)`$ at time $`t`$. Measurements were performed at room temperature over periods of roughly one hour, with temperature fluctuations smaller than $`\pm 1\mathrm{K}`$ over the course of any measurement.

From $`\rho (𝐫,t)`$, we calculate the radial distribution function,

$$g(r)=\frac{1}{n^2}\rho (𝐫^{}𝐫,t)\rho (𝐫^{},t),$$
(9)
where $`n=N/A`$ is the areal density of $`N=N(t)`$ particles in the field of view of area $`A`$, and the angle brackets indicate averages over angles and time. Assuming that the system is in equilibrium and that its interactions are isotropic and pairwise additive, $`g(r)`$ may be inverted to obtain an estimate for $`u(r)`$ kepler94 ; carbajaltinoco96 . At low enough densities, the Boltzmann distribution provides the necessary relationship: $`\beta u(r)=lim_{n0}\mathrm{ln}g(r)`$. Unfortunately, the need to sample $`g(r)`$ adequately in a limited field of view requires higher concentrations behrens01a ; han03a , with $`0.05<n\sigma ^2<0.1`$ being typical for our experiments. We extract candidate pair potentials $`u(r)`$ such as the examples in Fig. 1 using the liquid-structure inversion method based on the Ornstein-Zernike equation with hypernetted-chain (HNC) and Percus-Yevick (PY) closures carbajaltinoco96 ; behrens01a ; han03a . As we have reported previously, the sedimented silica spheres repel each other as predicted by Eq. (7) at the largest inter-plated separations considered, $`H=200\mu \mathrm{m}`$ behrens01a ; han03a . Reducing $`H`$ does not perceptibly change the spheres’ equilibrium height $`h`$ above the lower glass wall, yet nonetheless introduces a minimum into $`u(r)`$ consistent with a long-ranged attraction han03a . The example in Fig. 1 at $`H=9\mu \mathrm{m}`$ has a minimum roughly $`0.3k_BT`$ deep at $`r=1.5\sigma `$. Well-resolved minima are evident for spacings as large as $`H30\mu \mathrm{m}`$.

Even the small amount of scatter in the measured pair potentials yields unacceptably large fluctuations in the derivatives used to calculate the configurational temperatures. We avoid this by fitting the experimental data to fifth-order polynomials, as shown in Fig. 1, and using the fits as inputs to Eqs. (4), (5) and (6).

In calculating the total force $`𝐅_i`$ on the $`i`$-th particle, we must consider all relevant pair interactions. Particles close to the edge of the field of view may have strongly interacting neighbors just out of view. To avoid errors due to the resulting spuriously unbalanced forces, we restrict ensemble averages to particles farther from the edges than the range $`R`$ of the interaction. We estimate $`R`$ by plotting $`T(r)/T=2\pi (r/\sigma )g(r)|u(r)|^2/^2u(r)`$, as shown in Fig. 2(a), which qualitatively gauges contributions to the configurational temperature due to particles at separation $`r`$. This is most useful for systems with weak three-body correlations. Typically, $`R2.0\sigma `$ for our samples.

Sample imperfections such as a small number of dimers also distort the apparent force distribution We omit such particles from the ensemble averages. By contrast, we include the small number of pair interactions with $`r/\sigma 1`$, which arise from the samples’ polydispersity and also because of projection errors due to out-of-plane motions for particles near contact. Omitting these has little effect on $`T_{\text{conF}}`$, but leads to large systematic errors in higher-order $`T_\text{h}^{(s)}`$.

The restricted sample includes only $`N=𝒪(100)`$ particles, hardly the thermodynamic limit. To correct for finite-size effects, we deliberately sub-sample our data, and plot the configurational temperature as a function of $`1/N`$, as shown in Fig. 2(b). Polynomial fits account for the finite-size scaling of Eq. (1), and permit extrapolations to large $`N`$. As expected, $`T_{\text{con1}}`$ and $`T_{\text{con2}}`$ are more sensitive to sample size than $`T_\text{h}^{(s)}`$ because their derivations involve ignoring more terms of $`𝒪(1/N)`$. Despite these differences, all orders of $`T_\text{h}^{(s)}`$, as well as $`T_{\text{con1}}`$ and $`T_{\text{con2}}`$, extrapolate to the thermodynamic temperature in the large-$`N`$ limit. This successful outcome strongly suggests that the experimentally determined potential, including its long-ranged attraction, accurately describes the dispersion’s equilibrium pair interactions.

The configurational temperatures are exceedingly sensitive to small variations in $`\beta u(r)`$, with systematic adjustments as small as 0.01 in the short-range repulsive core leading to variations in the configurational temperature as large as ten percent. Truncating the attractive part of $`u(r)`$ increases the configurational temperatures by fifty percent. Similarly, failure to precisely correct the imaging system’s aspect ratio can lead to large deviations. This potential source of error can be monitored by factoring $`T_{\text{conF}}`$ into components along and transverse to the video scan lines and comparing the results. Deliberately rescaling one axis by 0.01 causes the apparent temperatures along the two directions to differ systematically by as much as ten percent for all samples.

Figure 3 demonstrates that the configurational temperatures are consistent with the thermodynamic temperature over the entire range of wall separations from $`H=3.2\mu \mathrm{m}`$ to $`H=195\mu \mathrm{m}`$, despite variations in the form of the associated pair potential han03a . This allows us to draw several conclusions regarding the nature of confinement-mediated colloidal interactions. Primarily, we conclude that the measured pair potentials accurately and self-consistently describe the colloidal particles’ interactions. To the extent that the configurational temperatures are sensitive to local departures from equilibrium ennis01 , the result $`T_{\text{conf}}/T=1.00\pm 0.04`$ for all of our samples suggests that anomalous confinement-induced like-charge colloidal attractions cannot be ascribed to nonequilibrium mechanisms such as hydrodynamic coupling due to transient flows in the sample popov02 .

In summary, we have calculated the configurational temperature for experimentally determined distributions of colloidal silica spheres using their measured pair potentials as inputs. The success of this procedure provides a thermodynamic self-consistency test for the measured potentials, and thus establishes that confinement induces equilibrium pair attractions between charged colloidal spheres. It furthermore demonstrates the configurational temperature to be a powerful new tool for experimental condensed matter physics.

We are grateful to Owen Jepps for introducing us to the notion of configurational temperatures, to Sven Behrens for extensive discussions, and to the donors of the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society for support.


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# Newly Discovered Globular Clusters in the Outer Halo of M31

## 1. Introduction

$`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM cosmological models, and their semi-analytical extensions, have had considerable success in describing hierarchical structure formation and galaxy evolution. However, important questions still remain. For example, where are the predicted large number of low mass dark haloes? What are the profiles of the dark haloes? How important are major and minor mergers in building galaxies and star formation? One way to address such issues is by detailed study of nearby resolved galaxies, to deduce evolutionary history from their present day structure. The galaxies of the local group are ideal for such investigations, and a wide area CCD survey of the halo of M31 has been undertaken by our collaboration. This survey has already revealed previously unknown detail and structure (Ferguson et al. 2002), including the discovery of a large stellar stream, presumably the relic of dwarf galaxy destruction (Ibata et al. 2001). We have now used this survey to complete a search for previously undiscovered globular clusters, which are important tracers of the dynamics and chemistry of the outer halo .

## 2. GCs as dynamical and chemical tracers

Recent modelling by Evans et al. (2000) suggests that, contrary to accepted wisdom, the mass of the halo of M31 is comparable to, or less than, that of the Milky Way. However the uncertainties are large. For example, test particles at large galactocentric radius are important to constrain the total mass, but are currently limited to dwarf satellites and other local group galaxies, whose past interactions with, for example, Milky Way are not known. Thus Evans and Wilkinson (2000) emphasise the need for more test particles at an appropriate distance. Globular clusters (GCs) are particularly useful, being relatively bright they enable good spectroscopy, and are found far from the host galaxy (e.g. see figure 1), hence our motivation in seeking new examples in the outer halo. Furthermore, there is evidence that they occur in distinct sub-populations, as characterised by position, velocity, and colour (Perrett et al. 2003). These populations provide a fossil record of the formation history of the galaxy. Various routes have been proposed for the production of GCs. Each produces specific signatures being found in that GC population, which will help to unravel the history of the M31 system. Hence, we are also interested in the metallicity of our candidate globular clusters, in addition to their kinematics.

## 3. Candidate identification

Initial candidates were found from the survey database, produced by the standard INT Wide Field Survey pipeline and provided by the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit. Candidate selection, was based on magnitude, colour, ellipticity, object classification (stellar/non-stellar) and image width (sigma). These values were iteratively refined, by ensuring that known good quality cluster candidates were accepted by the cuts. Few GCs are expected at such large galactocentric radii, and selecting candidates based solely on the criteria listed above would produce too many false positives for spectroscopic followup. Hence the initial list of candidates were visually inspected to identify final candidates, and these were finally cross-checked against existing catalogues (especially the online catalogues maintained by Barmby and by Huchra) giving the final nine, previously unknown, GCs presented here.

## 4. Future work

One of the candidate GCs, at the extreme south-west of the M31 survey field, lies at the largest known projected galactocentric radius from M31. Spectroscopy of this object was obtained with WHT/ISIS in service time at the end of 2002. The data is currently being reduced, and the results will presented in a later paper. Further time for radial velocity and metallicity determination of the other eight candidates is currently being sought.

## References

Evans, N. W. et al. 2000, ApJ, 540, L9

Evans, N. W. & Wilkinson, M. I. 2000, MNRAS, 316, 929

Ferguson, A. M. N. et al. 2002, AJ, 124, 1452

Ibata, R. et al. 2001, Nature, 412, 49

Perrett, K. M. et al. 2003, ApJ, 589, 790

Perrett, K. M. et al. 2002, AJ, 123, 2490


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# Extreme gas properties in the most distant quasars

## 1 Introduction

The exceptional luminosities of quasars allow us to study the properties of gas and dust in their circumnuclear region even in the most distant systems known. The strong emission lines excited by the nuclear source have been widely used to infer the metallicity and the physical/dynamical state of the gas (e.g. Hamman & Ferland hamann99 (1999), Verner et al. verner03 (2003)). These studies have been extended to the most distant quasars known at z$`>`$5, approaching the epoch of re-ionization and of the formation of the first generation of stars. The UV rest-frame emission line properties of the highest redshift quasars have indicated little or no evolution of the gas metallicity (e.g. Dietrich et al. dietrich03 (2003), Maiolino et al. maiolino03 (2003), Pentericci et al. pentericci02 (2002)) up to z=6.4, suggesting that the first epoch of star formation occurred at z$`>`$9, in these objects. Recent sub-mm and mm observations have allowed the detection of dust emission in some quasars at z$`>`$5, indicating that large amounts of dust were already formed at these early epochs (Bertoldi et al. bertoldi03 (2003), Priddey et al. priddey03 (2003)).

Within this context, Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasars offer additional tools to investigate the circumnuclear medium. These objects, which account for about 15% of the whole quasar population at low and intermediate redshifts (Reichard et al. 2003b , Hewett & Foltz hewett03 (2003)), are characterized by deep and broad absorption features associated with UV resonant lines. Generally the most prominent absorption line is CIV$`\lambda `$1549. A small fraction of BAL quasars (16%, or $``$2% of all quasars at low and intermediate redshifts) also show absorption by low ionization species (MgII$`\lambda `$2798 and often AlIII\]$`\lambda `$1857), these are called LoBALs (in contrast to HiBALs, which only show the high ionization absorption lines). An even rarer class are FeLoBALs, which also show prominent FeII and FeIII absorption. The basic interpretation is that in BAL quasars we are seeing the active nucleus through a dense outflowing gas. BALs are characterized by redder continua with respect to non-BALs, which is commonly interpreted as reddening by dust associated with the outflowing gas (Reichard et al. 2003b , Brotherton et al. brotherton01 (2001)). The reddening is generally fit best by a SMC-like extinction curve, at variance with more absorbed AGNs which are characterized by a flatter extinction curve (Gaskell et al. gaskell03 (2003), Maiolino et al. 2001a , Maiolino, Marconi & Oliva maiolinooliva01 (2001)). LoBALs are generally characterized by higher reddening than HiBALs (Reichard et al. 2003b , Becker et al. becker00 (2000)).

Various interpretations have been given for the BAL phenomenon. One possibility is that all quasars are characterized by an outflowing wind, but occurring only in certain preferential directions; within this scenario BALs and non-BALs are the same kind of quasars but observed along different viewing angles (Weymann et al. weymann91 (1991), Elvis elvis00 (2000), Ogle et al. ogle99 (1999), Schmidt & Hines schmidt99 (1999)). Alternatively, BALs and non-BALs could be two distinct populations of quasars (Surdej & Hutsemekers surdej87 (1987), Boroson & Meyers boroson92 (1992)), with and without outflows. Becker et al. (becker00 (2000)) suggested that BALs may trace the early stages of quasar activity, while King (king03 (2003)) and King & Pounds (kingpounds03 (2003)) suggested that strong winds may be related to episodes of enhanced accretion.

We have observed in the near-IR (UV rest-frame) a sample of eight quasars in the redshift range 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4 (among the highest redshift quasars currently known). The spectra were obtained with an instrumental setup that can cover the full near-IR spectrum from 0.8$`\mu `$m to 2.4$`\mu `$m in a single exposure (and with very high throughput). We find that four of these objects are BALs, and two (probably three) of them are LoBALs. Although the statistics are very limited, this result suggests that the fraction of BALs and LoBALs at z$`>`$5 may be higher than at lower redshift. We discuss the extreme properties of the gas and dust absorption in these objects, in comparison with lower redshift quasar. We infer that gas and dust in these most distant quasars are likely to be different with respect to the lower redshift cases, and this is probably related to the early evolutionary stage of these quasars and of their host galaxies.

## 2 Observations and data reduction

The observations were obtained with the Near Infrared Camera Spectrograph (NICS) at the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), a 3.56 m telescope. Among the various imaging and spectroscopic observing modes (Baffa et al. baffa01 (2001)), NICS offers a unique, high sensitivity, low resolution observing mode, which uses an Amici prism as a dispersing element (Oliva et al. oliva03 (2003)). In this mode it is possible to obtain the spectrum from 0.8$`\mu `$m to 2.4$`\mu `$m in a single exposure. The throughput of the Amici prism is nearly two times higher than other more commonly used dispersers. The spectral resolution with a 0′′.75 slit, as it was in our case, is 75 (4000 km s-1) and nearly constant over the whole wavelength range. This observing mode is appropriate to study the near-infrared continuum of faint sources and to detect broad ($`4000`$ km s-1) emission and absorption lines in faint quasars.

Observations were performed in three observing runs: 2002 November 7-9; 2003 February 25-29; and 2003 May 23-26. Several quasars were observed more than once on different nights to check for any instrumental or observational artifacts in the individual spectra. Wavelength calibration was performed by using an argon lamp and the deep telluric absorption features. The telluric absorption was then removed by dividing the quasar spectrum by a reference star spectrum (FV-GV) observed at similar airmass. The intrinsic features and slope of the reference star were then removed by multiplying the corrected quasar spectrum by a spectrum of the same stellar type from the library by Pickles et al. (pickles98 (1998)), smoothed to our resolution. Absolute flux calibration was obtained by using the photometry on the acquisition image or through photometry reported in the literature.

These spectra were also discussed in Maiolino et al. (maiolino03 (2003)) in relation to the FeII bump and MgII emission, with the goal of measuring the iron abundance as a function of redshift. Here we focus on the detection of the UV absorption lines tracing BALs and on the continuum shape. For this reason we restrict this investigation to the quasars in the Maiolino et al. (maiolino03 (2003)) sample with z$`>`$4.9, for which any putative CIV absorption is redshifted into the spectral range where Amici+NICS allows a reliable detection (for all the quasar at lower redshift the spectrum on the blue side of CIV is too noisy to infer the presence of any absorption). We include also the data of SDSSJ1044-0125 obtained previously at the same instrument and already published in Maiolino et al. (2001b ). The eight quasars selected with this redshift constraint are all from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

The quasars in our sample are listed in Tab. 1, where their full IAU designations are reported. However, in the following we will adopt a shortened version of their names.

## 3 BAL quasars

In this sample we identify four high redshift BAL quasars, which are discussed in detail in this section.

We determine the continuum slope and the balnicity index of the CIV absorption (which is similar to the Equivalent Width expressed in km/s, as defined in Weymann et al. weymann91 (1991)) by following the method described in Reichard et al. (2003a ). More specifically, the average SDSS non-BALs quasar spectrum, which has a continuum slope $`\alpha =1.61`$ ($`\mathrm{F}_\lambda \lambda ^\alpha `$), is taken as a template and modified to match the observed spectrum. The template is smoothed to our resolution. Then the continuum shape is modified to match the line-free regions of the observed spectrum either by changing the spectral index (by multiplying the spectrum by $`\lambda ^{\alpha /1.61}`$) or by absorbing the template with an SMC extinction curve. The CIV emission intensity of the template may also be modified to match the observed intensity and to better calculate the balnicity index; in practice in our cases this is a very difficult task, since the CIV emission is so heavily absorbed that it is difficult to estimate its intrinsic flux and profile (this issue is discussed more in detail below).

### 3.1 SDSS1048+46: the most distant LoBAL quasar (z=6.22)

At a redshift of 6.22 this quasar is now the highest redshift BAL known. Fan et al. (fan03 (2003)) suggested that, based on a hint of SiIV absorption in the optical spectrum, this might be a BAL. The Amici+NICS spectrum is shown in Fig. 1a and clearly displays a very deep and very broad CIV absorption. The absorption profile is resolved and displays a clear double trough, a feature which is commonly observed in LoBALs. The two main troughs have a blueshift of 11000 and 20000 km/s, which are labeled as systems 1 and 2, respectively, in Fig. 1a. At the lower velocity shift (11000 km/s) there is also a deep SiIV absorption and absorption of AlIII\] and MgII, which identify this object as a LoBAL.

In Fig. 1a the thin solid line shows the non-BAL template where the slope has been adapted to match the line-free continuum regions (redward of CIV). We have to force a slope of $`\alpha =2.1`$, bluer than the average SDSS spectrum (but in agreement with the slope of dereddened BALs, as discussed below). There is a strong mismatch between the template and the observed spectrum blueward of CIV which might be ascribed to the very deep absorption by the UV lines (but see below for an alternative explanation). The continuum slope redward of CIV would indicate that this BAL is not subject to any dust reddening. This result is at odds with what observed in lower redshift BALs, and specifically LoBALs, which are systematically reddened. To illustrate this difference the thin dashed line in Fig. 1a shows the average LoBAL spectrum obtained by the SDSS (Reichard et al. 2003a ), which is clearly much redder than the spectrum of SDSS1048+46. All LoBALs quasars observed at lower redshift have an observed spectral slope redder than observed in SDSS1148, more specifically at z$`<`$4 all LoBAL quasars in the SDSS have an observed $`\alpha >1.9`$.

Another possible explanation to fit the observed spectral shape would be to assume that the flattening blueward of 1600Å is not due to broad line absorption but to dust reddening. However, a SMC extinction curve does not work, since it would make the whole spectrum redder. Even steeper extinction curves, as those inferred in some rare BALs, would be unable to reproduce the observed continuum shape. The only possibility would be a (speculative) extinction curve which is relatively flat at $`\lambda >1500`$Å and steeply rising at $`\lambda <1500`$Å (never observed so far). We do not discuss in detail this possibility, since it will be investigated more in detail in a forthcoming paper (Maiolino et al., in prep), but in Fig. 1b we only show the effect of such an unusual extinction curve on the continuum shape. Obviously tackling this issue will require higher spectral resolution over the whole band 0.8–1.3$`\mu `$m to disentangle the effects of broad absorption lines from the true continuum curvature.

On the the very blue spectral shape redward of 1500Å, with $`\alpha =2.1`$ it is most interesting to note that the ’intrinsic’ LoBALs spectral index inferred by Reichard et al. (2003b ) is $`2.01`$ (altough there is some degeneracy with reddening). Based also on the analysis of their emission line properties, Reichard et al. (2003b ) suggested that BALs may, in fact, be (intrinsically) bluer than the average quasar, despite being dust reddened. The lack of dust absorption (at least reward of 1500Å) in SDSS1048+46 allows us to observe directly the intrinsic slope of this BAL and the resulting very blue slope strongly supports the finding of Reichard et al. (2003b ) indirectly inferred for lower redshift BALs QSOs.

The balnicity index of CIV cannot be measured very accurately, because it is not possible to properly recover the intrinsic profile of the CIV emission prior of absorption. For this reason we derive a balnicity index with a relatively large error, which is not due to signal-to-noise but dominated by the uncertainty on the CIV emission profile. We obtain: BI(CIV)$`=`$6500$`\pm `$1100 km/s. As discussed in Sect.6, this high value is located on the high balnicity indices tail of the BALs observed at lower redshift (Reichard et al. 2003a ).

Another interesting feature of this BAL is the presence of absorption even on the red side of CIV (system #3 in Fig. 1). If associated with redshifted CIV the corresponding receding velocity would be about $``$3800 km/s, such a redshifted trough was never observed at lower redshift (only a weak “droop” was found on the red wing of CIV of the average spectrum of BAL quasars by Reichard et al. (2003b ), but only after a careful subtraction of the emission line profile). The redshifted trough may be explained in a scenario of a rotating disk wind whose size (or at least part of it) is comparable with the continuum emitting region. A similar scenario was invoked by Hall et al. (hall02 (2002)) to explain the suppression of the red wing of CIV in lower redshift BALs. However, we note that the redshifted absorption may well be tracing inflowing gas along the line of sight, again under the assumption that the size of the absorber is comparable with the emitting source. An alternative explanation is that system #3 is actually absorption of HeII$`\lambda `$1640 associated with system #1. Absorption by HeII would require extreme gas properties in terms of opacity. However, recently HeII blueshifted absorption has been detected in one SDSS quasar (Hall et al. hall04 (2004)). Higher spectral resolution observations of this object are certainly required to further investigate the nature of this absorption system.

Finally we note that the SiIV and CIV emission lines appear significantly blueshifted with respect to the template at z$`=`$6.22, which may suggest a lower redshift for this source. However higher spectral resolution is required to better disentangle absorption and emission components and to better determine the redshift of this system. If CIV, in particular, is really blueshifted with respect to the rest frame, this may be consistent with the intrinsically bluer continuum of this QSO, in keeping with the finding by Reichard et al. (2003b ) that bluer QSOs tend to be associated with blueshifted CIV.

### 3.2 SDSS1605-01: an extreme LoBAL at z=4.92

The Amici+NICS spectrum of this extreme BAL is shown in Fig. 2. This has the deepest CIV absorption of all BALs found at high redshift. Its balnicity index of about 9300$`\pm `$2000 km/s is among the highest value ever found among BALs known so far (again, the large error on the balnicity index is dominated by the large uncertainty on the CIV emission profile). The CIV absorption is so deep that it has “eaten” nearly all of the CIV emission. Balnicity indices higher than 8000 km/s are only found among LoBAL quasars. Indeed, also in this object there is indication of MgII absorption (though with a low S/N), confirming the LoBAL nature of this object.

This is the only BAL clearly characterized by a redder slope than the average of quasars. The thin line in Fig. 2 shows the non-BAL template reddened with an SMC extinction curve to match the observed continuum slope. A reddening of $`\mathrm{E}_{\mathrm{B}\mathrm{V}}=0.03`$ is required. Alternatively the spectrum can be fitted by forcing the template to have a flatter power law and, more specifically $`\alpha =1.35`$.

The fit in Fig. 2 suggests a strong excess of FeII emission. This excess is unlikely to be a flux calibration problem, both because the observing mode adopted by us prevents this kind of calibration problems between the IR bands (since the full spectrum is obtained simultaneously), and because this object was observed in two different nights and both spectra show the same feature. As noted by Weymann et al. (weymann91 (1991)), Fe emission in excess of the average is commonly associated with BAL quasar with high balnicity index.

Finally, we note that this object may also be characterized by redshifted absorption, similar to the previous case. However, higher resolution observations are required to clearly disentangle emission features from possible redshifted absorption troughs.

### 3.3 SDSS1044-01: the most distant HiBAL quasar (z=5.78)

The Amici+NICS spectrum of this quasar was already shown in Maiolino et al. (2001b ). We present again the spectrum here to extract the continuum slope and balnicity index with the same template spectrum as the other quasars. In Fig. 3 we show the observed spectrum along with the SDSS non-BAL template (thin line). Our spectrum is best fit by a redshift of 5.78 rather than 5.74 derived previously, but the difference my be caused by the blending with the absorption features. The continuum slope appears only slightly redder than the average of the SDSS non-BAL quasars: $`\alpha =1.55`$ (though consistent with the unreddened value of -1.62 within the uncertainties). Note that in Maiolino et al. (2001b ) we found a better match (both for the continuum and for the emission lines) with the QSO template obtained by Francis et al. (francis91 (1991)). However, even the slope of $`1.55`$ is still significantly bluer than the average slope found in HiBAL quasars at lower redshift, $`\alpha (HiBAL,z<4)=1.39`$, suggesting little or no dust reddening in this object.

The balnicity index111Goodrich et al. (goodrich01 (2001)) obtain a much lower balnicity index for this quasar because they integrated starting from 5000 km/s blueward of the peak, while the formal balnicity index has to be calculated starting 3000 km/s blueward of the peak (Weymann et al. weymann91 (1991)). is 1950$`\pm `$250 km/s.

This BAL was observed with XMM by Brandt et al. (brandt01 (2001)) who derive a very steep optical–to–X-ray spectral index $`\alpha _{OX}`$, which is rather typical of BAL quasars as a consequence of strong gas absorption which suppresses the X-ray emission.

### 3.4 SDSS0756+41 (z=5.09)

The Amici+NICS spectrum of this quasar is shown in Fig. 4, which is significantly noisier with respect to the previous spectra. Our spectrum suggests a slightly lower redshift of 5.08 than previously reported and both CIV and CIII\] appear blueshifted with respect to the template. There is a blueshifted absorption (9000 km/s) of CIV with balnicity index of 270$`\pm `$60 km/s. This absorption is much weaker than in the previous cases, but still quite significant (5$`\sigma `$), also given that the absorption is consistently observed in three different spectra (taken on different nights), which were coadded to produce the final spectrum shown in Fig. 4. Some absorption may be observed blueward of MgII, but with a slightly different velocity (6000 km/s). We also find a dip in the blue region of the FeII bump, which might trace Fe absorption and would identify this as a FeLoBAL. However, higher S/N spectra are required to confirm this finding. FeLoBAL with weak or no CIV absorption have been found in the SDSS (Reichard et al. 2003a ).

The continuum slope is slightly bluer than the non-BAL template ($`\alpha =1.67`$), again indicating no dust reddening.

There is an emission feature at 1800Å, but we note that it may be attributed to imperfect subtraction of a bright sky emission feature in this spectral region.

## 4 Non-BAL quasars at 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4

Four out of the eight quasar at z$`>`$4.9 do not show indication of BAL-like absorption features. Their Amici+NICS spectra are shown in Fig. 5. However the limited spectral resolution (which might cause a blending with the emission lines) and the limited signal-to-noise do not allow us to exclude the presence of absorption features with a balnicity index below $``$200 km/s. As listed in Tab. 1 the continuum of these non-BAL spectra does not show indication of significant reddening and, actually, they are generally bluer than the average of non-BAL quasars found at lower redshift. This finding suggests that, at least in this small sample, there are no representatives of the reddened quasar found at lower redshift (Richards et al. richards03 (2003)).

## 5 The fraction of BAL quasars at 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4

As mentioned in the Introduction, the fraction of BAL quasars at low redshift is about 15%. Only 2% of the quasar population are LoBAL, while FeLoBAL quasars are even more rare. Reichard et al. (2003b ) obtained that the fraction of BAL quasars is constant up to z$`<`$4.

The very limited statistics of our sample does not allow us to draw statistically firm conclusions on the fraction of BAL quasars at high redshift. However, it is impressive that out of 8 quasars 4 are BAL. The probability that the fraction of BAL quasars in this small sample is consistent with the fraction of 0.15 found at lower redshift is only 2%. Even more astonishing is that two (may be three) of these objects are LoBAL, which is an extremely rare class at low redshift. Note that there are no obvious effects, in terms of spectral shape, that would favor the selection of BAL quasars at z$`>`$5 in the the SDSS survey (actually any dust reddening would bias against BAL quasars). These findings suggest that at z$``$5–6 the fraction of BAL, and specifically the fraction of LoBAL, increases dramatically. This might be associated with larger amount of (accreting) gas surrounding the circumnuclear region of these high redshift quasars, as discussed in sect.8.

Another possibility is that the larger fraction of BALs among high redshift quasars is a consequence of a selection effect. More specifically, high redshift QSOs are more luminous and, therefore, probably accreting at higher rate. If BAL QSOs are associated with high accretion rates, as suggested by various studies (sect.1 and sect.8), an implication would be that they are more likely to be selected at higher redshift. Actually, at z$`<`$4 where larger samples of quasars and BALs are available, there is no evidence that the BAL fraction change with luminosity, although dust absorption and variations of the spectral slope (Reichard et al. 2003b ) may prevent the detection of such a dependence. However, we have investigated this possibility by comparing the luminosity of our BAL quasars at z$``$5–6 with the luminosity of the BALs at lower redshift in Reichard et al. (2003b ). We derived the absolute magnitude $`\mathrm{M}_\mathrm{i}^{}`$ in the rest frame $`\mathrm{i}^{}`$ band (which is tabulated also for the SDSS BAL QSOs at z$`<`$4), by using the extrapolation of the slope measured in our spectra to derive the K-correction. The resulting absolute magnitudes222For consistency with Reichard et al. (2003b ) we adopt $`\mathrm{H}_0=50\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1\mathrm{Mpc}^1`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{m}=1`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$. are reported in Tab. 1. If in Reichard et al. (2003b ) we select those BALs at 2.5$`<`$z$`<`$4, a range where the statistics is still very high and where the fraction of BAL is still estimated to be $``$15%, we obtain absolute magnitudes ranging from -26 to -28.8 with an average of $`\mathrm{M}_\mathrm{i}^{}_{2.5<\mathrm{z}<4}=27.4`$, and a standard deviation $`\sigma _{\mathrm{M}_\mathrm{i}^{}}=0.66`$. The comparison with the absolute magnitudes in Tab. 1 indicates no obvious differences in the luminosity distribution between the sample of BALs at $`4.9<\mathrm{z}<6.4`$ and those at $`2.5<\mathrm{z}<4`$. Tab. 1 also shows that the non-BAL quasars in our sample are even more luminous than BALs. If one takes into account that BALs at lower redshift tend to be absorbed by dust (which seems not to be the case in our redshift sample, as discussed in sect.7) a correction for dust absorption would probably make the low redshift sample even more luminous. Summarizing, a contribution from a luminosity effect on the larger fraction of BALs at high redshift cannot be excluded, but probably it does not play a dominant role.

## 6 The balnicity index at 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4

With four BAL quasars only it is not possible to derive a distribution for the CIV balnicity index among quasars at z$`>`$4.9. Nonetheless, it is most interesting to note that three of these BALs have very high balnicity indices, which are in the high tail of the distribution found for quasars at z$`<`$4 (Fig.7 of Reichard et al. 2003a ). In particular two of the BAL in our sample have a balnicity index higher than 6000 km/s, while at lower redshift (z$`<`$4) only 2% of BAL have balnicity index higher than this value. This result is also indicative of larger amount of circumnuclear gas in these high redshift quasars.

## 7 Dust at 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4

One of the most interesting peculiarities of the BAL quasars found at z$`>`$4.9 is that most of them appear not to be reddened by dust. In particular most of them are bluer than the average slope of the corresponding sub-class at z$`<`$4 (we recall that at low redshift $`\alpha [NonBAL]=1.62`$, $`\alpha [HiBAL]=1.39`$, $`\alpha [LoBAL]=0.93`$, Reichard et al. 2003b ). There are some deviations from this trend, in particular Stern et al. (stern03 (2003)) have found evidence for significant reddening in one quasar at z=5.8 and also, within our sample, one of the two LoBAL quasars appears to be significantly reddened (although still bluer than the average of low redshift LoBAL). However, the general trend is to have bluer continuum slopes. The most intriguing case is the most distant LoBAL (SDSS1048+46 at z=6.22, Fig. 1) which is much bluer than any LoBAL found at z$`<`$4.

One naive interpretation would be that at these high redshift we are approaching the epoch when dust had no time to form in large quantities, both because of the lower metallicities and because AGB stars did not have enough time to inject dust into the ISM. Therefore, these high redshift quasars could be relatively poor in dust. On the contrary, powerful dust emission in the mm/submm was detected in several of these quasars, and in particular in three of the BAL quasars, indicating that these systems are characterized by very large dust masses (Priddey et al. priddey03 (2003), Bertoldi et al. bertoldi03 (2003)).

A possible explanation of this puzzling result may be found in the origin and evolution of dust in these very high redshift quasars. Possibly, the gas density in the circumnuclear region of these primordial quasars is much higher than at lower redshift. Higher gas density may favor the growth of grains and yielding to a flatter extinction curve, which would significantly reduce the reddening by dust. An additional or alternative possibility is that at these extreme redshifts the main dust production mechanism is different. While at low redshift dust is predominantly produced in AGB stars, at very high redshift dust may be predominantly produced by SNe (Schneider et al. schneider03 (2003), Nozawa et al. nozawa03 (2003), Todini & Ferrara todini01 (2001)) or even directly produced in the the BLR of quasars (Elvis et al. elvis02 (2002)): the different dust production mechanism may yield an extinction curve quite different than observed locally. This issue will be discussed more in detail in a forthcoming paper (Maiolino et al. in prep.).

## 8 Discussion

Although the small number of objects does not allow us to draw strong conclusions, our results suggest that the physics of the circumnuclear medium of the most distant quasars currently known, at 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4, is probably different than in lower redshift quasars. The large fraction of BAL quasars suggest that either the outflowing wind occurs over a much wider solid angle (in a scenario where BAL and nonBAL quasars are unified through the viewing angle) or that the fraction of quasars experiencing strong outflowing winds is much larger at high redshift (in a scenario where the wind of BAL quasars covers isotropically the continuum source). Both scenarios would imply an evolution of quasars’ circumnuclear medium at high redshift. Both the extreme depth of the absorption features and the identification of low ionization species (MgII, AlIII\]) suggest that the column density of the outflowing gas is higher in these high redshift quasars. Summarizing, quasars at 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4 are probably expelling larger amount of gas, through winds, than quasars at z$`<`$4.

As suggested by some authors (e.g. King king03 (2003), King & Pounds kingpounds03 (2003), Mathur mathur01 (2001)) the strong winds observed in some AGN are probably associated with large accretion rates. In particular, quasars characterized by the strongest outflows (in terms of mass outflow rate) may be accreting at or above the Eddington rate. Within this context, the differences found by us between low and high redshift quasars may reflect different evolutionary stages, where the most distant quasars are accreting at a significantly higher rate. Such an evolutionary scenario for these highest redshift BAL quasars would also be consistent with the study of Becker et al. (becker00 (2000)) on radio loud quasar, who find that the BAL phenomenon is preferentially associated with younger radio sources and, therefore, tracing the early stages of quasar activity. Recently Willott et al. (willott03 (2003)) and Lewis et al. (lewis03 (2003)) suggested that the evolutionary scenario for BALs might be wrong based on the lack of difference in terms of sub-mm emission between non-BALs and BALs. However, they only probed the redshift range $`1.0<\mathrm{z}<2.6`$. As mentioned by Willott et al. (willott03 (2003)), their finding may still fit within the evolutionary scenario if the sub-mm emission by the host galaxy is not related to the BAL activity of the nucleus, at least in the $`1.0<\mathrm{z}<2.6`$ redshift range.

At z$``$6 we are probably probing the epoch of formation for the first galaxies, and approaching the re-ionization epoch, as inferred by the evolved metallicity of these systems (e.g. Maiolino et al. maiolino03 (2003), Dietrich et al. dietrich03 (2003), Pentericci et al. pentericci02 (2002)). Our results would support the scenarios of a co-evolution between QSOs and host galaxies, which predict that the rapidly forming spheroids at high redshift would be associated with a large accretion rate onto the central Black Hole as a consequence of the enhanced viscous drag (e.g. Granato et al. granato04 (2004), Umemura et al. umemura97 (1997)). The same models expect a strong feedback by the quasars themselves in the form of strong outflows, as actually observed by us. Although the qualitative agreement between observations and models is remarkable, much effort is still required for an accurate quantitative comparison.

## 9 Conclusions

We have presented near-IR spectra covering the whole 0.8–2.4$`\mu `$m range for eight among the most distant quasars known, and specifically in the redshift range 4.9$`<`$z$`<`$6.4. At these redshifts our spectra sample the UV rest-frame spectral region and, in particular, include several prominent UV lines such as CIV, AlIII\], CIII\], MgII and the UV FeII bump. The observational results strongly suggest that the physical properties of the circumnuclear medium of these most distant quasars are different with respect to lower redshift quasars. More specifically, the observational results can be summarized as follows:

1. Half of the quasars show broad and deep (blueshifed) absorption of CIV, i.e. belong to the class Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasars, which are characterized by large quantities of gas outflowing at high velocities. At lower redshift (z$`<`$4) the fraction of BAL quasars is about 15%. Our finding strongly suggests that the fraction of BAL quasars increases at z$`>`$4.9. We cannot exclude a possible luminosity dependence of the BAL fraction, although probably it does not play a major role.
2. Two (possibly three) of the BAL quasars also show absorption associated with low ionization lines (MgII and AlIII\]), i.e. belong to the subclass of “Low Ionization BAL” (LoBAL). This class of quasars is very rare at lower redshifts, accounting only for 2% of the whole quasar population at z$`<`$4. Our finding suggests that LoBAL may be much more common at z$`>`$4.9.
3. The CIV absorption features are on average deeper than found in lower redshift BAL quasars. This finding, along with the presence of low ionization species in absorption, indicates that the column density of the outflowing gas is larger than in lower redshift quasars.
4. The most distant BAL quasar (SDSS1048+46, a LoBAL at z=6.22) is also characterized by an absorption feature on the red side of CIV. This might be absorption due to redshifted CIV, or blueshifted absorption associated with HeII$`\lambda `$1640 (observed only in one case at lower redshift).
5. The continuum of the quasars in our sample is on average bluer than the quasars at lower redshift. The most interesting case is the most distant LoBAL quasar which is bluer than any quasar of the same class found at lower redshift (although an intriguing bending of the spectrum at $`\lambda <1500`$ is observed) . These findings suggest little, or very low, dust reddening with respect to what observed in lower redshift quasars. Yet, dust is present in large quantities, as inferred by the mm/submm detections.

These observational results suggest the following conclusions about the physics of the most distant quasars:

i) The large fraction of BAL quasars, the depth and ionization state of the absorption systems suggest that, at z$``$5–6, quasars are surrounded by larger amount of denser gas with respect to lower redshift quasars.

ii) The presence of strong outflows is likely associated with high accretion rates in these primordial quasars. Strong quasars winds and high accretion rates are expected by the models of co-evolution of quasars and host galaxies at high redshifts.

iii) The dust extinction curve in these distant quasars is probably different than lower redshift quasars. This may reflect different evolution and formation mechanisms of dust grains at z$`>`$5. This issue will be discussed more in detail in a forthcoming paper (Maiolino et al., in prep).

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank G. Richards and P. Hall for very useful comments. This work was partially supported by the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR) and by the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF).


text:
# Quantum cryptography with and without entanglement

## I Introduction

Quantum cryptography is a beautiful idea! It covers aspects from fundamental quantum physics to Applied Physics via classical and quantum information theories . During the last ten years, quantum cryptography progressed tremendously, in all directions: from mathematical security proofs of idealized scenarii to commercial prototypes. In these proceedings we review the intuition, the experimental progress in optical fibers implementations and some security aspects, each viewed first with entanglement, and then without. Undoubtedly, quantum cryptography is intellectually more fascinating and conceptually easier with entanglement, but much more practical without it. Hence both aspects, with and without entanglement, are equally beautiful!

The next section presents the intuition behind quantum cryptography. Section III can be seen as a lesson in Applied Physics: how to simplify a theorist’s implementation of a nice idea until it is practical, while keeping the essential. This shows that Applied Physics requires a lot of imagination and a deep understanding of the essential physical ingredients. Finally, section IV reviews some security issues: coherent and individual eavesdropping, Trojan horse attacks, photon number splitting attacks and means to limit their efficiency.

## II Intuitions

### A Key distribution

The general scenario for key distribution, whether classical or quantum, goes as follows. Alice and Bob, the honest parties, hold many realizations of random variables X and Y respectively. The adversary, Eve, holds realizations of a third random variable Z. Hence the scenario is described by a joint probability distribution $`P(X,Y,Z)`$ . Intuitively it is clear that if $`X`$ and $`Y`$ are strongly correlated (e.g. almost identical) and furthermore, if $`Z`$ is essentially uncorrelated, then Alice and Bob can use a public communication channel to distil secret bits. This intuition is made precise in the following theorem. The useful measure of correlation here is the mutual Shannon information.

Theorem For a given $`P(X,Y,Z)`$, Alice and Bob can establish a secret key (using only error correction and classical privacy amplification) if and only if $`I(X,Y)\mathrm{min}\{I(X,Z),I(Y,Z)\}`$, where $`I(X,Y)=H(X)H(X|Y)`$ denotes the mutual information and $`H`$ is the Shannon entropy.

Note that by definition privacy amplification uses only 1-way communication. If Alice and Bob use 2-way communication, the situation is more complex . But these 2-way protocols are so inefficient that in practice they are always ignored.

### B Quantum key distribution with entanglement

Let us assume that the random variables $`X,Y`$ and $`Z`$ introduced above result from quantum measurements that Alice, Bob and Eve perform on a quantum state $`\psi _{ABE}`$. It is clear for the quantum physicists, that if the partial state $`\rho _{AB}`$ shared by Alice and Bob is close to maximally entangled, then Eve is ”factorized out”, i.e. is uncorrelated. This is because a maximally entangled state is a pure state $`\rho _{AB}|\psi _{AB}\psi _{AB}|`$, hence the global state has to be close to a product state: $`\psi _{ABE}\psi _{AB}\psi _E`$. If one understands entanglement, more precisely, if one is familiar with the algebra of tensor products, then the reason why quantum key distribution with entanglement is secure becomes very intuitive!

### C Quantum key distribution without entanglement

Assume now that Alice and Bob do not share an entangled state, but \- following the original idea  \- that Alice sends individual quanta to Bob (when the quanta are described by a 2-dimensional Hilbert space, one speaks of qubits). Alice and Bob use two (or more) incompatible bases to prepare and measure each quanta. Because of the use of incompatible bases, there is no way for Eve to make copies of the flying quanta. Indeed, the no-cloning theorem guarantees that there is no way to copy an unknown quanta without perturbing its state . Thus Alice and Bob can check for the presence of an adversary, Eve, by comparing a sample of their data: if the data is perfectly correlated, then Eve did not try to copy it and the remaining data is safe. Each time Alice and Bob happen to have used the same basis, their data provides them with a secret bit.

This view of QKD without entanglement can be based on different aspects of quantum physics, like Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation or that quantum measurements perturb the system. But in the end all these are based on the linearities of quantum kinematics (the Hilbert space) and dynamics (Schrödinger’s equation). And this linearity is also the basis for entanglement, which appears when one introduces linear combinations of product states. Hence, intuitively one feels that both QKD schemes are closely related.

## III Experiments: a lesson in Applied Physics

The first choice when thinking about an experimental realization of QKD concerns the degree of freedom used for encoding the qubit. Indeed, if one goes for optical fibers, then the system is imposed: telecom photons. A first possible choice would be polarization. Unfortunately this is a quite unstable degree of freedom: actual fibers have some birefringence (different polarization modes travel at different speeds), moreover the polarization modes suffer from random polarization mode coupling . And if the fiber is hanging between posts, the situation is even worse: Berry phase would be random, leading to fast (ms) random polarization fluctuations . Hence, better choices should be envisaged. In Geneva, we chose time-bin qubits . The idea is depicted in Fig. 1. Each photon is brought into a superposition of two time-bins, an early and a delayed one. The probability amplitudes of each time-bin and their relative phase allow one to prepare any possible qubit state. Also any possible projective measurement can be realized using a similar interferometer shown on the right hand side of Fig 1.

In the following sub-sections we review step by step simplifications of the theorist’s implementation of QKD.

### A Basic experiment with entangled time-bin qubits

The configuration presented in Fig. 2 is close to Ekert’s original proposal , but uses time-bin qubits instead of polarization. The source at the center contains a non-linear crystal in which a pump photon spontaneously splits into two twin photons. Energy conservation guarantees that the twins’ energies (i.e the optical frequencies) add up to the well defined energy of the pump photon, although each of the twin photon has itself an uncertain energy, uncertain in the usual quantum mechanical sense. The pump photon is part of a large classical pulse, about 500 ps long. Since the probability of ”splitting”, i.e. of spontaneous parametric downconversion, is low (typically $`10^{10}`$, up to $`10^{}6`$ in PPLN waveguides ), the pulse energy can be adjusted such that the probability that a pair of twin photons is generated is around 10%. In order to produce entangled time-bin qubits, the pump pulse passes through an unbalanced interferometer, where the imbalance is much longer than the pulse duration. Alice and Bob both use the standard time-bin qubit analyzer presented in Fig. 1. They fix the phases (relative to the pump interferometer) of their interferometers such that the two twin photons always emerge at the same output port, hence their detectors clicks are perfectly correlated. For a second, incompatible, basis Alice and Bob could use different phase settings. But a first simplification can immediately be implemented. They replace the switch of their measuring interferometer by a much simpler and less lossy fiber optical coupler. Hence, Alice and Bob can also detect photons at an earlier or at a later time: earlier if the pump and their twin photons passed through the short arms of the interferometers, later if they both travelled the long way. Consequently, whenever Alice and Bob both detect their twin photon in the lateral peaks (i.e. early or late), then they both definitely have the same detection time: either both early or both late. And if Alice and Bob both detect their twin photon in the central time-bin, then they definitely have a click in the same detector (assuming their phases are fixed at $`\alpha =\beta =0`$). The first case uses the time-basis, the second the frequency-basis (see Fig. 3).

Conceptually this is quite elegant. It has even been realized in our lab , and recent results show that it is feasible over a significant distance. But this configuration is not very practical: there are three interferometers to align and stabilize, and the polarization of the three photons has to be kept under control. Hence, let’s simplify this!

### B First simplification: energy-time entanglement

A first simplification of the previous scheme consists in suppressing the pump interferometer and replacing the pulsed laser by a continuous pump laser, see Fig. 4. If the coherence length of this cw pump laser is larger than the imbalance of Alice and Bob’s interferometers, then 2-photon interference can still be observed. Indeed, when Alice and Bob post-select coincidence detections, then there are two possibilities: either both photons passed through the short arm of both interferometers, or both passed through the long arm. Since the pump laser’s coherence is large, these two possibilities are indistinguishable. Hence, according to quantum mechanics, one should add the probability amplitudes and observe interference. In this configuration Alice and Bob need to randomly choose the settings of their phase modulators: 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees, let’s say. Whenever they happen to use settings corresponding to a phase difference multiple of $`180^o`$, then their detectors always fire together.

This is a nice configuration, but admittedly more suited for tests of Bell inequality (i.e. of quantum non-locality) than for a practical quantum cryptography setup. Actually, this configuration has been proposed in 1989 by J. Franson on the context of quantum nonlocality and is called a Franson interferometer . This is the configuration we used in 1997 for our long distance Bell test over 18km in optical fibers (10km in straight line) .

### C Somewhat simpler

The next step notices that there is no need to put the source at the middle, half-way between Alice and Bob. The middle position is merely elegant. But it is more practical to put the source on one side, let’s say Alice’s side. Notice that Alice doesn’t become the sender of the quantum key: the key results eventually from independent random choices made by both partners and by Nature, there is nothing like a quantum key sender. But now, only one photon must travel a long distance. Hence, the photon that stays on Alice’s side can be chosen at a more convenient wavelength for efficient detection, that is at a wavelength where silicium APDs are available, i.e. below 1 $`\mu `$, around 800 nm. This configuration, with some additional nice tricks, was demonstrated in 2001 by G. Ribordy , who founded id Quantique a few years later, the first company to propose a quantum cryptography setup . His experiment was the first one targeting primarily quantum cryptography with entangled photons - all other experiments, including ours, where tailored for Bell tests and merely adapted to fashion. Ribordy’s experiment still holds the distance record of QKD using entangled photons. But admittedly, is not yet that practical since two photons must be detected. Hence, let’s make it simpler!

### D The first main step towards a practical system

The first step towards a really practical system consists in moving the photon source to the other side of Alice’s interferometer. At first this may look like a complete change, but it really isn’t! Let’s first use formulas. Whenever a unitary operator $`U`$ acts on one subsystem of a maximally entangled pair state $`\mathrm{\Phi }^{(+)}`$, then the same effect can be obtained by acting with a related unitary operator on the other subsystems:

$$U\text{11}\mathrm{\Phi }^{(+)}=\text{11}U^t\mathrm{\Phi }^{(+)}$$
(1)
where $`U^t`$ denotes the transpose.

This formula applied to our case simply tells us that for Alice’s interferometer, the long arm with a central source is equivalent to the short arm with a source moved to the left of the interferometer, as shown in Fig. 5. Now the interference results from the indistinguishability of the following two paths: short-long and long-short, where the first term applies to the path in Alice’s interferometer and the second to the path in Bob’s interferometer. The significant simplification follows quite naturally. Since the photon travelling to the left on Fig. 5 is actually not used, or only as a trigger, one may as well use a single photon source. Well, that is even less practical, at least as long as single photon sources at telecom wavelength do not exists. But now one can also use the much more practical pseudo-single photon sources. These sources are simply very attenuated telecom laser pulses, such that the mean photon number per pulse is only of the order of 0.1. Hence the probability that a pulse contains two photons is almost negligible (in section III we come back to the issue of multi-photon pulses). Attenuating a laser pulse that low is not trivial, but still much simpler and much more stable, which is very important, than twin-photon sources.

This configuration presented in Fig. 5 was first used by Paul Townsend, then at BT, and John Rarity, then at DERA , and is still developed at Los Alamos National Laboratories, USA, in the group of Richard Hughes . But looking at Fig. 5 one still sees two interferometers that need to be stabilized: the difference long-short has to be the same for both interferometers. And since this scheme relies on interferences, the polarization of the pseudo-single photons must be controlled. All this requires active feedback, which is not impossible to achieve, but not yet entirely practical. So let’s simplify it further!

### E A practical setup: the Plug & Play configuration

The next step realizes that there is no need for two interferometers, one is enough (see Fig. 6). But then the pulse must travel go-&-return, using a mirror as indicated on the figure. The indistinguishable paths are still short-long and long-short, but now referring to the paths during the go and the return propagations. Notice that in this scheme the role of Alice and Bob are inverted: Bob chooses one among four phase settings and Alice chooses a measurement basis. A serious drawback is that the photons must travel twice the distance, hence suffer from twice the loss. But this can be circumvented. Actually it is only on the return flight that the pulse has to be attenuated down to the pseudo-single photon level. Consequently, a bright pulse is sent out, attenuated by Bob and reflected to Alice. Notice that since there is now only a single interferometer, there is no longer any need to align it! All that is needed is that it remains stable during the time of a go-&-return, i.e. a few micro-seconds. But there remains the polarization. Here again there is an elegant solution, first suggested in a different context by Martinelli . It consists of using a Faraday mirror. The details can be found in . Essentially such mirrors act on polarization like a phase conjugating mirror acts on phase. The net result is that when a light pulse arrives back on Alice’s side, it is in a fixed polarization state, independent of all the polarization fluctuation light underwent during propagation: all the fluctuations where undone during the return journey. Faraday mirrors use the non-reciprocal Faraday effect, the same effect used in isolators and in circulators. Hence the telecom industry has developed this technology to a remarkable point and Faraday mirrors can readily be bought .

A further simplification comes from the fact that a Faraday mirror exchanges vertical and horizontal polarization. Hence, replacing the output coupler of Alice’s interferometer by a polarization beam splitter guarantees that a photon that passed through the long arm when emitted, will return via the short arm, and vice-versa. Consequently, Alice doesn’t need to post-select the cases where the photon arrives in the correct time-bin since all detected photons arrive at the correct time.

When this setup was first tested using classical light (i.e. without the attenuator), experimentalists in Geneva were very pleased to measure visibilities up to $`V=99.8`$%, without much effort, even over tens of km! Accordingly this configuration was named Plug-&-Play . Using this setup for QKD, the noise (QBER) is largely dominated by the detector noise: $`QBER_{optical}=\frac{1+V}{2}<<1\%`$.

The Plug & Play configuration has been demonstrated in a QKD experiment between Geneva and Lausanne over a distance of 67km using the swiss telecom network, with terrestrial and with a cable under lake Geneva  (see also ). This experiment received quite a lot of attention. But actually, another experiment presented in the same paper deserves probably more attention. It used aerial cables and was done in mountains near Geneva. This clearly demonstrated the very high stability of the Plug & Play configuration. Indeed, it would be almost impossible to demonstrate QKD with any of the previously discussed configurations using aerial cables!

## IV Security

### A Security proofs based on entanglement

The most general proofs of security, often termed à la Shor-Preskill, are quite surprising . Following ideas by Mayer , Lo and Chau  and the development of quantum error codes, these proofs essentially show that from Alice and Bob’s points of view everything is as if they had used close to maximally entangled states, although they actually did use a scheme without entanglement. More details can be found in I. Chuang’s contribution to these proceedings. Let us simply emphasize that it is still not known whether Eve can in principle reach these bounds, or whether these bounds are sub-optimal. From a practical point of view this is a pity, since we do not know whether we do really need to sacrifice qubits to these bounds or could use the more optimistic bound summarized in the next sub-section.

### B Security proofs without entanglement

The proofs in this subsection do not consider the most general attack, but only what is called the individual, or incoherent attack. Actually, these proofs also treat the case of finite-coherent attacks, hence let us concentrate on the later. All the security proofs are valid only in the limit of arbitrarily long keys. If not, the statistical arguments wouldn’t apply. Now, let’s assume that Eve can attack several qubits in a coherent way, i.e. she can coherently let auxiliary systems under her control interact (unitarily of course) with the flying qubits. Assume that Eve can do this up to a maximum number of N qubits. We call this finite-coherent attacks. If Alice and Bob use key lengths much longer than N, then Eve is in the same situation as if she would be limited to individual attacks (one auxiliary system per qubit). Hence, the proofs ”without entanglement” are valid for all senarii except if Eve can attack coherently an unlimited number of qubits \- a conceptually interesting scenario, but hard to take seriously for the practical physicist.

In 1997 Fuchs et al.  presented the optimal individual attack, see also . Since then it has been generalized to more than two bases  and to higher dimensions . By now, the BB84 case is well known. The main results are summarized in Fig. 7.

### C Trojan horse attacks and technological loopholes

As shown in Fig. 6 the configuration opens a new possible attack for Eve, the so-called Trojan horse attack. Eve could send into Bob’s apparatus a bright laser pulse to sense the phase modulator’s setting. This illustrates that for every simplification step one has to carefully check the security of the configuration. In the present case there is a simple way to avoid Trojan horse attacks. Bob adds a coupler taking out a large fraction (typically 90%) of the light at his apparatus input. This coupler can be considered as part of the attenuator shown in Fig. 6. The extracted light is directed onto a standard detector that monitors the energy of each incoming pulse. Additionally this detector is very useful for the synchronization of the phase modulator. Eve could now use a different wavelength at which either the coupler or the detector is inefficient. To avoid this Bob has to use a filter which blocks all unwanted wavelengths. This discussion could be extended more or less for ever. Let us emphasize two important points. First, this is not specific to the Plug-&-Play configuration, every real optical component has some imperfection, in particular they do all reflect some light. Hence Eve could always try to send a sensing pulse and Alice and Bob should always have warning detectors and protecting filters. The second point is that this brief discussion illustrates the limit of mathematical proofs of security. Indeed, such proofs have either to assume perfect components, or components with precisely defined defects. In practice a central issue is how to make sure that an actual prototype satisfies the assumptions of a mathematical theorem? In this respect, it should be mentioned that when we made the simplification from a 2-photon to a 1-photon configurations, we lost the possibility of using the violation of Bell’s inequality as a signature of quantumness (i.e. if the correlation measured by Alice and Bob violate some Bell inequality, then they definitely share an entanglement preserving quantum channel). Using Bell inequalities in this sense is a very nice idea . However the detection efficiency loophole that affects all optical tests of Bell inequality renders this kind of control infeasible with near future technology . Note also that a violation of a Bell inequality could not detect a Trojan horse type of attack.

### D What is secure?

Since there is some controversy on this, let us ask ”what is secure in QKD?”. It is clear that Eve should not have access to Alice nor to Bob’s electronics. Indeed, there the information is classical and Eve could merely copy it. On the contrary, the quantum channel, i.e. the optical fiber, is secure thanks to quantum physics. But now comes an old question in a new context: where does the quantum/classical transition happen? As long as the information is quantum, the no-cloning theorem applies. As soon as it is classical, security is lost (i.e. must be guaranteed by other means). Surprisingly to us, many physicists (mainly theorists) consider the detector on the quantum side. This is of course a simple way to be on the safe side . But it implies a very significant waste of qubits. It seems really hard to imagine Eve modifying Bob’s detector’s dark count probability from a distance. And if we give her this capability, why not also give her the power to change Alice’s source from a distance? Let’s say that quantum cryptography offers ”only” secure key distribution over a quantum channel, assuming the hardware on both sides are secured by classical means.

There remains though an issue. Eve could modify the apparent detection efficiency of Bob’s detector by sending brighter pulses. This is clearly feasible and Bob thus has to continuously monitor the coincidence rate between his detectors. If this coincidence rate exceeds the threshold corresponding to accidentals (due mainly to dark counts), then he should interrupt the protocol.

### E Multi-photon pulses: problem and solutions

Another potential security loophole comes from the cases where the pseudo-single photon source actually produces more than one photon. These events being rare one may think that they are negligible. However, if the losses on the quantum channel are high, e.g. the fiber is long, then the cases where the desired photon makes it to Bob are also rare. Hence Eve could perform the following attack . Directly at the exit of Alice’s office, Eve counts the number of photons in each pulse, without perturbing the degree of freedom used to encode the qubit, i.e. Eve performs quantum nondemolition measurements on each pulse (this is total science fiction with today’s technology, but if one assumes that Eve is limited only by the laws of physics, she could do so). Next, Eve blocks all single-photon pulses. Whenever a pulse contains 2 or more photons, she keeps one and sends the others to Bob through a perfect channel, or even better she teleports them to Bob. If the fraction of pulses Eve blocks balanced the fraction of pulses that would have got lost in normal operation, then Bob notices no difference. But now Eve holds a copy of the qubits. The main point is that she didn’t need to make any copy, Alice unwillingly offered her some.

Of course, once the attack was performed, Eve has to conserve her photons, waiting for the basis reconciliation, when Alice publicly announces which basis she used to encode each qubit. Thus Eve clearly needs a quantum memory, which again is far from today’s technology but could in principle be designed.

A first way around such PNS (Photon Number Splitting) attack consists of using sources producing sub-poissonian light. Indeed in such sources, the probability of 2-photon pulses is reduced compared to a poissonian light source like a laser, for the same probability of a 1-photon pulse. Such sources are often named single-photon sources and are an active field of research .

Another approach realizes that the weakness of the BB84 protocol against PNS attacks is that whenever Eve holds a copy, she has full information about the quantum state. But then, why not replace in the protocol the bases by sets of non-orthogonal states . Remember that unambiguous discrimination of non orthogonal states is possible, but at the cost of some inconclusive results . So even when Eve has a perfect copy of the state she cannot find out what the bit is with certainty. A particularly simple example of such new protocols uses precisely the same states and measurements as in the BB84 protocol, but the sifting procedure differs . This protocol is called SARG and is described in Fig.8

Though PNS attacks seem completely unrealistic with today’s technology, it is nice to see that new protocols can still be devised, inspired by practical considerations. In this respect, see also Ph. Grangier’s contribution to these proceedings.

## V Conclusion

Quantum cryptography is a beautiful idea! It is also an excellent teaching tool, encompassing basic quantum physics (no-cloning theorem, entanglement) and Applied Physics (telecom engineering). It also involves a significant part of classical and of quantum information theory.

## Acknowledgements

Financial support by the Swiss OFES within the European project RESQ and the NCCR Quantum Photonics are acknowledged. Many thanks to Rob Thew for careful reading of the manuscript.


text:
# Bag formation in Chiral Born-Infeld Theory

## 1 Introduction

The construction of the low-energy baryon state model is a long-standing task, and perhaps the first realistic solution of this problem was proposed by Skyrme . Within the Skyrme approach baryon treated as a topological soliton of non-linear chiral meson field and the topological number of such soliton is associated with the baryon number. This idea was very popular in the eighties due to the intense interest to the solitonic physics at that time. The Skyrme model is well studied and gives us the quite good description of the many low-energy nuclear physics phenomena.

On the other hand, from the DIS experiments we know, that the baryon consists of the charged constituents (so called constituent quarks), but the experiments with spin of proton showed that only twenty percents of the baryon spin can be associated with the charged constituents ! Therefore, the realistic model for low-energy baryon state should describe the quark constituents as well as the chiral degrees of freedom of the meson cloud around them.

But how to combine these two opposite points of view on the baryon into the framework of a one model? In order to find the model with such dualistic properties, the so-called ”two-phase” models were proposed. The simplest realization of the two-phase idea is the well-known Chiral Bag Model (ChBM) . In this model, the constituent quarks are placed inside a spherical region (so-called ”bag”), subject to the confining boundary conditions, and meson cloud lives outside. As a rule, the exterior pion field are Skyrmionic but the quark part is necessary in this model for the self-consistency of the model, as will as for the phenomenological point of view. Typical Lagrangian of the two-phase model consists of the three parts

$$_{\text{model}}=_\text{q}\theta _V+_\pi \theta _{\overline{V}}+_V\delta _V$$
(1)
where Heaviside’s $`\theta _V`$ function cuts out the internal region for quark part of the Lagrangian $`L_q`$, inverse $`\theta _{\overline{V}}`$ function cuts out the external region for meson field with the Lagrangian $`L_\pi `$. The crucial point of this model steams from the fact that the kinematic consequence of the confinement boundary conditions for fermions in the bag is the non-zero axial current across the boundary. For self-consistency of the model, these two regions should be joined by the requirement of continuity of the axial current on the boundary. In order to guarantee such continuity, the boundary term $`L_V`$ must be introduced.

Chiral Bag Model is used very widely in the phenomenology of elementary particle physics  but on the other hand this model has serious methodological disadvantages. First of all, as one can easily see in (1), this Lagrangian depends directly on the geometry of the confinement region $`V`$. In the case of the Chiral Bag Model, $`V`$ is a sphere. But it would be very interesting to find a theory where the form of the confinement region is generated dynamically, rather than is chosen ”by hand”, as in the case of the ChBM. Moreover, the geometry dependence of the Lagrangian (1) directly violates the Lorenz covariance of the theory, and thus there is no a way for connection such complicated and non-invariant construction with QCD.

Another kind of methodological difficulties appears from Skyrme part of the Skyrme Model . The point is that the simplest realization of the non-linear meson field (so-called Weinberg’s prototype theory)

$$_{\text{pr}}=\frac{f_\pi ^2}{4}\mathrm{Tr}L_\mu L^\mu $$
(2)
has no soliton solution and any non-trivial static solutions of this theory have infinite self-energy. But on the other hand, the theory (2) correctly describes the behavior of the meson field at large distance from the source (the proton or neutron). In order to regularize the singular self-energy of the prototype theory, Skyrme proposed to modify slightly the theory  by means of the additional term $`_{\text{Sk}}=\mathrm{Tr}[L_\mu ,L_\nu ]^2/e`$ (see Fig. 1). Such term in the Lagrangian of the meson field leads to generation of the soliton solutions (skyrmions), and now is treated as the leading order of the expansion of the effective meson theory in strong limit (by analogy with the Chiral Perturbation Theory Lagrangian defined as series). But unfortunately such analogy is not so good for the soliton paradigm of baryons. Basing on the renormalization group approach, one can show that the coefficients of such expansion depended strongly on the energy scale of the process, and in the strong regime (near the nucleon) the highest terms of the expansion become more and more essential . This fact is connected with the nonrenormalizable nature of chiral field theory and this situation is similar with quantum gravity.

An additional point to emphasize is that the Skyrme regularization procedure does not solve the problem of singular solutions of chiral field theory, because Skyrme model has a lot of another singular solutions along with soliton sector.

In order to construct a suitable candidate for the role of the chiral effective theory, let us consider a very illuminative historical analogy with the problem of singular self-energy of electron. Before the Era of Quantum Electrodynamics, Born and Infeld  proposed the non-linear covariant action for the electro-magnetic fields with very attractive features. Firstly, in the framework of the BI theory, the problem of singular self-energy of electron can be solved. In this theory the electron is a stable finite energy solution of the BI field equation with electric charge. Second, the BI action has the scale parameter $`\beta `$. Using expansion in this parameter, one reduces the BI action to the usual Maxwell form in the low-energy limit. Indeed, using the analogy with the relativistic particle action, let us consider the action in the Born-Infeld form

$$_{BI}=\beta ^2\left(1\sqrt{1+\frac{1}{\beta ^2}F_{\mu \nu }F^{\mu \nu }}\right)\stackrel{\beta \mathrm{}}{}\frac{1}{2}F_{\mu \nu }F^{\mu \nu }$$
(3)
It can be shown that the solution for the electrostatic spherically symmetrical potential $`A_0=\varphi `$ reads

$$\varphi (r,\beta )=C_0^R\frac{dr}{\sqrt{r^4+C^2/\beta ^2}}\stackrel{R\mathrm{}}{}\frac{C}{R}+\underset{¯}{O}(\frac{1}{R^5})$$
(4)
In Fig. 2 the Coulomb solution and the relevant soliton of BI electrodynamics are presented. Comparing Fig.1 and Fig. 2, one finds that the situations with the singular salfenergy in these two theories (singular selfenergy of the Coulomb potential and singular selfenergy of the solutions of the prototype Lagrangian (2) ) are very similar and in our paper we apply the very similar procedure for the chiral prototype Lagrangian (2).

## 2 Chiral Bag solution of Chiral Born-Infeld Theory

Let us consider the Lagrangian

$$_{ChBI}=f_\pi ^2\mathrm{Tr}\beta ^2\left(1\sqrt{1\frac{1}{2\beta ^2}L_\mu L^\mu }\right)\stackrel{\beta \mathrm{}}{}\frac{f_\pi ^2}{4}\mathrm{Tr}L_\mu L^\mu ,$$
(5)
where $`\beta `$ is the mass dimensional scale parameter of our model. It can be easily shown that the expansion of the Lagrangian (5) gives us the prototype theory as the leading order theory in the parameter $`\beta `$. The theory (5) is the direct analogue of the Born-Infeld action for chiral fields.

Our theory contains only the second-order derivative terms. Thus the dynamics of this theory can be studied in detail. Now we consider the spherically symmetrical field configuration

$$U=e^{iF(r)(\stackrel{}{n}\stackrel{}{\tau })},\stackrel{}{n}=\stackrel{}{r}/|r|.$$
(6)
The energy of such configuration is the functional

$$E^\beta [F]=8\pi f_\pi ^2\beta ^2\underset{0}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\left(1R\right)r^2𝑑r,$$
(7)
where

$$R=\sqrt{1\frac{1}{\beta ^2}\left(\frac{F^2}{2}+\frac{\mathrm{sin}^2F}{r^2}\right)}.$$

Using the variation principle, we get the equation of motion

$$\left(r^2\frac{F^{}}{R}\right)^{}=\frac{\mathrm{sin}2F}{R}$$
(8)
and for amplitude $`F(r)`$ we obtain

$$(r^2\frac{1}{\beta ^2}\mathrm{sin}^2F)F^{\prime \prime }+(2rF^{}\mathrm{sin}2F)$$

$$\frac{1}{\beta ^2}(rF^3F^2\mathrm{sin}2F+3\frac{1}{r}F^{}\mathrm{sin}^2F\frac{1}{r^2}\mathrm{sin}2F\mathrm{sin}^2F)=0.$$
(9)
The next aim of our investigation is finding the solutions of equation (9). This equation is a very complicated nonlinear differential equation. In order to solve it, only numerical or approximation methods seem applicable. The crucial point of such analysis is that the leading derivative term in this equation contains the factor

$$\left(r^2\frac{1}{\beta ^2}\mathrm{sin}^2F\right).$$
(10)
Due to this factor, equation (9) has a singular region (singular surface) with singular behavior of solutions. One can find an equation on such surface by using the standard singular perturbation theory techniques . Let $`r_0`$ belong to such singular surface. Then

$$\{\begin{array}{ccc}\hfill (\beta r_0)^2\mathrm{sin}^2F_0& =& 0\hfill \\ \hfill F_0^{}\left((F_0^{})^2\mathrm{sin}F_0F_0^{}\mathrm{sin}2F_0+\mathrm{sin}^2F_0\right)& =& 0\text{where}F_0=F(r_0).\hfill \end{array}$$
(11)
Equations (11) have only two solutions: whether

$$\{\begin{array}{ccc}r_0\hfill & & 0,\hfill \\ F_0\hfill & =& \pm \mathrm{arcsin}(\beta r_0)+\pi N,\text{where}N\text{Z},\hfill \\ F_0^{}\hfill & =& 0.\hfill \end{array}$$
(12)
or

$$\{\begin{array}{ccc}r_0\hfill & =& 0,\hfill \\ F_0\hfill & =& \pi N,\text{where}N\text{Z},\hfill \\ F_0^{}\hfill & & 0.\hfill \end{array}$$
(13)
Topological solitons of ChBI theory correspond to the possibility (13) were studied in . In our paper we consider the more interesting possibility (12)

Using the standard singular perturbation theory procedure , one obtains the asymptotic behavior near the singular surface ($`rr_0`$, $`F(rr_0)\mathrm{arcsin}(\beta r_0)`$)

$$F(rr_0)=\mathrm{arcsin}(\beta r_0)+\text{b}(rr_0)^{3/2}+\underset{¯}{O}((rr_0)^2),$$
(14)
where b is a constant. Of course, the derivative $`F_0^{}`$ at the point $`r=r_0`$ is zero.

To guarantee the finiteness of the energy of our solutions, we should choose the following asymptotic at infinity ($`r\mathrm{}`$)

$$F(r)=a_{\mathrm{}}(1/r)^2\frac{a_{\mathrm{}}^3}{21}(1/r)^6\frac{a_{\mathrm{}}^3}{3\beta ^2}(1/r)^8+\underset{¯}{O}(1/r^{10}),$$
(15)
where $`a_{\mathrm{}}`$ is a constant.

Notice that equation (9) has very useful symmetries. First of all, this equation is symmetrical with respect to the changes $`FF+N\pi ,N𝐙`$ and $`FF`$.

The numerical investigation of the solutions of equation (9) which have the asymptotics (12) ($`a_{\mathrm{}}>0`$) at infinity is presented in Fig.3. Most of these solutions can be evaluated only for $`r>r_0`$, where $`r_0`$ is determined by $`F(r_0)=\pm \mathrm{arcsin}(\beta r_0)`$. But among this set of solutions there are solutions with $`r_0=0`$. Such solutions have the asymptotics

$$F(r)=\pi N+ar\frac{7a^24\beta ^2}{30(a^2\beta ^2)}a^3r^3+\underset{¯}{O}(r^5)$$
(16)
at origin ($`a^2<\beta ^2/3`$ is a constant), and these are the topological solitons of the ChBI theory. Solitons with $`B=1,2`$ and $`3`$ are presented in Fig.4. The scale parameter $`\beta =807\text{MeV}`$ is preliminarily defined from the hypothesis that the soliton with $`B=1`$ is a nucleon.

Now we would like to draw the attention to another class of solutions. These solutions are defined everywhere, except the small ($``$ 0.2 fm) spherical region about the origin. These solutions look like a ”bubble” of vacuum in the chiral fields and are of the interest for the chiral bag model of baryons . In the internal region ($`r<r_0`$), the only vacuum configuration can exist. From the mathematical point of view, such ”step-like” solutions with jump of $`F(r)`$ at $`r=r_0`$ are a generalized solutions .

To clarify the physical nature of this ”step-like” generalized solutions, let us consider the projection of the left-hand chiral current on the outward normal of the singular surface. As we pointed out in the Introduction, a non-zero chiral current across the boundary the kinematic is the consequence of the confinement boundary conditions for the fermions in the bag. According to our proposition, the singular surface of ”step-like” solutions is a confinement boundary surface for constituent quarks. For the self-consistency of our ”two-phase” picture, let us check is it possible to compensate the non-zero quark chiral current on the confinement surface by the non-zero chiral current of ChBI ”step-like” configuration that appear due to the defect on the singular surface. The projection the chiral current on the outward normal of the singular surface for the spherically symmetrical configuration (6) reads

$$(\stackrel{}{n}\stackrel{}{J}_\pi )|_V=f_\pi ^2\mathrm{Tr}\frac{\tau ^a\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{L}}{\sqrt{1\frac{1}{2\beta ^2}L_\mu L^\mu }}=\frac{3}{2}f_\pi ^2\frac{\text{b}r_0}{\sqrt{2r_0+9r_0^2\text{b}^2}},$$
(17)
where the coefficient b from the asymptotic (14) is a function of $`F_0=F(r_0)`$ and can be evaluated numerically.

The crucial point for such analysis steams from the fact that $`\text{b}(F_0)`$ has the singularity at $`F_0=\pi N`$ and $`r_0=0`$, or $`\text{b}(F(r_0=0))=\mathrm{}`$. This implies that the soliton solutions of the ChBI theory are solutions with point-like singular chiral source and the ”bag”-like solutions are the solutions with the some distribution of the chiral current on the confinement surface. It is possible to show that for any internal constituent quark configuration with confinement inside some volume $`V`$ the solution of ChBI theory $`U(\stackrel{}{\pi })`$ could be defined which compensate the non-zero quark’s chiral current across the surface $`V`$

$$(\stackrel{}{n}\stackrel{}{J}_q)|_V=\underset{g}{}\frac{i}{2}\overline{\mathrm{\Psi }}_q(\stackrel{}{x}\stackrel{}{\gamma })\gamma _5\mathrm{\Psi }_q=(\stackrel{}{n}\stackrel{}{J}_\pi )|_V$$
(18)
Equation (18) can be considered as a condition on coefficient $`\text{b}(V)`$, and plays the role of the self-consistency condition between quark and chiral phases.

In conclusion of this section, it would be interesting to point out that the condition (18) is not jast an artifact of the spherical symmetry of our task. This is a direct consequence of the asymptotics (14) but, as easy to see, such asymptotics can depended only on local characteristics of surface $`V`$. It means that the asimptotics of the field configuration along the normal in the leading order depends only on the curvature radius of the confinement surface at this point and equation (18) can be used for any other geometry of $`V`$.

## 3 Conclusions

The aim of this paper is to study of ”bag”-like generalized solutions of the Born-Infeld theory for chiral fields. These solutions were firstly proposed in our work . For simplicity, in this work we restricted ourselves by the spherically symmetrical configuration (6), but, of course, the ChBI theory has solutions with another geometry of the singular surface. Physically the critical behavior in the ChBI theory appears when the chiral field strength of the prototype field theory approaches the value of the squarred f effective coupling constant ($`\beta ^2`$). This is a very physical idea. Today we know that there are many theories which have the low-energy limit in the form of the Born-Infeld action .

The Chiral Born-Infeld theory is a good candidate on the role of the effective chiral theory and the model for the chiral cloud of the baryons. In this model one can find not only spherical ”bags”, it is possible to also study the ”string”-like, toroidal or ”Y-Sign”-like solutions, or some another geometry. The geometry of confinement surface depends directly on the model of color confinement and it would be very interesting to use, for example, the Lattice QCD simulations for the color degrees of freedom in combination with our model for external chiral field.

In conclusions I would like to point out that there are many interconnections between Lattice QCD at strong coupling limit and ChBI theory. It is possible to prove such low-energy chiral limit of QCD using the lattice regularization of QCD. All this questions should be the topics for future works.

I would like to thank Dr. Igor Cherednikov for interesting discussions and comments. This work is partially supported by the Russian Federation President’s Grant 1450-2003-2. The hospitality and financial support of the ICTP in Trieste is gratefully acknowledged.