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# Statistics of String vacua

## 1 Introduction

What is the most important problem of string phenomenology?

Most would probably say that it is to find a compactification which reproduces the Standard Model in all its details, and makes new predictions. More realistically, one could settle for qualitative agreement with the Standard Model, as long as one gets new predictions.

If one interprets “qualitative” loosely enough, this has been done, but the standard which has been met is not very high. While the general structure of supersymmetric grand unification was already realized in the early works, many of the important features, especially the hierarchy of scales and the small cosmological constant, not to mention specific parameter values, were controlled by non-perturbative effects, which were not at all understood at that time. Besides these classic problems, string and M theory constructions come with new problems of their own, which require solution or explanation: why our universe appears four-dimensional, what chooses a particular compactification or other extra dimensional structure, and so forth.

Building on the understanding of non-perturbative string/M theory achieved in the mid-late 1990’s, it is now possible to study compactifications which address these goals. Still, no model has been proposed which meets all of the requirements. Should we be worried?

One can argue that, to the contrary, this is good news for any hope for making predictions from string theory. The argument is simply that we have only explored a tiny fraction of the compactifications now believed to exist, and these seem to be a fairly random cross section chosen not because they are more likely to work, but more because of ease of analysis and historical accident.

If we had already found satisfactory candidates in this small sample, it is likely that the full set would contain large numbers of theories which agree with the Standard Model in every detail. Even worse, different theories out of this set might lead to very different predictions. In a worst-case scenario, string theory might not be testable at all.

To bring home this point, let us look at the variety of string/M theory constructions, and ask how many might be candidates. Focus on Calabi-Yau compactification, where some numbers are known.

The number of distinct CY threefolds is believed to be $`10^5`$$`10^6`$. All these constructions involve additional choices – a choice of bundle or brane, with comparable multiplicity, which directly affect the spectrum. Choices of flux or nonperturbative gauge theory vacuum probably bring in much larger multiplicities – numbers $`10^{100}`$ are often cited (more below).

In a weakly coupled construction, it is not hard to exclude models with exotic matter of various types. But most constructions contain sectors with $`O(1)`$ couplings. Many proposals exist for strongly coupled sectors (composite models, supersymmetric technicolor, the supersymmetry breaking sector, or just hidden sectors) and our current understanding of nonperturbative gauge theory tends to support these claims. Thus, one cannot throw out such models from the start. On the positive side, one is better able to check if a specific model works.

Even leaving out considerations of moduli fixing and couplings, numbers like $`10^{10}`$ qualitatively distinct models seem very plausible. So far, the number which have been considered in any detail is more like $`100`$.

If one agrees with this argument, then one is led to the belief that constructing a model which agrees with the Standard Model in detail is not the primary goal we should be pursuing at this point:

* If it is possible within our present limitations, this is a negative result.
* If it is not possible within our present limitations, one cannot get a result.

While this conundrum oversimplifies the situation, it deserves consideration.

Of course there are ways around it. Before focusing on one, let us at least mention the two others we know of.

One is to look for predictions which cannot be matched by four dimensional effective field theory, for example short range modifications to gravity. This is important, and many speakers here are discussing it. On the other hand, we have no clear reason to think such effects must exist. Indeed, the “traditional” Kaluza-Klein scenario still seems to fit evidence such as unification of coupling constants better than any of the more recently proposed variations, and must be taken seriously.

The other is to look for some a priori principle which selects among the possible vacuum configurations. Given such a principle, it is of course much more interesting to know if the vacuum it selects can reproduce the observations.

As an example to illustrate “Vacuum Selection Principles,” let me give you my best idea along these lines. One might imagine (see for example ) that our vacuum is in some sense “the most symmetric” among the various possibilities. Besides esthetics, many other candidate principles – for example, maximizing some natural wave function of the universe – seem likely to prefer such vacua.

On the face of it, this proposal is absurd. Higher dimensional models with more supersymmetry are obviously more symmetric. By rights, the “most symmetric” four dimensional theory, is the one with the most gauge symmetry. F theory examples are known with rank $`10^5`$ gauge groups.  The Standard Model is not even in the running.

However, one might imagine that there exists some unstable nonsupersymmetric vacuum with a huge gauge group, which is preferred by Planck scale cosmology. It would then roll down to our physical vacuum. Then, the “right vacuum” would be near this preferred symmetric point.

This is as close to a plausible a priori principle as I have come, but using it still requires some fairly detailed knowledge about the set of possible vacua, and the configuration space which contains the vacua. Most such ideas require even more information. It does not seem reasonable to hope for a principle which will tell one in advance which string theory, Calabi-Yau, brane configuration etc. to look at.

Of course, it could be that the tests we already know of (or will know in ten years time) are already stringent enough to select out zero or one vacua. Maybe if we could work with them, an a priori principle would not be necessary.

And, we should keep in mind, that there is no guarantee that any a priori vacuum selection principle exists. We only have one sample, and the question of why we observe this one need not have any better answer than “because we are here.”

This is not an anthropic argument, which is a much more specific and predictive type of argument. It is just a conservative interpretation of the goal of science: to explain what we see, not why we see it.

## 2 Statistics of vacua

So what to do? There is a third approach, which has been advocated for some time by Dine ; it is to look for “generic” predictions of string theory. Can we make this idea precise?

Any attempt to make generic predictions has to be founded on the idea that we know “all” string vacua or at least some representative set, in the sense that the distribution of a property of interest is the same in the representative set as in the whole. At present we can only hypothesize that the sets of vacua we can study concretely could be representative, and eventually check this by the results. For example, one can argue that the set of all type II compactifications on Calabi-Yau, to the extent that it can be studied at arbitrary volume and string coupling, could be a large fraction of the vacua, because the other known large classes of vacua are believed to be dual to these.

This at least gets us started, but it is clear that any representative class of vacua is far too complicated to study in any detail at present. We need to ask simpler questions, which might give us some picture of this huge “landscape” of theories.

To do this, we proposed in  to work as follows. The idea is to make a precise hypothesis for an approximate description of this set: the vacua are vacua of a specific ensemble of effective field theories, something like a list or set of theories which we believe can come out of string/M theory. While the ensemble should be precisely specified, we need not claim that it exactly represents the set of string/M theory vacua, only that it represents it well enough for our purposes.

We then can proceed in two directions:

* We can test whether our hypothesized ensemble is accurate, by comparing with actual string/M theory constructions.
* We can find out what fraction of vacua out of our ensemble meet a specified phenomenological test.

Let us give a very simple example to illustrate the point, by asking the question: Out of all the four dimensional vacua obtained by string/M theory compactification, how many of them are effective field theories with $`SU(3)\times SU(2)\times U(1)`$ gauge symmetry unbroken at low energy? If we define our terms, and if string/M theory has a precise definition, and if there are finitely many physically distinct vacua, then this question has a definite answer.

One can just as easily generalize the question to, out of all vacua, how many have low energy gauge group $`G`$ ? Let us denote this number by the function

$$d\mu [G].$$

While finding this function exactly is hard, perhaps it can be approximated in some simple and useful way.

For example, could it be that the rank $`r=\mathrm{rk}G`$ of the unbroken gauge group, roughly satisfies a power law distribution,

$$d\mu [r]N\times r^\alpha .$$

If so, and if we could estimate $`N`$ and $`\alpha `$, we could get a rough estimate for how many vacua have a rank 4 gauge group, without much effort. One could go on to study the distribution $`d\mu [N_1,N_2,\mathrm{}]`$ of the ranks of the simple factors, etc. Although this may sound ambitious, given that the function $`d\mu [r]`$ is well defined, why shouldn’t it have a simple approximate description ?

### 2.1 Distribution of quiver gauge theories

Let me turn to another problem along these lines, for which I can even suggest a simple approximate description (details can be found in ). We consider $`U(N)`$ quiver gauge theories, i.e. with gauge group $`_iU(N_i)`$, and a spectrum of purely bifundamental matter. Such theories arise on the world-volumes of D-branes in type II string theory, embedded in the $`3+1`$ observable dimensions. and constructing these is the first step in making “brane world” realizations of the Standard Model, as discussed in many talks here.

It would be quite interesting to know the distribution of gauge groups and matter content for the theories which come out of string compactification. Let us focus on part of this information: the difference between the number of multiplets $`(\overline{N}_i,N_j)`$, and the number $`(\overline{N}_j,N_i)`$. For a theory with $`K`$ factors in the gauge group, which would arise by wrapping branes on $`K`$ distinct cycles, these are $`K(K1)/2`$ a priori independent numbers; we can summarize them in an antisymmetric matrix, the “intersection matrix” $`I_{ij}`$.

These numbers counts chiral matter multiplets which cannot be lifted by mass terms, and thus generalize the “number of generations” in the Standard Model. In explicit brane constructions, they are entirely determined by the topology of the branes $`B_i`$ and $`B_j`$ carrying the $`U(N_i)`$ and $`U(N_j)`$ gauge groups. The simplest example of this is to consider D$`6`$-branes in Calabi-Yau compactification of IIa string theory: in this case, the intersection numbers are literally topological intersection numbers between the three-dimensional world-volumes of the branes in the CY. Similar formulas are known for the other types of branes, in all cases topological.

Let us grant that the totality of type II compactifications on CY, with subsequent choices, leads to a finite set of vacua, each with a quiver gauge theory realized on D-brane world-volumes. If this set is finite, it defines a distribution $`d\mu [N_i;I_{ij}]`$, the number of theories realizing each possible choice of the $`N_i`$ and $`I_{ij}`$.

In , we give arguments that as a matrix element $`I_{ij}`$ becomes large (but not too large), this distribution goes as

$$d\mu [N_i;I_{ij}]\frac{dI_{ij}}{|I_{ij}|},$$
(1)
(with a cutoff $`I_{max}\mathrm{min}(N_1,N_2)`$, determined in string theory compactification to be $`I_{max}100`$ by tadpole cancellation.)

The basic argument for this is that any given $`U(N_1)\times U(N_2)`$ theory leads to a distribution $`Ik,k^2,k^3,\mathrm{}`$ with this power-like falloff, and the “total” distribution obtained by adding such distributions will also have this power-like falloff.

We then generalize to many gauge groups, by taking the distributions of bifundamentals for each pair of gauge groups to be independent. This ensemble has the great virtue of simplicity, and should not be dismissed out of hand. However, it is probably too simple, as it ignores the fact that branes tend to wrap groups of cycles which intersect among themselves, and do not intersect between groups.

A better candidate ensemble of theories can be obtained by considering $`K\times K`$ matrices which can be decomposed into blocks of size $`K_1\times K_1`$, $`K_2\times K_2`$, and so on, and using (1) to describe the expected distribution of matter content in each block. This is also very simple, and not obviously wrong.

Of course, we are not claiming that this is an exact description of the list of gauge theories coming out of string theory compactification, only that it models some features of the true list. One could go further and assert that, at the moment, this is the best simple candidate description of the range of matter spectra coming from brane constructions; it would be interesting to test it by checking it against the families of models which have already been concretely developed. In any case, it is a precise ansatz which one can use to study the fraction of models with a specified matter content.

For example, one can obtain the Standard Model by taking the gauge group $`U(3)\times U(2)\times U(1)\times U(1)`$, and the intersection matrix

$$\left(\begin{array}{cccc}0& 3& 3& 3\\ 3& 0& 1& 2\\ 3& 1& 0& 0\\ 3& 2& 0& 0\end{array}\right),$$

and applying a subsequent orientifold projection.

In the ensemble (1) with $`K=4`$, the fraction of brane models which realizes this spectrum is

$$d\mu (3)d\mu (3)d\mu (3)d\mu (1)d\mu (2)d\mu (0)10^6.$$

If a given compactification has more than $`4`$ gauge groups, we need to enumerate subsets of $`4`$ and compare them with the SM. The fraction which work depends on whether we allow exotic matter charged under the SM gauge groups, which would live in the off-diagonal terms in the following block decomposition:

$$I=\left(\begin{array}{cc}I_{SM}& I_{exotic}\\ I_{exotic}^t& \mathrm{}\end{array}\right)$$

If we do not allow exotic matter, since most of the distribution has $`I_{ij}0`$, models in which the SM is realized in a block with $`K_i=4`$ are very much favored.

While these ensembles are rather oversimplified, we believe that a description of the true ensemble of brane gauge theories, which suffices for this purpose, need not be too much more complicated. One can refine our estimate by formulating more detailed ensembles, and comparing them with actual string theory constructions. We suspect this will lead to similar results, say

$$10^{16}<\frac{N_{SM}}{N_{\mathrm{all}G,R}}<1.$$

In any case, we have formulated a quantitative sense in which the Standard Model matter content is “generic.” It is not to say that most models have this spectrum; indeed the fraction which do is small. But it might be large, when compared with other numbers.

## 3 Flux vacua

Perhaps the most straightforward class of vacua to which to apply these ideas is the set of “flux vacua” obtained by turning on gauge field strengths in the compact dimensions. These have been the focus of much recent work, in which it has been shown that their contributions to the vacuum energy can stabilize moduli.

Flux compactifications can even realize the observed small positive vacuum energy, and in this sense solve the cosmological constant problem. A particularly simple proposal of this type was made by Bousso and Polchinski  (see also Feng et al ). They argued that, in compactification on a Calabi-Yau with $`K`$ cycles, the number of vacua with small cosmological constant could go as $`c^K`$, growing exponentially with the number of cycles. Since typical Calabi-Yau’s have $`K100500`$ cycles, this suggests that string theory could have a huge multiplicity of vacua, $`N_{vac}10^{100}10^{500}`$. Furthermore, these vacua realize a spectrum or “discretuum” of values for the cosmological constant, which is roughly uniform near zero. Even if the distribution has no special properties near zero, this makes it quite likely that vacua with the small observed cosmological constant could exist just on statistical grounds.

In more detail, let $`F`$ be a gauge field strength. The equations of motion $`F=0`$ force it to be harmonic, so determined by its integral over non-trivial homology cycles $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_\alpha `$. Let

$$N^\alpha =_{\mathrm{\Sigma }_\alpha }F$$

be the quantized number of $`F`$ fluxes on the cycle $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_\alpha `$, and $`K`$ be the number of cycles.

A qualitative description of the total energy is is

$$E=E_0+\frac{1}{l^4}\underset{i=1}{\overset{K}{}}q_i(z)^2N_i^2$$

where $`E_0`$ is a flux-independent contribution, $`q_i`$ is a “charge” (determined by kinetic terms) and $`l`$ is the length scale of the internal space.

Suppose $`E_0<0`$ and $`q1`$, then the number of flux vacua with given $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=E(N)`$ is roughly

$`d\mu _{vac}(\mathrm{\Lambda })`$ $`{\displaystyle d^KN\delta (\mathrm{\Lambda }E)}`$ (2)
$`\left(\mathrm{\Lambda }(E_0l^4)\right)^{K/21}.`$ (3)
Thus, the number of vacua with $`|\mathrm{\Lambda }|<ϵ/l^4`$ is roughly

$$d\mu _{vac}(\mathrm{\Lambda }0)ϵL^{K/21}$$

with $`L=E_0l^4`$, substantiating the claims.

While we see the exponential emerge, and the large number of vacua, this argument raises many questions: for example, what determines the crucial parameters $`E_0`$ and $`l`$.

More to the point, this is only a heuristic argument, which ignored the fact the fluxes back react on the metric. In the above formula, this was expressed in the dependence $`q_i(z)`$ of the “charges” on moduli. The actual energy is found by minimizing $`z`$, and this is what determines the distribution of vacua in the moduli space.

Could it be that for many fluxes, there is no minimum apart from the infinite volume limit? Then, back reaction would eliminate most of this supposed large number of vacua ? Or, could most of them be dual realizations of the same vacua ?

### 3.1 Counting flux vacua

In , with Sujay Ashok, we answer this question by giving the first precise estimate for the number of vacua in a family of compactifications. Without going into excessive detail, we work with the IIb compactifications developed by Giddings, Kachru and Polchinski, in which the problem of finding vacua in the full ten dimensional theory can be shown (in the large volume limit) to precisely reduce to a problem in an $`𝒩=1`$ effective supergravity theory.

This effective theory has the following chiral superfields: $`\tau =C^{(0)}+ie^D`$ the axion-dilaton, $`z^i`$ the complex structure moduli of $`M`$, and $`\rho ^i`$ the Kähler moduli of $`M`$. Their Kähler potential is the same (up to truncating fields) as in the related $`𝒩=2`$ supersymmetric compactification with no flux,

$$K(z,\overline{z})=\mathrm{log}\mathrm{Im}\overline{z}^i\frac{(z)}{z^i}\mathrm{log}\mathrm{Im}\tau 3\mathrm{log}\mathrm{Im}\rho .$$

Besides a choice of CY and orientifolding, a flux compactification sector is characterized by a quantized flux. In IIb theory these are described by two integers for each three-cycle of $`M`$,

$$N^\alpha N_{RR}^\alpha +\tau N_{NS}^\alpha =_{\mathrm{\Sigma }_\alpha }F_{RR}^{(3)}+\tau H_{NS}^{(3)}.$$

The potential can then be computed exactly at large volume, using special geometry and the superpotential

$`W(z)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle _M}(F_{RR}^{(3)}+\tau H_{NS}^{(3)})\mathrm{\Omega }(z){\displaystyle _M}G\mathrm{\Omega }(z);`$
This $`W`$ and $`K`$ can be computed explicitly, using techniques developed in the study of mirror symmetry.

This superpotential depends on dilaton and complex structure moduli in a fairly complicated way, and indeed stabilizes all of these moduli. On the other hand, it does not depend on Kähler moduli, and as is well known this $`K`$ exhibits “no scale” structure and does not stabilize these moduli at all. Let us completely neglect the Kähler moduli for the time being and treat the others, returning to this point below.

In this problem, it turns out that the allowed “amount of flux,” the number $`L`$ of the previous argument, is constrained by tadpole cancellation:

$$FH=N(O3\mathrm{planes})N(D3\mathrm{branes})L$$
(4)
Thus, the precise question we ask, is to count the number of supersymmetric vacua, i.e. solutions of

$$D_iW(z,\tau )=0,$$

satisfying this bound, as a function of $`L`$, up to duality equivalences. The duality group in this context (large volume Calabi-Yau) is $`SL(2,Z)`$ acting on the dilaton-axion, times a subgroup of $`Sp(b_3,Z)`$, which acts simultaneously on the choice of flux, and on the complex structure. A simple way to get one representative of each duality class is to sum over all choices of flux, but only count vacua which are stabilized at $`(z,\tau )`$ in a fundamental region (of both duality groups) in moduli space.

In , we compute the large $`L`$ asymptotics for an “index” which counts supersymmetric vacua with signs, and is thus a lower bound for the total number of supersymmetric vacua. The general formula for this is

$`I_{vac}(LL_{max})`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{(2\pi L)^{b_3}}{\pi ^{n+1}b_3!}}{\displaystyle _\times }det(R\omega 1),`$ (5)
where $``$ is a fundamental region in the complex structure moduli space, and $``$ is the fundamental region of $`SL(2,Z)`$ in dilaton-axion moduli space. This formula will have corrections in a series in $`1/L`$, but these should be small if $`L>>K`$.

An important point about the result is that it gives not just the number, but the actual distribution of points where the flux vacua stabilize the moduli. The term $`det(R\omega 1)`$ which appears under the integral sign, is a $`2n+2`$ form, derived from the Kähler form $`\omega `$, and the matrix of curvature two-forms $`R`$. If we integrate this form over a subregion in moduli space, we obtain the number of vacua which sit in this region. These results can be used to compare the numbers of vacua in different regimes of coupling and field space, as we will discuss in .

While mathematical techniques exist to do this type of integral, the actual result is known at present only for compactification on $`T^6/Z_2`$, for which $`K=b_3=20`$ and $`L=32`$: one finds

$$I_{vac}=\frac{7(2\pi L)^{20}}{41814401220!}410^{21}.$$

To complete the discussion, we need to discuss stabilization of Kähler moduli. Now no-scale structure is generically spoiled by $`\alpha ^{}`$ and non-perturbative corrections, say

$$W_{NP}=e^{iN\rho }+\mathrm{}.$$

which, it has been suggested , can be arranged to arise from some brane world-volume theory. Very generally, a solution of $`DW(z)=0`$ for the complex structure moduli, with $`e^K|W|^2<<M_{pl}^4`$, will become a stable supersymmetric AdS vacuum once these are taken into account.  For example,

$$0=D_\rho W=iNe^{iN\rho }\frac{3}{\rho \overline{\rho }}W_{rest}$$

has a solution for

$$\frac{2N}{3}(\mathrm{Im}\rho )e^{iN\rho }=W_{rest}.$$

The function on the l.h.s. can take any value up to $`2/3e1`$, and one expects an exact nonperturbative $`W(\rho )`$ to behave similarly. Thus, any vacuum with $`W_{rest}`$ not too large, can be stabilized.

Thus, we need to know the distribution of AdS cosmological constants. This distribution can be computed in the same way as above; details will appear in . One finds that the distribution is “uniform near zero,” in other words the number of vacua with small $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=ϵ<<L`$ goes as $`N_{vac}\times ϵb_3/L`$.

There is a simple intuitive argument for this result. The AdS cosmological constant can be regarded as the length squared of a “vector in flux space” defined by the values of the various periods of cycles entering (3.1). If we assume that this vector is totally uncorrelated with the specific choice of flux, all vacua with flux roughly orthogonal to this vector will have small cosmological constant, leading to this result. Now this assumption is not innocent and is false in very similar examples (such as flux in the heterotic string); however the actual computation in type II does produce this result.

Thus, taking $`ϵ10^3`$, we obtain a lower bound $`410^{18}`$ on the number of flux vacua on $`T^6/Z_2`$. One might be even more conservative and cut out the strong coupling regime, where the analysis is not presently under control. If we do this by insisting on $`\mathrm{Im}\tau >40`$, we find that $`10^{17}`$ vacua satisfy these constraints.

## 4 Conclusions

We discussed the statistical approach to string phenomenology, and gave the first computation of the number of flux vacua in a specific model. This result confirmed the suggestion of Bousso and Polchinski that this number should grow as $`L^K`$, exponentially in the number of cycles $`K`$, and is a first step in getting a solid idea of just how many string theory vacua there are.

CY’s are known with $`K500`$ and $`L10^4`$, so there is some danger that the number of vacua is large enough to spoil predictivity. We can roughly quantify the number at which we should start to worry, as follows . Consider the twenty dimensional parameter space of the Standard Model couplings, along with the cosmological constant. Now, compute the volume in this space consistent with present-day observations, where we measure each coupling in Planck units (so, a coupling $`\lambda `$ of dimension $`n`$ has measure $`M_{pl}^n𝑑\lambda `$. For the Standard Model, this comes out to about $`10^{240}`$, where $`10^{120}`$ of this comes from matching the cosmological constant, and the rest from the Higgs mass and other couplings.

Now, suppose we consider string models which match the spectrum of the Standard Model at low energies. As we discussed, the fraction of four dimensional models which do this is surely much greater than $`10^{100}`$, and $`10^{10}`$ would seem to be a reasonable guess.

Take these models, and plot their couplings in this twenty dimensional space. The computation we discussed is also a first step towards doing this, as it gives the distribution of vacua in moduli space, and these moduli will control the couplings in the resulting low energy theory. To some approximation, the result (5) says that models are roughly uniformly distributed in moduli space; this suggests that the dimensionless couplings could come out roughly uniformly distributed as well. This is less clear for dimensionful couplings, and discussing these requires taking supersymmetry and its breaking into account in more detail. Let us continue however to illustrate the idea, and return to this point.

Then, we can distinguish various cases. If the number of models is less than $`10^{120}`$, we do not expect to match the cosmological constant, and need to find mechanisms which produce the observed small value, to reasonably expect string theory to reproduce the data. If it is between $`10^{120}`$ and $`10^{240}`$, we expect models which reproduce the cosmological constant to exist, and can in principle test string theory by checking that the observed Standard Model couplings are possible in some compactification – just on statistical grounds, this would be unlikely.

On the other hand, suppose there were many more than $`10^{240}`$ models, say $`10^{1000}`$ for definiteness. In this case, one would expect a vast number of models to reproduce the Standard Model in every detail, just on statistical grounds. If it furthermore turned out that they led to many different predictions at higher energies, one would clearly have grounds to worry that string theory was not testable.

Of course supersymmetry changes these numbers. With low scale breaking (say $`10\mathrm{TeV}`$), the corresponding “volume in coupling space” becomes about $`10^{120}`$. Thus, unless the ratio of nonsupersymmetric candidates to these candidates is greater than $`10^{120}`$, these considerations might be regarded as favoring supersymmetry, as discussed at more length in .

There are some important points to be made here. First, it is essential to have some estimate of the a priori numbers, here the ratio between the numbers of nonsupersymmetric and supersymmetric vacua, to make this claim. It is true that one does not need a very accurate estimate of this ratio (here any accuracy better than $`10^{100}`$ would suffice), but one does need some estimate, for this argument to have any content beyond the standard argument for supersymmetry from naturalness.

Second, it should be realized that “favoring” one mechanism over another is interesting but not in itself decisive, if in fact both types of vacuum exist. We only observe one vacuum, and it might be of either type. On the other hand, suppose we estimated the number of supersymmetric vacua which pass all tests as $`10^{40}`$, while the number of non-supersymmetric vacua was estimated as $`10^{40}`$. This could come out of the type of approximate estimates we are discussing, and would mean that we need a coincidence which tunes parameters at the $`10^{40}`$ level to get a candidate nonsupersymmetric vacuum. If our estimates were reliable, then the most reasonable interpretation of such evidence would be that there are in fact no candidate nonsupersymmetric vacua, and we would get a strong prediction from the statistics of vacua. It is this goal which motivates trying to get controlled estimates for these numbers.

As a final comment, it is interesting that the numbers which are coming out, of order $`10^{100}`$, are of the general order we need to solve the cosmological constant problem, while not obviously spoiling predictivity. Thus, the picture we just outlined need not be depressing – there are many further conditions the correct vacuum must satisfy, and it may be that further work along these lines will demonstrate that only one or a few vacua work. In any case, our main point is that these are questions about string theory which, if the theory has a precise definition, have definite answers, and that are now becoming accessible to investigation.

I would like to thank S. Ashok, T. Banks, F. Denef, S. Dimopoulos, M. Dine, S. Kachru, G. Kane, J. Maldacena, G. Moore, B. Shiffman, S. Thomas, S. Trivedi, E. Witten and S. Zelditch for collaboration and valuable discussions.


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# ION-ION CORRELATION EFFECT ON THE NEUTRINO-NUCLEUS SCATTERING IN SUPERNOVA CORES

## 1 INTRODUCTION

In a recent important paper, Liebendörfer et al. (2003) have made thorough comparisons of various neutrino radiation-hydrodynamical codes of the supernova explosion caused by the delayed neutrino-driven mechanism. They have carefully assessed the magnitude of the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in the supernova cores and have found that this effect causes an appreciable difference in the supernova core collapse results.

Historically, Itoh (1975) pointed out the importance of the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in the supernova cores for the first time shortly after Freedman’s (1974) theoretical discovery of the coherent aspect of the neutrino-nucleus scattering and its importance to the supernova problem. Itoh (1975) used Hansen’s (1973) rather limited Monte Carlo results on the classical one-component plasma then available and showed the appearance of the dramatic reduction of the effective neutrino-nucleus scattering cross section caused by the ion-ion correlation effect for relatively low energy neutrinos. Bowers & Wilson (1982) subsequently published an analytic fitting formula for the ion-ion correlation effect that is based on the work of Bond (1980). Bruenn (1993) discussed the consequence of the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in supernova cores in great detail.

More recently Horowitz (1997) presented a detailed fitting formula for the ion-ion correlation effect based on his Monte Carlo calculations. Bruenn & Mezzacappa (1997) and Liebendörfer et al. (2003) have made a detailed assessment of the importance of the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in the supernova explosion using the results of Horowitz (1997). Since this effect plays an important role in the supernova explosion, we wish to carry out an independent calculation of the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering and make a detailed comparison with Horowitz’s results in this paper.

The present paper is organized as follows. Physical conditions relevant to the present calculation are made explicit in § 2. Calculation of the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in supernova cores is presented in § 3. An analytic fitting formula that summarizes the numerical results is presented in § 4. Concluding remarks are given in § 5.

## 2 PHYSICAL CONDITIONS

We assume that a supernova core consists of atomic nuclei $`(Z,A)`$ and degenerate electrons. At the densities and temperatures relevant to the supernova core, these nuclei interact with each other strongly by the Coulomb interaction. The conventional parameter that characterizes such strongly-interacting classical ions is (Itoh et al. 2003)

$`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\left(Ze\right)^2}{a_Ik_BT}}=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0.2275}{\displaystyle \frac{Z^2}{T_{10}}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{\rho _{12}}{A}}\right)^{1/3},`$ (1)
where $`a_I`$ is the ion-sphere radius

$`a_I`$ $`=`$ $`0.7346\times 10^{12}\left({\displaystyle \frac{\rho _{12}}{A}}\right)^{1/3}\mathrm{cm},`$ (2)
$`Z`$ being the atomic number of the nucleus, $`A`$ being the mass number of the nucleus, $`T_{10}`$ being the temperature in units of 1010K, and $`\rho _{12}`$ being the mass density in units of 1012 g cm-3.

In this paper we restrict ourselves to the case in which electrons are strongly degenerate. This condition is expressed as

$`TT_F`$ $`=`$ $`5.930\times 10^9\left[\left\{1+1.018(Z/A)^{2/3}\rho _6^{2/3}\right\}^{1/2}1\right]\mathrm{K},`$ (3)
where $`T_F`$ is the electron Fermi temperature and $`\rho _6`$ is the mass density in units of 106 g cm-3. We impose a further condition that the ions are in the liquid state (Nagara, Nagata, & Nakamura 1987),

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }<172.$$
(4)
The conventional $`r_s`$-parameter for the electron liquid is given by (Itoh et al. 2002)

$`r_s`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{a_e}{\mathrm{}^2/m_ee^2}}=1.388\times 10^4\left({\displaystyle \frac{A}{Z\rho _{12}}}\right)^{1/3},`$ (6)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{4}{3}}\pi a_e^3n_e=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1},`$
where $`n_e`$ is the electron number density. The electron Fermi wave number is expressed as

$`k_F`$ $`=`$ $`2.613\times 10^{12}\left({\displaystyle \frac{Z}{A}}\rho _{12}\right)^{1/3}\mathrm{cm}^1.`$ (7)
We have the relationship

$`k_Fa_I`$ $`=`$ $`\left({\displaystyle \frac{9\pi }{4}}\right)^{1/3}Z^{1/3}.`$ (8)
When electrons are extremely relativistic, the Fermi-Thomas screening wave number is expressed as (Flowers & Itoh 1976)

$`{\displaystyle \frac{k_{FT}}{k_F}}`$ $``$ $`\left({\displaystyle \frac{4}{\pi }}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{137.036}}\right)^{1/2}=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0.0964}.`$ (9)
Therefore, for the extremely relativistic electrons, one obtains

$`k_{FT}a_I`$ $`=`$ $`0.1850Z^{1/3}.`$ (10)
In Figure 1 we show the density-temperature diagram of the pure 56Fe plasma that illustrates the physical conditions described in this section. Here one should note that we assume the ion-ion correlation effect is caused only by the Coulomb interaction between the nuclei. At extremely high densities $`\rho 10^{14}`$ g cm-3 one should also take into account the nuclear (strong) interaction to calculate the ion-ion correlation effect accurately.

## 3 ION-ION CORRELATION EFFECT

Bruenn & Mezzacappa (1997) have given detailed expressions for the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in the supernova core. We refer the reader to this very comprehensive paper for the detailed discussion of this effect.

It is well-known in liquid metal physics that one has to include the liquid structure factor to obtain the effective cross section for the X-ray scattering in the liquid metals (March 1968). This condition equally applies to the neutrino-nucleus scattering in supernova cores, as the nuclei are strongly correlated with each other by the Coulomb interaction. The strength of the ion-ion correlation is measured by the Coulomb coupling parameter $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ in equation (1).

The effective transport cross section for the neutrino-nucleus scattering is given by (Freedman 1974; Itoh 1975)

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d\sigma }{d\mathrm{cos}\theta }}`$ $`=`$ $`a_0^2{\displaystyle \frac{G^2}{2\pi }}A^2E_\nu ^2\left(1+\mathrm{cos}\theta \right)\left(1\mathrm{cos}\theta \right)S(k),`$ (11)
where $`\theta `$ is the neutrino laboratory scattering angle, $`a_0`$ is a numerical parameter of the theory of the weak interaction, $`G`$ is the Fermi coupling constant, $`A`$ is the mass number of the nucleus, and $`S(k)`$ is the liquid structure factor. The momentum transfer $`k`$ is related to the neutrino energy $`E_\nu `$ by

$`k`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2E_\nu }{\mathrm{}c}}\mathrm{sin}{\displaystyle \frac{\theta }{2}}.`$ (12)
We refer the reader to Bruenn & Mezzacappa (1997) for more detailed expressions for the cross section.

For the uncorrelated ions with $`S(k)=1`$, we have the angle-integrated cross section

$`<\sigma >_{uncorr}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{4}{3}}a_0^2{\displaystyle \frac{G^2}{2\pi }}A^2E_\nu ^2.`$ (13)
Therefore, we can express the ion-ion correlation effect $`S(k)1`$ by writing

$`<\sigma >_{corr}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{4}{3}}a_0^2{\displaystyle \frac{G^2}{2\pi }}A^2E_\nu ^2<S>,`$ (14)
$`<S>`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{3}{4}}{\displaystyle 𝑑\mathrm{cos}\theta \left(1+\mathrm{cos}\theta \right)\left(1\mathrm{cos}\theta \right)S(k)}`$ (15)
$`=`$ $`12{\displaystyle _0^1}x^3(1x^2)S(x)𝑑x,`$
$`x`$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{a_Ik}{2E_\nu a_I/\mathrm{}c}}={\displaystyle \frac{a_Ik}{2ϵ}},`$ (16)
$`ϵ`$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{E_\nu a_I}{\mathrm{}c}}={\displaystyle \frac{E_\nu a_I}{197.3\mathrm{MeV}\mathrm{fm}}}.`$ (17)
So far we have considered only one nuclear species $`(Z,A)`$. However, in the real supernova explosion more than one nuclear species exist in supernova cores (Liebendörfer et al. 2003). Here we give a prescription to calculate the neutrino mean free path $`\mathrm{}`$ due to the neutrino-nucleus scattering including protons:

$`\mathrm{}^1`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}n_j<\sigma _j>,`$ (18)
where $`n_j`$ is the number density of ions of $`j`$-th species and $`<\sigma _j>`$ is the neutrino-nucleus scattering cross section by $`j`$-th species ions (nuclei). In calculating $`<\sigma _j>`$ for the neutrino-nucleus scattering by $`j`$-th nuclear species $`(Z_j,A_j)`$, one uses the mass number $`A_j`$ and the angle-averaged ion-ion correlation factor $`<S>`$ in equation (14) corresponding to the $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$-value (Itoh et al. 1979)

$`\mathrm{\Gamma }_j`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{Z_j^{5/3}e^2}{a_ek_BT}}=\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0.2275}{\displaystyle \frac{Z_j^{5/3}}{T_{10}}}\left(\rho _{12}{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}{\displaystyle \frac{X_iZ_i}{A_i}}\right)^{1/3},`$ (19)
where $`X_i`$ is the mass fraction of the $`i`$-th nuclear species $`(Z_i,A_i)`$ and $`a_e`$ is the electron-sphere radius

$`a_e`$ $`=`$ $`\left({\displaystyle \frac{3}{4\pi n_e}}\right)^{1/3}=\left({\displaystyle \frac{3}{4\pi _in_iZ_i}}\right)^{1/3},`$ (20)
$`n_e`$ being the electron number density.

For the 56Fe plasma with $`Z`$=26, we have $`k_{FT}a_I`$=0.548 from equation (10). Hubbard & Slattery (1971) have carried out a Monte Carlo simulation of the ions screened with the dielectric function of the electron liquid. They have shown that for $`k_{FT}a_I0.5`$ the results that take into account the electron dielectric function are close to the results corresponding to the ions imbedded in the negative background. Therefore, we are justified in using the liquid structure factor corresponding to the ions imbedded in the negative background (classical one-component plasma).

In this paper we use the liquid structure factor of the classical one-component plasma calculated by Ichimaru, Iyetomi, & Tanaka (1987) using the improved hypernetted-chain scheme. They have presented a numerical table for $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$=2, 5, 10, 20, 40, 80, 125, and 160. We supplement this table by the table presented in Itoh et al. (1983) by using the same method for the case of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$=1. In passing, it should be noted that those who wish to calculate the angle-dependent cross section should use the tables of the liquid structure factor $`S(k)`$ presented in Ichimaru, Iyetomi, & Tanaka (1987) and also in Itoh et al. (1983). Constructing analytic fitting formulae for $`S(k)`$ would be extremely difficult, since $`S(k)`$ has oscillatory behavior. It would be best to use numerical tables rather than analytic fitting formulae for $`S(k)`$.

In Figure 2 we show the results of the calculation for $`<S>`$ in equation (15). A similar graph has been presented in Bruenn & Mezzacappa (1997). They have used Horowitz’s (1997) fitting formula.

In Figure 3 we compare our results with Horowitz’s fitting formula. We find that Horowitz’s results for $`ϵ1.0`$ greatly differ from our results. It appears that this is due to the inaccurate treatment done by Horowitz to calcuate the small-$`k`$ behavior of the liquid structure factor $`S(k)`$ that cannot be directly obtained from the Monte Carlo results because of the finite size of the simulation. We have used the correct small-$`k`$ ($`a_Ik<1`$) behavior of the liquid structure factor (Ichimaru 1982; Itoh et al. 1983):

$`S(k)`$ $`=`$ $`\left[{\displaystyle \frac{3\mathrm{\Gamma }}{(a_Ik)^2}}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{k_BT}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{P}{n}}\right)_T\right]^1,`$ (21)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{k_BT}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{P}{n}}\right)_T`$ $`=`$ $`0.733170.39890\mathrm{\Gamma }+0.34141\mathrm{\Gamma }^{1/4}+0.05484\mathrm{\Gamma }^{1/4}.`$ (22)
We find that the present more accurate calculation leads to a more dramatic reduction of the neutrino-nucleus scattering cross section for $`ϵ1.0`$ than has been calculated by Horowitz (1997). Therefore, the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in supernova cores will be more important than has hitherto been recognized. However, the consequence of the modification in the ion-ion correlation effect may not be so great as to drastically change the whole scenario of the supernova explosion, since the phase space for these low energy neutrinos is relatively small.

## 4 ANALYTIC FITTING FORMULA

In this section we present an accurate analytic fitting formula for $`<S>(\mathrm{\Gamma },ϵ)`$ in order to facilitate the application of the numerical results obtained in the present paper. We have carried out the numerical calculations of $`<S>(\mathrm{\Gamma },ϵ)`$ for $`1\mathrm{\Gamma }160`$, $`0.01ϵ10.0`$. We express the analytic fitting formula for this range by

$`<S>_{fit}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{X(\gamma ,\xi )}{1+{\displaystyle \frac{3}{2}}{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }}{ϵ^2}}\mathrm{exp}\left({\displaystyle \frac{ϵ^2}{\mathrm{\Gamma }^{1/16}}}\right)}},`$ (23)
$`X(\gamma ,\xi )`$ $`=`$ $`1{\displaystyle \frac{1}{7.8}}(\xi 1)^2(\gamma +2)^2\mathrm{exp}\left\{10\left(\xi {\displaystyle \frac{\gamma }{10}}0.25\right)^20.8(\gamma 0.2)\right\}`$ (24)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{10}}(\gamma +2)^{0.3}\mathrm{exp}\left\{6\left(\xi {\displaystyle \frac{\gamma }{10}}+0.2\right)^2\right\}`$
$`+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{74}}(\gamma +1.1)^5\mathrm{exp}\left\{130\left(\xi +{\displaystyle \frac{\gamma }{10}}0.5\right)^2\right\}`$
$`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{42.2}}(\gamma +2)^2\mathrm{exp}\left\{20(\gamma +2)(\xi 0.25)^20.8(\gamma 0.2)\right\},`$
$`\gamma `$ $``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{1.10206}}\left(\mathrm{log}_{10}\mathrm{\Gamma }\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1.10206}\right),\mathrm{for}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}1}\mathrm{\Gamma }160`$ (25)
$`\xi `$ $``$ $`\mathrm{log}_{10}ϵ,\mathrm{for}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}\hspace{0.17em}0.01}ϵ10.0.`$ (26)
The ratio of the present fitting formula value to our numerical result $`<S>_{fit}/<S>`$ is shown in Figure 4. It is readily seen that the accuracy of the fitting is better than 6% for all the parameter range considered.

## 5 CONCLUDING REMARKS

We have calculated the ion-ion correlation effect on the neutrino-nucleus scattering in supernova cores by using the liquid structure factor of the classical one-component plasma obtained by the improved hypernetted-chain scheme. We have found a dramatic reduction of the neutrino-nucleus scattering cross section due to the ion-ion correlation effect. We have compared the results of our calculation with those of Horowitz. We have found Horowitz’s calculation greatly differs from ours for $`ϵE_\nu a_I/\mathrm{}c1`$ because of his inaccurate treatment for the calculation of the liquid structure factor $`S(k)`$ for small-$`k`$ values. Thererfore, we have found that the ion-ion correlation effect is more important than has hitherto been recognized. We have presented an accurate analytic fitting formula that summarizes our numerical results to facilitate the application. Supernova collapse simulations that take into account the present results are strongly awaited.

We wish to thank N. W. Ashcroft, G. Chabrier, W. B. Hubbard, T. Janka and M. Liebendörfer for most helpful communications. We also wish to thank our referee for very useful comments that helped us improve the paper. This work is financially supported in part by Grants-in-Aid of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology under contracts #13640245 and #15540293.


text:
# Thermal conduction in simulated galaxy clusters

## 1. Introduction

Over the last few years, spatially resolved spectroscopic observations with the XMM–Newton and Chandra satellites have provided invaluable information about the structure of cooling gas in central cluster regions. Contrary to expectations based on the standard cooling–flow model (Fabian 1994), these observations have ruled out the presence of significant amounts of star formation and cold gas at temperatures below 1/3rd–1/4th of the cluster virial temperature (e.g., Peterson et al. 2001; Molendi & Pizzolato 2001; Böhringer et al. 2002). The spectroscopically measured mass–deposition rates are $`10`$ times smaller than those inferred from the spikes of X-ray emissivity seen in relaxed clusters (e.g., McNamara et al. 2001; David et al. 2001). Furthermore, measurements of temperature profiles for relaxed hot clusters ($`T>\text{ }3`$ keV) show that they follow an approximately universal profile: gas is almost isothermal on scales below one–fourth of the virial radius (De Grandi & Molendi 2002; Pratt & Arnaud 2002), with a smooth decline of temperature towards the innermost regions (e.g., Allen, Schmidt & Fabian 2001; Johnstone et al. 2002; Ettori et al. 2002). These results consistently indicate that some heating mechanism operates in cluster cores, supplying sufficient energy to the gas to prevent it from cooling to low ($`<\text{ }1`$ keV) temperatures.

Direct hydrodynamical simulations of cluster formation have so far failed to reproduce these features. In particular, simulations that include cooling and star formation find an increase of the gas temperature in the central regions (e.g., Katz & White 1993); here central gas does cool out of the ICM and loses its pressure support, so that gas flows toward the center, undergoing compressional heating. This leads to the counterintuitive result that cooling generates a steepening of the central temperature profiles, unlike observed.

Narayan & Medvedev (2001) have suggested thermal conduction as a possible heating mechanism for the cores of galaxy clusters. This process could transport thermal energy from the outer cluster regions to the (slightly cooler) central gas, thereby largely offsetting its cooling losses and stabilizing the ICM (cf. also Soker 2003). However, conduction can only have a significant effect if the conductivity $`\kappa `$ of the ICM is a sizable fraction of the Spitzer (1962) value, $`\kappa _{\mathrm{sp}}`$, appropriate for an unmagnetized plasma. In the presence of a magnetic field, conduction is heavily suppressed orthogonal to the field lines, so that for a tangled magnetic field, one usually expects a relatively low, effectively isotropic conductivity, with the amount of suppression depending on the field topology. However, Narayan & Medvedev (2001) have shown that for a chaotically tangled magnetic field, conductivities in the range $`\kappa `$ (0.2–0.5)$`\kappa _{\mathrm{sp}}`$ can be recovered. Such field configurations may quite plausibly arise in clusters of galaxies as a result of turbulence, so that high conductivities in some parts of the ICM may be viable despite the presence of magnetic fields.

Using simple analytic models based on the assumption of a local balance between radiative cooling and thermal conduction, Zakamska & Narayan (2003) and Voigt & Fabian (2003) were able to reproduce the observational data for several clusters, including their detailed temperature profiles. They treated the effective isotropic conductivity $`\kappa `$ as a fit parameter and found good fits for several clusters with sub–Spitzer values, while some implied unphysically large super–Spitzer conductivities. These results interestingly suggest that conduction may play an important role, while also hinting that yet another heating mechanism may be present (cf. also Medvedev et al. 2003). For example, the energy feedback from a central AGN may supplement conduction in a double heating model (Ruszkowski & Begelman 2002, Brighenti & Mathews 2003).

In this Letter, we present the first cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of cluster formation that account self-consistently for thermal conduction, as well as radiative cooling and supernova feedback. Such simulations are essential to understand the highly non-linear interplay between conduction and cooling during the formation of clusters. In this study, we focus on the effect of conduction on the temperature and entropy structures of clusters with rather different temperatures of $`T_{\mathrm{Lx}}2`$ and 12 keV.

## 2. Numerical Simulations

Our simulations were carried out with GADGET-2, a new version of the parallel TreeSPH simulation code GADGET (Springel et al. 2001). It uses an entropy-conserving formulation of SPH (Springel & Hernquist 2002), and includes radiative cooling, heating by a UV background, and a treatment of star formation and feedback processes. The latter is based on a sub-resolution model for the multiphase structure of the interstellar medium (Springel & Hernquist 2003). We have augmented the code with a new method for treating conduction in SPH, which is both stable and manifestly conserves thermal energy even when individual and adaptive timesteps are used. In our cosmological simulations, we assume an effective isotropic conductivity parameterized as a fixed fraction of the Spitzer rate. We also account for saturation, which can become relevant in low-density gas. A full discussion of our numerical implementation of conduction is given in Jubelgas, Springel & Dolag (2004).

We have performed simulations of galaxy clusters of two widely differing virial mass. We refer to them as ‘Cl1’ ($`1.1\times 10^{14}h^1M_{}`$) and ‘Cl2’ ($`2.3\times 10^{15}h^1M_{}`$) systems. The clusters have been extracted from a DM–only simulation with box-size $`479h^1`$Mpc of a flat $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM model with $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0.3`$, $`h=0.7`$, $`\sigma _8=0.9`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_\mathrm{b}=0.04`$. Using the ‘Zoomed Initial Conditions’ technique (Tormen et al. 1997), we re-simulated the clusters with higher mass and force resolution by populating their Lagrangian regions in the initial conditions with more particles, adding additional small-scale power appropriately. Gas was introduced in the high–resolution region by splitting each parent particle into a gas and a DM particle. The final mass–resolution of these simulations was $`m_{\mathrm{DM}}=1.13\times 10^9h^1M_{}`$ and $`m_{\mathrm{gas}}=1.7\times 10^8h^1M_{}`$ for dark matter and gas within the high–resolution region, respectively. The clusters were hence resolved with about $`4\times 10^6`$ and $`2\times 10^5`$ particles, respectively. The substantially lower computational cost of ‘Cl1’ systems allowed us to simulate 5 clusters within a very narrow mass range, all yielding consistent results. The gravitational softening length was $`ϵ=5.0h^1`$kpc (Plummer–equivalent), kept fixed in comoving units.

For each cluster, we run simulations both with and without thermal conduction, but we always included radiative cooling with a primordial metallicity, and star formation. For the conduction runs, we assume a conductivity of $`\kappa =1/3\kappa _{\mathrm{sp}}`$, where $`\kappa _{\mathrm{sp}}T^{5/2}`$ is the temperature-dependent Spitzer rate for a fully ionized, unmagnetized plasma. Our choice for $`\kappa `$ is appropriate in the presence of magnetized domains with randomly oriented $`B`$–fields (e.g., Sarazin 1988), or for a chaotically tangled magnetic field (Narayan & Medvedev 2001).

## 3. Results

An expected general effect of thermal conduction is to make the gas more isothermal by smoothing out temperature substructure in the ICM. This effect is clearly visible in Figure 1, where we compare projected temperature maps of our massive cluster, with and without conduction. The cluster without conduction (left panel) shows a rich pattern of small-scale temperature fluctuations, stemming from the continuous stirring of the ICM by infalling galaxies. These fluctuations are largely wiped out when conduction is included (right panel). Gas in large infalling galaxies can stay cooler than the local ICM (prior to ram-pressure stripping) in the simulation without conduction, but this same gas is conductively heated as soon as it enters the hot cluster atmosphere in the other simulation, leading to much more rapid thermalization. We also note that the cluster with conduction shows a larger, near-isothermal region near the center, and appears somewhat hotter in its outer parts.

In Figure 2, we show the projected temperature profiles for the simulated clusters, compared with observational results by De Grandi & Molendi (2002) for a set of 22 clusters with $`T>3\mathrm{keV}`$ observed with the Beppo–SAX satellite. For the runs that include only cooling and star formation, we find rising temperature profiles towards the cluster center, consistent with recent simulation work (e.g., Lewis et al. 2000, Kay et al. 2002, Tornatore et al. 2003; Borgani et al. 2003). This behavior disagrees with observational evidence for the presence of an isothermal regime at $`R<\text{ }0.2R_{180}`$ (here $`R_{180}`$ is the radius encompassing an average density $`180\rho _{\mathrm{crit}}`$) and a smooth decline in the innermost regions (Allen, Schmidt & Fabian 2001; De Grandi & Molendi 2002).

However, thermal conduction significantly flattens the temperature profiles. In fact, for the hot cluster, an isothermal core is created, making it more similar to what is observed. For the colder system on the other hand, the temperature profile is almost unaffected, consistent with expectations based on the strong dependence of the conductivity on electron temperature, which favors thermal conduction in hotter gas. This also implies that thermal conduction cannot easily account for the observed self–similarity of the temperature profiles of fairly relaxed clusters.

Interestingly, we find that the mass–weighted as well as emission–weighted temperatures of the two simulated clusters change by less than 10% when conduction is included. Conduction thus mainly appears to re–distribute the overall thermal energy content within the cluster, while not causing a significant heat loss to the outer intergalactic medium as proposed by Loeb (2002). We do however find that the temperature of the outer parts of clusters is raised by conduction, as seen in the temperature profiles of Fig. 2. In fact, based on our simulations, it is not clear whether conductive heating of the innermost parts of clusters occurs in any significant way. Instead, the dominant effect seems to be heat transport from inner to outer parts, which can be understood as a consequence of the falling temperature gradient obtained in simulations that only include radiative cooling and star formation. While conduction appears to be effective in establishing an isothermal temperature in the core, the innermost regions subsequently do not become still cooler, which would be required to turn around the direction of conductive heat flow and tap the thermal reservoir at larger radii in the way proposed by Zakamska & Narayan (2003). We do thus not find that conduction can really prevent the central cooling flow; it apparently only transports the energy gained by compressional heating of inflowing gas to outer regions of the cluster.

In fact, the inclusion of conduction may even make the central cooling flow stronger, depending on the resulting density and temperature structure of the inner parts in dynamical equilibrium. For our hot cluster, this actually seems to be the case, judging from the bolometric X–ray luminosity, which is increased by about 40% at $`z=0`$ when conduction is included. The colder clusters on the other hand show an essentially unchanged X-ray luminosity, consistent with our previously found trends.

However, we note that the fraction of collapsed baryons (cold gas and stars) in the clusters is essentially independent of conduction, as seen in Table 1, where we summarize some of the main characteristics of the simulated clusters. This result is not really surprising because at high redshift, when most of the star formation in the cluster galaxies takes place, the gas temperature in the progenitor systems is much lower than the virial temperature reached eventually at $`z=0`$, and, therefore, the effect of thermal conduction is expected to be weak. The amount of collapsed gas thus remains at $`f_{\mathrm{cold}}0.20`$–0.25, about a factor two larger than indicated by observations (e.g., Balogh et al. 2001; Lin, Mohr & Stanford 2003), suggesting that stronger feedback processes than included in our simulations are at work in the real universe. In any case, conduction appears unable to resolve this overcooling problem on its own.

Another piece of information about the thermodynamical properties of the ICM is provided by its entropy ($`S=Tn_e^{2/3}`$) profile, which we show in Figure 3 for our cluster simulations, also compared to results for pure gravitational heating. The effect of cooling is that of selectively removing low entropy gas from the hot diffuse phase in central cluster regions, such that a net entropy increase of X–ray emitting gas compared to pure gravitational heating simulations is seen. This has been predicted by analytic models of the ICM (e.g. Voit et al. 2003) and has also been confirmed in direct hydrodynamical simulations. Interestingly, the inclusion of heat conduction appears to reverse part of this change in the entropy profile, but only in the hot cluster, where conduction is efficient. Here, the entropy decreases on scales $``$(0.01–0.1)$`R_{\mathrm{vir}}`$ because of conductive losses both to the outer and innermost parts. For the colder systems, only a very weak modification in the region of central mass drop-out is seen. Hotter systems hence tend to become more isentropic in central regions, which is just the opposite of what one would observe if, instead, pre-heating is responsible for breaking the ICM self-similarity (Borgani et al. 2001), but the trend is consistent with a recent analysis of entropy profiles obtained from ASCA data of galaxy groups and clusters (Ponman et al. 2003).

## 4. Conclusions

We have presented self-consistent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of the formation of galaxy clusters which for the first time included the effect of thermal conduction. In particular, we carried out simulations of moderately poor clusters with $`T_{\mathrm{ew}}2.0`$ keV, and of a rich system with $`T_{\mathrm{ew}}12\mathrm{keV}`$. For both clusters of both masses, we compared simulations that followed radiative cooling, star formation and feedback with corresponding ones that also accounted for thermal conduction with an effective isotropic conductivity of $`\kappa =\kappa _{\mathrm{sp}}/3`$. Our main results can be summarized as follows:

(a) Thermal conduction creates an isothermal core in the central regions of our hot cluster, thus producing a temperature profile similar to those observed. However, this effect is much less pronounced for our poorer systems, owing to the sensitive temperature dependence of the conductivity. As a result, the presence of conduction together with cooling does not lead to self–similar temperature profiles, unlike observed for real clusters.

(b) Compared to simulations with cooling only, conduction leads to a small decrease of the entropy in most of the inner regions of the hot galaxy cluster, except perhaps for the innermost part at $`R<\text{ }0.01R_{\mathrm{vir}}`$. This can be understood as a result of heat flowing from these regions both to outer parts of the cluster, and at some level also to the innermost regions. Again, this effect is largely absent in the colder simulated clusters.

(c) Conduction does not avoid the ‘overcooling problem’. Even for our hot cluster, where conduction is quite efficient, we find an essentially unchanged baryon fraction of $`f_{\mathrm{cold}}>\text{ }0.2`$ in cold gas and stars, which is larger than what is observed. This is because most of the cooling and star formation takes place at high redshift when the temperature of the diffuse gas in halos is low enough that conduction is inefficient. Stronger feedback processes than considered here, e.g. energetic galactic winds, are required to solve this problem. We note that even for the hot cluster at $`z=0`$, we do not find a temperature structure that would allow central cooling losses to be offset by heat conduction, making it questionable whether a detailed local balance between radiative losses and heat conduction can arise naturally in hierarchical cluster formation.

While larger samples of simulated clusters will be required for a more detailed assessment of the role of thermal conduction, our results already demonstrate that conduction can have a sizeable effect on the observational characteristics of rich galaxy clusters. However, its inclusion appears unlikely to to overcome the current discrepancies between simulated and observed properties of the ICM. For instance, conduction tends to produce different temperature profiles for cold and hot clusters, invoking a conflict with the observed self–similarity. Furthermore, since conduction does not prevent overcooling, the presence of some other heating source, perhaps AGN, appears still required.

Admittedly, our present simulations still lack a realistic self-consistent description of the magnetic field structure, which can make conduction less important. Spatial variations in the conductivity, its interplay with gas turbulence, as well as potential effects of anisotropic conduction due to ordered field components, can thus not be properly taken into account. This represents a major uncertainty in assessing the relevance of conduction for real galaxy clusters. It is a highly interesting task for future work to reduce this uncertainty by a better theoretical and observational understanding of the magnetic properties of the ICM.

The simulations were carried out on the IBM-SP4 at CINECA, Bologna, with CPU time assigned under an INAF-CINECA grant, and on the IBM-SP3 at Padova. We acknowledge useful discussions with S. Molendi, and thank G. Tormen for providing the ZIC code. K. Dolag acknowledges support by a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Community program “Human Potential” under contract number MCFI-2001-01227.


text:
# Untitled Document

Quantum Field Effect on Symmetry Breaking and Restoration in Anisotropic Spacetimes

Wung-Hong Huang

Department of Physics

National Cheng Kung University

Tainan,70101,Taiwan

The one-loop effective potential for $`\varphi ^4`$ theory on a Bianchi type-I universe is evaluated in the adiabatic approximation. It is used to see the quantum-field effects on symmetry breaking and restoration in anisotropic spacetimes. The results show that the fate of symmetry will not be changed in the cases of conformal coupling or a vanishing scale curvature, and only for some suitable values of scalar-gravitational coupling could the symmetry be radiatively broken or restored.

E-mail: whhwung@mail.ncku.edu.tw

Physical Review D42 (1990) 1287-1288

Quantum fields in curved space have been investigated by many authors , It has been found that gravitational effects play an important role in cosmological phase transition \[2-11\]. From analyses based on the loop-correction effective potential they then conclude that the scalar-gravitational coupling $`\xi `$ and the magnitude of the scalar curvature $`R`$ crucially determine the fate of symmetry.

The effect of anisotropy in static spacetimes such as mixmaster or Taub universes on the process of symmetry breaking and restoration has been discussed . Recently, the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism  of symmetry breaking in a Bianchi type-I universe has also been investigated . In Ref.6, the radiative-correction terms arising from the anisotropy are found to be positive and proportional to the magnitude of anisotropy Q. Thus symmetry will be restored for a high-Q value, irrespective of the magnitude of the scalar curvature and value of the scalar-gravitational coupling. As the effective potential presented in the Ref. 6 is calculated by the perturbation with respect to Q, the conclusion for the case of a large-Q value is untruthful. In this paper we will display the one-loop effective potential for $`\varphi ^4`$ theory in a Bianchi type-I universe in the adiabatic approximation (AA) scheme. Although the AA scheme is valid only in the quasiclassical or WKB region, i.e., a spacetime with slowly varying background fields , the value of Q is, however, not limited. (Note: It is not clear that the systems evolving in a spacetime with a large shear Q do not invalidate the slowly varying background field assumption in the treatment of symmetry behavior in dynamical spacetimes .) We are therefore able to see the quantum-field effect on the fate of symmetry in a universe with large anisotropy. Our result, however, does not agree with that in Ref. 6. We find that only for some suitable values of scalar-gravitational coupling could the symmetry be radiatively restored, even if the anisotropy is very large.

The derivative of a one-loop effective potential for massive $`\varphi ^4`$ theory in spatially flat Robertson-Walker spacetime has been calculated in Ref.10 \[Eq.(39)\] by using the AA scheme. It is

$$\frac{V}{\varphi _c}=(m_r^2+\delta m^2)\varphi _c+(\xi _r+\delta \xi )R\varphi _c+\frac{\lambda _r+\delta \lambda }{3!}\varphi _c+\frac{\lambda _r}{16\pi ^2}\mathrm{\Lambda }^2\varphi _c$$

$$\frac{\lambda _r\varphi _c}{32\pi ^2}\left[m_r^2+\left(\xi _r\frac{1}{6}\right)R+\frac{\lambda _r}{2}\varphi _c^2\right]\left[1+ln\left[\frac{m_r^2+\left(\xi _r\frac{1}{6}\right)R+\frac{\lambda _r}{2}\varphi _c^2}{4\mathrm{\Lambda }^2}\right]\right],$$
$`(1)`$
in which the counterterms $`\delta m^2`$, $`\delta \xi `$, and $`\delta \lambda `$ are needed for renormalization and a momentum cutoff $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ is introduced for regularization. We are interested in the massless $`\lambda \varphi ^4`$ theory in Bianchi type-I spacetime. Through the same procedure one can easily show that the derivative of a one-loop effective potential for the theory is just Eq. (1) if the mass $`m^2`$ is re placed by $`Q/a^2`$, in which $`a^2`$ is the average cosmic scale function and $`Q`$ the anisotropy in the Bianchi type-I spacetime \[for the definitions of $`a^2`$ and $`Q`$ see Eqs. (5.79) and (5.83) in Reft. 1\].

After introducing the renormalization conditions

$$0=\frac{^2V}{\varphi ^2}|_{\varphi _c=R=0},\xi _r=\frac{^3V}{\varphi ^2R}|_{\varphi _c=R=0},\lambda _r=\frac{^4V}{\varphi ^4}|_{\varphi _c=R=0}$$
$`(2)`$
we finally obtain the derivative of the one-loop renormalized effective potential

$$\frac{V}{\varphi _c}=\left[\xi _r\frac{\lambda _r}{32\pi ^2}(\xi _r\frac{1}{6})\right]R\varphi _c+\left[\frac{\lambda _r}{3!}\frac{\lambda _r^2}{64\pi ^2}\right]\varphi _c^3$$

$$+\frac{\lambda _r\varphi _c}{32\pi ^2}\left[\frac{\lambda _r}{2}\varphi _c^2+(\xi _r\frac{1}{6})R+\frac{Q}{a^2}\right]ln\left[\frac{\lambda \varphi _c^2/2+(\xi _r\frac{1}{6})R+Q/a^2}{4Q/a^2}\right].$$
$`(3)`$
Now we are in a position to investigate the gravitational effect on the effective potential in (3). This can be done by considering the case at $`\varphi 0`$; then

$$\frac{V}{\varphi _c}\xi _rR\varphi _c+\frac{\lambda _r\varphi _c}{32\pi ^2}\left[(\xi _r\frac{1}{6})R+\left[(\xi _r\frac{1}{6})R+\frac{Q}{a^2}\right]ln\left[\frac{(\xi _r\frac{1}{6})R+Q/a^2}{Q/a^2}\right]\right].$$
$`(4)`$
The second term, which is the radiative correction term, is zero if $`\xi _r=\frac{1}{6}`$ and/or $`R=0`$. Thus, in the cases of conformal coupling or vanishing scalar curvature the one-loop quantum correction does not change the fate of symmetry of the tree level. For the other cases, we can from the above equation find that only for some suitable values of scalar-gravitational coupling could the symmetry be radiatively broken or restored.

1. N. D. Birrell and P. C. W. Davies, Quantum Fields in Curved Space (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1982).
2. B. L. Hu, in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, Padua, Italy, 1983, edited by B. Bertotti, F. deFelice, and A. Pascolini (Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, Roma, 1983), p. 1086.
3. L. F. Abbott, Nucl. Phys. B185, 233 (1981); L. H. Ford and D. J. Toms, Phys. Rev. D 25, 1510 (1982); B. Allen, Nucl. Phys. B226, 228 (1983); Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 161, 152 (1983); A. Vilenkin, Nucl. Phys. B226, 504 (1983).
4. R. Critchley and J. S. Dowker, J. Phys. A 15, 157 (1982).
5. T. C. Shen, B. L. Hu, and D. J. O’Connor, Phys. Rev. D 31, 2401 (1985).
6. T. Futamase, Phys. Rev. D 29, 2789 (1984).
7. B. L. Hu and D. J. O’Connor, Phys. Rev. D 30, 74 (1984); 34, 2535 (1987); 36, 1701 (1987); B. L. Hu and Y. Zhang, ibid. 37, 2125 (1988).
8. B. L. Hu, Phys. Lett. 123B, 189 (1983); L. F. Chen and B. L. Hu, ibid. 160B, 36 (1985).
9. S. Sinha and B. L. Hu, Phys. Rev. D 38, 2423 (1988).
10. A. Ringwald, Phys. Rev. D 36, 2598 (1987).
11. A. Ringwald, Ann. Phys. (N.Y.) 177, 129 (1987).
12. S. Coleman and E. Weinberg, Phys. Rev. D 7, 1888 (1973).
13. Ya. B. Zel’dovich and A. A. Starobinsky, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 61, 2162 (1972) \[Sov. Phys. JETP 34, 1159 (1972)\].
14. L. Parker and S. A. Fulling, Phys. Rev. D 9, 341 (1974); S. A. Fulling, L. Parker, and B. L. Hu, ibid. 10, 3905 (1974).


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# 1 Specific partition entropy as function of 𝑥=𝜎_𝑇/𝑛

BI-TP 2004/01

The Hagedorn Temperature

and Partition Thermodynamics

Ph. Blancharda, S. Fortunatoa and H. Satza,b

a: Fakultät fur Physik, Universität Bielefeld

Postfach 100 131, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany

b: Centro de Física das Interacções Fundamentais (CFIF)

Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, P-1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal

Dedicated to Rolf Hagedorn, 1919 - 2003

Abstract:

We review the resonance gas formalism of hadron thermodynamics and recall that an exponential increase of the resonance spectrum leads to a limiting temperature of hadronic matter. We then show that the number $`p(n)`$ of ordered partitions of an integer $`n`$ grows exponentially with $`n`$ and satisfies the integer counterpart of the statistical bootstrap equation. Considering the set of all partitions as a Gibbs ensemble provides a partition thermodynamics which is also governed by a limiting temperature, determined by the combinatorial structure of the problem. Further associating intrinsic quantum numbers to integers results in a phase diagram equivalent to that found in QCD for hadronic matter as function of temperature and baryochemical potential.

1. Introduction

The most important observation in particle physics around 1960 was that the number of different species of so-called elementary particles seemed to grow without limit. Hadron-hadron collisions produced more and more resonant hadronic states of increasing masses. This phenomenon triggered two different theoretical approaches.

The more conventional idea, classical reductionism as pursued in atomism since antiquity, proposed that there must be a smaller number of more elementary objects, which then bind to form the observed hadrons as composite states. This approach, as we know, ultimately led to quantum chromodynamics as the fundamental theory of strong interactions and thus once more proved most successful.

A second, truly novel approach asked what such an increase of states would lead to in the thermodynamics of strongly interacting matter . Both the question and the answer: the existence of an ultimate temperature of hadronic matter, are the contribution of Rolf Hagedorn. We know today that strong interaction thermodynamics leads to critical behavior, to a phase transition in which hadronic matter turns into a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. Statistical QCD has confirmed this and led to a detailed picture of this novel phenomenon. Let us see how it comes about and what is its hadronic basis.

2. Hadron Thermodynamics

Consider an ideal gas of identical neutral scalar particles of mass $`m_0`$ contained in a box of volume $`V`$, assuming Boltzmann statistics. The grand canonical partition function of this system is given by

$$𝒵(T,V)=\underset{N}{}\frac{1}{N!}\left[\frac{V}{(2\pi )^3}d^3p\mathrm{exp}\{\sqrt{p^2+m_0^2}/T\}\right]^N,$$
(1)
leading to

$$\mathrm{ln}𝒵(T,V)=\frac{VTm_0^2}{2\pi ^2}K_2(\frac{m_0}{T}).$$
(2)
For temperatures $`Tm_0`$, the energy density of the system becomes

$$ϵ(T)=\frac{1}{V}\frac{\mathrm{ln}𝒵(T,V)}{(1/T)}\frac{3}{\pi ^2}T^4,$$
(3)
the particle density

$$n(T)=\frac{\mathrm{ln}𝒵(T,V)}{V}\frac{1}{\pi ^2}T^3$$
(4)
and the average energy per particle

$$\omega 3T.$$
(5)
Hence an increase of energy of the system has three consequences: it leads to

* a higher temperature,
* more constituents, and
* more energetic constituents.

If we now consider an interacting gas of basic hadrons and introduce resonance formation as the fundamental feature of their dynamics, we can approximate the interacting medium as an ideal gas of the possible resonance species . The partition function of this resonance gas is

$$\mathrm{ln}𝒵(T,V)=\underset{i}{}\frac{VTm_i^2}{2\pi ^2}\rho (m_i)K_2(\frac{m_i}{T})$$
(6)
where the sum begins with the stable ground state $`m_0`$ and then includes the possible resonances $`m_i,i=1,2,\mathrm{}`$ with weights $`\rho (m_i)`$ relative to $`m_0`$. Clearly the crucial question here is how to specify $`\rho (m_i)`$, how many states there are of mass $`m_i`$. It is only at this point that hadron dynamics enters.

The simplest answer is that $`\rho (m)`$ is obtained just from combinatorics, and it immediately gives us Hagedorn’s statistical bootstrap model. Hagedorn assumed that “fireballs consist of fireballs, which consist of fireballs…”. In a more modern form, one would assume that resonance formation and decay follow a self-similar pattern. In any case, the defining equation for $`\rho (m)`$ is

$$\rho (m,V_0)=\delta (mm_0)+$$

$$\underset{N}{}\frac{1}{N!}\left[\frac{V_0}{(2\pi )^3}\right]^{N1}\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}[dm_i\rho (m_i)d^3p_i]\delta ^4(\mathrm{\Sigma }_ip_ip).$$
(7)
It was solved analytically by W. Nahm , giving

$$\rho (m,V_0)=\mathrm{const}.m^3\mathrm{exp}\{m/T_H\}.$$
(8)
The density of states thus increases exponentially in $`m`$, with a coefficient $`T_H^1`$ determined by

$$\frac{V_0T_H^3}{2\pi ^2}(m_0/T_H)^2K_2(m_0/T_H)=2\mathrm{ln}21,$$
(9)
in terms of two parameters $`V_0`$ and $`m_0`$. Hagedorn assumed that the composition volume $`V_0`$, specifying the intrinsic range of strong interactions, is determined by the inverse pion mass as scale, $`V_0(4\pi /3)m_\pi ^3`$. This leads to a temperature $`T_H150`$ MeV. It should be emphasized, however, that this is just one possible way to proceed. In the limit $`m_00`$, eq. (9) gives

$$T_H=[\pi ^2(2\mathrm{ln}21)]^{1/3}V_0^{1/3}1/r_h,$$
(10)
where $`V_0=(4\pi /3)r_h^3`$ and $`r_h`$ denotes the range of strong interactions. With $`r_h1`$ fm, we thus have $`T_H`$ 200 MeV. From this it is evident that the Hagedorn temperature persists in the chiral limit and is in fact only weakly dependent on $`m_\pi `$, provided the strong interaction scale $`V_0`$ is kept fixed.

If we now replace the sum in the resonance gas partition function (6) by an integral and insert the exponentially growing mass spectrum (8),

$$\mathrm{ln}𝒵(T,V)\frac{VT}{2\pi ^2}𝑑mm^2\rho (m_i)K_2(\frac{m_i}{T})$$

$$V\left[\frac{T}{2\pi }\right]^{3/2}𝑑mm^{3/2}\mathrm{exp}\{m\left[\frac{1}{T}\frac{1}{T_H}\right]\},$$
(11)
we obtain a divergence for all $`T>T_H`$: in other words, $`T_H`$ is the ultimate temperature of hadronic matter. In contrast to what we found above, an increase of energy now leads to

* a fixed temperature limit, $`TT_H`$,
* the momenta of the constituents do not continue to increase, and
* more and more species of ever heavier particles appear.

We thus obtain a new, non-kinetic way to use energy, increasing the number of species, not the momentum per particle.

Hagedorn originally interpreted $`T_H`$ as the highest possible temperature of strongly interacting matter. Somewhat later Cabibbo and Parisi  pointed out that the resonance gas partition function (11) in fact does not diverge at $`T=T_H`$, while its higher derivatives do. Such behavior occurs at phase transition points, and so $`T_H`$ is “only” a critical temperature of strongly interacting matter. It is clear now that $`T_H`$ indeed defines the transition from hadronic matter to a quark-gluon plasma. Hadron physics alone can only specify its inherent limit; to go beyond this limit, we need QCD.

The crucial feature leading to the observed limit of hadron physics at $`T_H`$ is the exponential increase in the number of hadronic states. In the following section, we want to study the origin of such an increase and look somewhat closer at the nature of $`T_H`$.

3. Partition Thermodynamics

To arrive at the simplest possible problem leading to an exponentially increasing number of ‘states’, we consider the number $`p(n)`$ of ordered partitions of an integer $`n`$ into integers. To illustrate: for $`n=3`$, we have the ordered partitions 3, 2+1, 1+2, 1+1+1, so that

$$p(n=3)=4=2^{n1}.$$
(12)
Similarly, $`n=4`$ gives the partitions 4, 3+1, 2+2, 2+1+1, 1+3, 1+2+1, 1+1+2, 1+1+1+1, leading to

$$p(n=4)=8=2^{n1}.$$
(13)
This solution can be shown to hold in fact for all $`n`$ (see Appendix), i.e.,

$$p(n)=2^{n1}=\frac{1}{2}\mathrm{exp}\{n\mathrm{ln}2\}.$$
(14)
We note here for completeness that calculating the number $`q(n)`$ of unordered partitions of an integer $`n`$ (i.e., not counting permutations) is more difficult and solved only asymptotically :

$$q(n)=\frac{1}{4\sqrt{3}n}e^{\{\pi \sqrt{2n/3}\}}\left[1+O(\frac{\mathrm{log}n}{n^{1/4}})\right]$$
(15)
We will not make use of this result here.

The problem of ordered partitions can also be solved for restricted or extended cases. For example, if we allow only odd integers in the partitions, we get for large $`n`$

$$p(n)\frac{\kappa }{\sqrt{5}}e^{n\mathrm{ln}\kappa }$$
(16)
with $`\kappa =(1+\sqrt{5})/21.62<2`$. On the other hand, if we introduce further degrees of freedom, e.g., giving each integer an intrinsic quantum number (‘spin’) which can take on the values $`\pm 1`$, the exact solution is

$$p(n)=2\kappa ^{n1}=\frac{2}{\kappa }e^{\{n\mathrm{ln}\kappa \}},$$
(17)
now with $`\kappa =3>2`$. Hence we have as solution to the generalized ordered partition problem the form (see Appendix)

$$p(n)\kappa ^n=e^{\{n\mathrm{ln}\kappa \}}$$
(18)
with $`\kappa =2`$ for the “standard” case and in general $`\mathrm{}>\kappa >1`$.

We thus obtain an exponential increase in the number of possible partitions. How is this related to the statistical bootstrap condition (7)? Consider a density of states defined by a bootstrap equation for integers,

$$\rho (n)=\delta (n1)+\underset{k=2}{\overset{n}{}}\frac{1}{k!}\underset{i=1}{\overset{k}{}}\rho (n_i)\delta (\mathrm{\Sigma }_in_in).$$
(19)
Its solution is just the number of partitions of $`n`$,

$$\rho (n)=zp(n)$$
(20)
up to a normalization of order unity (for the standard case $`\kappa =2`$, $`z1.25`$). We can thus conclude

* the statistical bootstrap equation is an integral formulation of a partition problem;
* the exponential increase in the number of states is of combinatoric origin, and
* the exponential coefficient $`\kappa `$ is determined by the combinatoric structure.

Let us therefore consider $`\kappa `$ in more detail. In the standard case, see eq. (14), the exponential increase in the number of partitions is determined by $`\mathrm{ln}2`$; in eq. (9), we had seen that in the actual statistical bootstrap, $`T_H`$ is also determined by $`\mathrm{ln}2`$, but in a somewhat more complex way due to the presence of momentum degrees of freedom in addition to the hadron masses.

To understand the meaning of $`\kappa `$ in a thermal context, we construct a statistical mechanics of partitions, considering each partition as a point in the ‘phase space’ of all partitions of fixed $`n`$. The set of all partitions thus forms a Gibbs ensemble, and we define the partition entropy as

$$S(n)=\mathrm{ln}p(n)n\mathrm{ln}\kappa ,$$
(21)
the specific partition entropy as

$$s(n)=\frac{S(n)}{n}\mathrm{ln}\kappa $$
(22)
and the partition temperature $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$ as

$$\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Theta }}=\frac{dS(n)}{dn}=\mathrm{ln}\kappa .$$
(23)
The parameter $`\mathrm{ln}\kappa `$ determining the increase of the number of partitions of $`n`$ is thus the partition temperature $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$, which here for large $`n`$ coincides with the inverse of the specific partition entropy.

Next we turn to the mentioned generalized form, in which each integer $`n_i`$ has an intrinsic ‘spin’ variable $`\sigma _i=\pm 1`$, in order to see what the effect of conserved quantum numbers is. We define the total spin for a given partition of $`n`$ as

$$\sigma _T(n)=\underset{i}{}\sigma _i,$$
(24)
where the sum runs over all $`kn`$ terms of the partitions. We now calculate the number $`p(n,\sigma _T)`$ of partitions of $`n`$ at fixed $`\sigma _T`$. For $`\sigma _T=n`$ we have $`p(n,n)=1`$, since only the partition $`n=1+1+\mathrm{}+1`$ of all spins $`+1`$ can give a total spin equal to $`n`$. For $`\sigma _T=0`$ we find $`p(n,0)3^{n1}`$, since total spin zero constitutes the dominant part of all configurations. The specific partition entropy $`s(n,\sigma _T)`$ is shown in Fig. 1. It was calculated numerically for values of $`n`$ up to $`20000`$ (see Appendix) and it was found to depend only on $`x=\sigma _T/n`$. Moreover, our calculations show no appreciable difference between $`n=10000`$ and $`n=20000`$, so that the latter is in good approximation the asymptotic form of the curve. It can be fitted by

$$s(x)=\left[1x^a\right]^b\mathrm{ln}3,$$
(25)
with a=2.1, b=0.736, and is shown in Fig. 1, varying from $`s(0)=\mathrm{ln}3`$ to $`s(1)=0`$.

The partition temperature now becomes

$$\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Theta }(x)}=\frac{dS(n,\sigma _T)}{dn}=\frac{d[ns(x)]}{dn}=s(x)x\frac{ds(x)}{dx}$$
(26)
and is thus no longer equivalent to the inverse specific partition entropy: for $`x1`$, both $`s(x)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Theta }(x)`$ vanish. Through (26) we can determine $`\mathrm{\Theta }(x)`$ from the function $`s(x)`$ (see eq. (25)) that we have previously calculated. The resulting form is shown in Fig. 2; it decreases from $`\mathrm{\Theta }=1/\mathrm{ln}3`$ at $`x=0`$ to 0 at $`x=1`$.

The constituents of our partition thermodynamics are the different integers occurring in the partitions; they are the resonances of the resonance gas. It is thus interesting to ask for the relative abundance $`R_{n,\sigma _T}(a,b)`$ of two integers $`a,b<n`$ in the set of all partitions of $`n`$. In the appendix, we calculate the total occurrence $`h(n,a,\sigma _T)`$ of an integer $`a`$ in the partitions of $`n`$ at fixed $`\sigma _T`$. Given this, the desired relative abundance is defined as

$$R_{n,\sigma _T}(a,b)=\frac{h(n,a,\sigma _T)}{h(n,b,\sigma _T)}$$
(27)
For $`a,bn`$ it turns out that for large $`n`$, $`R_{n,\sigma _T}(a,b)`$ depends only on the ratio $`\sigma _T/n`$ and has the form

$$R_{n,\sigma _T}(a,b)e^{(ab)/\mathrm{\Theta }(\sigma _T/n)},$$
(28)
where $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$ is precisely the partition temperature shown in Fig. 2. We thus see that the resonance gas feature of species abundances specified by one universal temperature in fact has its origin in the underlying combinatoric structure.

So far, we have considered partition thermodynamics in what might be called a grand microcanonical formulation: the number of terms in the different partitions varies, but their sum $`n`$ and the overall spin $`\sigma _T`$ are specified exactly. To go to a grand canonical formulation, we fix $`n`$ and $`\sigma _T`$ only on the average. The starting point is the grand canonical partition function

$$𝒵(T,\mu )=_1^{\mathrm{}}𝑑n\mathrm{exp}\{n/T\}_n^n𝑑\sigma _T\mathrm{exp}\{\mu \sigma _T/T\}p(n,\sigma _T),$$
(29)
with the temperature $`T`$ and the chemical potential $`\mu `$ the Lagrangian multipliers for $`n`$ and $`\sigma _T`$. Since $`p(n,\sigma _T)=\mathrm{exp}\{ns(\sigma _T/n)\}`$, where $`s(\sigma _T/n)`$ is the specific entropy calculated above, we get

$$𝒵(T,\mu )=_1^{\mathrm{}}𝑑n_n^n𝑑\sigma _T\mathrm{exp}\{n\left[\frac{1}{T}\frac{\mu }{T}\frac{\sigma _T}{n}s(\sigma _T/n)\right]\}.$$
(30)
The integral (30) is not defined for all pairs of values $`(T,\mu )`$: for fixed $`\mu `$, it exists only for those values of the temperature for which

$$\frac{1}{T}\frac{\mu }{T}\frac{\sigma _T}{n}s(\sigma _T/n)>0T<\frac{1\mu x}{s(x)}\sigma _T,n.$$
(31)
We note that the function on the right of the last inequality depends only on the variable $`x=\sigma _T/n`$, and not on $`\sigma _T`$ and $`n`$ separately. Since the condition (31) must be valid for any possible value of the ratio $`\sigma _T/n`$, with $`|\sigma _T/n|\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$, $`T`$ has to be smaller than the absolute minimum of the function

$$f(x,\mu )=\frac{1\mu x}{s(x)},$$
(32)
in the interval $`1x1`$. Hence for any $`\mu `$ there exists a limiting value $`T_c(\mu )`$ of the temperature beyond which the grandcanonical partition function is not defined. In particular, for $`\mu =0`$, we get $`T_c=1/\mathrm{ln}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}3}`$, which is the temperature determined in the previous section for the partition problem with total spin $`\sigma _T=0`$. We further note that $`|\mu |\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$, because otherwise the function $`f(x,\mu )`$ would become negative for some $`x`$ and the inequality (31) could never be satisfied by positive values of the temperature $`T`$. By varying $`\mu `$ we obtain a curve in the $`T\mu `$ plane, which defines the existence region for our system. Determining numerically the minimum of the $`f(x,\mu )`$ as function of $`\mu `$, we obtain the form shown in Fig. 3.

The resulting ‘phase diagram’ of partition thermodynamics, i.e., the boundary for the existence of such thermodynamic systems, is evidently very similar to that expected in statistical QCD for the phase boundary of hadronic matter. It thus seems that quantum chromodynamics leads to a resonance pattern which is basically of combinatoric nature. Moreover, the conservation of baryon number also appears to follow a simple combinatoric form resulting from the addition of the baryonic degrees in the resonance composition.

4. Conclusions

We have shown that the limit of hadron physics obtained in resonance gas thermodynamics with an exponentially increasing mass spectrum is due to the combinatorics of resonance formation. In particular, the simplest partition systems provide

* a limiting temperature determined solely by the combinatoric structure of the system;
* a reduction of this limiting temperature for conserved intrinsic quantum numbers and hence a phase boundary for partition thermodynamics;
* a relative abundance of constituents governed by the limiting temperature.

Hence, if all combinations of $`n`$ hadrons are resonances and the degeneracy of each resonance is determined by the number of composition patterns, an energy input eventually goes into species formation, not into faster constituents. Comparing such a resonance gas to a conventional pion gas, we thus find for the dependence on energy density $`ϵ`$

pion gas resonance gas

$`n_\pi ϵ^{3/4}n_{res}ϵ`$

$`\omega _\pi ϵ^{1/4}\omega _{res}\mathrm{const}.`$

Here $`n`$ denotes the density of constituents, $`\omega `$ the average energy of a constituent.

We close with a rather speculative question, concerning the relation of our considerations to nuclear collisions. In the experimental study of such interactions, it is found that the relative abundances of hadron species are essentially determined by two parameters, the temperature $`T`$ of a resonance gas and the baryochemical potential $`\mu `$ specifying its overall baryon density . For high energy collisions at $`\mu =0`$, $`T175`$ MeV; with increasing $`\mu `$, $`T(\mu )`$ decreases in a form quite similar to that shown in Fig. 3. What can we learn from this? There seem to be two possible scenarios:

* Each collision produces a thermal system and thus corresponds to an ensemble of many partitions: nuclear collisions produce matter.
* Each collision is one partition, and only the ensemble over many collisions forms a thermal ensemble: nuclear collisions simulate matter.

Which of these two is realized in nature appears to be one of the most crucial questions for the experimental high energy heavy ion program.

Acknowledgements

S.F. acknowledges the support of the DFG Forschergruppe under grant FOR 339/2-1.

Appendix

A. Standard Case

To determine the number of ordered partitions of an integer $`n`$ into integers $`k_in`$, we start from the number of partitions containing $`m`$ terms. This is equivalent to the number of divisions of a segment of length $`n`$ units into $`m`$ parts. Each partition of this type is constructed by choosing $`m1`$ of the first $`n1`$ integers as end points for the $`m`$ segments dividing $`[0,n]`$. This can be done in

$$p(n,m)=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n1}{m1}\right)$$
(33)
possible ways. By summing over all possible values of $`m`$, we obtain

$$p(n)=\underset{m=1}{\overset{n}{}}p(n,m)=\underset{m=1}{\overset{n}{}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n1}{m1}\right)=2^{n1}.$$
(34)
Next, we determine the abundance of a given integer $`a`$ in the set of all partitions. Suppose we have a partition of $`m`$ terms with at least one occurrence of the number $`a<n`$. By changing the position of $`a`$ within the partition, we get $`m`$ possible partitions containing the same number of terms, with order of the $`m1`$ other terms unchanged. Hence the number of occurrences of $`a`$ in partitions with $`m`$ summands is just $`m`$ times the number of partitions of $`na`$ into $`m1`$ terms. Among the partitions of $`na`$ into $`m1`$ terms there will in general be other $`a`$’s, and in this case each partition gives a contribution larger than one to the occurrence of $`a`$. However, this larger contribution is exactly compensated by a reduction of the number of corresponding partitions, since the different $`a`$ are indistinguishable and can be freely permuted without generating new partitions. To get the total occurrence $`h(n,a)`$ of $`a`$ in all partitions of $`n`$ we sum over all possible values of $`m`$ and obtain

$$h(n,a)=\underset{m=2}{\overset{na+1}{}}m\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{na1}{m2}\right).$$
(35)
Defining $`l=m2`$, we get

$$h(n,a)=\underset{l=0}{\overset{na1}{}}(l+2)\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{na1}{l}\right)=2\underset{l=0}{\overset{na1}{}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{na1}{l}\right)+\underset{l=0}{\overset{na1}{}}l\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{na1}{l}\right).$$
(36)
and from this

$$h(n,a)=(na1)\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}^{na2}+2^{na}=\frac{na+3}{4}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}2}^{na}$$
(37)
for the abundance of $`a`$ in the partitions of $`n`$.

B. Intrinsic Degrees of Freedom

We now assume that each integer carries an intrinsic degree of freedom, an integer ‘spin’ $`\sigma `$, giving it $`2\sigma `$ degenerate states; in the example above, we had $`\sigma =1`$ and hence the two states $`\pm \mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}1}`$. It is obvious that such a spin leads to an increase in the number of partitions; each partition is now labeled by $`n`$ and by the total spin $`\sigma _T=_k\sigma _k`$ of its summands. If we do not impose any constraint on the total spin, it is trivial to calculate the total number of partitions. There are now $`2\sigma `$ copies of each number, so that in a partition with $`m`$ terms, each summand contributes an additional factor $`2\sigma `$. Eq. (33) thus becomes

$$p_\sigma (n,m)=(2\sigma )^m\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n1}{m1}\right)$$
(38)
so that

$$p_\sigma (n)=\underset{m=1}{\overset{n}{}}p_\sigma (n,m)=\underset{m=1}{\overset{n}{}}(2\sigma )^m\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n1}{m1}\right)=(2\sigma )(2\sigma +1)^{n1}.$$
(39)
The problem is more interesting if $`\sigma _T`$ has a well defined value, which is equivalent to requiring the conservation of a spin, isospin or baryon number for a system of particles. In this case, it is not possible to compute the total number of partitions and the abundances in closed form. However, at least for the special case $`\sigma =1`$, we can derive formulas that allow a numerical computation of the quantities of interest. Since the problem is completely symmetric under a change of sign of the spin, we consider positive values of the total spin.

We start by asking how many partitions of $`m`$ terms there are with a total spin $`\sigma _T`$. The summands of the partitions carry spin $`+1`$ or $`1`$. If there are $`k`$ numbers with spin $`+1`$ there must then be $`mk`$ numbers with spin $`1`$. In order to have a total spin $`\sigma _T`$, there is only one possibility: $`(m+\sigma _T)/2`$ terms must carry spin $`+1`$ and $`(m\sigma _T)/2`$ terms spin $`1`$. Hence the required number of partitions at fixed $`m`$ is

$$p(n,m,\sigma _T)=\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{m}{(m+\sigma _T)/2}\right)\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n1}{m1}\right)$$
(40)
and the total number becomes

$$p(n,\sigma _T)=\underset{m=\sigma _T}{\overset{n}{}}p(n,m,\sigma _T)=\underset{m=\sigma _T}{\overset{n}{}}\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{m}{(m+\sigma _T)/2}\right)\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{n1}{m1}\right).$$
(41)
Note that the sum over $`m`$ is constrained by the parity of the total spin: if $`\sigma _T`$ is even (odd), $`m`$ must be even (odd). Hence the sums run over those values of $`m`$ between $`\sigma _T`$ and $`n`$ which have the same parity as $`\sigma _T`$.

To obtain the abundances, we only have to insert in Eq. (35) the factor due to the spin degeneracy of the partitions, given in Eq. (41), leading to

$$h(n,a,\sigma _T)=\underset{m=\sigma _T}{\overset{n}{}}m\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{m}{(m+\sigma _T)/2}\right)\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{na1}{m2}\right).$$
(42)
Eqs. (41) and (42) can easily be evaluated using Mathematica.