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# Neural coding of naturalistic motion stimuli

## 1 Introduction

One tried and tested way to study sensory information processing by the brain is to stimulate the sense organ of interest with physically appropriate stimuli and to observe the responses of a selected part of the system that lends itself to measurement. Within that framework there are strong incentives, both practical and analytical, to simplify stimuli. After all, short lightflashes or constant tones are easier to generate and to capture mathematically than the everchanging complex world outside the laboratory. Fortunately, sense organs and brains are extremely adaptive, and they apparently function in sensible ways, even in the artificial conditions of typical laboratory experiments. A further reason for using simplified stimuli is that they are presumed to elicit simple responses, facilitating interpretation of the system’s input-output behaviour in terms of underlying mechanism. Typically, these simple stimuli are repeated a large number of times, the measured outputs are averaged, and this average is defined to be the ‘meaningful’ component of the response. This is especially helpful in the case of spiking neurons, where we face the embarrasment of the action potential: Because they are an extremely nonlinear feature of the neural response we often do not really know how to interpret sequences of action potentials (Rieke et al, 1997). One way to evade the question and save tractability is to work with derived observables, in particular with smooth functions of time, such as the average firing rate.

Although it certainly is useful to perform experiments with simplified inputs, one also would like to know how those stimuli are processed and encoded that an animal is likely to encounter in nature. We expect animals to be ‘designed’ for those conditions, and it will be interesting to see to what extent the brain can keep up with the range and strength of these stimuli. In the present work we are concerned primarily with the question of how noisy neural information processing really is. This question cannot be answered satisfactorily if we do not study the problem that the brain is designed to solve, because for us it is hard to distinguish willful neglect on the part of the brain in solving artificial tasks, from noisiness of its components.

As soon as we try to characterize the behaviour of a sensory system in response to the complex, dynamic, nonrepeated signals presented by the natural world, we lose many of the simplifications mentioned earlier. To meet the challenge we must modify both our experimental designs and our methods for analyzing the responses to these much more complicated inputs. Recent examples of laboratory based approaches to the problem of natural stimulation are studies of bullfrog auditory neurons responding to synthesized frog calls (Rieke et al, 1995), insect olfactory neurons responding to odour plumes (Vickers et al, 2001), cat LGN cells responding to movies (Dan et al, 1996, Stanley et al, 1999), primate visual cortical cells during free viewing of natural images (Gallant et al, 1998, Vinje and Gallant, 2000), auditory neurons in song birds stimulated by song and song–like signals (Theunissen and Doupe, 1998, Theunissen et al, 2000, Sen et al, 2000), the responses in cat auditory cortex to signals with naturalistic statistical properties (Rotman et al, 1999), and motion sensitive cells in the fly (Warzecha and Egelhaaf, 2001, de Ruyter van Steveninck et al, 2001). In each case compromises are struck between well controlled stimuli with understandable statistical properties and the fully natural case.

A more radical approach to natural stimulation was taken by Roeder in the early sixties (see Roeder, 1998). He and his coworkers made recordings from moth auditory neurons in response to the cries of bats flying overhead in the open field. More recently the visual system of Limulus was studied with the animal moving almost free on the sea floor (Passaglia et al, 1997).

Here we study motion sensitive visual neurons in the fly, and—in the spirit of Roeder’s work—rather than trying to construct approximations to natural stimuli in the laboratory, we take the experiment into nature. We record the responses of H1, a wide field direction selective neuron that responds to horizontal motion, while the fly is being rotated along angular velocity trajectories representative for free flying flies. These trajectories indeed are quite wild, with velocities of several thousand degrees per second and direction changes which are complete within ten milliseconds. In analyzing the responses to these stimuli we would like to use methods that do not depend on detailed assumptions about what features of the stimulus are encoded or about what features of the spike sequences carry this coded signal. Recently, information theoretical methods were developed for analysing neural responses to repeated sequences of otherwise arbitrarily complex stimuli (de Ruyter van Steveninck et al, 1997, Strong et al, 1998). In our experiments we repeat the same motion trace, lasting several seconds, and this provides us with the raw data for computing the relevant information measures, as explained in section 2.3. We emphasize that although we repeat the stimulus many times to estimate the relevant probability distributions of responses, the measures we derive from these distributions characterize the information coded by a single example of the neural response.

## 2 Methods

### 2.1 Stimulus design considerations

The giant motion sensitive interneurons in the fly’s lobula plate are sensitive primarily to such rigid rotational motions of the fly as occur during flight (Hausen, 1982, Krapp et al, 1997), and these cells typically have very large visual fields. It is this wide field rigid rotation that we want to reproduce as we construct a naturalistic stimulus. But what pattern of rotational velocities should we use? As a benchmark we will present data from an experiment where the fly was rotated at velocities that remained constant for one second each. We would, however, also like to present the fly with stimuli that are more representative for natural flight. Free flight trajectories were recorded in the classic work of Land and Collett (1974), who studied chasing behaviour in Fannia canicularis and found body turning speeds of several thousand degrees per second. A recent study (van Hateren and Schilstra, 1999) reports flight measurements from Calliphora at high temporal and spatial resolution. In these experiments flies made of order 10 turns per second, and turning speeds of the head reached values of over 3000/s. In general, high angular velocities pose problems for visual stimulus displays, because even at relatively high frame rates they may give rise to ghost images. In our laboratory we use a Tektronix 608 display monitor with a 500 Hz frame rate,. Then 3000/s corresponds to jumps from frame to frame of 6, four times larger than the spacing between photoreceptors. Although the frame rate used here is well above the photoreceptor flicker fusion frequency (de Ruyter van Steveninck and Laughlin, 1996) the presence of ghost images may have consequences for the encoding of motion signals. Further, the light intensity of the typical displays used in the laboratory is much lower than outside. As an example, the Tektronix 608 induces of order $`510^4`$ photoconversions/s in fly photoreceptors at its maximum brightness. The brightness outside can easily be a factor of a hundred higher (Land, 1981), although the photoreceptor pupil mechanism will limit the maximum photon flux to about $`10^6`$ photoconversions/s (Howard et al, 1987). Finally, the field of view of H1 is very large, covering essentially the field of one eye (Krapp and Hengstenberg, 1997), which is about 6.85 sr or 55$`\%`$ of the full $`4\pi `$ sr in female Calliphora vicina (estimates based on Beersma et al, 1977. See also Fig. 1). In practice with a display monitor it is hard to stimulate the fly with coherent motion over such a large area and in most of our laboratory experiments we stimulate less than about 20$`\%`$ of the full visual field of H1.

### 2.2 Stimulus apparatus

All the factors mentioned above suggest an experimental design in which the visual world can be made to move more or less continuously relative to the fly, and this is easiest to accomplish by moving the fly relative to the world as occurs during free flight. We therefore constructed a light and compact assembly consisting of a fly holder, electrode manipulator, and preamplifier that can be mounted on a stepper motor, as shown in figure 1. This setup is rigid enough to allow high speed rotations around the vertical axis while extracellular recordings are made from the H1 cell. Because it is powered by batteries the setup can be taken outside, so that the fly’s visual system is stimulated with natural visual scenes. The mounting and recording stage inevitably covers some area in the fly’s visual field. During the experiment this rotates along with the fly, and so does not contribute to motion in the fly’s visual field. By tracing the contours of the setup as seen from the fly, we estimate the shape and size of this overlap, as depicted in figure 1. The setup was designed to minimize the overlap in the visual field of the left eye. In the experiments presented here, recordings were therefore made from contralateral H1, on the right side of the head. The setup occludes only 1.52 sr, or 22%, of the visual field of the left eye, most of it ventral-caudal, as indicated by the heavy mesh in the right panel of figure 1.

The stepper motor (Berger-Lahr RDM 564/50) was driven by a Divistep 331.1 controller in microstep mode, that is, at $`10^4`$ steps per revolution, corresponding to a smallest step size of $`0.036^{}`$ or roughly 1/30th of an interommatidial angle. The Divistep controller in turn was driven by pulses from a custom designed interface that produced pulse trains by reading pulse frequency values from the parallel port of a laptop computer. Pulse frequency values were refreshed every 2 ms.

To generate naturalistic motion stimuli we used published trajectories of chasing Fannia from Land and Collett (1974), interpolated smoothly between their 20 ms sample points. For technical reasons we had to limit the accelerations of the setup, and we chose therefore to rotate the fly at half the rotational velocities derived from the Land and Collett data. This may be reasonable as Calliphora is a larger fly than Fannia, and is likely to make slower turns. The constant velocity data presented in figure 2 were taken with rotation speeds ranging from about $`0.28^{}`$/s to $`4500^{}`$/s. To avoid extreme accelerations during high velocity presentations the pulse program for the stepper motor delivered smooth 100 ms pulse frequency ramps to switch between velocities. For velocities below $`18^{}`$/s pulses were sent to the controller at intervals longer than 2 ms. At the lowest constant velocity used in our experiments, $`0.28^{}`$/s, pulses were delivered at 128 ms intervals. The step size was small enough so that a modulation of the PSTH was undetectable in the experiment.

The experiment of figure 2 compares data from the outdoor setup to data taken inside with the fly observing a Tektronix 608 CRT. The stimulus displayed on this monitor consisted of 190 vertical lines, with intensities derived from a one-dimensional scan of the scene viewed by the fly in the outdoor experiment. The moving scene was generated by a digital signal processor, and written at a 500 Hz frame rate. As mentioned above, this gives rise to ghosting at high image speeds when the pattern makes large jumps from frame to frame. The DSP produced the coarse part of motion essentially by stepping through lines in a buffer memory. On top of this, fine displacements were produced by moving the entire image by fractions of a linewidth at each frame. The resulting motion was smooth and not limited to integer steps. The fly was positioned so that the screen subtended a rectangular area of $`67^{}`$ horizontal by $`55^{}`$ vertical, with the left eye facing the CRT and rightmost vertical edge of the CRT approximately in the sagittal plane of the fly’s head.

### 2.3 Information theoretic analysis of neural firing patterns

We describe briefly a technique for quantifying information transmission by spike trains (de Ruyter van Steveninck et al, 1997, Strong et al, 1998, de Ruyter van Steveninck et al, 2001). We consider segments of the spike train with length $`T`$ divided in a number of bins of width $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$, where $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ ranges from one millisecond up to $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=T`$. Each such bin may hold a number of spikes, but within a bin no distinction is made on where the spikes appear. However, two windows of length $`T`$ that have different combinations of filled bins are counted as different firing patterns. Also, two windows in which the same bins are filled but with different count values, are distinguished. We refer to such firing patterns as words, $`W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t}`$. From an experiment in which we repeat a reasonably long naturalistic stimulus a number of times, $`N_r`$ (here $`N_r=200`$ repetitions of a $`T_r=5`$ seconds long sequence) we get a large number of these words, $`W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)`$, with $`t`$ the time since the start of the experiment. Here we discretize $`t`$ in 1 ms bins, giving us 5000 words per repetition period, and $`10^6`$ words in the entire experiment. From this set of words we set up word probability distributions, from which we calculate total and noise entropies, and their difference, according to Shannon’s definitions:

1. The total entropy, $`S_{tot}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$. From the list of words $`W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t}(t)`$, for all $`t`$ ($`0tN_rT_r`$), we directly get a distribution, $`P(W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t})`$ describing the probability of finding a word anywhere in the entire experiment. The total entropy is now:

$$S_{tot}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)=\underset{W}{}P(W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t})\mathrm{log}_2[P(W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t})]$$
(1)
This entropy measures the richness of the ‘vocabulary’ used by H1 under these experimental conditions, hence the time of occurrence of the pattern within the experiment is irrelevant.
2. The average noise entropy, $`\overline{S}_{noise}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$. If the neuron responded perfectly reproducibly to repeated stimuli, then the information conveyed by the spike train would equal the total entropy defined above. There is noise, however, and this leads to variations in the responses, as can be seen directly from the rasters in Fig. 3. $`\overline{S}_{noise}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ gives us an estimate of how variable the response to identical stimuli is. We first accumulate, for each instant $`t_r`$ in the stimulus sequence, the distribution of all those firing patterns $`P(W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t}|t_r)`$, taken across all trials, that begin at $`t_r`$ (note that $`0t_rT_r`$). The entropy of this distribution measures the (ir)reproducibility of the response at each instant $`t_r`$:

$$S_{noise}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t,t_r)=\underset{W}{}P(W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t}|t_r)\mathrm{log}_2[P(W_{T,\mathrm{\Delta }t}|t_r)].$$
(2)
Calculating this for each point in time and averaging all these values we obtain the average noise entropy:

$$\overline{S}_{noise}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)=\frac{1}{T_r}_0^{T_r}S_{noise}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t,t_r)𝑑t_r.$$
(3)
3. The information conveyed by words at the given length $`T`$ and resolution $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ is the difference of these two entropies:

$$I(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)=S_{tot}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)\overline{S}_{noise}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t).$$
(4)
The coding efficiency of the spike train is the fraction of the total entropy that is utilized to convey information:

$$\eta (T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)=\frac{I(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)}{S_{tot}(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)}.$$
(5)

Small values of $`\eta (T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ indicate a loose coupling between stimulus and spike train, whereas values close to 1 imply that there is little noise entropy, so that most of the structure of the spike train is meaningful, and carries a message. Here we will not be interested in the decoding question, that is in what that message is, but only in how much information is conveyed about the stimulus. We will then compare these values in different conditions.

It should be stressed that the information values we derive by these methods are not strictly about velocity. They are potentially about anything in the stimulus that is repetitive with period $`T_r`$. It is our job as experimenters to construct inputs that we think will stimulate the neuron well, and for H1, naturalistic wide field motion seems to be a good choice. But that does not necessarily mean that that is the best choice. Further, the motion pattern is dynamic, and any noiseless time invariant operation on this signal will produce a result that has the same repeat period as the original. Our information measures do not distinguish these cases; specifically, our discussion is unaffected by the question of whether H1 encodes velocity, acceleration, or some nonlinear function of these variables. Questions of decoding are highly interesting, but at the same time difficult to tackle for stimuli of the type studied here, and we will leave them aside in this paper.

It is interesting to try and estimate $`I(T,\mathrm{\Delta }t)`$ as we let $`T`$ become very long, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$ very short, as this limit is the average rate of information transmission. Because calculating this limit requires very large data sets, we focus here on the information transmitted in constant time windows, $`T=30\mathrm{ms}`$, as a function of $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$. We choose $`T=30\mathrm{m}\mathrm{s}`$ because that amounts to the delay time with which a chasing fly follows turns of a leading fly during a chase (Land and Collett, 1974); the end result, that is the dependence of information transmission on $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$, was found not to depend critically on the choice of $`T`$.

To quantify noise entropy, the method described above requires that a stimulus waveform be repeated. Although it is possible in principle to quantify information transmission based only on one repetition, using many repetitions is easier in practice. In a sense this mode of stimulation is still removed from the realistic situation in which stimuli are not repeated at all. Indeed, in our experiments there are hints that the fly adapts to the stimulus somewhat over the first few presentations of the 5 second long stimulus. The effects of adaptation to dynamic stimuli are certainly interesting (Brenner et al, 2000, Fairhall et al, 2001), but in the data we present here we skip the first few presentations, and only analyze that part of the experiment in which the fly seems fully adapted to the ongoing dynamic stimulus. Inspection of the rasters in that phase shows no obvious trends, so that the fly seems to be close to stationary conditions. In this regard our information measures are lower bounds, as deviations from stationarity will increase our estimate of the noise entropy, lowering information estimates.

## 3 Results

### 3.1 Operating range for naturalistic motion stimuli

In order to be sure that H1 receives no dominant motion related signals from other modalities than vision we rotated the fly either in darkness or under a cover that turned along with the fly. This did not produce discernible motion responses in H1. Strictly speaking that does not exclude possible modulatory mechanosensory input, which could be investigated in principle by presenting conflicting visual and mechanosensory stimuli. The possibility seems remote, however, and even if true it would not invalidate our conclusions about the dependence of H1’s information transmission on parameters of the visual stimulus.

As a first comparison between laboratory and natural conditions we present data from an experiment in which H1 was excited by one second long episodes of motion at constant velocity. These were presented at a range of velocities from about 0.28/s to 4500/s. Outdoors the fly was placed in a wooded environment and rotated on the stepper motor. In the laboratory the same fly watched a vertical bar pattern derived from a one dimensional scan of the natural environment in which the outdoor experiment was done. This pattern was displayed on a standard Tektronix 608 monitor, with a rectangular stimulated visual area of 67 horizontal by 55 vertical. The pattern moved at the same settings of angular velocity as were used outdoors, but the indoor and outdoor stimuli differed both in average light level and in stimulated area.

Figure 2 shows the average firing rates obtained from the last half second of each velocity presentation. At low velocities, up to about 20/s, the spike rates for both conditions are not very different, despite the large change in total motion signal present in the photoreceptor array. Apparently the fly adapts these differences away (see Brenner et al, 2000). In both experiments the rate depends roughly logarithmically on velocity over an appreciable range and this is partly a result of adaptation as well (de Ruyter van Steveninck et al, 1986). In the laboratory experiment the motion response peaks at about 100/s, whereas in natural conditions the fly encodes velocities monotonically for an extra order of magnitude, its response peaking in the neighbourhood of 1000/s. This brings H1’s encoding of motion under natural conditions in the range of behaviourally relevant velocities. A lack of sensitivity to high speeds has been claimed both to be an essential result of the computational strategy used by the fly, and to be advantageous in optomotor course control (Warzecha and Egelhaaf, 1998). These conclusions do not pertain to the conditions in the outdoor experiment, where H1 responds robustly and reliably to angular velocities of well over 1000/s.

### 3.2 Motion detection throughout the day

Figure 3 shows spike train rasters generated by H1 in three outdoor experiments, focusing on a short segment that illustrates some qualitative points. Trace (a) shows the velocity waveform, which was the same in all three cases. The experiments were performed at noon (b), half an hour before sunset (c), and about half an hour after sunset (d). Rough estimates of the photon flux in a blowfly photoreceptor looking at zenith are shown beside the panels. In all experiments the fly saw the same scene, with a spatial distribution of intensities ranging from about 5% to 100% of the zenith value.

The figure reveals that some aspects of the response are quite reproducible, and further that particular events in the stimulus can be associated reliably with small numbers of spikes. More dramatically, the timing precision of the spike trains gradually decreases going from the noon experiment to the one after sunset. Higher photon rates imply a more reliable physical input to the visual system. The figure therefore strongly suggests that the fly’s visual system utilizes this increased input reliability to compute and encode motion more accurately when the light intensity increases. This statement is ecologically relevant, as the conditions of the experiment correspond to naturally occurring light levels and approximately to the naturally stimulated visual area. To get a feeling for the spike timing precision in the three conditions we can simply look at the distribution of timing of the first spike generated after a fixed criterion time (for which we choose t=0.28 s in (b) and (c) and t=0.30 s in (d)). The jitter in the spike timing across different trials has a standard deviation of 0.95 ms in (b), 1.4 ms in (c), and 5.8 ms in (d). The relative timing of spikes can be even more accurate: the interval from the first to the second spike fired after the criterion time is 2.3$`\pm `$0.23 ms in (b), 5.0$`\pm `$0.6 ms in (c), and 16$`\pm `$2.4 ms in (d). Compared to the rapid onsets and offsets of the spike activity at the higher photon fluxes, the stimulus varies rather smoothly, which means that the time definition of spikes with respect to the stimulus can be much better than might be suggested by the stimulus bandwidth. An example can be seen in the rather smooth hump in the velocity waveform at about t=0.43 s, which induces on most trials a well defined response consisting of a sharply defined pair of spikes.

We quantify these impressions using the information theoretic approach described briefly in section 2.3. The result of this analysis is shown in Fig. 4a-d, for the three different experiments discussed above. Figure 4c clearly shows that the information in a 30 ms window increases both when the light intensity goes up, and when the spikes are timed with higher accuracy. The increase in information with increasing spike timing precision is most dramatic for the highest light levels, indicating that coding by fine spike timing becomes more prominent the better the input signal to noise ratio. A comparison of figures 4a (total entropy) and figure 4b (noise entropy) reveals that the increase in information content with increasing light levels is primarily due to an increase in total entropy: The neuron’s vocabulary increases in size as its input becomes better defined. Figure 4d shows that at the two highest light intensities the coding efficiency is of order 0.5 at time resolution $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$=1 ms, increasing slightly for larger values of $`\mathrm{\Delta }t`$. In the darkest condition the efficiency decreases markedly for all values of time resolution.

The right column of figure 4 compares experiments in which we took data both outdoors and in the laboratory. These data are from another fly, but the conditions of the outdoor experiment were similar to those for the first fly at the highest light level. After the outdoor experiment the fly was taken inside the laboratory, and the same velocity stimulus as the one used outside was repeated inside. In the laboratory, as before, the visual stimulus was presented on a Tektronix 608 CRT. Photoreceptors facing the CRT received about 5 $`10^4`$ photons per second at maximum intensity, a value in between the light intensities seen by the first fly in the experiments just before and just after sunset (grey and black symbols in figure 4a-d). Two experiments were done indoor, one in which the picture on the monitor consisted of vertical bars with a contrast pattern measured in a horizontal scan of the outdoor scene (filled triangles), the other a high contrast square wave pattern with contrast=1, and spatial wavelength=12.5 (filled squares). From figure 4g we see that the information transmitted by H1 is much lower in the laboratory experiments than in the outdoor experiment, due to the smaller stimulated area and the lower light level. Figure 4e shows that the decrease in information, as before, is mainly due to a lowering of the total entropy. The noise entropy also decreases (figure 4f), but not enough to compensate. Somewhat surprisingly, the experiment with the high contrast pattern indoors leads to a slightly higher coding efficiency than even the outdoor experiment.

## 4 Discussion

Outdoor illumination can easily be a hundred times brighter than anything displayed on common laboratory equipment, and in the outdoor experiment stimuli extend over a large fraction of the fly’s full visual field rather than being confined to a small flat monitor. Both effects are relevant for our experiments, as the higher brightness leads to higher photoreceptor signal to noise ratios (de Ruyter van Steveninck and Laughlin, 1996), and as H1’s receptive field covers almost a hemisphere (Krapp and Hengstenberg, 1997). In moving from laboratory to outdoor conditions, both effects increase the signal to noise ratio of the input available for computation of rigid wide field motion from the photoreceptor array. The question then is whether the fly’s brain uses this improvement in input signal quality to produce more accurate estimates of visual motion, and/or increase its operating range of motion detection. Figure 2 shows that the range of velocities that are encoded increases markedly when the visual input becomes more reliable.

If the accuracy of information processing is limited by noise sources within the nervous system, we should observe a plateau, that is, information transmission should saturate at some defined level of input signal quality. There is some arbitrariness in the choice of the level of input signal quality, however: In principle we can surpass any degree of accuracy of the physical input signal by simply increasing the light intensity, and at some point the internal randomness of the brain’s components must become the limiting factor in information processing. However, statements about the magnitude of internal versus external noise in sensory information processing are primarily meaningful in the context of reasonable, physiological levels of input signal quality. Those stimuli that the animal encounters naturally, taken at the high end of their dynamic range, would meet this criterion. For the case considered here the dynamic range refers to light intensity, size of stimulated visual field, and dynamics of motion. The data we recorded outdoors show no sign of saturation in information transmission when the input signal quality increases. On the contrary, if we compare the rasters of figure 3b and 3c, we see that there is a marked improvement in the timing of spikes, even over the highest decade of light intensity ($`2\times 10^5`$ to $`3\times 10^6`$ photons/s at zenith per photoreceptor). This improvement translates into a significant gain in information transmission, especially at fine time resolution, as shown in figure 4c. Thus, in computing motion from the array of photoreceptors, the fly’s brain does not suffer noticeably from information bottlenecks imposed by internal noise, under ecologically relevant conditions.

In our outdoor experiments, the information content of the spike train varies primarily as a result of a varying total entropy (figure 4a). The noise entropy (figure 4b) appears to be almost constant as a function of light level. One can distinguish two different ways to increase information transmission through a channel. The first is to encode the same messages more accurately, the second to increase the variety of messages, keeping the accuracy of each individual message the same. The first scheme implies constant total entropy and decreasing noise entropy, the second an increase in total entropy at constant noise entropy. Our data suggest that as the visual input becomes more reliable, the fly chooses to increase the vocabulary of H1 to encode a wider variety of features of the motion stimulus, keeping precision roughly constant.

#### Acknowledgments

We thank Naama Brenner, Steve Strong and Roland Koberle for many pleasant and enlightening discussions.

## References

## Figure legends


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# Study of Low Energy Spin Rotons in the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

## Abstract

Motivated by the discovery of extremely low energy collective modes in the fractional quantum Hall effect (Kang, Pinczuk et al.), with energies below the Zeeman energy, we study theoretically the spin reversed excitations for fractional quantum Hall states at $`\nu =2/5`$ and 3/7 and find qualitatively different behavior than for $`\nu =1/3`$. We find that a low-energy, charge-neutral “spin roton,” associated with spin reversed excitations that involve a change in the composite-fermion Landau level index, has energy in reasonable agreement with experiment.

Inelastic light scattering has proved to be an extremely useful tool for investigating the neutral excitations of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE). The initial focus was at at $`\nu =1/3`$, where three modes have been observed: the long wavelength collective mode, the roton mode, and the spin wave mode. The last has an energy, in the small wave vector limit, equal to the Zeeman splitting, denoted below by $`E_Z`$. Recently, substantial progress has been made in extending the experiments to other fractions, e.g., $`\nu =`$ 2/5 and 3/7, where a much richer structure has emerged. In particular, Kang et al.  have reported observation of spin-reversed modes other than the spin wave at these fractions . At $`\nu =2/5`$, they find a mode with energy approximately equal to $`2E_Z`$; the near absence of $`\sqrt{B_{}}`$ dependence of the energy indicates that it is not modified by the Coulomb interaction. Another striking observation was of a mode at $`\nu =3/7`$ which has an energy smaller than $`E_Z`$, roughly $`0.4E_Z`$. These findings have prompted us to investigate the spin-reversed neutral excitations at $`\nu =2/5`$ and 3/7. We find that the nature of the low-energy spin reversed excitations is in general qualitatively different than that at $`\nu =1/3`$, and involves composite-fermion Landau level transitions in conjunction with spin reversal.

The low energy excitations that conserve spin find a good description in terms of composite fermions . The incompressible ground state at $`\nu =n/(2n+1)`$ is interpreted as a state in which composite fermions completely fill $`n`$ composite-fermion (CF) Landau levels . The neutral excitation is a particle-hole pair of composite fermions, i.e. an exciton of composite fermions. For fully polarized excitations, the lowest energy exciton corresponds to exciting a composite fermion from the topmost occupied CF-Landau level (LL) into the lowest unoccupied CF-LL; for such excitations, the CF theory is in good agreement with experiment, both for the roton minima at $`1/3`$, $`2/5`$, and $`3/7`$, and for the long wavelength neutral mode at $`1/3`$ . The focus in this work is on spin reversed excitations. At $`\nu =1/3`$, which maps into $`\nu ^{}=1`$ of composite fermions, the lowest energy spin reversed mode clearly is the one in which the composite fermion flips its spin while remaining within the lowest CF-LL . For other fractions, the situation is more complicated. Consider, for example, $`\nu =2/5`$, where two CF-LLs, labeled 0 and 1, are fully occupied. In the simplest approximation, neglecting excitations involving the third CF-LL, there are three possible low-energy excitations: (i) $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$, (ii) $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`1`$$``$, and (iii) $`0`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$. The last two conserve the CF-LL index, whereas the composite fermion lowers its LL index in the first. One combination of these must produce the spin wave excitation. It is not a priori obvious which of these is the lowest energy mode. Our aim is to see if theory finds low energy excitations at general fractions that can be identified with the experimentally observed modes.

The relation between the spin reversed excitations of the FQHE and the corresponding integral quantum Hall states is implicit in the composite fermion description of these modes, and has been investigated in the past within the Chern Simons  and the Hamiltonian formulations . While our approach below does not produce exactly the same quantitative dispersions as these studies, there are qualitative similarities. The behavior of the three modes at $`\nu =2/5`$ is analogous to that for the $`\nu =2`$ state, and the spin-wave mode of $`1/3`$ is qualitatively similar to that of $`\nu =1`$ . In particular, many of the qualitative features of the results below (the nature of the lowest mode and the presence of a spin roton) were obtained in an extensive theoretical study of magnetoexcitations by Murthy.

We evaluate the energy dispersions of the spin-reversed excitations numerically using the wave functions of the composite fermion theory.  The method has been described previously and will not be repeated here. The spherical geometry is used in the calculations, where the total orbital angular momentum $`L`$ is related to the wave vector of the planar geometry as $`k=L/R`$, where $`R=\sqrt{Q}l_0`$ is the radius of the sphere, $`Q`$ is the strength of the monopole at the center (corresponding to a total flux of $`2Qhc/e`$), and $`l_0=\sqrt{\mathrm{}c/eB_{}}`$ is the magnetic length. The thermodynamic ($`N^10`$) values of the Coulomb energies of the spin reversed excitations as well as of the fully polarized ground state are calculated by extrapolating the results for up to $`N=50`$ particles, and up to $`10^7`$ Monte Carlo steps have been used to obtain each energy. The Coulomb energy of the exciton measured relative to the ground state is denoted by $`\mathrm{\Delta }_c^{ex}`$; the Zeeman energy $`E_Z=|g|\mu _BB`$ must be added to it to obtain the full energy of the spin-reversed excitation.

We begin with $`\nu =2/5`$ and compute the energies of the excitations $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$, $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`1`$$``$, and $`0`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$, shown in the upper panel of Fig. 1 for $`N=30`$. However, the wave functions for three states are not necessarily mutually orthogonal for a given $`L`$. This, for example, is the reason why the gapless spin-wave mode is absent. In order to obtain meaningful results, it is necessary to diagonalize the Hamiltonian in an orthonormal basis. The orthonormal basis can be obtained by the Gram-Schmid procedure in the subspace of three states. The orthonormalization as well as the diagonalization of the Hamiltonian $`H=\frac{1}{2}_{jk}V(r_{jk})`$ requires a calculation of the off-diagonal matrix elements of the type $`<u_l|u_m>`$ and $`<u_l|H|u_m>`$, where $`u_l`$ and $`u_m`$ ($`lm`$) are unorthonormalized wave functions. Since the Monte Carlo evaluation is most efficient when the integrand is positive definite, we determine these using the equation

$$<u_l|u_m>=\frac{<u_l+u_m|u_l+u_m><u_l|u_l><u_m|u_m>}{2},$$

and a similar equation for the Hamiltonian matrix elements.

The three Coulomb eigenvalues obtained in this way are shown in Fig. 1, labeled (a), (b), and (c). For $`\nu =3/7`$, we diagonalize the Coulomb Hamiltonian in the subspace defined by six modes: $`2`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$; $`2`$$``$ $``$ $`1`$$``$; $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$; $`2`$$``$ $``$ $`2`$$``$; $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`1`$$``$; and $`0`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$. The resulting spectrum is shown in Fig. 2. (The discrete points correspond to the discrete $`L`$ values. Because of certain properties of the single particle eigenstates in the spherical geometry, there is no state at $`L=0`$ or $`L=1`$ for the $`2`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$ transition, and none at $`L=0`$ for $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$ and $`2`$$``$ $``$ $`1`$$``$ transitions.) Of particular interest is the lowest energy excitation, which may be expected to be the sharpest due to the absence of lower energy modes into which it may decay. Given that the ground state wave function is extremely accurate, our results provide a variational upper bound on the energy of this mode. We also note that the energy of the lowest mode at $`\nu =2/5`$ is in semi-quantitative agreement with that obtained in the Hamiltonian approach .

The spin-wave mode is recovered at small wave vectors, as expected. However, it is not the lowest energy mode in general. Except at very small wave vectors, the lowest energy mode corresponds to an excitation that involves a change of CF-LL index. It is well approximated by the unorthonormalized inter-CF-LL excitation $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$ at $`\nu =2/5`$ and $`2`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$ at $`\nu =3/7`$. The energy of this excitation is surprisingly low, which can be understood physically by noting that the energy increase due to the self energies of the particle and hole is offset to a large degree by the decrease in the CF cyclotron energy. Another noteworthy aspect is that this excitation has a roton minimum, termed the “spin roton”. The presence of the roton is significant because, due to a divergent density of states associated with it, the roton is more readily observable in Raman scattering. (The roton wave vector is much larger than that of light, but it can be activated by disorder, which breaks the translational invariance and hence wave vector conservation. The roton has also been investigated by ballistic phonon scattering. )

In the 2D limit, the energies of the spin rotons at $`\nu =2/5`$ (for the $`1`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$ mode) and $`\nu =3/7`$ ($`2`$$``$ $``$ $`0`$$``$) are estimated to be $`0.0024(18)e^2/ϵl_0`$ and $`0.0091(36)e^2/ϵl_0`$, respectively. Fig. 3 shows the dependence of the thermodynamic energies on the carrier density for the heterojunction geometry as well for the quantum well geometry for two typical widths. Only the interaction energy is shown in these figures; the Zeeman energy must be added to obtain the total energy of the excitation.

In order to make contact with experiment, we obtain the thermodynamic limits for the energies of the rotons at 2/5 and 3/7. For this purpose, we will use the unorthonormalized mode, which is quite accurate near the roton minimum. The above results were given for a strictly two-dimensional system, for which the interaction potential is $`V(r)=e^2/ϵr`$, $`ϵ`$ being the background dielectric constant. However, the finite width of experimentally realized heterojunction and square-well systems reduces the effective interaction potential in two dimensions, which is known to often make a sizable correction to the excitation energy. A reasonable approximation for these potentials is obtained (see Ref.  for details) by self-consistently solving Schrödinger and Poisson equations in a local density approximation with the sample geometry and the electron density as the only two input parameters. The correction in the energy due to finite size deviation of the density from its thermodynamic value is taken into account by changing energies by the factor $`\sqrt{2Q\nu /N}`$ for the $`N`$ particle system.

At $`\nu =2/5`$, the interaction energy of the spin roton is very close to zero, implying that its total energy is close to $`E_Z`$. At $`\nu =3/7`$, the interaction energy of the roton is negative, which, for typical parameters, leads to a total energy of approximately $`0.5E_Z`$. We believe that it is plausible to associate it with the low-energy excitation observed by Kang et al. at this filling factor both because no other such low energy mode is known, and because the calculated energy of the spin roton is in reasonable agreement with the observed energy. (We note that the energy of the spin roton at 3/7 gets contributions from both the Zeeman and the interaction energies. As a result, its dependence on $`B`$ is expected to contain both $`B`$ and $`\sqrt{B_{}}`$ terms.) The observation of a spin roton at $`\nu =2/5`$, which may be complicated by its proximity to the much stronger spin wave excitation, will provide additional support to the above physics of the low energy mode at $`\nu =3/7`$.

One may also speculate that the $`2E_Z`$ mode observed by Kang et al.  is a zero-wave-vector two-roton mode, formed from the combination of two spin rotons with equal and opposite momenta. This is analogous to the two-roton mode for the fully polarized long-wavelength excitation . The nearly vanishing interaction energy of this mode is consistent with the linear-$`B`$ dependence of the energy found experimentally. Again, if this assignment is correct, one may anticipate a two-roton mode at $`\nu =3/7`$ as well. Kang et al.  have also reported $`2E_Z`$ modes at other filling factors, which we do not address in the present work.

Because $`\mathrm{\Delta }_c^{ex}`$ is negative for the roton, both 2/5 and 3/7 are susceptible to a roton instability at sufficiently small Zeeman energies. Such an instability may be expected, because the $`E_Z=0`$ ground state at these filling factors is not fully polarized. It is interesting to compare the lines of instability that follow from these results with the spin phase diagram of the FQHE states obtained in an earlier study . (The lines of instability do not necessarily coincide with phase boundaries.) In the zero thickness limit, the above results imply that the unpolarized 2/5 state is unstable for the densities greater than $`8.8(0.3)\times 10^{10}`$ cm-2 (assuming $`B=B_{}`$) and the fully polarized state is unstable for the densities less than $`1.6(0.9)\times 10^9`$ cm-2. There is thus a range of densities for which both the unpolarized and fully polarized states are stable against quantum fluctuations. This suggests that the transition is first order, occurring before the roton energy vanishes.

For completeness, we have also considered excitations of the spin-unpolarized ground state of $`\nu =2/5`$, in which both spin states of lowest CF-LL are fully occupied. The unpolarized ground state is relevant at sufficiently small Zeeman energies. The lowest energy excitation, namely $`0`$$``$$``$$`1`$$``$, always involves a spin-reversal. (In this case, the Zeeman energy $`E_Z`$ must be subtracted from the interaction energy to obtain the full energy.) The dispersion for this excitation is shown in Fig. 1 (curve d in the lower panel). It also has a roton minimum, with energy $`0.0178(34)e^2/ϵl_0`$ in the thermodynamic limit.

To summarize, we have studied spin reversed excitations at $`\nu =2/5`$ and $`3/7`$ and found qualitatively different behavior compared to $`\nu =1/3`$. Our results provide a possible explanation for the low energy modes observed in recent light scattering experiments in terms of spin rotons.

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DMR-9986806. We would like to thank K. Park and V.W. Scarola for numerous helpful suggestions and discussions, and A. Pinczuk for discussions and sharing his data with us prior to publication.


text:
# HST Observations of SGR 0526-66: New Constraints on Accretion and Magnetar Models

## 1 Introduction

Soft $`\gamma `$-ray Repeaters (SGRs; for a recent observational review, see Hurley 2000) were initially discovered by their intense and repeated emission of soft ($`kT30`$ keV) $`\gamma `$-rays. These bursts are significantly super-Eddington ($`10^3L_{\mathrm{Edd}}`$; Hurley 2000), but are dwarfed by the giant flares. The flares are thousands of times more energetic than typical bursts and have harder spectra ($``$ MeV), but are rare, with only two observed in the past 20 years.

SGRs also emit quiescently in X-rays. This emission exhibits a power-law spectrum with photon index $`\mathrm{\Gamma }2`$, and may also have small blackbody contributions with $`kT0.5`$ keV. SGRs pulsate both in quiescence and during bursts with periods (5–8 s) that are longer than those typical for radio pulsars, and relatively large spin-down rates as well ($`\dot{P}10^{11}\text{ s s}^1`$; Kouveliotou et al. 1998; Hurley 2000).

Based on energetics and proximity to supernova remnants (SNRs) or star-formation regions, SGRs are generally thought to be young ($`10^4`$ yr) neutron stars. Given this, the most widely accepted model for SGRs has been the magnetar model (Thompson & Duncan 1993). Magnetars, neutron stars with $`B10^{15}`$ G, are objects whose primary power source is magnetic field decay rather than spin-down (radio pulsars) or accretion (X-ray binaries). The high magnetic fields were invoked to explain the very long super-Eddington tail of the 5 March 1979 outburst (Paczyński 1992) and its spin period (Duncan & Thompson 1992). In the magnetar model, SGRs produce bursts and flares through violent recombination and unpinning of the magnetic field, driven by crust fractures (Thompson & Duncan 1995). Non-thermal quiescent emission is thought to be due to currents in their magnetospheres arising from the continuing competition between crust and magnetic stresses (Thompson & Duncan 1996; Thompson 2000).

The Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs; see Mereghetti 2000 for a review) are a group of objects that appear similar to the SGRs. However, they have softer spectra ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }4`$ and more prominent blackbody components) and have not been observed to burst. Thompson & Duncan (1996) proposed that both classes had similar origins, based on similar spin properties and X-ray luminosities.

While intriguing, magnetars are not the only possible models for AXPs. Propeller driven spindown of accreted/ejected matter from a fallback disk (van Paradijs, Taam, & van den Heuvel 1995; Chatterjee, Hernquist, & Narayan 2000) produced during the supernova explosion, a “pushback” disk (enhanced fallback from an overly dense environment; see Marsden et al. 2001, 2000), or a disk acquired by a high velocity neutron star that has caught up with its ejecta Marsden et al. (2001), was postulated to explain the emission and period clustering of the AXPs. With a standard $`10^{12}`$-G magnetic field, an accreting pulsar would naturally reach an equilibrium spin period of $`8`$ s, and the observed variations in spin-down (Kaspi et al. 2000; Kaspi, Lackey, & Chakrabarty 2000) could be explained by accretion torques.

Accretion would provide a large and easily accessible reservoir of energy for the AXPs. This is in contrast to magnetars, which can only emit $`EB^2/8\pi \times 4\pi R^3/3=10^{47}\text{ ergs}`$ (for a $`10^{15}`$-G field) over their lifetimes. Given the attractiveness of the accretion model on energetics ground, it has also been proposed that SGRs are powered by the same mechanism (Marsden et al. 2001). In the propeller spin-down model, the bursts are expected to result from starquakes produced (e.g. Ramaty et al. 1980, 1981; Ellison & Kazanas 1983), by fractures and phase transitions in subducted crust piled up by the extreme plate tectonics (Ruderman 1991) driven by the very rapid spindown of the neutron star. The damping times of neutron star vibrational modes in such a quake model can possibly explain (Ramaty et al. 1981) both the duration of the 5 March 1979 outburst and its very long super-Eddington tail.

The discovery of the soft power-law spectrum ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }=3.24`$) of one SGR, SGR 0526$``$66 by Kulkarni et al. (2001, hereafter K00) suggests AXPs and SGRs may be linked through spectral as well as spin properties, and that SGR 0526$``$66 may be a transition object bridging the two classes.

With its high Galactic latitude, SGR 0526$``$66 has a comparatively low extinction, allowing much deeper optical observations than those of the other SGRs, despite its greater distance. The other SGRs have extinctions of 10–30 magnitudes in the optical band ($`A_V13`$ for SGR 1900$`+`$14 based on Hurley et al. 1999c; $`A_V28`$ mag for SGR 1806$``$20; van Kerkwijk et al. 1995). Therefore, this object provides an important test for models of the quiescent optical emission from SGRs.

## 2 SGR 0526$``$66

On 5 March 1979, spacecraft recorded a giant $`\gamma `$-ray flare (Mazets et al. 1979; Cline et al. 1980) that is currently second in brightness, behind only the 28 August 1998 flare of SGR 1900$`+`$14 (Hurley et al. 1999a). The burst showed a very short rise ($`<1`$ ms) followed by a $`150`$-ms decay and a pulsating phase (lasting $`>2`$ min; Cline et al. 1980). While overall the spectrum is rather soft, the initial flare had a hard tail, perhaps associated with the initial outburst rather than its afterglow (Mazets et al. 1979). There were also indications of a 430-keV emission line, probably the 511-keV annihilation line redshifted by gravity from the surface of a neutron star (Mazets et al. 1979). Barat et al. (1979) and Mazets et al. (1979) identified an 8-s periodicity in the burst data.

Triangulation located the source in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), specifically in the direction of SNR 0525$``$66.1 (catalog ) (N49; Evans et al. 1980). Assuming the association to hold, the inferred isotropic luminosity of the source was calculated to be $`5\times 10^{44}\text{ erg s}^1=2\times 10^6L_{\mathrm{Edd}}`$, with a total energy output of $`7\times 10^{44}\text{ erg}`$ (for X-rays $`>50`$ keV; Mazets et al. 1979; Hurley 2000).

On 6 March 1979 a second burst lasting $`1.5`$ s was observed at the same position, with a similarly soft spectrum, although its intensity was a factor of 100 below that of 5 March 1979. Bursts of lower intensity were subsequently observed (Rothschild & Lingenfelter 1984), although none after $`1983`$. The later bursts showed a clustering which was interpreted (Rothschild & Lingenfelter 1984) as a periastron passage in a highly eccentric 164 day orbit, which was later also indicated in the observation of and optical flash from SGR 0526$``$66 (Pedersen et al. 1984). However, later analysis of the clustering of bursts from SGR 1900$`+`$14 which has also emitted a giant flare) and SGR 1806$``$20 has pointed towards a lognormal distribution of time intervals, similar to that of earthquakes (Cheng et al. 1996; Göğüş et al. 1999; Göğüş et al. 2000). This distribution suggests that the bursts result from internal rather than external triggers.

Later, X-ray observations identified a point source, RX J052600.3$``$660433 (catalog ), coincident with the $`\gamma `$-ray error box (Rothschild, Kulkarni, & Lingenfelter 1994; Marsden, Rothschild, Lingenfelter, & Puetter 1996). The luminosity of the quiescent source is $`10^{36}\text{ erg s}^1`$ (0.1–2.4 keV; Marsden et al. 1996; K00), and while no periodicity was found in the ROSAT data, the limit on the pulsed fraction of 66% (Marsden et al. 1996) was not very stringent. Recent Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO) observations of RX J052600.3$``$660433 (catalog ) have shown that the source is indeed pointlike and has a drastically different spectrum (nonthermal with photon index of $`3.24`$) than the rest of the supernova remnant, leaving little doubt that RX J052600.3$``$660433 (catalog ) is the quiescent counterpart of SGR 0526$``$66 (K00).

### 2.1 Distance and Reddening to SGR 0526$``$66

To find the extinction $`A_V`$, Marsden et al. (1996) use a relation between the hydrogen column density $`N_H`$ ($`8.3\times 10^{21}\text{ cm}^2`$; K00) and the extinction. Most of the intervening hydrogen and extinction are local to the LMC ($`A_{V,\mathrm{Galactic}}0.1`$, as inferred from Burstein & Heiles 1982), so we therefore use the relation appropriate to the LMC: $`A_V=N_H/8.3\times 10^{21}\text{ cm}^2`$ (Weingartner & Draine 2000) and find $`A_V=1.0`$ mag. We then use the standard Galactic reddening curve (which should also apply to the LMC longward of 200 nm; Nandy et al. 1980; Zaritsky 1999) from Schild (1977) normalized to $`A_V`$. From this we find the reddening $`E_{BV}=0.3`$ mag, generally consistent with that found by Vancura et al. (1992) from studies of line ratios in N49 (although there is significant variation over the remnant, with $`E_{BV}`$ ranging from 0.0 mag to 0.5 mag). We note that the values for the extinction are somewhat imprecise and may have significant variations on scales as small as $`2\mathrm{}`$ (Vancura et al. 1992), but this does not significantly affect our analysis. The extinction values that we used are listed in Table 1, and are at the upper end of the range possible for SGR 0526$``$66.

We parameterize the distance to the LMC/SGR 0526$``$66 as $`D_{\mathrm{LMC}}=50d_{50}`$ kpc.

## 3 Observations

The data consist of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFPC2 observations with several filters of the field centered around the supernova remnant N49 in the LMC. See Table 1 for a log of the observations. The HST WFPC2 filter designations describe the center wavelengths and widths. F300W, for example, is a wide bandwidth filter centered at 300 nm, while F547M is a medium bandwidth filter centered at 547 nm.

### 3.1 Image Reduction

The data from 14 November 1998 and 27 April 1999 were taken with HST in different orientations, so they were processed separately, although with the same procedure.

We used the drizzling111Drizzling is a technique to combine HST images from slightly different positions and orientations into a single image. The HST PC has $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}046`$ pixels, and the nominal resolution is $`1.2\lambda /D=0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}05`$, indicating that it undersamples the point-spread function (PSF). By dithering to positions with fractional-pixel offsets, we are able to retrieve some of the lost information, eventually increasing the nominal resolution by a factor of $`\sqrt{2}`$, while preserving photometric integrity. procedure to reduce the images and remove cosmic rays (Fruchter & Mutchler 1998), employing the standard methodology and parameter values. We combined the resulting images into a master $`2048\times 2048`$ pixel image, oversampling the Planetary Camera (PC) pixels by a factor of two (changing the pixel scale from $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}046\text{ pixel}^1`$ to $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}023\text{ pixel}^1`$). We also applied geometric distortion corrections appropriate for each wavelength, so that the relative astrometry between detectors or in a given detector should be accurate. Typical stellar sources had a FWHM of $`2.8\text{ pixels}=0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}06`$, as expected from the telescope PSF.

### 3.2 Astrometry

We used the USNO-A2.0 catalog (Monet 1998) as our astrometric reference, fitting to the F547M images (which presented the best combination of signal to noise ratio and nebular rejection). While no USNO-A2.0 stars were visible on the PC image, we had many on the Wide Field (WF) images. Using twenty-four USNO-A2.0 stars, we computed a solution for a mosaiced image of all the WFPC2 detectors assembled with the task wmosaic. The wmosaic task corrects for geometric distortions and relative offsets between the different detectors, so using the mosaiced image to solve for stars on an individual detector should not have introduced significant errors. The solution has $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ rms residuals in each coordinate (comparable to the accuracy of the USNO-A2.0 positions; Monet 1998). We then identified fourteen fainter stars on the PC portion of the mosaiced image, determined their positions from the mosaic plate solution, and found the solution for the drizzled images ($`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}03`$ residuals for each coordinate), which we transferred to the other bands. The position for RX J052600.3$``$660433 (catalog ) \[determined by K00 to be $`\alpha (J2000)=05^\mathrm{h}26^\mathrm{m}00\stackrel{\mathrm{s}}{\mathrm{.}}819`$, $`\delta (J2000)=66\mathrm{deg}04\mathrm{min}36.48\mathrm{sec}`$\] was located on the drizzled images, yielding the position in Figure 1. The final intrinsic astrometric uncertainties are $`0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}4`$, and the CXO systematic uncertainties are $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}0`$ (based on other data, we believe $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}0`$ to be a conservative estimate for CXO; E. Schegel 2000, private communication). This gives $`1\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}1`$ for the overall 1 $`\sigma `$ uncertainty in each coordinate. From this we find the 90% confidence radius to be $`2\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$.

### 3.3 Photometry

The position of RX J052600.3$``$660433 (catalog ), as measured with CXO by K00, is on the PC detector, so we are only concerned with these data.

Once we had drizzled images for each filter, we performed aperture photometry on each object on the PC using the SExtractor photometry package (Bertin & Arnouts 1996). Using the F547M image as the reference, we measured the positions of $`220`$ stars on the PC. We then used this master list of sources to do photometry for all of the filters. Because of the large amount of nebulosity in the images, it is difficult to determine the background level accurately. We computed a background by gridding the image into $`32\times 32`$ pixel bins ($`=0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}7\times 0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}7`$), and then producing an average (after rejecting high pixels) for each one. We subtracted this smooth background, resulting in an image that does not contain most of the variations due to nebulosity. Next, a fitted elliptical profile was analyzed for each source. The magnitude was determined by fitting this profile out to a radius of $`2\times \text{FWHM}=0\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}12`$ (for stars) and integrating. We then applied two types of aperture-corrected magnitude estimates with SExtractor (“adaptive aperture” and “corrected isophotal” magnitudes) to compute the true magnitude.

Zero-point magnitudes in the STMAG system222All magnitudes are in the STMAG system, where $`m=21.12.5\mathrm{log}F_\lambda `$, with $`F_\lambda `$ in $`\text{ ergs s}^1\text{ cm}^1\text{ Å}^1`$. were calculated according to the WFPC2 manual333http://www.stsci.edu/instruments/wfpc2/Wfpc2\_phot/wfpc2\_cookbook.html, where the calibration parameters PHOTFLAM and PHOTZPT are taken from the image headers. The values we calculated are listed in Table 1. To convert the magnitudes to fluxes, we scale our count rates by the PHOTFLAM parameter, which is the flux of a source that produces $`1\text{ DN s}^1`$.

To determine limiting magnitudes, we empirically determined the point-spread functions (PSFs) of the different images for $`30`$ stars. We then used this PSF to add 50 simulated stars to the central part of the images. These stars were distributed in magnitude such that some were above and some below the detection limit. We performed photometry on these simulated stars, and define the limiting (3$`\sigma `$) magnitude to be where the measured magnitudes of the stars have errors $`0.3`$ mag, indicating that stars can no longer be accurately measured. These values have an intrinsic uncertainty of $`0.1`$ mag, and are reported in Table 1. We note that these values represent completeness limits for the region around SGR 0526$``$66 — individual stars can still be detected with fainter magnitudes, but no source was missed to the limits presented here.

## 4 Analysis

Our primary goal for these observations was to detect a counterpart to SGR 0526$``$66 or a cooling synchrotron nebula left by previous bursts (cf. the radio nebula from Frail, Kulkarni, & Bloom 1999) and confined by the hot gas in the interior of N49. We therefore examined all of the sources within the $`2\stackrel{}{\mathrm{.}}3`$ error circle that were not obviously part of the SNR. The images are shown in Figure 1. We present photometric data concerning the sources in the error circle in Table 2.

We compared the colors of these sources to those of the $`200`$ other sources detectable on the PC image. All but one of the nine candidate sources lie in the color-magnitude diagram formed by the field sources, as seen in Figure 2.

Seven (possibly eight) of the sources from Table 2 are generally consistent with main sequence G/K stars at the distance of the LMC, with reddening similar to that used here ($`E_{BV}0.3`$). Of the two that are not (F and possibly E), both have nebulosity leading to other parts of the SNR. We now examine these sources in detail. For source E we find $`M_{\mathrm{F380W}}6.2`$, $`M_{\mathrm{F547M}}5.4`$, and $`M_{\mathrm{F814W}}6.2`$. This may be consistent with a GV star (given reddening uncertainties), but the source has some surrounding nebulosity trailing to the South and West, in the direction of other filaments. We therefore believe that this is part of the SNR. For source F, we find $`M_{\mathrm{F300W}}4.1`$, $`M_{\mathrm{F380W}}5.0`$, and $`M_{\mathrm{F547M}}7.6`$, and a slightly extended morphology. This is not consistent with a main-sequence star. However, the source is extended towards the South thereby making the photometry suspect, and the source merges into the SNR nebulosity. In the F814W image F appears almost to have a bow-shock morphology, but this morphology changes so much in the other images that we believe it to be coincidence. We therefore conclude that F, like E, is part of the SNR. Narrowband imaging of the field could easily settle this matter, as source F would primarily emit in emission lines if it is part of the SNR.

## 5 Discussion

Using the optical data from this paper and the X-ray data from K00 we can plot the spectral energy distribution (SED) of SGR 0526$``$66. We find that any optical detections or upper limits severely constrain the spectrum below 0.5 keV (see Figure 3). The optical data given here demonstrate that the spectrum cannot continue to climb when going to lower frequencies, as it does in the X-rays ($`f_\nu \nu ^{2.24}`$ from 6.0 keV down to 0.5 keV; K00). It must therefore peak between the near UV and the hard UV/soft X-ray bands. The location of the peak depends on the form of the spectrum below the peak. Below we discuss several possibilities for the nature of SGR 0526$``$66, along with consequences for its optical emission.

### 5.1 An Isolated NS Accreting from a Disk

We modeled the emission from a fossil disk (Chatterjee et al. 2000; Marsden et al. 2001) surrounding a neutron star based on the work of Perna, Hernquist, & Narayan (2000) and Perna & Hernquist (2000). Our model accounts for both viscous dissipation (Shakura & Sunyaev 1973) and re-radiation of X-rays emitted by the central source (Vrtilek et al. 1990), and solves for the disk structure in a self-consistent manner. This is similar to the models used by Hulleman et al. (2000) and Hulleman, van Kerkwijk, & Kulkarni (2000), and is reasonably general. The major assumption is that the disks radiate like superpositions of many blackbodies. One might think that beaming could influence the results, but Perna & Hernquist (2000) found that beaming from a relativistic central object did little to change the observed spectrum.

The basic disk model (BD), plotted in Figures 3, 4, and 5, assumes $`L_X=1.2\times 10^{36}d_{50}^2\text{ ergs s}^1`$ (0.5–10 keV; K00), which agrees with the ROSAT determination (calculated using W3PIMMS444http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/Tools/w3pimms.html assuming $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=3.24`$ and $`N_H=8\times 10^{21}\text{ cm}^2`$). The inner radius is the corrotation radius $`R_{\mathrm{in}}=R_{\mathrm{co}}(GMP^2/4\pi ^2)^{1/3}=6.8\times 10^8`$ cm ($`M=1.4M_{\mathrm{}}`$, $`P=8.04`$ s), and the outer radius is $`5\times 10^{14}`$ cm (Perna & Hernquist 2000). We do not determine a value for the outer radius independently, but the results are insensitive to it as long as $`R_{\mathrm{out}}10^{13}`$ cm. We also consider an alternate model proposed by Perna & Hernquist (2000), where $`R_{\mathrm{in}}=10R_{\mathrm{mag}}`$, which we designate HD1 (hollow disk); here $`R_{\mathrm{mag}}`$ is the magnetetospheric radius defined as $`1/2`$ the Alvén radius $`R_\mathrm{A}\left(\sqrt{2GM}\dot{M}B^2R^6\right)^{2/7}`$, and $`B10^{13}`$ G is the magnetic field. As Figures 4 and 5 show, these models are very likely excluded for the sources in the error circle. The disk models are both significantly brighter ($`2`$ mag) than the stars and have the wrong colors. This result is not very sensitive to the value of the extinction, as our value is at the high end of reasonable values, and therefore the corrected stellar fluxes in Figure 5 would only decrease upon changing $`A_V`$. We therefore do not believe that any of the sources in Table 2 could be an accretion disk. Thus the optical counterpart to SGR 0526$``$66 must be fainter than the limits presented here.

In order to accommodate these optical limits for an accretion disk, we must modify either the inclination angle $`i`$, the outer radius $`R_{\mathrm{out}}`$, or the inner radius $`R_{\mathrm{in}}`$. For the first two parameters, acceptable values are $`R_{\mathrm{out}}5\times 10^9`$ cm for reasonable values of $`i`$ ($`i88\mathrm{deg}`$, at which point the central X-ray source would be hidden). We label disks with a truncated outer radius TD (truncated disk). The third parameter, $`R_{\mathrm{in}}`$, must increase by three orders of magnitude above the nominal value to $`10^3R_{\mathrm{mag}}10^{12}`$ cm (HD3 model). This limit needs justification — maintaining a disk with such an inner radius would be difficult. We plot these possible but unlikely disks that do satisfy our limits (by changing the parameters listed above) along with the X-ray spectrum in Figure 3.

While making $`R_{\mathrm{in}}`$ significantly greater than $`R_{\mathrm{co}}`$ or $`R_{\mathrm{mag}}`$ (in the HD3 model) seems contrived, altering $`i`$ or $`R_{\mathrm{out}}`$ are much less so. For most values of $`i`$ we need to truncate the disk at a radius of $`10^{10}`$ cm to accommodate our limits, similar to Hulleman et al. (2000), which as they note is difficult to produce but not unprecedented. It is not likely that such a truncated disk would be able to provide sufficient material to power the SGR for its lifetime. Even so, we examine the implications of the TD model.

As there have been no timing observations to constrain possible companions to SGR 0526$``$66, a companion could exist and provide an outer limit to the disk. The suggested 164 day periodicity (Rothschild & Lingenfelter 1984) in the bursts could be consistent with such a companion, but only if the eccentricity $`e`$ is $`>0.999`$, which seems unlikely.

We examine the possible masses and radii of such companions in the TD model. We do this by requiring $`R_{\mathrm{out}}10^{10}`$ cm, where we determined $`R_{\mathrm{out}}`$ as the distance from a $`1.44M_{\mathrm{}}`$ neutron star to the outermost stable orbit of a disk (assumed to be in the orbital plane) of pressureless particles (Paczynski 1977; Paczynski & Rudak 1980). This then gives a constraint on the companion radius $`R_2`$ by requiring that it not overflow its Roche lobe (with the Roche lobe radius determined using Eggleton 1983), as this would make the source a Low-Mass X-ray Binary (LMXB) with substantially different properties. For a white dwarf with $`R_{\mathrm{wd}}=7.2\times 10^8(M_2/M_{\mathrm{}})^{1/3}`$ cm ($`\mu _e=2`$), $`R_{\mathrm{wd}}<R_2`$ for all companion masses $`M_2`$ and such a source is acceptable. A main-sequence star with $`R_{\mathrm{ms}}/R_{\mathrm{}}=M_2/M_{\mathrm{}}`$, however, would overflow $`R_2`$ for all $`M_20.07M_{\mathrm{}}`$. The mass limit is even lower if the effects of irradiation on the companion’s radius (Podsiadlowski 1991) are taken into account. Also, main-sequence stars of type K or earlier (and hotter white dwarfs) are excluded photometrically. We therefore require a faint, compact companion: a planet, brown dwarf or cool white dwarf. However, producing a white dwarf in a very tight orbit around a $`10^4`$ yr old neutron star may be very difficult.

Thus the lack of an optical counterpart to SGR 0526$``$66 places strong new constraints on accretions disk models.

### 5.2 A Magnetar

There are no clear predictions for the optical appearance of magnetars, and so one of the stars in the error circle (Section 4) may be such a source. However, based on spin (Thompson & Duncan 1996) and spectral (K00) properties, we believe that the SGRs and AXPs share a common origin. If this is the case, we can use optical data concerning AXPs (Hulleman et al. 2000, 2000) along with the stellar appearances of sources A–I to exclude them from consideration as counterparts to SGR 0526$``$66. We therefore conclude that SGR 0526$``$66 has not been detected. This gives an unabsorbed X-ray to optical flux ratio $`f_\mathrm{X}/f_V3.5\times 10^3`$ (where $`f_\mathrm{X}`$ is the integrated X-ray flux and $`f_V\nu _Vf_{\nu ,V}`$). This ratio is extremely high — almost all neutron stars have lower ratios (Hulleman et al. 2000). We must account for this in our models for SGR 0526$``$66.

A continuation of the possible blackbody emission found in the X-ray spectrum by K00 would be extremely faint in the optical, and could satisfy our limits (see Figure 3). However, given the nonthermal optical emission from radio pulsars as well as the emission from 4U 0142$`+`$61 (catalog ) (Hulleman et al. 2000), we believe that the emission from SGR 0526$``$66 would arise from another process.

We neither know nor can predict the details of this process, but we examine the emission heuristically to derive its basic properties. A continuation of the X-ray power-law is impossible. In general, a broken power-law is the simplest parameterization of the spectrum, with both the peak location and index below the peak as yet undetermined. Simple choices for the index would be 2 (thermal emission) or 2.5 (self-absorbed synchrotron emission), although most indices are possible. Hulleman et al. (2000) suggest that the optical emission for 4U 0142$`+`$61 (catalog ) follows a power-law $`f_\nu \nu ^\alpha `$, with $`\alpha 2`$. This provides the motivation for the lines drawn on the SED in Figure 3 extending from the optical and meeting the X-ray spectrum in the hard-UV/soft X-ray. The lowest spectral index for a power-law could be 1.6, which is when the spectrum peaks just at the lower limit of the CXO data (0.5 keV; K00), but this seems artificial.

At the other extreme, if the power-law has $`\alpha 2`$, this would lead to the overall SED having a peak at $`30`$ nm and a luminosity of $`10^{37}\text{ ergs s}^1`$, or 10 times that inferred from X-ray observations alone (K00; this also ignores particle and the likely extremely luminous neutrino emission). Such a luminosity requires that we supply even more energy to the source during quiescence, further constraining the energetics and leading to $`B10^{16}`$ G (as noted by K00), assuming that the source persists for $`10^4`$ yr (suggested by the estimated age of the supernova remnant and and the spin-down timescales of other SGRs; also see Colpi, Geppert, & Page 2000) and that the magnetic field is the primary energy supplier. This is truly a magnetar-like field! The actual case is most likely between the two curves on Figure 3, with a more gentle peak giving a more relaxed energy requirement, but one that still implies $`B10^{15}`$ G.

Such large fields may not be consistent with the association of the SGR with N49, which has an age in the range $`516`$ kyr (Vancura et al. 1992; Shull 1983). Calculations for AXPs (Colpi et al. 2000) indicate that a magnetar with an initial dipolar field of $`B>10^{15}`$ G would spin-down to the present day SGR spin period in only $``$1000 yr, and increasing the field only makes the situation worse. However, for SGR 0526$``$66 these calculations are a simplification. The large ($`10^{13}`$ G) magnetic field would likely be tangled and exist close to the surface (K00); this would then still dominate the energetics and produce crust stress but not the spin-down (which also must incorporate winds; Thompson et al. 2000; Harding, Contopoulos, & Kazanas 1999). Alternatively, the SGR 0526$``$66/N49 association could be false, as has recently been found for other SGR/SNR associations (Hurley et al. 1999b; Xilouris et al. 1998; Lorimer & Xilouris 2000). K00 found that SGR 0526$``$66 and N49 had the same value for $`N_H`$, but they see no sign of interaction in X-rays and the projected position of SGR 0526$``$66 is near the edge of N49. SGR 0526$``$66 could merely be associated with nearby star formation that led to a massive cluster (like those for SGR 1900$`+`$14 and SGR 1806$``$20; Fuchs et al. 1999; Vrba et al. 2000; Mirabel, Fuchs, & Chaty 2000), which could have produced the N49 progenitor as well. A non-association could then allow the age of SGR 0526$``$66 to come closer to $`10^3`$ yr, with a consequent reduction of $`B`$ by a factor of $`3`$. Either way, the energetic requirements of the SGR 0526$``$66 SED provide a strong constraint on the magnetar model and formation scenario for this source.

Motivated by the detection of optical emission from an AXP (Hulleman et al. 2000), we examine whether it is likely that we could detect SGR 0526$``$66. Using the same X-ray to optical flux ratio as that for 4U 0142$`+`$61 (catalog ) ($`7.1\times 10^3`$; Hulleman et al. 2000), we estimate $`R27.2`$ (see Figure 3), beyond current limits but within the range of HST.

## 6 Conclusions

We have obtained deep HST images of the field containing SGR 0526$``$66. There does not appear to be a point-like optical counterpart consistent with either the colors or magnitudes of the disks described by Chatterjee et al. (2000). Assuming a non-detection, optical limits place strong new constraints on both accretion disks and magnetars as the source of the X-ray luminosity and spindown. Independent of the source’s nature, however, if SGRs and AXPs are related, we might expect $`R27.2`$ for SGR 0526$``$66, based on the optical to X-ray flux ratio of the one identified AXP.

This work is based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. under NASA contract No. NAS5-26555. We would like to thank A. Shapley for her assistance with the HST data reduction, and R. Perna and P. Goldreich for valuable discussions. DLK is supported by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, MHvK by a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and SRK by NSF and NASA. DLK and MHvK thank the ITP at Santa Barbara, where part of the work presented here was done, for hospitality. The ITP is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY99-07949.