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# A Machine-Learning Approach to Estimating the Referential Properties of Japanese Noun Phrases

## 1 Introduction

To estimate the referential property of a noun phrase (NP) in the Japanese language, which does not have any articles, is one of the most difficult problems in natural language processing . The referential property of a noun phrase represents how the noun phrase denotes the referent and is classified into the following three types:

* An indefinite NP — denotes an arbitrary member of the class of the noun phrase.

(Ex.) There are three dogs.
* A definite NP — denotes a contextually non-ambiguous member of the class of the noun phrase.

(Ex.) The dog went away.
* A generic NP — denotes all members of the class of the noun phrase or the class itself of the noun phrase.

(Ex.) Dogs are useful.

Note that “dogs” in this sentence denotes general dogs and are classified generic.

Estimating the referential properties of noun phrases in Japanese sentences is useful for (i) generating articles when translating Japanese nouns into English and (ii) estimating the referents of noun phrases.

* Article generation in machine translation

In the process of generating articles, when a noun phrase is estimated to be indefinite, it is given the indefinite article, “a/an”, when it is singular, but is given no article when it is plural. When a noun phrase is estimated to be definite, it is given the definite article, “the”. When a noun phrase is estimated to be generic, usage in terms of articles is generated by a method used for generic noun phrases (a generic noun phrase can be given a definite or an indefinite article or no article, and may also be in the plural form.)111 Bond et al. have actually used the referential properties of noun phrases in generating articles . For example, hon (book) in the following sentence is a generic noun phrase.

hon-toiunowa ningen-no seichou-ni kakasemasen  (book) (human being) (growth) (be necessary)  (Books are necessary for the growth of a human being.)    (1)
So it can be translated as “a book,” “books,” or “the book” in English. Note that in the following sentence, hon (book) is a definite noun phrase.

kinou boku-ga kashita hon-wa yomimashitaka  (yesterday) (I) (lend) (book) (read)  (Did you read the book I lent you yesterday?)    (2)
It can thus be translated as “the book” in English.
* Anaphora resolution

Only a definite noun phrase can refer to a previous noun phrase and this is very useful in anaphora resolution . For example, in the following example, hon (book) in the second sentence is a generic noun phrase, so it cannot be referring to hon (book) in the first sentence.

hon-wo omiyage-ni kaimashita.  (book) (as a present) (buy)  (I bought books as a present.)      hon-toiunowa ningen-no seichou-ni kakasemasen  (book) (human being) (growth) (be necessary)  (Books are necessary for the growth of a human being.)    (3)

As in the above explanation, the referential properties of noun phrases, i.e., generic, definite, and indefinite, are useful for article generation and anaphora resolution, and estimating them is a serious problem in natural language processing.

In the conventional estimation of referential properties , heuristic rules (made by hand) using surface clue words are used for estimation. For example, in sentence (1) above the referential property is estimated to be generic by using a Japanese clue word toiu-nowa; in sentence (2), the referential property of a noun phrase, hon (book), is estimated to be definite since the noun phrase is modified by an embedded sentence, kinou boku ga kashita (I lent you yesterday). In their work, 86 heuristic rules were created. When plural rules conflicted and the rule used in estimation was ambiguous, the conflict was solved by using the scores given in the rules. These scores needed to be adjusted by hand in order to properly resolve conflicts.

In the current work, to reduce human costs of previous research, we have used a machine-learning method to automatically adjust these rules. We selected the maximum entropy method (which is robust for sparse data problems) as the machine-learning method.

## 2 How to estimate referential property

### 2.1 Method used in previous research

The previous research gave each referential property two evaluation values, possibility and value, by using heuristic rules and estimated the referential property according to these values. Here, possibility is logically conjuncted and value is added. As a result, the referential property whose possibility is 1 and whose value is maximum is estimated to be the desired one.

Heuristic rules are given in the following forms:

(condition for rule application)
$``$ { indefinite (possibility, value)
definite (possibility, value)
generic (possibility, value) }

A surface expression, which contains a clue word for estimating the referential property, is written in condition for rule application. Possibility has a value of 1 when the categories indefinite, definite and generic are possible in the context checked by the condition. Otherwise, the possibility value is 0. Value means that a relative possibility value between 1 and 10 (an integer) is given according to the plausibility of the condition that the possibility is 1. A larger value means the plausibility is high.

Several rules can be applicable to a specific noun in a sentence. In this case, the possibility values for the individual categories are added, and the category for the noun is decided as the category with the highest sum of possibility values.

86 rules were created. Some of the rules are given below.

1. When a noun is modified by a referential pronoun, kono (this), sono (its), etc., then {indefinite (0, 0)222 (a, b) means possibility (a) and value (b).  definite (1, 2) generic (0, 0)}
kono hon-wa omoshiroi.  (this) (book) (interesting)  (This book is interesting.)
2. When a noun is accompanied by a particle, wa, and the predicate is in the past tense, then {indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 3) generic (1, 1)}
inu-wa mukou-he itta.  (dog) (away there) (went)  (The dog went away.)
3. When a noun is accompanied by a particle, wa, and the predicate is in the present tense, then {indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 2) generic (1, 3)}
inu-wa yakunitatsu doubutsu desu.  (dog) (useful) (animal) (is)  (Dogs are useful animals.)

When there are no clues, “indefinite” is assigned as the default value.

Let us look at an example of a noun to which several rules apply, kudamono (fruit) as used in the following sentence.

| wareware-ga | kinou | tsumitotta | kudamono-wa | aji-ga | iidesu. |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| (we) | (yesterday) | (picked) | (fruit) | (taste) | (be good) |
| (The fruit that we picked yesterday tastes delicious.) | | | | | |

(4)
All the rules were applied and the condition only satisfied the following seven rules which were then used to determine the degree of the definiteness of the noun.

* When a noun is accompanied by wa, and the corresponding predicate is not in the past tense
(kudamono-wa aji-ga iidesu), then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 2) generic (1, 3)}
* When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which is in the past tense (tsumitotta),
then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 0)}
* When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which has a definite noun accompanied by wa or ga (wareware-ga), then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 0)}
* When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which has a definite noun accompanied by a particle (wareware-ga), then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 0)}
* When a noun is modified by a phrase which has a pronoun (wareware-ga), then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 0)}
* When a noun has an adjective as its predicate (kudamono-wa azi-ga iidesu), then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 3) generic (1, 4)}
* When a noun is a common noun (kudamono),
then
{indefinite (1, 1) definite (1, 0) generic (1, 0)}

By using the scores from these rules, total possibilities and values were calculated. The overall possibilities for all three categories were 1 because all three categories carried possibilities of 1 for all of these rules. The total values for all three categories were 1, 9, and 7, respectively, because the results of aggregating the values of all of these rules were 1 ($`=0+0+0+0+0+0+1`$), 9 ($`=2+1+1+1+1+3+0`$), and 7 ($`=3+0+0+0+0+4+0`$), for the respective categories. A final score of {indefinite (1, 1) definite (1, 9) generic (1, 7)} was obtained, and the system judged, correctly, that the noun here is “definite.”

Each noun, from left to right, in the sentence was estimated according to (a) - (g) above. This process allows the decision process to make use of referential properties that has already been determined (see (c) and (d), for example).

In the method used in the previous work possibility and value had to be adjusted in order to estimate referential properties properly, and this required much work by human. Although gathering the clue words by hand might be effective, possibility and value can be adjusted by a certain machine-learning method. In this paper, we report on our use of the machine-learning method described in the next section. to verify this possibility,

### 2.2 The machine-learning method

A machine-learning method was applied to the estimation of referential properties. We used the maximum entropy method as a machine-learning method, which is robust against data sparseness, because it is difficult to make a large corpus tagged with referential properties. By defining a set of features in advance, the maximum entropy method estimates the conditional probability of each category in a certain situation of the features, and it is called the maximum entropy method since it maximizes entropy when estimating a probability. The process of maximizing entropy can make the probabilistic model uniform, and this effect is the reason that the maximum entropy method is robust against data sparseness. We used Ristad’s system  as the maximum entropy method. The three probabilities, generic, definite, or indefinite, are calculated from the output of Ristad’s system. The category having the maximum probability is judged to be the desired one.

To use the maximum entropy method, we must choose the features used in learning. We used the conditions of the 86 rules that had been used in the previous work. 86 features are thus used in learning.

If we use, for example, rules 1, 2, and 3 as described in Sec. 2.1, only condition parts are detected and the following three features are obtained.

1. Whether or not a noun is modified by a referential pronoun, kono (this), sono (its), etc.
2. Whether or not a noun is accompanied by a particle wa, and the predicate is in the past tense.
3. Whether or not a noun is accompanied by a particle wa, and the predicate is in the present tense.

Now, we use the last example from the previous section to explain how the referential property is estimated by the maximum entropy method.

| wareware-ga | kinou | tsumitotta | kudamono-wa | aji-ga | iidesu. |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| (we) | (yesterday) | (picked) | (fruit) | (taste) | (be good) |
| (The fruit that we picked yesterday tastes delicious.) | | | | | |

(5)
We again look at kudamono (fruit). The same seven rules are again applied. The value assigned to each of the referential properties for each rule indicates the conditional probability of that category being correct when only that rule is applied and they are calculated by the maximum entropy method. The values written here were obtained in our experiment of “Machine-Learning 2” described in Sec. 3.

* When a noun is accompanied by wa and the corresponding predicate is not in the past tense,
(kudamono-wa aji-ga iidesu), then
{indefinite 0.31 definite 0.29 generic 0.40}
* When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which is in the past tense (tsumitotta),
then
{indefinite 0.31 definite 0.49 generic 0.19}
* When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which has a definite noun accompanied by wa or ga (wareware-ga), then
{indefinite 0.19 definite 0.61 generic 0.19}
* When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which has a definite noun accompanied by a particle (wareware-ga), then
{indefinite 0.01 definite 0.80 generic 0.18}
* When a noun is modified by a phrase which has a pronoun (wareware-ga), then
{indefinite 0.20 definite 0.44 generic 0.37}
* When a noun has an adjective as its predicate (kudamono-wa azi-ga iidesu), then
{indefinite 0.13 definite 0.80 generic 0.07}
* When a noun is a common noun (kudamono),
then
{indefinite 0.72 definite 0.15 generic 0.14}

In the maximum entropy method the values assigned by the above rules are multiplied, the values in each category are normalized, and the category with the highest value is judged to be the desired one. In this case, we multiplied and normalized the values of all the rules and obtained the following results:
{indefinite 0.001, definite 0.996, generic 0.002}
“Definite” had the highest value and was thus judged to be the desired category.

## 3 Experiment and Discussion

Morphological and syntactic information are used as features in estimating referential properties. Before estimating the referential property, morphology and syntax were analyzed . We used the same learning set and test set as had been used in previous work.333The learning set: “Usage of the English Articles”, a folktale “The Old Man with a Wen” , and an essay tensei jingo. The test set: a folktale turu no ongaeshi , an essay tensei jingo, “Pacific Asia in the Post-Cold-War World” (A Quarterly Publication of The International House of Japan Vol. 12, No. 2 Spring 1992). The 86 rules had been made by examining the learning set by hand. In the previous work, the values written in the 86 rules had been adjusted by checking the accuracy rates in the learning set.

Firstly, we carried out the following two experiments.

* Manual Adjustment — The estimation was made by using the method described in Sec 2.1. (This result is identical to the result of the previous work.)
* Machine-Learning 1 — The estimation was made by using the method described in Sec 2.2.

The results are listed in Tables 1 to 4. “Other” in the tables indicates that the referential property is ambiguous; such cases can be neglected here since they were few.

The accuracy rate obtained by Manual Adjustment (Table 2) in the test set was 68.9% and that of Machine-Learning 1 (Table 4) was 72.1%. The machine-learning method was thus more accurate than Manual Adjustment method. But, as can be seen in Tables 2 and 4, all the categories of Manual Adjustment are about 70% and the method did not have a bad-accuracy category. However, the result from Machine-Learning 1 of the “generic” category was low (5.2%). We cannot therefore conclude that Machine-Learning 1 reliably gives good results444Here, we assume that not producing a bad-accuracy category was more important than having the highest total accuracy rate. We then constructed Method 2 as described in the following passages. However, if we assume that having the highest total accuracy rate is more important than not producing a bad-accuracy category, Method 1 is, in fact, better..

We felt that the reason for this low accuracy in estimating the “generic” category is that the frequency of “generic” terms is low and machine learning is biased toward “definite” terms, which have higher frequency than “generic” terms. We therefore carried out the following further experiments.

* Machine-Learning 2 — When machine learning is performed by using the maximum entropy method, the number of events in each category of the learning set is multiplied by the inverse of its occurrence. For example, in this paper, we multiplied 4, 2, and 9 by the frequencies of “indefinite,” “definite,” and “generic.”

In other words, since generic noun phrases only made up $`2/9`$ of definite noun phrases, we changed the frequencies of data as if definite noun phrases had occurred twice as often as in the actual data and generic noun phrases had occurred nine times more often than in the actual data. We found that this change made the frequencies of the three referential properties uniform and did not bias the analysis towards definite noun phrases. The change produced the following result. Machine-Learning 1 applies a general method of learning and learns data in order to maximize the following equation.

evaluation function = \[% of correct in overall the data\] (6)
On the other hand, Machine-Learning 2 uses the frequencies of the referential properties and learns data in order to maximize the following equation.

| evaluation function | |
| --- | --- |
| = | the average of |
|  | \[% of correct in “indefinite”\], |
|  | \[% of correct in “definite”\] and |
|  | \[% of correct in “generic”\] |

(7)
The results for Machine-Learning 2 are listed in Tables 5 and 6.

The accuracy rate of Machine-Learning 2 on the test set was 69.1%. This is nearly equal to the 68.9% obtained by using the Manual Adjustment. It was found that the accuracy rates for all three referential properties were about 70%. Since even for the worst category, “generic,” 63.8% was achieved, it is clear that Machine-Learning 2 was able to quite precisely estimate the referential properties.

As the above results show, we found that manual adjustment for estimating referential properties was not necessary and therefore human costs were decreased.

We also examined the values of the rules as given by the maximum entropy method used in Machine-Learning 2. We examine some of the rules as listed below. In each of the rules in the list, (i) the condition parts, (ii) values assigned by hand, and (iii) values assigned by Machine learning 2 are included.

1. Rules for indefinite noun phrases

(a) When a noun is accompanied by a particle, ga (new-topic marker), then
{indefinite (1, 2) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 0)}
{indefinite 0.62, definite 0.21, generic 0.17}

In general, a noun accompanied by a particle, ga, one function of which is to indicate a new topic, roughly tends to be indefinite. The highest value is thus assigned to “indefinite” when manual adjustment is used. The value of “indefinite” as determined by Machine-Learning 2 is also the highest. In manual adjustment, the possibilities of all categories are set to 1, so any of the three categories can be the answer. In Machine-Learning 2, since the value of “indefinite” is not terribly high, (not, e.g., 0.99), any of the three categories can also be the answer.

(b) When a noun is modified by an adjective aru (a certain $``$), then
{indefinite (1, 2) definite (0, 0) generic (0, 0)}
{indefinite 0.99, definite 0.0001, generic 0.0001}

Generally, a noun modified by aru (a certain $``$) is indefinite. The values for possibility of the other categories are thus set to 0 in manual adjustment. The values used in Machine-Learning 2 are 0.0001, which is also a very small value. The value of “indefinite” is extremely high in Machine-Learning 2. We find that Machine-Learning 2 can judge that the category of a noun modified by aru is almost certainly indefinite.
2. Rules for definite noun phrases

(a)When a noun is a pronoun, then
{indefinite (0, 0) definite (1, 2) generic (0, 0)}
{indefinite 0.005, definite 0.99, generic 0.005}

When a noun is a pronoun, it is always definite, so the values of possibility of the other categories are manually set to 0. The values assigned to the other categories by Machine-Learning 2 are also very small.

(b) When a noun is modified by an embedded sentence which has a definite noun accompanied by wa or ga (nominative-case particle), then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 0)}
{indefinite 0.19, definite 0.61, generic 0.19}

Although such a noun is not always definite, it is likely to be definite. The value of “definite” in Machine-Learning 2 is the highest of the three, but is not extremely high.
3. Rules for generic noun phrases

(a) When a noun is followed by a particle wa, which does not have a modifier, then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 1) generic (1, 1)}
{indefinite 0.03, definite 0.26, generic 0.71}

The particle wa, which is a topic marker, is an expression which is likely to accompany either a definite noun phrase or a generic noun phrase. The possibility values of the two categories are both set to 1 by Manual Adjustment. Machine-Learning 2 found that the values assigned to “definite” and “generic” are higher than that assigned to “indefinite,” but “generic” is assigned a higher value than “definite.” This is because there are many rules for estimating that a noun phrase is “definite,” so a word can be estimated as “generic” if no other clue words appear.

(b) When a noun is followed by a particle wa and it modifies an adjective, then
{indefinite (1, 0) definite (1, 3) generic (1, 4)}
{indefinite 0.13, definite 0.80, generic 0.07}

Although “generic” is assigned the highest value by Manual Adjustment, “definite” is assigned the highest value by Machine-Learning 2. This is because of (i) a wrong estimate by Machine-Learning 2 due to a small learning set, (ii) the influence of other rules, such as the previous rule, or (iii) incorrect manual adjustment in the earlier work. If the actual reason is (i), then making the learning set larger should improve the results.

As stated above, the values assigned by Machine-Learning 2 tended to be similar to those obtained by hand, and they demonstrated some degree of linguistic intuition.

## 4 Conclusions

We have succeeded in creating a system for automatically giving rules values for solving conflicts when estimating the referential properties of noun phrases. We have thus shown that the cost in terms of human time of manually adjusting values is not unavoidable. We also found that, in machine learning, making the frequencies of the categories uniform can help to make their accuracy rates more uniform. Finally, we examined the values produced for rules by applying the Machine-Learning method, and confirmed that they were consistent with linguistic intuition.


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# The Probability Distribution Function of Column Density in Molecular Clouds

## 1 Introduction

In recent years, several studies of the probability density function111The PDF is frequently also referred to, in loose form, as the probability distribution function. Note also that the PDF is a one-point statistic and contains no spatial information, contrary to the case of, say, the correlation function, which is a two-point statistic, and from which the PDF is an independent quantity. (PDF) of the density field in numerical simulations of compressible turbulent flows have been advanced as a first step in its full statistical characterization. These studies have shown that the density PDF depends on the effective polytropic exponent $`\gamma `$ of the fluid, defined by the expression $`P\rho ^\gamma `$, where $`P`$ is the pressure and $`\rho `$ is the gas density. Specifically, for isothermal flows ($`\gamma =1`$), the PDF is lognormal (Vázquez-Semadeni 1994; Padoan, Nordlund & Jones 1997; Passot & Vázquez-Semadeni 1998; Scalo et al. 1998; Ostriker, Gammie & Stone 1999; Ostriker, Stone & Gammie 2000), while Passot & Vázquez-Semadeni (1998) noted that, for $`\gamma <1`$ (resp. $`\gamma >1`$), the PDF develops a power-law tail at high (resp. low) densities (see also Scalo et al. 1998, Nordlund & Padoan 1999, and the review by Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 2000). Additionally, Gotoh & Kraichnan (1993) have reported a power-law tail at high densities for Burgers flows, and Porter, Pouquet & Woodward (1991) have reported an exponential behavior for adiabatic flows. Passot & Vázquez-Semadeni (1998) explained the lognormal PDF for isothermal flows as a consequence of the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) acting on the distribution of the logarithm of the density field. They assumed that a given density distribution is arrived at by a succession of multiplicative density jumps, which are therefore additive in the logarithm. Since for an isothermal flow the speed of sound is spatially uniform, the density jump expected from a shock of a given strength is independent of the local density, and thus all density jumps can be assumed to follow the same distribution (determined by the distribution of Mach numbers, as studied, for example, by Smith, Mac Low & Zuev 2000 and Smith, Mac Low & Heitsch 2000). Finally, at a given position in space, each density jump is independent of the previous and following ones. Therefore, the CLT, according to which the distribution of the sum of identically-distributed, independent events approaches a Gaussian, can be applied to the logarithm of the density, and the density itself is expected to possess a lognormal PDF.

However, the observationally accessible quantity is not the PDF of the mass (or “volume”) density, but rather that of the column density, i.e., the integral (or sum, for a discrete spatial grid) of the density along one spatial dimension (the “line of sight”, or LOS). Recently, Padoan et al. (2000) and Ostriker et al. (2000, hereafter OSG01) have also discussed this PDF in three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulations of isothermal compressible MHD turbulence with resolutions up to $`256^3`$ zones. In particular, OSG01 have found that the column density distribution has essentially the same shape as that of the underlying density field (a lognormal for isothermal gas), although with smaller mean and width. This result is puzzling because, according to the CLT, the PDF of column density should approach a Gaussian shape, the column density being proportional to the mean density along the LOS. OSG01 attributed the apparent inapplicability of the CLT to the possible presence of intermediate-sized structures in the density field that invalidate the requirement of statistical independence of the individual zones needed for the CLT.

In this paper we suggest that density “events” along the LOS can be regarded as independent if they are separated by distances larger than some “decorrelation length”, over which the density autocorrelation function (ACF) has decayed by a large enough factor (we use a factor of 10). If the column length is significantly larger than this, then convergence to a Gaussian might be expected. For 3D numerical simulations of magnetic and non-magnetic, isothermal turbulence forced at intermediate-to-large scales (1/4 of the box size), we find that the ACF drops to the 10% level at relatively short separations ($`15`$% of the box size). Using random realizations of 3D lognormal fields, we show that this convergence is nevertheless very slow because of the large skewness (asymmetry) and kurtosis (wing excess) of the lognormal density PDF. Then we discuss in a speculative way the factors that may determine the shape of the density ACF in molecular clouds, and suggest that its characteristic length may be inferred observationally. In §2 we describe the numerical data we use, both from simulations of isothermal compressible turbulence and from random realizations of lognormal fields. In §3 we discuss the ACFs and PDFs of the projected density fields and, in particular, the LOS lengths required for convergence to a Gaussian. In §4 we discuss the PDF width in simulations and observations, the case of non-isothermal gas, the dependence of the correlation length on physical parameters of the turbulence, and some caveats. Finally, in §5 we summarize our results.

## 2 Numerical data

We use two different sets of data for our analysis. The first comprises two numerical simulations of forced, compressible, isothermal, 3D turbulence, performed at a resolution of $`100^3`$ grid points, one non-magnetic and one magnetic. The numerical method is pseudospectral with periodic boundary conditions, employing a combination of eighth-order hyperviscosity and second-order viscosity which allows larger turbulent inertial ranges than can be attained with second-order viscosity only. A second-order mass diffusion operator is included as well. We refer the reader to Passot, Vázquez-Semadeni & Pouquet (1995) and Vázquez-Semadeni, Passot & Pouquet (1996) for details. Here we just mention that for both runs the forcing rises as $`k^4`$ for $`2k4`$, and decays as $`k^4`$ for $`4<k15`$, where $`k`$ is the wavenumber. For the non-magnetic run the forcing is 100% compressible and has an amplitude of 25 in code units; the hyperviscosity coefficient $`\nu `$ is $`8\times 10^{11}`$, the second-order coefficient $`\mu `$ is $`3.56\times 10^3`$, and the mass diffusion coefficient $`\mu _\rho `$ is $`0.02`$. The sound speed is $`c=0.5u_0`$, where $`u_0`$ is the velocity unit. The Mach number has an rms value $`1`$, with maximum excursions up to $`3.5`$. For the magnetic run the forcing also peaks at $`k=4`$, but is 50% compressible, and has an amplitude of 7.5 in code units; the diffusive coefficients are $`\nu =2\times 10^{11}`$, $`\mu =3.5\times 10^3`$, and $`\mu _\rho =0.03`$. The sound speed is $`c=0.2u_0`$, giving an rms Mach number $`2.5`$. A uniform magnetic field is placed initially along the $`x`$ direction, giving a $`\beta `$ parameter, defined as the ratio of the mean thermal to magnetic pressures, equal to 0.04, and an rms Alfvénic Mach number $`0.5`$. We have chosen this rather strongly magnetized case in order to bring out the effects of the magnetic field clearly. The differences between the two simulations are due to the fact that the magnetic simulation was not originally intended for the present study, but we do not believe this is a concern for our purposes. Our simulations are only mildly supersonic because of limitations of both the numerical scheme and the computational resources available to us, which constrain the resolution to the value mentioned above.

Since at $`100^3`$ a projection along one axis gives a square of only $`100^2`$ points, column density PDFs for one single temporal snapshot contain only 10,000 data points, giving relatively poor statistics. We thus take advantage of the fact that the simulations are statistically stationary (although the maximum density contrast and rms Mach number do fluctuate by about 50% in time), and choose to combine several density snapshots to produce a single column density histogram. Specifically, for the non-magnetic run we use 19 subsequent snapshots, spaced an amount $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=0.1`$ code time units ($`1.6\times 10^2`$ large-scale turbulent crossing times at the rms speed). For the magnetic run we use 18 snapshots, spaced an amount $`\mathrm{\Delta }t=0.2`$ code units ($`3.2\times 10^2`$ large-scale turbulent crossing times).

In order to overcome the limitations of the numerical simulations, we consider a second set of data, consisting of simple realizations of random fields with lognormal PDFs, obtained by generating random numbers $`X_i`$ with a standard Gaussian distribution (zero mean and unit variance) and defining a new random variable $`\rho _i=e^{bX_i}`$, where $`b`$ is a parameter that controls the width of the lognormal distribution. We use sequences of these “density” values to fill “cubes” (actually parallelepipeds) with fixed “plane of the sky” (POS) dimensions $`\mathrm{\Delta }x`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }y`$, and “LOS” lengths $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ ranging from a few tens of grid cells to a few thousands.

It is important to note that we have two different sets of “samples” in this problem: one is the set of points along the LOS, whose number is given by $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ (for simplicity, $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ is measured in grid cells, so that it is numerically equal to the number of contributing cells). The density is effectivelyaveraged along the LOS. The other sample is the set of lines of sight in the POS, whose number is given by the product $`\mathrm{\Delta }x\mathrm{\Delta }y`$. This equals the number of data points in the column density PDFs. We emphasize that the number of points in a PDF is completely independent of the LOS length $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$, so that we can have PDFs with the same number of data points, but with different values of $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$. Increasing the number of points in the POS allows us to improve the “signal-to-noise” ratio for the PDF, especially at the wings. However, the functional shape of the PDF is expected to depend only on the number of points in the LOS. Indeed, the column density is equivalent to the sample mean (along the LOS) in sampling theory, and it is well known that the statistics of the sample mean depend on the sample size (again, the sample along the LOS). In other words, the column density PDFs are histograms of the sample means, of which there is one for each LOS.

To improve the PDF signal-to-noise ratio, we consider many parallelepipeds (actually, 50 in all cases, each with $`\mathrm{\Delta }x=\mathrm{\Delta }y=50`$) for each set of parameters ($`b,\mathrm{\Delta }z`$), although this is exactly equivalent to having a single larger parallelepiped with 125,000 data points in the “plane of the sky”, due to the statistical independence of the data, and we only keep track of the individual parallelepipeds for analogy with the procedure of combining several temporal snapshots used in the case of the numerical simulations. But in practice, the only relevant datum in this sense is how many data points does each PDF contain, the projected “shape” of the parallelepiped on the POS being completely irrelevant (for example, it may be a square, or a straight line). Thus, the total number of grid cells in the larger parallelepipeds (i.e., their total volume), is 125,000$`\times \mathrm{\Delta }z`$. We consider two subsets of data, obtained from using two different values of $`b`$, namely $`b=1`$ and $`b=1.5`$.

For both the simulation and the random data sets, we first normalize the lognormal density data as required by the CLT, by defining a new variable $`\rho _i^{}(\rho _i\rho )/\sigma _\rho `$, where $`\rho `$ is the mean density, $`\sigma _\rho `$ is the standard deviation, and $`i`$ counts pixel position along the LOS. For the random data, the mean and variance of the $`\rho `$ distribution are related to those of the Gaussian variable $`X`$ by $`\rho =\mathrm{exp}(X+\sigma _X^2/2)`$ and $`\sigma _\rho ^2=\left[\mathrm{exp}(\sigma _X^2)1\right]\mathrm{exp}(2X+\sigma _X^2)`$ (see, e.g., Peebles 1987, app. F). For the simulation data, the mean density is 1, but $`\sigma _\rho `$ is not known a priori, and attempting to measure it gives large errors both because of the relatively high frequency of high-density events and because it is not constant over time. We find empirically that the necessary values of $`\sigma _\rho `$ to bring the column density to near unit variance (see below) are approximately 2 and 3 for the non-magnetic and magnetic runs, respectively.

We then project (sum) the normalized density along the $`z`$-axis to obtain its associated normalized (i.e., of zero-mean and unit-variance) “column density” $`\zeta `$, defined by (Peebles 1987, sec. 4.7)

$$\zeta \frac{_i\rho _i^{}}{\sqrt{\mathrm{\Delta }z}},$$
(1)
where the sum extends over all grid cells along the LOS. In the next section we discuss the PDFs of $`\zeta `$. Figure 1 shows the underlying density PDFs for the numerical simulation data (left) and for the random lognormal data (right) before normalization. The density fields are seen to be exactly lognormal in the case of the random data, and approximately so in the simulation data. The PDF of the non-magnetic simulation exhibits an excess at small densities but, since we will be focusing mostly on the high-density side, and our main conclusions will be drawn from the random data, we do not consider this excess to be a problem. Note also that the non-magnetic run has a wider density PDF even though it has a smaller mean Mach number than its magnetic counterpart. This is probably due to the fact that in the latter the forcing is only 50% compressible, and of smaller amplitude. The density PDFs for the random data are seen to span dynamic ranges of $`10^4`$ and $`10^6`$ for $`b=1`$ and $`b=1.5`$ respectively.

## 3 The ACFs and column density PDFs

Figure 2 shows, in log-$`y`$, lin-$`x`$ form, the time-integrated (i.e., adding several temporal snapshots into the same histogram) normalized-column density ($`\zeta `$) PDFs for the magnetic and non-magnetic numerical simulations. In this graph format, a Gaussian is a parabola, and an exponential is a straight line. In the two runs, a nearly exponential decay is apparent at moderately high $`\zeta `$, although the very-large-$`\zeta `$ tail clearly exhibits an excess from this trend in the non-magnetic case and a defect in the magnetic one. This may be an effect of the less extended underlying density PDF in the magnetic case. As already pointed out by OSG01 with respect to their nearly lognormal column density PDFs, these results are puzzling: one would expect the $`\zeta `$-PDF to be Gaussian, as the column density is essentially a sum (or equivalently, an average) of the density events along each LOS, whose distribution should approach a Gaussian by virtue of the CLT. As mentioned in the Introduction, OSG01 interpreted the deviation from Gaussianity in terms of a violation of the statistical independence requirement of the CLT, due to the existence of intermediate-size correlations in the density field.

In order to test this hypothesis, we have computed the ACF of the density field in the numerical simulations, at time $`t=2.8`$ for the non-magnetic run, and at $`t=3.2`$ for the magnetic run ($`0.45`$ and 0.51 large-scale turbulent crossing times, respectively). These are shown in fig. 3 as a function of spatial separation (“lag”) in grid cells. Note that we show lags only up to half the simulation size, since the periodic boundary conditions imply that the ACF is symmetric about this value. It is seen that the ACF has decreased to half its maximum (zero-lag) value at separations of only about 7 cells, and to 10% at lags of only $`14`$ cells. We can effectively consider the latter to be a “decorrelation length” for the simulations. Note that the presence of the magnetic field does not seem to have an important effect on the decorrelation length. For distances significantly larger than this decorrelation length, the effects of density autocorrelation should be negligible, and the CLT should be applicable (see §4 for a discussion of possible caveats). We do not choose the more familiar $`1/e`$ criterion for the decorrelation length because of two reasons. First, the $`1/e`$ criterion is only truly meaningful for exponential decay laws, but in general the ACF does not decay in this form, and in fact crosses zero at a finite lag in the non-magnetic run. Second, we are interested in lags at which the ACF has become effectively negligible compared to its zero-lag value, so that events separated by this length can be assumed to be independent, and a factor of 1/10 seems more appropriate for this purpose than one of $`1/e`$. For these reasons, we also have chosen to refer to this as a “decorrelation” length, rather than a correlation one. But in any case, this choice is essentially arbitrary. In what follows, we denote the ratio of the column (or cloud) length to the decorrelation length by $`\eta `$.

Our simulations clearly do not have a large enough number of independent events along the LOS for the column density PDF to approach a Gaussian, as $`\eta 7`$ in the simulation box. We thus have chosen to study this problem using simple random realizations of lognormal fields, sacrificing the realistic hydrodynamic origin of actual density data in favor of the ability to control $`\eta `$ precisely, and to generate much longer LOSs than can be attained with even the largest presently available computational resources in numerical hydrodynamical simulations. This approach has been used in the past for simulating turbulent velocity fields without the numerical expense of actual hydrodynamical simulations (e.g., Dubinsky, Narayan & Phillips 1995; Klessen 2000; Brunt & Heyer 2000). The main feature that is lost by doing this is the spatial correlation that is inherently present in actual mass density fields, due to the continuum nature of real flows. In any case, random, spatially uncorrelated fields should constitute a best-case scenario for studying the convergence to a Gaussian PDF. The presence of correlations of a certain size in grid cells should increase the required path lengths for convergence by a factor equal to this size, making convergence even slower. For the random lognormal realizations, one decorrelation length can be thought of as a single cell, so that the integration length along the line of sight $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ equals $`\eta `$ for the random data.

We study the convergence of the PDF to a Gaussian as a function of two parameters: the width of the underlying lognormal density PDF, given by $`b`$, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$. Figure 4 shows the PDFs of $`\zeta `$ for three realizations with $`\mathrm{\Delta }z=`$ 10, 50 and 500 grid cells. It can be seen that at $`\mathrm{\Delta }z=10`$, the PDF of $`\zeta `$ appears to decay exponentially for $`0<\zeta <4`$, but develops a concavity at larger $`\zeta `$. At $`\mathrm{\Delta }z=50`$, the high-$`\zeta `$ side of the PDF is almost a perfect exponential, but at $`\mathrm{\Delta }z=500`$ no exponential segment is left, and the curve begins to approach a Gaussian.

Figure 5 shows a similar sequence as that in fig. 4, but for $`b=1.5`$. In this figure we show realizations with $`\mathrm{\Delta }z=`$200, 500, 2000 and 4000. Again a transition from concavity to convexity is seen to occur at high $`\zeta `$ as $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ increases, although in this case, even at $`\mathrm{\Delta }z=4000`$ an excess is seen at the largest values of $`\zeta `$, so the convergence is not yet complete at this path length for $`b=1.5`$. Indeed, it is known that for very asymmetric distributions with important wing excesses, the convergence to a Gaussian is fastest near the middle of the PDF, and slowest at the tails (Peebles 1987, sec. 4.7). We conclude that, even for completely uncorrelated data, convergence to a Gaussian occurs very slowly at the high-$`\zeta `$ tail if the skewness, kurtosis and dynamic range of the underlying density data are large. Also, we can expect that, as more LOSs are included in the column density PDF, the extreme-$`\zeta `$ tail will reach higher $`\zeta `$ values, and will thus require larger lengths $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ to converge

## 4 Discussion

### 4.1 What is the value of $`\eta `$ in real molecular clouds?

The convergence studied in the last section refers to completely uncorrelated random data, so that the correlation length is effectively one grid cell. As mentioned in §3, the presence of a finite decorrelation length in the density data should cause the convergence to be even slower with path length, as sufficiently independent “events” are expected to be separated by lags of the order of the decorrelation length. Note that, if the decorrelation length is a sizeable fraction of the column (cloud) size, i.e., if $`\eta `$ is not very large, then full convergence to a Gaussian is not expected.

Clearly, in the case of real molecular clouds, the concept of “grid cell” disappears, and the natural unit for measuring the path length should be the decorrelation length itself. Thus, the ratio $`\eta `$ serves as a measure of the path length. In our simulations, $`\eta 7`$, and, according to the results of §3, this is too small a length to produce a full convergence to a Gaussian column density PDF even at moderate underlying density contrasts. However, in real molecular clouds the actual value of $`\eta `$ is essentially unknown, and convergence to a Gaussian column density PDF is plausible, if $`\eta `$ is large enough. Thus, it becomes important to assess this possibility.

The value of $`\eta `$ must be related to some characteristic scale of the density-fluctuation power spectrum. If the spectrum has a self-similar (power law) dependence on wavenumber over some range, then there are no characteristic scales in this range222We thank Thierry Passot for pointing this out., and the only natural characteristic scales are those where the power-law range ends at high and low wavenumbers (analogous to the the “inner” and “outer” scales of the turbulent energy spectrum). In order to investigate this dependence, we use a spectrum-modifying algorithm introduced by Lazarian et al. (2001), which allows us to modify the spectrum of any physical field without modifying its spatial distribution. This amounts to only changing the “contrast” of the physical field (Armi & Flament 1985). Since the power spectrum only depends on the Fourier amplitudes of a field, but not its Fourier phases, the modification is accomplished by Fourier-transforming the physical field, and then replacing the Fourier amplitudes by others that satisfy the desired spectral shape, without altering the phases. We refer the reader to Lazarian et al. (2001) for details of the algorithm.

We apply the spectrum-modifying algorithm to the density field of the non-magnetic simulation, and impose on it the two spectra shown in fig. 6a. In both cases, the spectrum rises as $`k^3`$ for $`kk_\mathrm{p}`$ and then decreases as $`k^3`$ for $`k>k_\mathrm{p}`$, where $`k`$ is the wavenumber in units of the inverse box length, and $`k_\mathrm{p}`$ is a “peak” wavenumber. One case has $`k_\mathrm{p}=3`$ (solid line) and the other has $`k_\mathrm{p}=7`$ (dotted line). These spectra produce the density ACFs shown in fig. 6b. It is seen that the 10% level of the ACF occurs at a lag $`r1/(2k_\mathrm{p})`$, suggesting that the decorrelation length is related to the “outer scale” of the density power spectrum.

What determines the shape of the density fluctuation power spectrum, and, in consequence, of the density ACF in highly compressible turbulence is, to our knowledge, an open problem. It should most likely be related to the energy spectrum and the forcing (energy injection) spectrum333We thank E. Ostriker for noting this point., but the actual forms of all these spectra in molecular clouds are unknown. For example, the temporally and spatially intermittent energy injection in molecular clouds from embedded stellar sources and passing shocks differs significantly from the standard random forcing scheme used in most numerical simulations, which is applied everywhere in space and continuously in time (see, e.g., Norman & Ferrara 1996 and Avila-Reese & Vázquez-Semadeni 2001 for related discussions at larger scales in the ISM). In particular, if the energy is injected at small scales, the energy spectrum in a cloud complex may peak at scales quite smaller than the complex’s size, and possibly drive the density field to a similar spectral shape. Moreover, note that, if the energy spectrum is dominated by shocks, then its form ($`k^2`$) is of geometrical, rather than dynamical, origin (see, e.g., Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 2000), and in this case the density power spectrum need not have the same outer scale as the the energy spectrum. Self-gravity may be an important ingredient, too. In summary, the actual shapes of all the relevant spectra in molecular clouds, and thus the value of $`\eta `$, remain unknown, and deserve to be studied systematically.

Observationally, several workers have looked at correlation lengths in molecular gas. In a pioneering study, Kleiner & Dickman (1984) investigated the ACF of column density in the Taurus region, and from their plots one infers a correlation length of a few pc. This is not too short a distance compared to the complex’s size, but note, however, that this correlation length refers to the projected intensity data rather than to the underlying 3D density field. Most other observational correlation studies have focused on the ACF of the line velocity centroid distribution, and are not directly applicable to our puposes. In any case, they have either reported correlation lengths of fractions of a parsec (e.g. Scalo 1984; Kleiner & Dickman 1985) or else find them difficult to determine unambiguously (e.g. Miesch & Bally 1995).

In this respect, our results suggest that the column density PDF provides us with a means of observationally measuring the ratio of the cloud size to the decorrelation length $`\eta `$ when optically thin transitions or extinction data are used: the observed column density PDF should transit from a lognormal to an exponential and then on to a Gaussian as $`\eta `$ increases. Unfortunately, we do not know the path length a priori, but if it can be estimated by some other means at least in some cases, then the decorrelation length, and consequently the density power spectrum outer scale can be derived. This suggests that it is necessary to investigate numerically how the decorrelation length depends on parameters of the flow such as the forcing parameters, self-gravity, the energy and magnetic spectra, etc.

### 4.2 The width of the column density PDF

Another implication of the results from §3 is that, at large $`\eta `$, the column density dynamic range becomes small. Figure 7 shows the PDFs of the mean density (i.e., the un-normalized column density divided by the path length) for all LOSs for the two sets of random density fields. It is seen that, while the underlying density PDFs discussed here have density contrasts of up to $`10^6`$, the column density PDFs typically have dynamic ranges of at most a factor of 20, and, for very large $`\eta `$, of only factors of a few. This is actually a trivial result, since in the limit $`\eta \mathrm{}`$, all LOSs would give exactly the same column density (i.e., the sample mean asymptotically approaches the distribution mean), and the column density PDF would collapse to a Dirac delta function, independently of the dynamic range of the underlying density distribution. This suggests that, if $`\eta `$ is large in actual clouds, then nearly constant column densities are expected, but this tells little about the dynamic range of the actual density field. In this case, Larson’s (1981) density-size relation, $`\rho R^1`$, which implies constant column density, could simply be an observational averaging effect along the LOS (J. Scalo 2000, private communication). On the other hand, a relatively large observational column density range would point towards relatively small values of $`\eta `$.

Observational studies of extinction (e.g., Lada et al. 1994; Kramer et al. 1998; Cambrésy 1999) typically report extinction (proportional to column density) dynamic ranges of about a factor of 10. Comparing with the mean-density PDFs of fig. 7, these ranges are consistent with $`\eta 10`$ and $`\eta 100`$ for underlying density ranges of $`10^4`$ and $`10^6`$, respectively. For comparison, the column densities reported by Padoan et al. (2000) from numerical simulations of MHD turbulence at a resolution of $`128^3`$ with underlying density fields with a dynamic range of $`10^6`$, span 3 orders of magnitude, suggesting that in actual molecular clouds $`\eta `$ may be significantly larger than in those simulations. On the other hand, OSG01 have compared the column density cumulative distribution from their simulations to that of visual extinction in cloud IC5146 (Lada, Alves & Lada 1999), finding that the overall curve width in both data sets is comparable. Unfortunately, in order to determine whether similar PDF widths imply similar values of $`\eta `$, it is necessary to know whether the dynamic ranges of the underlying density distributions are also comparable. Moreover, due to the poorly-sampled nature of the observational data, OSG01 had to present the distributions in cumulative form, and in linear plots, rather than semi-logarithmic. In this format, it would be hard to distinguish, for example, between lognormal and exponential PDFs that have similar values at moderate column densities. In any case, the results are promising, and indicate that properties of molecular cloud turbulence such as the decorrelation length may indeed be determined from the column density PDF and the dynamic range of the density field.

Finally, note also that our results imply that there should exist a relationship between the functional shape of the column density PDF and its width, i.e., between its skewness and its variance. We plan to quantify this relation in future work.

### 4.3 The case of non-isothermal gas

In this paper we have restricted the analysis to lognormal underlying density PDFs, in part for simplicity and in part in order to relate our results on PDFs to those from recent numerical simulations of compressible isothermal MHD turbulence (e.g., OSG01, Padoan et al. 2000). Isothermal flows are normally considered as representative of the flow within molecular clouds. However, it is possible that molecular is really only close to being isothermal in the density range $`10^3n/\mathrm{cm}^310^4`$ (see the discussion by Scalo et al. 1998). Moreover, diffuse gas in the ISM, either neutral or ionized, is in general non-isothermal, and in this case, if the flow behaves approximately barotropically ($`P\rho ^\gamma `$, $`\gamma 1`$), a power-law range is expected to appear in the PDF (Passot & Vázquez-Semadeni 1998). In this case the CLT does not necessarily apply. Indeed, let us consider a power-law range of the form $`f(\rho )=C\rho ^\alpha `$, where $`C`$ is a constant. If the range extends to arbitrarily large and/or small values, the variance does not exist, and therefore the CLT does not apply. If the power law is truncated at low densities, and $`\alpha >1`$, then the column density PDF becomes a gamma distribution (Adams & Fatuzzo 1996). However, if the power-law range has a finite extension, and beyond it the PDF drops rapidly, such as the PDFs reported by Scalo et al. (1998) for non-isothermal numerical simulations of the ISM, and by Passot & Vázquez-Semadeni (1998) for polytropic flows with $`\gamma 1`$, then the variance should still exist and the CLT should apply. We expect this to be the case of observational PDFs of diffuse gas.

### 4.4 Caveats

Although the results of this paper are rather straightforward, a number of possible complications should be kept in mind. First, it is possible that the ACF fails to capture long-range correlations because the short-range ones may mask them, as small-scale structures are generally much denser. So, even in cases where the 10% level of the ACF is reached over lags much smaller than the cloud size, it is possible that the flow is not sufficiently decorrelated for the CLT to apply (J. Scalo 2000, private communication). Numerical simulations of turbulent flows with large values of $`\eta `$ are necessary to test for this possibility. Second, in cases where the Jeans length is close to the system size, self-gravity may promote the formation of large-scale structures, counteracting the possible action of small-scale energy injection sources, and tending to reduce the value of $`\eta `$. In this case, column densities closer to lognormal shapes, and with rather large variances might be expected. High-resolution numerical experiments with self-gravity and realistic stellar-like forcing, even if just in 2D, similar to those of Passot, Vázquez-Semadeni & Pouquet (1995) or of Vázquez-Semadeni, Ballesteros-Paredes & Rodríguez (1999) but with cooling functions appropriate for molecular clouds, may help resolve this issue.

Finally, we have suggested that a small column density dynamic range should be taken as an indication of large values of $`\eta `$. Unfortunately, small column density dynamic ranges may also arise from limitations in the sensitivity of the observations and saturation effects. Thus, the best suited observations for testing the above results are those in which these limitations are minimized.

## 5 Summary

Our results can be summarized as follows:

1. We have proposed that the relevant parameter determining the form of the column density PDF in molecular clouds is the ratio $`\eta `$ of the cloud size to the decorrelation length of the density field, with the latter operationally defined in this paper as the lag at which the density autocorrelation function (ACF) has decayed to its 10% level. Assuming that density “events” along the LOS are essentially uncorrelated, large values of this ratio imply that the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) can be applied to those events, and a Gaussian PDF should be expected for large enough values of $`\eta `$. This parameter is essentially the number of independent events (the “sample size”) along the LOS, and the column density is equivalent to the “sample mean” along the LOS.

2. We have measured $`\eta `$ in two 3D numerical simulations of isothermal turbulence forced at intermediate scales, one magnetic and one non-magnetic. In both cases we find $`\eta 7`$, suggesting that at least partial convergence to a Gaussian PDF should occur. The column density PDFs for both runs are approximately exponential.

3. Using simple random realizations of uncorrelated, lognormally-distributed fields, we have shown that the PDF of the normalized (i.e., with zero mean and unit variance) column density $`\zeta `$ indeed converges to a Gaussian shape as $`\eta `$ increases, as dictated by the CLT, albeit very slowly, due to the large dynamic range, skewness and kurtosis of the density lognormal distribution. For cases in which the underlying data have a dynamic range (“density contrast”) $`10^4`$, convergence to a Gaussian requires $`\eta `$ several hundreds. For density dynamic ranges $`10^6`$, the required sample size is several thousand events. Additionally, the width (variance) of the column density PDF also decreases as $`\eta `$ increases, as expected for the distribution of the “sample mean”. Specifically, for $`\eta 10`$ and an underlying density dynamic range of $`10^4`$, the column density dynamic range is $`20`$, and has decreased to a factor of a few for $`\eta `$ a few hundred.

4. We have discussed the turbulent parameters that determine $`\eta `$. Using a spectrum-modifying algorithm, we have shown that the 10%-level decorrelation length appears to be given approximately by $`1/(2k_\mathrm{p})`$, where $`k_\mathrm{p}`$ is the wavenumber at which the density fluctuation power spectrum peaks. Thus, the decorrelation length appears to be very close to the “outer scale” of the density power spectrum. However, we believe that what determines the shape of the density spectrum in molecular cloud turbulence is still an open problem requiring much further work.

5. We have suggested that the slow convergence of the column density PDF, which transits from lognormal (or a power-law, if the underlying gas behaves polytropically, but is not isothermal), to exponential and on to nearly Gaussian shapes as $`\eta `$ increases, can be used to observationally determine the latter in molecular clouds. This would provide a direct observational diagnostic of this fundamental property of the turbulence in molecular clouds. Additionally, since the variance of the column density PDF decreases with increasing $`\eta `$, a functional relationship between the PDF’s variance and skewness is expected to exist.

6. The decrease of the PDF variance with increasing $`\eta `$ suggests that, if $`\eta `$ turns out to be large in real molecular clouds, Larson’s (1981) density-size relation, which implies roughly constant column density, could be simply a result of this averaging along the LOS (J. Scalo, 2000, private communication). Conversely, wide, skewed PDFs may be an indication that the clouds are not very large compared to the turbulent density decorrelation length, and Larson’s relation might then be the result of limited observational dynamic range (Kegel 1989; Scalo 1990; Vázquez-Semadeni et al. 1997).

7. We also discussed briefly the case of power-law underlying density PDFs, expected when the gas is not isothermal. In this case, the CLT is only expected to apply if the power laws are truncated at both low and high densities, although the convergence to a Gaussian may be even slower if the power-law range is very extended, as power laws have even higher tails than a lognormal distribution.

8. Finally, we have mentioned several possible caveats, specifically: a) the possibility that the large-scale correlations are masked in the density ACF because they involve lower-density structures, b) the fact that self-gravity may possibly increase the decorrelation length, and c) the fact that sensitivity and saturation problems with the observations limiting their dynamic range may incorrectly be taken to mean large values of $`\eta `$.

We thank Laurent Cambrésy for discussing his data with us, and Eve Ostriker, Thierry Passot, Luis Rodríguez and John Scalo for sharp comments and/or a careful reading of the manuscript. In particular, John Scalo provided us with important comments about statistical distributions, limitations of the various statistical methods, and interesting implications of this work. Remarks from Eve Ostriker helped us uncover a misconception in an earlier version of this paper. The turbulence simulations were performed on the Cray Y-MP 4/64 of DGSCA, UNAM. This work has made extensive use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Abstract Service, and received partial funding from Conacyt grant 27752-E to E. V.-S.


text:
# Growth Shape of Isotactic Polystyrene Crystals in Thin Films

## 1 Introduction

Recently, crystal growth of polymers in thin films has attracted much attention on morphology and growth rate. Several authors have reported the appearance of diffusion controlled morphology in polymer thin films. Lovinger and Cais observed the single crystals crystallized from the melt of poly(trifluoroethylene) with branched morphology and discussed the morphology on the basis of the diffusion limited aggregation . Reiter and Sommer investigated the crystallization of poly(ethylene oxide) in quasi 2-dimensional monolayers and suggested that a diffusion field caused finger-like branched patterns observed ; Sakai et al. reported the diffusion limited crystal growth of poly(ethylene terephthalate) in thin films .

On the other hand, when isotactic polystyrene (it-PS) is crystallized from the melt in thin films down to 20 nm, the crystal has shown the same morphological change with crystallization temperature. Above $`200^{}`$C the crystals grown are hexagonal plates, rounded hexagonal plates around $`195^{}`$C, circular discs at $`180^{}`$C (Fig.1), and below $`170^{}`$C two dimensional spherulites . Although the morphology is unchanged, the growth rates have been observed to decrease in thin films. The film thickness dependence of the growth rate was expressed by the following equation,

$$\frac{G(d)}{G(\mathrm{})}=1\frac{a}{d},$$
(1)
where $`G(d)`$ is the growth rate in a film of thickness $`d`$, $`G(\mathrm{})`$ is the growth rate in the bulk and $`a`$ is a constant of about 6 nm . The constant $`a`$ was independent of crystallization temperatures, molecular weight and substrate material.

In the present paper we report the morphology, growth rate and crystal thickness of it-PS crystals grown in ultrathin films, the thickness of which is less than the radius of gyration of a polystyrene molecule in the melt. In particular, the morphology will be discussed in the light of morphological instability in a diffusion field specific to thin polymer films, and compared with numerical simulations of crystal growth by Saito and Ueta  which took into account both surface kinetic process and diffusion process.

## 2 Experimental

The it-PS used in this study was purchased from Polymer Laboratory ($`M_w=590000,`$ $`M_w/M_n=3.4`$, tacticity: 97% isotactic triad). This molecular weight corresponds to 22 nm in radius of gyration of a polystyrene molecule in the melt. Ultrathin films of it-PS were prepared on a carbon-evaporated glass slide by spin coating at 4000 rpm; amorphous it-PS films with uniform thickness of about 11 nm were obtained with use of a 0.4 wt% cyclohexanone solution. The thickness of the film is determined by an atomic force microscope, AFM (SHIMADZU SPM-9500J). The films thereby obtained were crystallized isothermally at several temperatures, 180, 190, 195, 200, 205 and $`210^{}`$C for a certain period of time in a hot stage (Mettler FP800). Before crystallization, the films were melted at $`250^{}`$C for 3 minutes, quenched to room temperature much lower than the glass transition temperature $`T_g`$ (=$`90^{}`$C), and immediately elevated to a crystallization temperature. The lateral growth rate was determined by in-situ differential-contrast optical microscopy. Detailed morphology and structure of the crystals were investigated by the AFM and a transmission electron microscope, TEM (JEOL 1200EX II), at room temperature.

## 3 Results

Figure 2 shows the AFM images of it-PS crystals grown at several crystallization temperatures in 11 nm thick films. It is to be noted that 11 nm is about a half of the radius of gyration of the molecules. The fact that these crystals can be observed by AFM necessitates that crystals are protruding from the surface of the surrounding amorphous it-PS. Indeed, in polymer crystallization in thin films, amorphous region close to the growth interface is always thinner by several nanometers than the region far from the interface. The surface of a lamellar crystal, including both the upper side and lateral growth front, is covered by an amorphous layer a few nm in thickness . A schematic view of the cross section is drawn in Fig. 3. At $`210^{}`$C the morphology of the crystal is a hexagon with the 110 facets same as in the bulk. Below $`210^{}`$C, however, the crystals were found to show morphology different from that in the bulk. At $`205^{}`$C, the 110 facets are no longer flat but have re-entrant corners to form a star-like shape. Side branches begin to appear at $`200^{}`$C and appears a dendrite similar to a snowflake at $`195^{}`$C. At $`190^{}`$C, a dendrite has a number of side branches and the crystal still has 6-fold symmetry. Below $`180^{}`$C, we can observe the splitting of growing tips and many irregular branches to form the morphology similar to the compact seaweed (CS)  or dense branching morphology (DBM)  with a circular and convex envelope. The mean width of branches, $`w`$, measured directly from AFM images, decreases with decreasing crystallization temperature as shown in Fig. 4. The electron diffraction pattern from a crystal grown at $`180^{}`$C is shown in Fig. 5 with its bright field image. Although there are many irregular branches, the pattern reveals that this crystal has a single crystallographic orientation with the chain axis perpendicular to the film surface. In fact, all the crystals in Fig. 2 were single crystals. With decreasing crystallization temperature, the morphology of the it-PS single crystals in ultrathin films therefore changes from a nucleation-controlled faceted hexagonal plate to the branching morphology observed in the crystal growth in a diffusion field.

In polymer crystallization, important aspects besides morphology are the thickness of a lamellar crystal and the lateral growth rate . The thickness of each crystal in ultrathin films is almost constant during growth as revealed by the uniform contrast in the AFM image of crystal surfaces (Fig. 2). Since amorphous layers cover the upper and lateral surfaces of crystals and should also exist between the crystals and the substrate , it is difficult to determine the absolute value of the lamellar thickness. However, as shown in Fig. 3, the height difference $`h`$ may be a relative measure of the thickness since the amorphous layers covering the crystals are considerably thin compared with lamellar thickness and the depth of concave region, $`d_{dip}`$, has an almost constant value of several nm in ultrathin films. The height differences measured increased with crystallization temperature, agreeing well with theoretical curve of lamellar thickness  as shown in Fig. 6. This result suggests that crystallization temperature dependence of the lamellar thickness in ultrathin films is almost the same as in the bulk . For the growth rate determined by the time development of the separation of the farthest tip $`r_{tip}`$ from the center of the crystal (Fig. 7), the rate was found to be constant during growth (linear growth) and was about $`5/11`$ of those in the bulk at each crystallization temperature (Fig. 8), agreeing with Eq. (1) for $`d=11`$ nm and $`a=6`$ nm. As for the re-entrant site of the crystal between the farthest tips shown by the arrows in Fig. 2 (b), on the other hand, the grwoth rate was not constant but decreasesd during growth, and the film thickness in front of the re-entrant site decreases with time. It should be noted, however, that the lamellar crystal thickness is almost constant throughout the crystal including the re-entrant site with different growth rate. Consequently, the lamellar thickness and the linear growth rate at the growing tip in the ultrathin films depend on crystallization temperature as in the bulk. Hence the surface kinetics  of the crystallization in ultrathin films is the same as that in the bulk regardless of the drastic morphological change.

## 4 Discussion

According to the theory of crystal growth, dendrites and CS can appear in the crystal growth in a diffusion field. When a part of the flat interface grows faster than the other by some fluctuation, the advanced part can grow faster owing to a gradient (e.g. of concentration) in the diffusion field, and the deformation is enhanced. Hence the flat interface becomes unstable, resulting in dendrites or CS. The morphology of it-PS crystals grown in ultrathin films below $`205^{}`$C therefore suggests that a diffusion process plays an important role in the crystal growth. In fact, the morphological change with increasing supercooling or driving forces similar to the present study has been reported in both experiment and simulation on crystal growth in a diffusion field . For example, in the growth of snow crystals, both a diffusion process and a surface kinetic process are closely reflected in the variety of growth shape . Saito and Ueta performed the Monte Calro (MC) simulation on the crystal growth in a diffusion field  and found the morphological transition from a polygon through a dendrite to CS with increasing driving force, which is very similar to our result. A further important point in their study is that those crystals show a linear growth and surface kinetics controls the growth until morphological transition to CS occurs. Hence in the crystallization of it-PS in ultrathin films, the surface kinetics keeps working at the growth tip while the morphology is controlled by diffusion process.

Here we must ask a question: what kind of diffusion field causes the instability in the present case? The diffusion field is generally either that of concentration or temperature with a gradient at growth face; the gradient causes the instability of flat growth faces to give rise to dendrites or DBM depending on supersaturation or supercooling and the strength of anisotropy in surface free energy. However, in the crystallization of polymers, the growth rate is so slow that the thermal diffusion length is much larger than crystal size, and hence no appreciable temperature gradient exists ; we can neglect the effect of thermal diffusion. In the melt growth, no concentration gradient exists other than that of any kind of impurity. However, we need not take into consideration even the effect of impurity diffusion because no morphological instability is observed on the crystal growth in the thicker films in spite of much higher growth rates.

Detailed inspection of the AFM images in Fig. 1 elucidates the gradient of thickness of melt around a crystal; the thickness of melt increases gradually with separation from the crystal edge to surrounding melt. The gradient is formed owing to the protrusion of a crystal from the surrounding melt . This gradient makes self-diffusion field in front of growing crystals. Since the thickness in thin films is proportional to the amount of polymer segment per unit area, the thickness of melt, $`d`$, can correspond to the concentration; we can recognize this morphological instability on the analogy of that of the crystal growth from solutions. Therefore it must be this gradient of thickness around the crystal that introduces the instability. The effect of this gradient on the growth rate may be related with the film thickness dependence of the growth rate (eq. (1)). However, the detail of this relation is yet to be discussed. The film thickness in the previous study  was above 20 nm and much thicker than the depletion of the thickness around a crystal, several nm, and hence the effect of the gradient of thickness on the growth rate was so small that no morphological instability was observed.

Lastly, we consider one of the main structures of branching morphology, the width of branches $`w`$ (Fig. 4). The characteristic length of diffusion-controlled growth is generally given by the stability length $`\lambda _s=2\pi \sqrt{d_0l_D}`$, where $`d_0`$ is a capillary length and $`l_D`$ a diffusion length . Indeed, the occurrence of spherulites, which consist of stacking elongated lamellae, was accounted for with the diffusion-controlled growth, and their characteristic dimension was predicted to be scaled with $`\lambda _s`$. In the MC simulation mentioned above, on the other hand, the structure of dendrites is characterized by the diffusion length $`l_D`$. In either case, the change in $`l_D`$ with decreasing temperature allows us to predict the qualitative change in characteristic length. The diffusion length is given by $`l_D=2D/G`$, where $`D`$ is the diffusion coefficient and $`G`$ is the growth rate; in the present experiment of melt crystallization, we assume that $`D`$ represents the self-diffusion coefficient of polymer chains. In the range of crystallization temperature investigated the growth rate increases rapidly with decreasing crystallization temperature (Fig. 7), while the diffusion coefficient generally decreases with decreasing temperature, and hence $`l_D`$ decreases rapidly with decreasing crystallization temperature, agreeing with the experimental result (Fig. 4).

## 5 Conclusions

We have clearly shown that the morphology of it-PS crystals grown in ultrathin films changes from the faceted morphology to that in the diffusion field; the lateral growth interface becomes unstable with increasing supercooling. This morphological instability is considered to result from the gradient of film thickness around the crystal; the formation of gradient is specific in polymer crystallization in thin films. The growth rates and the lamellar thickness show that the surface kinetics keeps working on the crystallization in ultrathin films while the morphology is controlled by diffusion process.

## Acknowledegments

This work was supported partly by Grant-in-Aid for Science Research on Priority Areas, ”Mechanism of Polymer Crystallization” (No12127204) and Grant-in Aid for Exploratory Research No12874048 from The Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture.


text:
# 1 a Integrals 𝐼_𝑜(𝑇ₛ) and 𝐼(𝑇_ch) for various emission band and different distribution of supernova explosion energy. 1 – 𝐼_𝑜(𝑇ₛ), 2 – 𝐼(𝑇_ch) for 𝑏=1.5. b Spectral indexes 𝛼_𝑜(𝑇ₛ) and 𝛼(𝑇_ch) at different photon energy. 1 – 𝛼_𝑜(𝑇ₛ), 2 – 𝛼(𝑇_ch) for 𝑏=1.5.

THERMAL X-RAY EMISSION OF THE REMNANTS
OF ASPHERICAL SUPERNOVA EXPLOSIONS

O. Petruk1

© 2000

1Institute for Applied Problems in Mechanics and Mathematics
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
3-b Naukova St., 79053 Lviv, Ukraine

e-mail: petruk@astro.franko.lviv.ua

Evolution of adiabatic remnants of an aspherical supernova explosion in uniform medium are considered. Thermal X-ray emission of such remnants are investigated. It is shown that integral thermal X-ray characteristics (X-ray luminosity and spectrum) of the objects do not allow us to reveal the assymetry in the explosion because these characteristics are close to their Sedov counterparts. Surface distribution of X-ray emission is sensitive to anisotropy of the explosion and nonuniformity of the interstellar medium.

INTRODUCTION

In some models of supernova explosion the energy is realised anisotropically . Aspherical explosion of supernova (SN) may cause a barrel-like supernova remnant (SNR) . Observations show that SN may really be aspherical, as e.g. in well-known case of SN1987A . High birth velocities of pulsars aslo suggest anizotropy in SN explosion . In the past, the morphological evolution and instabilities of asymmetric SN explosion were investigated in .

In present work we consider properties of thermal X-ray emission of adiabatic remnants of aspherical SN explosions. Hydrodynamics is modelled here with an approximate method for description of the adiabatic phase of a remnant of aspherical SN explosion in an arbitrary large-scale nonuniform medium . Equilibrium thermal X-ray emission model is taken from  and approximation for the Gaunt factor from .

ASPHERICAL SN EXPLOSION IN A UNIFORM MEDIUM

Spherical adiabatic SNR in uniform medium is described by self-similar Sedov solutions  where distributions of thermodynamic parameters are self-similar downstream: $`\rho (r,t)=\rho _\mathrm{s}\overline{\rho }(\overline{r})`$, $`P(r,t)=P_\mathrm{s}\overline{P}(\overline{r})`$, $`T(r,t)=T_\mathrm{s}\overline{T}(\overline{r})`$, where distance from the center $`\overline{r}`$, density $`\overline{\rho }`$, pressure $`\overline{P}`$, temperature $`\overline{T}`$ are normalized on the values at the shock: $`R_\mathrm{s},`$ $`\rho _\mathrm{s},`$ $`P_\mathrm{s},`$ $`T_\mathrm{s}.`$

Let us consider aspherical supernova explosion

$$E(\vartheta ,\varphi )=E_o\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )\mathrm{where}\underset{0}{\overset{2\pi }{}}𝑑\varphi \underset{0}{\overset{\pi }{}}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )sin\vartheta 𝑑\vartheta =4\pi .$$
(1)
As an example of aspherical energy distribution we will consider the function:

$$\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )=\left(1\frac{b}{2}\right)+b|\mathrm{cos}\vartheta |,0b<2.$$
(2)
SNR 3C 58, which is probably on the free expansion phase of his evolution, has maximal axis ratio among known young SNRs: $`1.67.`$ So, possible anisotropy of explosion energy distribution is $`E_{\mathrm{max}}/E_{\mathrm{min}}=(R_{\mathrm{max}}/R_{\mathrm{min}})^2=2.8.`$ Such anisotropy have place for (2) if $`b1`$.

Let us consider uniform medium. Our hydrodynamic method works within the framework of sector approximation approach where flows in sectors are independent. This causes essential simplification in modelling of the object. Namely, in such a case, we only have to re-normalize energy in each sector and distributions of parameters in each sectors remain to be self-similar since each sector may be described by the Sedov solution with a relevant value of explosion energy. Thus, the flow characteristics may be written as

$$\begin{array}{c}R_\mathrm{s}(\vartheta ,\varphi )=\stackrel{~}{R}_\mathrm{s}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )^{1/5},D(\vartheta ,\varphi )=\stackrel{~}{D}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )^{1/5},\hfill \\ \\ \rho _\mathrm{s}(\vartheta ,\varphi )=\rho _\mathrm{s},P_\mathrm{s}(\vartheta ,\varphi )=\stackrel{~}{P}_\mathrm{s}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )^{2/5},T_\mathrm{s}(\vartheta ,\varphi )=\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )^{2/5},\hfill \end{array}$$
(3)
where $`\stackrel{~}{R}_\mathrm{s},`$ $`\stackrel{~}{D},`$ $`\stackrel{~}{P}_\mathrm{s},`$ $`\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}`$ coinside with relevant values in case of Sedov SNR.

Luminosity of SNR

$$L_\mathrm{x}=\underset{0}{\overset{2\pi }{}}𝑑\varphi \underset{0}{\overset{\pi }{}}\mathrm{sin}\vartheta d\vartheta \underset{0}{\overset{R_\mathrm{s}(\vartheta ,\varphi )}{}}\mathrm{\Lambda }(T)n_\mathrm{e}n_\mathrm{H}r^2𝑑r$$
(4)
where emissivity $`\mathrm{\Lambda }(T)=\left(\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{c}(T,\epsilon )+\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{l}(T,\epsilon )\right)𝑑\epsilon `$, subscript ”c” refer to continuum and ”l” to line emission. It is in case of the Sedov SNR

$$L_\mathrm{x}=C(\gamma ,\mu )E_{51}n_\mathrm{H}T_\mathrm{s}^1I_o(T_\mathrm{s})\mathrm{erg}/\mathrm{s},$$
(5)
where

$$I_o(T_\mathrm{s})=4\pi \underset{0}{\overset{1}{}}\mathrm{\Lambda }\left(T_\mathrm{s}\overline{T}(r)\right)\overline{n}^2(r)r^2𝑑r,$$
(6)
and $`C=3.6510^{66}`$ for $`\gamma =5/3,`$ $`\mu =0.609.`$ Thermal X-ray spectral index

$$\alpha =\frac{\mathrm{ln}}{\mathrm{ln}\epsilon }\underset{V}{}\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{c}(T,ϵ)n_\mathrm{e}n_\mathrm{H}𝑑V$$
(7)
is, in the case of the Sedov SNR,

$$\alpha _o=\frac{}{\mathrm{ln}\epsilon }\mathrm{ln}I_{o,\mathrm{c}}(T_\mathrm{s}),$$
(8)
where

$$I_{o,\mathrm{c}}(T_\mathrm{s})=\underset{0}{\overset{1}{}}\mathrm{\Lambda }_\mathrm{c}\left(T_\mathrm{s}\overline{T}(r)\right)\overline{n}^2(r)r^2𝑑r.$$
(9)
Luminosity of a remnant of aspherical SN explosion $`E(\vartheta ,\varphi )=E_o\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )`$ in uniform medium is

$$L_\mathrm{x}=C(\gamma ,\mu )E_{51}n_\mathrm{H}\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}^1I(\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s})\mathrm{erg}/\mathrm{s},$$
(10)
where integral

$$I(\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s})=\underset{0}{\overset{2\pi }{}}𝑑\varphi \underset{0}{\overset{\pi }{}}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )^{3/5}\mathrm{sin}\vartheta d\vartheta \underset{0}{\overset{1}{}}\mathrm{\Lambda }(\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}\psi (\vartheta ,\varphi )^{2/5}\overline{T}(r))\overline{n}^2(r)r^2𝑑r.$$
(11)
Thermal X-ray spectral index of such SNR is

$$\alpha =\frac{}{\mathrm{ln}\epsilon }\mathrm{ln}I_c(\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}),$$
(12)
where $`I_c(\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s})`$ is the same integral as (11) with $`\mathrm{\Lambda }_c`$ instead of $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$. In general case, the temperature $`\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}`$ in (10)-(12) is a characteristic parameter, the value of $`\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s}`$ coincides with a real temperature $`T_\mathrm{s}`$ on the shock front in the case of Sedov SNR.

Since volume, mass and effective temperature of a remnant of aspherical SN explosion differ from spherical SNR within $`1\%`$ only , we may expect that luminosity $`L_x`$ and spectral index $`\alpha `$ of such SNR will be close to their Sedov counterparts because these characteristics essentially depend on emission measure $`EMn_\mathrm{e}^2VM^2V^1.`$ Really, Fig. 1a shows integrals $`I_o(T_\mathrm{s})`$ and $`I(\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s})`$ and Fig. 1b demonstrates variation of thermal X-ray spectral indexes $`\alpha _o(T_\mathrm{s})`$ and $`\alpha (\stackrel{~}{T}_\mathrm{s})`$. We see that luminosity in the band $`\epsilon >0.1\mathrm{keV}`$ has maximal differences of order $`2\%`$ for $`b=0.5`$ and $`5\%`$ for $`b=1.5;`$ they are $`2\%`$ and $`17\%`$ in the band $`\epsilon >4.5\mathrm{keV}`$. Relative differences in spectral index are less then $`1\%`$ for $`b=0.5`$ and $`5\%`$ for $`b=1.5.`$

Thus, summarizing, we cannot distinguish the cases of spherical and aspherical supernova explosions in uniform ISM having characteristics of SNR as a whole object, because such characteristics are very close to their Sedov counterparts.

It is easy to show that surface brightness along the radius of the projection of Sedov SNR distributes as

$$S_o(x)=\mathrm{const}E_{51}^{1/3}n_\mathrm{H}^{5/3}T_\mathrm{s}^{1/3}\underset{x}{\overset{1}{}}\mathrm{\Lambda }(T_\mathrm{s}\overline{T}(r))\frac{\overline{n}^2(r)dr}{\sqrt{r^2x^2}}$$
(13)
where $`x`$ is the position along the SNR radius of the projection in the units of the radius ($`0x1`$), $`\mathrm{const}=1.110^{21}`$ for $`\gamma =5/3`$ and $`\mu =0.609`$.

If explosion is axially-symmetrical $`E(\vartheta ,\varphi )=E_o\psi (\vartheta )`$ ($`E/\varphi =0`$) then the shape of the shock front is a figure of revolution with profile $`R(\vartheta )=\stackrel{~}{R}_\mathrm{s}\psi (\vartheta )^{1/5}.`$ If, additionally, the symmetry axis of the distribution $`\psi (\vartheta )`$ lies in the plan of projection (inclination angle $`\delta =0`$), the surface brightness distribution of such SNR is given with

$$S(x,z)=S_o\psi (\vartheta )^{1/5}\mathrm{sin}\vartheta ,$$
(14)
where $`z=R(\vartheta )\mathrm{cos}\vartheta `$ is the coordinate along the symmetry axis of the distribution $`\psi (\vartheta )`$, $`x`$ is coordinate perpendicular to $`z`$ in the plane of projection. This indicates that the surface brightness distribution profiles parallel to axis $`x`$ are re-normalzed profiles of the surface brightness distribution in Sedov SNR. This fact may be used to test the orientation of axis-symmetrical SNRs in uniform medium. Distribution of the spectral index has a similar behevior in case of $`\delta =0^o`$: profiles parallel to axis $`x`$ are like to profile of the Sedov SNR. Cases $`\delta 0^o`$ are considered in .

Evolution of an adiabatic remnant of aspherical SN explosion in nonuniform medium is investigated in a further paper .

CONCLUSIONS

Aspherical supernova explosion causes only small differences in thermal X-ray limonosity and spectral index of adiabatic SNR comparing to a spherical explosion case. Such a behaviour takes place in different X-ray bands and for a spectral index at different frequencies in X-rays. Thus, the thermal X-ray spectrum of a remnant of aspherical explosion is close to the spectrum of Sedov SNR.

These facts do not allow us to distinguish between the cases of spherical and aspherical SN explosion if we consider only the integral characteristics of X-ray emission of an adiabatic SNR.

X-ray properties of an SNR essentially depend on features of a disturbed plasma flow behind the shock because emission depends on density squared and temperature on velocity squared. Therefore, surface distributions of X-ray emission charateristics are a sensitive test on the conditions in which the object evolves. Asphrericity of explosion reveals itself in surface distributions of thermal X-ray characteristics. In the case of an axially-symmetrical explosion in uniform medium and when the axis of symmetry lies in the plan of projection, the profiles of X-ray surface brightness and spectral index along the lines perpendicular to the axis are re-normalized profiles of relevant distributions of the Sedov SNR.