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# Vitrification in a 2D Ising model with mobile bonds

## 1 Introduction

In a seminal article many years ago, Kauzmann Kauzmann48  provided the now standard Angell95  physical picture of vitrification in liquids, which emphasized that obstruction of configurational rearrangement by molecular interactions could lead to such an inefficient sampling of phase space, that thermodynamic equilibrium could not be reached for very long times. The ability to change configuration practically disappears at the glass transition, while orientational disorder does not change significantly, being high and relatively static in both the supercooled liquid and the glass. For our simple purposes, the scenario may be compared to a log-jam. There is nothing in the Hamiltonian to prevent orderly stacking, and indeed, vitreous liquids possess a crystal state of lower free energy. But once the logs are jammed, it is (very) improbable they will be ordered by random pushing and pulling.

By contrast, in spin glasses Binder86 ; Young95 , the Hamiltonian itself forbids crystal order, because of impurities, or lattice topology. Now disorder in terms of the original microscopic variables becomes an equilibrium property at all temperatures, leaving open the possibility of a true thermodynamic phase transition in terms of some other, less-than-obvious order parameter. In searching for it, the basic concept is frustration, introduced Toulouse77  to distinguish ‘intrinsically’ disordered states from those where apparent disorder can in fact be removed by redefining parameters of the Hamiltonian. These ‘serious’ and ‘trivial’ kinds of disorder may be called ‘glassy’ and ‘amorphous’, respectively.

In the present article, we bring the two subjects together, to obtain a toy model of kinetic vitrification. In brief, our algorithm gives a structural glass in a spin-glass setting. We begin with the discrete bond-disordered Ising model in two dimensions. It is known Bhatt88  that it has no spin-glass transition at $`T>0`$. Topologically frustrated configurations are too rare in two dimensions to contribute significantly to the sample-averaged free energy, when each random arrangement of impurities contributes a sample with equal *a priori* probability. We refer to this standard quenched-disorder picture as ‘frozen’ or ‘frozen bonds’, reserving the word ‘quenched’ as follows.

The model we consider is obtained from the above by allowing the impurity bonds to move. Throughout the article, ‘quenching’ means that this system, with movable bonds, is first equilibrated at high temperature, and the temperature then brought down to some low value in a single step, after which the evolution continues at that low temperature. Since the bonds move, there is no averaging over samples; the complete impurity configuration space is available to a single sample. Of course, the efficiency with which this space is explored after the quench critically depends on the nature of bond movement. We focus on the case where they move locally, *i.e.* a bond can only exchange places with another bond, impinging on the same site. Our main point is that such an algorithm, which would be very inconvenient to study the ground state of the disordered Ising model, because it is easily trapped in metastable states, is very convenient from the structural-glass point of view, because the metastable states in which it does get trapped are quite exceptional among all possible impurity arrangements, and are analogous to vitreous states in the structural sense.

It is easy to imagine how this happens: the bonds keep moving until they get stuck. These ‘stuck’ configurations are precisely the vitreous ones, which are (by definition) those in which evolution appears to cease before the ground state is reached. Various signals of their exceptional nature are studied throughout the article; let us only mention that their energy is markedly lower than the average energy in the frozen scenario, in fact close to the theoretical ground state energy (which can also be reached, by slow cooling). Nevertheless, it is finitely above the ground state, making them metastable.

In the present work, we consider only the fast evolution after a quench, leading to the above-mentioned metastable states, and the evolution of these states at intermediate times, but not their relaxation to the ground state, occuring at much longer time scales. The ground state (annealed system) is a comparatively trivial amorphous configuration, and our only interest in it is that it establishes the formal metastability of the long-lived quenched states. In this, of course, our toy model is different from a true vitreous liquid, where the ground state is an ordered crystal. The model analogue of melting involves no order-disorder transition.

In the description of our results, we use established language (*e.g.*, melting) and theoretical tools (*e.g.*, the spin-glass susceptibility) somewhat outside their original context. The model is purely kinetic, without a thermodynamic phase transition, so the interesting (vitreous) behaviour appears in quasi-equilibrium, established at the above-mentioned intermediate time scale. We are guided by an intuitive analogy between spins and bonds in the disordered Ising model, on the one side, and the orientational and configurational degrees of freedom, respectively, of a glass-former, on the other.

One class of Ising-like models, often used to study vitrification, are constrained kinetics models, such as the Frederickson-Andersen model Frederickson84 . They have no intrinsic disorder, but frustration is introduced by dynamical restrictions on changing the spin states, which take the part of configurational variables. Among work on variants of the disordered Ising model, our program is closest to that of the frustrated percolation problem Coniglio97 ; Cataudella96 . However, that approach views impurity bonds as obstacles to rearrangement, playing a role similar to the dynamical restrictions, mentioned above. In our work, bonds are imagined to represent the configurational degree of freedom itself, so their movement becomes of physical interest. It is responsible for the appearance of metastable states, the ‘supercooled bond liquid’, which have a distinct physical characteristic, a first-order zero in the field derivative of the spin glass susceptibility, not shared by the states on the cooling curve connected to the ground-state manifold. This liquid, and the accompanying glass, are the main subject of the present article.

## 2 Model and algorithm

The model is the bond-disordered two-dimensional Ising model on a square lattice Edwards75 :

$$H=\underset{ij}{}J_{ij}S_iS_jB\underset{i}{}S_i\underset{ij}{}J_{ij}S_iS_jBM,$$
(1)
where the ‘spins’ take the values $`S_i=\pm 1`$, as well the bonds, $`J_{ij}=\pm 1`$. Here $`M`$ is the total magnetization, calculated as above, not an independent parameter. The fraction of antiferromagnetic (negative $`J_{ij}`$) bonds is a fixed number $`p`$; in this paper, $`p=70`$%. The key new feature is the ability of bonds to move; this is considered to be purely diffusive, so there is no kinetic contribution to the Hamiltonian.

Spin updates proceed by flipping a spin at random; the criterion for acceptance is Glauber’s. Between spin updates are bond updates; the test move is to exchange two bonds of the opposite sign, impinging on the same site. This is accepted or rejected, again by the Glauber criterion. Which bonds are exchanged, and on which site, is chosen at random, taking care, of course, that the two bonds involved are indeed of the opposite sign. There is no regular ‘sweeping’ of the lattice, to avoid artificial correlations between spin and bond updates.

There still remains a physical freedom in the update protocol. One might consider, in general, flipping $`s`$ spins and moving $`b`$ bonds, before submitting the new configuration for acceptance. These are large steps in the random-walker picture. They are unlikely to be accepted in general, but once the system is trapped in a glassy state, such steps may significantly affect its chance to get out. These rare ‘cooperative’ fluctuations are considered responsible for re-crystallization of vitreous liquids in the Kauzmann picture, sometimes after ‘archeologically’ long times, as in window glass.

In this work, we only focus on driving the system into a glassy state, not getting it out. On this ‘laboratory’ time scale, alternating one-spin and one-bond updates, each subject to acceptance in turn, provide the dominant quasi-equilibration mechanism. The very-long-time behavior of the model is the subject of a limited investigation in Section 4 below, but still neglecting multistep (cooperative) processes, which could be important for the asymptotic regime. Parenthetically, we note that mode-coupling theory introduces an artificial thermodynamic transition, and therefore certainly has the wrong asymptotics, but even this does not affect the intermediate time scales, for which it was devised Schmitz93 .

We consider two situations: annealed, where the system is equilibrated at high temperature ($`T=5`$, but any $`T>2`$ will do), and then slowly cooled (in steps of $`0.05`$, waiting to equilibrate between temperature steps); and quenched, where it is brought down to the desired temperature in a single step from the high-temperature equilibrium, and then quasi-equilibrated. The high-temperature starting point is generated anew for each quenched point, so the agreement of annealed and quenched curves for not-too-low temperatures is also a check of equilibration. Similarly, the fact, that the annealed curve nearly reaches the ideal (defect-free) ground state energy at $`T=0.05`$, our lowest temperature, is indication that the cooling rate for annealment ($`\mathrm{\Delta }T10^9`$ per MC step) is sufficiently slow for our purposes.

For comparison, we also simulate some systems with frozen bonds. This opens the question of sample-averaging. We find that self-averaging is sufficient for our limited purpose, since the samples involved are rather large ($`100\times 100`$ and larger). To be safe, we have made some runs, averaging batches of up to $`500`$ small ($`10\times 10`$) samples, and indeed no claims made in the paper, based on the large self-averaged ones, were affected. Note, also, that the frozen bond arrangement at high temperature is different for each cooling run, so the above-mentioned check of equilibration is also a check of self-averaging in the frozen case.

## 3 Main result

All simulations were performed in a uniform external field, whose non-trivial range is $`0B4`$. Then the theoretical minimum energy per site of the annealed system with a fraction $`p`$ of antiferromagnetic bonds is

$$U_{\mathrm{min}}=2(1p)B,$$
(2)
which assumes the absence of defects: each spin, turned opposite to the field, is connected to its neighboring sites by antiferromagnetic bonds, which are all used up in this way. These ‘crosses’ carry no frustration, obviously: a simultaneous sign change of the spin and its four bonds leads to a perfect ferromagnet. There is a ground-state entropy, associated with their random placing on the lattice, so this ideal state is amorphous. It is our model’s analogue of the crystal state of vitreous liquids.

A convenient robust measure of additional disorder is the energy mismatch between this reference state and one obtained in an actual run. This can be extended to any temperature by using the reference system’s cooling curves, once it is checked that its zero-temperature limit is near the theoretical amorphous one, *i.e.*, that it is sufficiently annealed.

Figure 1 shows the energies per site for a single cooling run, in an external field $`B=1`$ and $`p=0.7`$. Four curves are given, annealed and suddenly cooled, with and without bond movement allowed. Two energy scales appear: a higher one, where the curves with bond movement separate, and a lower one, distinguishing annealed and suddenly cooled systems. Unexpectedly, the higher scale is about the square root of the coordination, which is the mean-field transition temperature of the model (1), $`T_{MF}=\sqrt{z}=2`$; this may be a coincidence. The lower one, denoted $`T_0`$, is the model’s melting temperature, a notion made precise in section 4.1 below. The main interest in this work is the range beneath it.

Below $`T_0`$, the dashed curves rise with falling temperature, because each point on them is generated anew by a drop from high temperature. The lower the temperature to which they are quenched, the ‘worse’ (energetically) the state in which they end. In the next section, we shall discuss a third type of cooling run, where the system is cooled slowly after a quench from high temperature. An example of this is also given in the figure, showing the thermodynamically expected behavior.

While the two dashed curves look similar, they refer to very different states. In Figures 2 and 3, we draw the respective lattices at low temperature, presenting only uncompensated bonds, *i.e.* those which are of the ‘wrong’ sign relative to the spins they connect. The exact ground states have as few of these as possible (a nonzero number may be topologically unavoidable Vogel98 ). The quenched state obviously has more, but the point is that they nearly always appear as well-separated singletons, carrying topological frustration. In other words, the frustration of our vitreous states is near the maximal possible one, for a given energy difference from the ground state. In consequence, spin orientation is fixed by a ‘majority vote’ of bonds *at every single site* (almost). The comparatively small energy difference between the ground and vitreous states is misleading; the two are separated by a topological barrier. The fact that such *a priori* rare states can be generated with so little effort, about 50 updates per site, is an important practical point of this work.

By contrast, in the case with frozen bonds, there appear many sites with two compensated and two uncompensated bonds, making the spin orientation energetically indifferent. Many of the corresponding plaquettes are not frustrated, so the energy difference relative to the ground state is largely due to trivial (amorphous) disorder. Because of this, the magnetization of the frozen-bond system is a sum of fluctuating contributions even at low temperature, making it constant in time only on the average, while the magnetization of the vitreous (quenched) system is a sum of spins which are individually fixed in time for the lifetime of the glass, as would be the case for all times with a perfect Ising ferromagnet at sufficiently low temperature.

Figure 4 shows the magnetization. For a frozen bond configuration, it barely distinguishes between annealing and quenching. What is unexpected is the difference between the annealed and quenched magnetizations, when bond movement is allowed. The annealed magnetization at $`T0`$ is higher than when bonds are frozen, reasonably enough. The quenched one, however, is much lower, indicating a system in which spin orientation is controlled by an internal field. It is very sensitive to the $`T_0`$ scale of Fig. 1, while the same scale is hardly visible in the other three curves.

It remains to show that the state quenched (in our sense, with mobile bonds) below $`T_g0.2`$ fulfills the criterion for a spin glass. We call it a ‘bond glass’, to emphasize the role of bond kinetics in its formation; it is not in thermodynamic equilibrium. The transition region $`T_g0.2<T<0.8T_0`$ in Figure 4 is then a ‘supercooled bond liquid’, characterized by a scale $`T_{\mathrm{}}0.5`$. For temperatures above $`T_0`$, we have a bond liquid. Carefull cooling below the melting temperature $`T_0`$ leads to the amorphous solid, described above. (Note the small downturn below $`T_0`$ in the slowly cooled curve, which seemed headed towards the theoretical maximum magnetization $`M=0.3`$. It is due to defects in the amorphous structure. The unavoidability of these is the subject of bond-percolation studies Vogel98 .)

We consider the spin-glass susceptibility, which is a time-asymptotic four-spin correlation function Young95 ; Bhatt88 :

$$\chi _{\mathrm{SG}}=V_1^1q^2P(q)𝑑q,$$
(3)
where the ‘volume’ $`V`$ is the number of spins in the lattice, and $`P(q)`$ is the distribution of the quantity

$$Q=\underset{\tau \mathrm{}}{lim}\frac{1}{\mathrm{\Delta }\tau }\underset{t=1}{\overset{\mathrm{\Delta }\tau }{}}\left[\frac{1}{V}\underset{i=1}{\overset{V}{}}S_i^{(1)}(\tau +t)S_i^{(2)}(\tau +t)\right],$$
(4)
where the superscripts on the spins denote two copies of the system, independently evolved, and ‘infinity’ is some intermediate time scale, before ergodicity is re-established, as discussed below. For each temperature, we first quasi-equilibrate the system, as to produce a point in the first two figures, then make two copies of the lattice, identical in both spins and bonds, so an artificial divergence is introduced in $`\chi _{SG}`$ at $`\tau =t=0`$. This is allowed to decay by evolving the copies independently for a further $`\tau =5\times 10^6`$ MC steps, each consisting of a spin and a bond trial, or only a spin trial, for the cases with frozen bonds. The distribution $`P(q)`$ is obtained by considering the next $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau =2.2\times 10^6`$ steps.

In the frozen case, this is done differently Bhatt88 : one randomizes the spins in both copies of the lattice, with the *same* bond arrangement, and waits for the correlation function to build itself up again from zero. We cannot do that, because the bonds also move: once the spins are randomized, bonds start flowing, and the lattice copies end up as distinct samples, as soon as the vitreous state is re-established, which takes a very short ‘$`\beta `$-relaxation’ time, only $`50`$ updates per site in our algorithm. In the usual picture of a glass free energy landscape, the two copies end in distinct deep and narrow minima, and the scale associated with tunneling between such minima is the long ‘$`\alpha `$-relaxation’ time. In the same language, the time window $`\mathrm{\Delta }\tau `$ is opened after ‘infinity’ $`20`$ times the $`\beta `$-relaxation period, *i.e.* in the quasi-equilibrated regime, $`\tau _\beta <\tau <\tau _\alpha `$ for all $`T`$, which is the regime of interest.

The use of the spin-glass susceptibility should not be construed to mean, that there is a true thermodynamic transition in the model. As long as the bonds move, all the reported phenomena are kinetic in origin. Asymptotically, $`\chi _{SG}`$ is zero at all temperatures, but the time needed to see this increases exponentially with falling temperature, as discussed in the next section.

The results are shown in Figure 5, which we discuss for the remainder of this section. The open circles correspond to the quenched bonds in Figure 4. The range $`T<0.2`$, where the magnetization saturates at $`M0.15`$, is clearly linked to a divergence in $`\chi _{SG}`$. The crossover region, $`0.2<T<0.8`$, is also evident in both figures.

The thin dashed line corresponds to the frozen-bond scenario, whose magnetization is given by the nearly horizontal dashed line in Figure 4. It saturates at $`\chi _{SG}/V=1`$ as well, which may cause doubt about the alleged special nature of the state, found by bond movement. To dispel it, we repeat all of the above with the magnetic field turned off. (We put $`B=0.001`$ to break inversion symmetry, and denote this $`B=0^+`$.) The frozen-bond susceptibility then drops to the lower, thick dashed curve, which no longer shows saturation. This indicates its divergence at finite field was in fact trivial, due to the difficulty of flipping spins when $`TB`$, so the spins on the two copies ‘marched together’ for a long time.

The quenched susceptibility shows precisely the opposite behavior, given by the filled circles. For $`B=0^+`$ it rises above the $`B=1`$ points, to achieve nearly perfect divergence for $`T<0.3`$, but drops below them in the high-temperature part, so the net effect is a narrower crossover (supercooled liquid) region, $`T_g=0.25<T<0.75=T_0`$, its center (half-point of $`\chi _{SG}/V`$) remaining at $`T_{\mathrm{}}=0.5`$. The low-temperature divergence in the quenched case is due to the bonds ‘holding’ the spins, in place of any external field. The field *widens* the supercooled liquid regime, and produces a less perfect glass (slightly smaller $`\chi _{SG}`$ below $`T=0.2`$). At $`B=0^+`$ nothing is visible in the magnetization, which fluctuates around zero at all temperatures.

We now turn to the role of bond rearrangement in the supercooled liquid. We restart the evolution from the same copies of the lattice as gave the circles in Figure 5, but now disallow further bond movement. In other words, we proceed as with frozen bonds (the dashed curves), but for the special bond configurations found by quenching (Fig. 2), not random ones (Fig. 3). Then the open and filled circles go over into the respective squares. The supercooled liquid has disappeared, replaced by a glass up to $`TT_{\mathrm{}}`$. This is in accord with the idea, that changing configurations is essential for the liquid. It may appear that the crossover has merely moved to higher temperatures, not shown in the figure. But $`T=0.8`$ is already the melting temperature in Figure 4, so the system cannot be ‘supercooled’ at $`T>T_0`$. It melts, as it eventually must, by a trivial high-temperature degradation of the initial spin orientations. However, the rarity of the bond configurations involved is evident in the lack of field-dependence of the susceptibility (the squares nearly overlap), in sharp contrast with the behavior of the dashed curves.

## 4 Equilibration

The basic point of this article is that the algorithm with bond movement is physically interesting in itself, as a model realization of a structural glass. At present, we have no physical argument that the degrees of freedom of any particular real glass map onto our model. So one has at best an analogy, or ‘toy model’, and the idea is to use the analogy to guide model investigations. Some quantitative evidence will be presented in this section, that the properties uncovered in this way are not spurious.

### 4.1 Short and long times

In Figure 6, we show the spin autocorrelation function

$$C(t,\tau )=\frac{1}{V}\underset{i=1}{\overset{V}{}}S_i(t)S_i(t+\tau ),$$
(5)
where the brackets denote an average over time-windows of 10 MCS/site. The reference state ($`t=0`$) is taken to be the high-temperature equilibrium ($`T=5`$) before the quench. A typical two-time evolution is observed. After a short $`\beta `$-relaxation time $`\tau _\beta `$, 50–100 MCS/site, the system enters a long-lived low-temperature state. This intermediate period, in which evolution almost seems to stop, ends at a time $`\tau _{\alpha 1}`$, when $`C(0,\tau )`$ begins to decay further, reaching zero only after a much longer time $`\tau _{\alpha 2}`$. The latter is usually called $`\tau _\alpha `$, the scale at which ergodicity is re-established. This is the time needed to tunnel between the ‘deep and narrow’ minima characterizing the glass free energy landscape. In the same picture, $`\tau _{\alpha 1}`$ would be the time needed to exit the original minimum, which trapped the system at $`t\tau _\beta `$.

It is easy to estimate $`\tau _{\alpha 2}`$ in the present model, because Fig. 2 indicates maximal topological frustration is a reasonable hypothesis. This implies, roughly, that *each* spin needs to flip against the local field before the state is completely dissolved. In other words, the reciprocal probability for a single spin to flip is the waiting time for dissolution, measured in updates per site. The energy difference for a flip is $`\mathrm{\Delta }E=4`$ or $`\mathrm{\Delta }E=8`$, depending on whether the spin is held in place by three or four compensated bonds. Taking the lesser of these gives an underestimate,

$$\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{4}{T}\right)<\tau _{\alpha 2}\text{ }[\mathrm{MCS}/\mathrm{site}],$$
(6)
which we find to be logarithmically correct (Fig. 6). It predicts $`\tau _{\alpha 2}>5\times 10^{34}`$ updates per site at $`T=0.05`$.

The success of the simple estimate (6) indicates that the algorithm with nearest-neighbor bond diffusion realizes, more or less, the maximal time scales possible in the model, for a purely kinetic scenario. But it also implies that the scenario is indeed kinetic: nothing really happens at $`T_g`$, except that a time scale becomes too long to follow. This is the reason the present approach is computationally so cheap. One knows in advance that, say, $`\chi _{SG}`$ in Fig. 5 is asymptotically zero. The question is, for what delay \[$`\tau `$ in Eq. (4)\] it is most informative of the processes in the system. This turns out to be fairly modest, $`10^3`$ updates per site. By then, the value of $`T_g`$ is as well established as for $`10^5`$ updates, while the $`\tau _\alpha `$ for most of the higher temperatures are still not reached, giving the largest possible range in temperature, for which $`0<\chi _{SG}<1`$. Of course, there is a highest temperature, where $`\tau _{\alpha 2}\tau _\beta 50`$. This is just the melting temperature $`T_0`$: $`\mathrm{exp}(4/T_0)50`$ gives $`T_01`$, as found in Fig. 1. Above it, $`\chi _{SG}`$ is zero at all times.

### 4.2 Aging

After the initial relaxation has passed, the supercooled liquid/glass spends a long time in a state which is nominally metastable, since its energy is above that of the annealed state (Fig. 1). However, it is equilibrated from the point of view of correlations; there is no ‘aging’ Kisker96  in the metastable state. In such a quasi-equilibrium, the autocorrelation function (5) does not depend on choice of origin $`t`$, apart from noise, as shown in Figure 7. Here all $`t>\tau _\beta `$, so the initial (reference) state is always a quasi-equilibrated one. The amplitude of the noise generally increases with $`\tau `$ and the temperature, while it decreases as the system gets larger. At $`T=0.2`$, $`C(t,\tau )=1`$, and there is no noise, for the trivial reason, that the state below $`T_g`$ does not evolve at the scale of the waiting times exhibited here.

### 4.3 Rattling and relaxation

It is illustrative of the qualitative behavior of the model, to look at the acceptance rates of various kinds of trial moves. They are the inverses of the time scales involved. We introduce a third type of cooling run, most similar to a real experiment. In zero field, the system is first quenched into the supercooled region (below $`T_0`$), and then slowly cooled through $`T_g`$, in steps of $`0.02`$. We look at the time evolution leading to quasi-equilibration (not after it, as in the study of $`\chi _{SG}`$). After the temperature is brought to the desired value, a $`120\times 120`$ lattice is subject to $`7.2\times 10^6`$ spin trials, interlaced with the same number of bond trials. The principal quantity monitored is the number of accepted relaxation steps, *i.e.* those in which the energy changes either way (positive changes are counted as relaxation, because they also mean the system is ‘working’).

The estimate (6) indicates that by lowering the temperature below $`T_g`$, one can really prevent the system from reaching the annealed state in any fixed time. In addition to the disappearance of spin flips, the nature of bond movement changes below $`T_g`$, and only ‘rattling’ Angell95  of the kind depicted in Figure 8 survives. For our purposes, we do not define ‘rattling’ geometrically, but by the property that the move is energetically indifferent, so that it cannot contribute to annealing, by definition.

In Figure 9, we show the total number of relaxation steps, accepted during the run above. Bond relaxation disappears around $`T_g`$, while spin relaxation stops earlier, and is a rough order of magnitude less significant everywhere. Spin rattling vanishes along with bond relaxation. Thus both the energy and magnetization cease to evolve below $`T_g`$. This is also visible in Fig. 1, the open circles there becoming strictly horizontal below $`T_g`$. Bond rattling, on the other hand, remains high and relatively constant throughout, in keeping with the analogy to ‘caged’ configurational movement.

This is in marked contrast to the behavior of a quenched, then slowly cooled system with random frozen bonds, shown by dashed lines. Spin moves in this case behave roughly as bond moves above. Relaxation stops above $`T_g`$, but spin rattling is remarkably constant down to lowest temperatures, as one would expect from the absence of a spin glass in 2D, *i.e.*, of an internal field to hold the spins in place. On the other hand, spin rattling in the 3D Edwards-Anderson model persists even below the spin-glasss transition. This is in contrast to the 2D vitreous state, in which there are virtually no loose spins at all (Fig. 2).

Finally, we compare the results of a standard annealing run, shown by full lines. They are in excellent quantitative agreement with the supercooled liquid/glass — despite the latter being by definition metastable, as it consists of higher-energy configurations. This is further illustration of the long-lived nature of the metastable quasi-equilibrium. In the absence of frustration, the difference in energy would translate into a larger number of accepted steps in the metastable case. This is actually observed at $`T=0.6`$, but only because the system is quenched from $`T=5`$ there. Even when shedding such a large energy, the excess steps are almost exclusively due to spins, indicating that the bond (‘configurational’) degree of freedom is most affected by frustration.

## 5 Discussion

The main problem with the identification of the glass in Section 3 is that $`\chi _{SG}`$ is not by itself a measure of frustration. It may function as such in a spin-glass setting, where one averages over many random bond configurations, so if two lattice copies ‘march in lockstep’ on the average, one can safely assume this is not due to the influence of the occassional ordered configuration.

Not so in our case, where the whole idea is that mobile bonds find rare configurations. In particular, they find the optimal amorphous ones, which show the same persistence of the initial divergence in $`\chi _{SG}`$, as would a perfect ferromagnet. The glassy configurations are not far in energy (Fig. 1), and they, too, contain large admixtures of the optimal arrangement (Fig. 2).

The problem reduces to this: can one find a qualitative criterion to distinguish the ‘amorphous solid with defects’, the uppermost of the magnetization curves in Fig. 4, from the ‘supercooled liquid/glass’, the curve which forks down from it below $`T_0`$? Luckily, yes. It is provided by the field-dependence of $`\chi _{SG}`$, shown in Figure 10 for the amorphous solid. The filled circles ($`B=0^+`$) show the same behavior as in Figure 5, in line with the doubts expressed above. But the $`B=1`$ curve (empty circles) is now entirely above the other one; in the annealed case, turning on the field increases $`\chi _{SG}`$ at all temperatures. The criterion follows, that if the field derivative of the spin-glass susceptibility

$$\frac{\chi _{SG}(T)}{B}|_{B=0^+}$$
(7)
is positive at all temperatures, we have a solid. If it is negative around zero and changes sign at a finite $`T=T_{\mathrm{}}`$, we have a supercooled liquid.

This criterion makes physical sense. In the amorphous solid, the bonds are as good as frozen, since any rattling occurs in an optimally arranged background of spins and bonds. The spins opposing the field are in a minority (witness a finite magnetization), so increasing the field will make the system more rigid, increasing $`\chi _{SG}`$ at all temperatures.

Not so in the supercooled liquid, where the bonds rattle against a suboptimal background. At low temperatures, spin flips induced by the field will increase the range of bond movement, which in turn has a cascading influence (stochastic, of course) on spins in the bond path, degrading the correlation between the two copies of the lattice (see Fig. 8). At higher temperatures, however, there are already many spin flips, so this effect is ‘played out’; the spin majority orchestrated by the field then increases the correlation, like in the solid. The temperature at which the two tendencies balance is just $`T_{\mathrm{}}`$.

This does not mean that $`T_{\mathrm{}}`$ is a thermodynamical (time-independent) temperature, indeed $`T_g`$ itself is not, in any kinetic model. Given that it refers to the liquid state, $`T_{\mathrm{}}`$ is subject to the same time evolution as $`\chi _{SG}`$ in that regime, or the correlation function in Fig. 6. Nevertheless, the above argument implies that the appearance of a point, where the zero-field and finite-field susceptibilities cross, is generic for the supercooled liquid in this model, and will always be present for times between $`\tau _\beta `$ and $`\tau _\alpha `$. Since $`\tau _\beta `$ is so short, it can be observed without large numerical effort.

There are two things to note. First, the criterion for a supercooled bond liquid implies (mildly) paradoxical behavior: the bonds ‘waiting to break out’ make the susceptibility *decrease* in response to an applied field, when $`T<T_{\mathrm{}}`$. The field has a net disorganizing effect on the spins, because it probes the configurational metastability of the supercooled liquid. Put simply, the uniform external field is in competition with the stochastic internal field, holding the spins in position for $`T<T_{\mathrm{}}`$.

Second, the glass itself is defined only quantitatively, as the manifold of states found on that part of the cooling curve of the supercooled liquid, where $`\chi _{SG}/V`$ saturates at unity. A qualitative characterization of $`T_g`$ is not to be expected, on general grounds. In this context, the switch from circles to squares in Figure 5 may be interpreted, that if one takes a ‘snapshot’ of the system below $`T_{\mathrm{}}`$ at an arbitrary point in time, no analysis of that one snapshot can tell, whether it was taken above or below $`T_g`$.

It is easily shown that the maximally frustrated (vitreous) bond arrangements, found by the quenching algorithm, are a very small subset of all possible ones. For a state to be maximally frustrated, uncompensated bonds must be singletons, like in Fig. 2, each well separated from the others by a ‘layer’ of compensated ones, effectively ‘using up’ $`q>1`$ bond positions for each singleton. Thus uncompensated bonds can choose only among some $`2V/q`$ positions, less than all $`2V`$ available ones. The number of distinct states is largest when the number of uncompensated bonds is one-half the total number of available positions, giving at most

$$\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{2V/q}{V/q}\right)4^{V/q}$$
(8)
states of this kind. On the other hand, supposing for simplicity that one has an equal number of positive and negative bonds ($`p=0.5`$), the number of ways to place them on the lattice without restriction is

$$\left(\genfrac{}{}{0pt}{}{2V}{V}\right)4^V,$$
(9)
of which the above $`q`$-th root is a vanishingly small fraction, when $`V`$ is large. Energetically, the vitreous states are well separated from the bulk of the arbitrary ones, witness Fig. 1. They correspond to the ‘deep and narrow’ minima of glass theory. In fact, since their energy is determined by the number of singletons, Eq. 8 is also their degeneracy, ‘exponentially large’, as the general picture assumes. Since the algorithm is trapped in only one of them during any given run (Fig. 6), one has ‘breaking of ergodicity’ Angell95  for times less than $`\tau _\alpha `$.

Let us summarize the analogies between our toy model and vitreous liquids. Bond and spin movement correspond to the configurational and orientational degrees of freedom, respectively. The diffusivity of bond movement reflects the absence of a kinetic energy contribution to the glass transition. The supercooled bond liquid turns into a glass if configurational rearrangements are artificially turned off. Spin disorder changes very little across the glass transition, but spin movement ceases there, as well as all relaxation. Configurational (bond) rattling persists to lowest temperatures. Somewhat above our original ambitions, the zero-field glass transition in the model occurs at about one-third the melting temperature, $`T_gT_0/3`$, an old rule of thumb in glass formers Kauzmann48 .

## 6 Conclusion

We have realized a structural spin glass in the two dimensional bond-disordered Ising model on a square lattice, by taking into account only a small subset of impurity arrangements. This subset was generated by a quenching algorithm which imitated vitrification in liquids, by allowing diffusion of impurity bonds over the lattice. The crossover between the glassy and high-temperature (melted) state was identified as a supercooled liquid. To distinguish from customary usage of the term ‘spin glass’, and to emphasize our glass is kinetic, not thermodynamic, we propose the terms ‘bond glass’ and ‘supercooled bond liquid’, respectively. A macroscopic criterion was shown to distinguish the supercooled liquid from the amorphous solid, connected to the ground-state manifold by slow cooling, which is this model’s analogue of the crystal state of vitreous liquids. The criterion makes it possible to study field and temperature hysteretic effects on the formation of the supercooled bond liquid.

## 7 Acknowledgements

Conversations with K. Uzelac and S. Barišić, and one with M. Mézard, are gratefully acknowledged. This work was supported by the Croatian Government under Project $`\mathrm{119\hspace{0.17em}204}`$.


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# The Optical/Infrared Astronomical Quality of High Atacama Sites. I. Preliminary Results of Optical Seeing

## 1 Introduction

Outer space provides the ideal setting for astronomical instruments. Freeing them from the limitations imposed by our planet’s atmosphere, observations of high angular resolution and in spectral bands to which the atmosphere is opaque have become possible. However, because of the steep costs of hauling large masses to space, very large collecting area telescopes have remained the domain of ground–based observatories. In addition to high sensitivity, large apertures, aided by adaptive optics techniques, allow high angular resolution images to be obtained from the ground, which are most effective in sites with good astronomical seeing. Especially in the infrared, atmospheric opacity and emissivity can be minimized by placing observatories at high altitude or in extremely cold locations. The South Pole has witnessed strong growth in the number and quality of astronomical installations in recent years. Similarly, high and dry sites have become increasingly attractive, in spite of the operational difficulties that arise with high altitude.

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is one of the driest regions on Earth. It lies between the Coastal Cordillera to the west and the Andes to the east. The region of the Altiplano to the east of the Salar de Atacama known as Llano de Chajnantor, a plateau of altitude near 5000 m, was selected by the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) as the future site for its Millimeter Array Project, while a neighboring plateau, Pampa La Bola, was selected by the Nobeyama Radio Observatory of Japan for its Large Millimeter and Submillimeter Array (LMSA) Project. These sites are within a few km from each other, at elevations between 4800 and 5050 m above mean sea level. Successively, the Millimeter Array Project has evolved into a U.S.–Europe consortium to build the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). Other radio and optical Astronomy consortia are under development for operation in this region, which has the potential for expanding into a major world astronomical center. Cerro Paranal, the site of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Project, is about 300 km to the southwest, on a peak on the Pacific coastal range (Coastal Cordillera).

The climatic qualities that make the Atacama region especially attractive to astronomers extend over a latitudinal band a few hundred kilometers wide, about the Tropic of Capricorn. The access to good quality services and good communications further focuses attention on the regions in the vicinity of the cities of Antofagasta, Calama and the village of San Pedro de Atacama. The presence of the VLT and the likely establishment of major national and international research centers, such as ALMA and the LMSA, adds promise of scientific and operational synergism to the region. The government of Chile has legislated the protection of an area which includes the Llano de Chajnantor, the Pampa La Bola and the surrounding peaks, as a National Science Preserve.

Several institutions are carrying out measurements to ascertain the characteristics of the region for astronomical observations in the radio and submillimeter parts of the spectrum. We have initiated a campaign to characterize the region for optical and infrared astronomical observations. In the following two sections, we present a brief description of the region and its climate. In Section 4, the seeing measurements and synoptic results are described, followed by brief remarks on photometric conditions. We conclude with a discussion on plans and prospects for future work. In a companion paper (Giovanelli et al.  2001; Paper II), we present the results of measurements regarding the water vapor content and its implications on infrared transparency and background emissivity.

## 2 Description of the Region

The Salar de Atacama (23 30’ S, 68 15’ W) is the largest salt flat in Chile. A basin with median elevation near 2300 m, it extends for more than 100 km from north to south, lies 200 km inland from the Pacific coast and is located about 1600 km north of the capital city of Santiago. The Salar is bounded to the west by the Domeyko mountain range, with peaks as high as 4300 m (Cerro Quimal), and to the east by the main Andean magmatic arc. Among the highest Andean peaks in the vicinity are Llullaillaco (6723 m) south of the Salar, and Acamarachi or Pili (6046 m), while among the most spectacular are Licancabur (5950 m) and Láscar (5592 m). Figure 1 is a composite satellite image of a region of approximately 400 by 200 km, extending from the Pacific coast on the west to the Andes on the east. The image is the combination of three frames taken through different broad–band filters: 0.5 $`\mu `$m (blue), 1.0 $`\mu `$m (green) and 1.5 $`\mu `$m (red). Data were acquired on July 20, 1985 by the Landsat 5 imaging satellite. The Salar de Atacama is the region filled with muds and evaporitic deposits outlined in light brown to the right and below of center, bordered on its right by turquoise hues (salt deposits and ponded water). To the east, where the volcanoes of the Andean magmatic arc rise above 5000 m, moisture has been intercepted by the high peaks and precipitated as snow on the plateau (represented by bright blue). The city of Antofagasta is to the south of the anvil–shaped Mejillones Peninsula, at the lower left in the figure.

Around the Salar, human settlements are only found in the vicinity of oases and they are generally quite small. The largest among them includes the village of San Pedro and its environs, with a combined population of about 1,200. San Pedro is located at the northern end of the Salar de Atacama, just to the west (left) of the red outline in Figure 1. No humans reside between San Pedro and the Bolivian border, 50 km to the northeast, nor between San Pedro and the Argentine border, 160 km to the east. The nearest large urban center is Calama–Chuquicamata, with a combined population of about 150,000, 100 km to the northwest of San Pedro, beyond the Domeyko range. Calama–Chuquicamata is at the center of the most important copper mining zone in the South American continent (just south of the upper boundary, center, of the image in Figure 1). Its airport is connected by several daily flights to other Chilean cities, such as Antofagasta, Santiago, Copiapó and La Serena. Antofagasta, the regional capital with a population of one–third of a million, is on the coast 200 km to the west of Calama. The nearest town with population exceeding 1000 to the east of San Pedro is across the Andes, some 500 km away. To the north, the nearest settlements are at Ollagüe, at 300 km, and Uyuni, 400 km away; neither exceeds the size of San Pedro. To the south, only a few villages much smaller than San Pedro dot the edges of the Salar. From an urban viewpoint, Atacama is thus a region of extreme isolation.

Traffic is however increasing, both because the colonial and archaeological patrimony and natural beauty of the surroundings make San Pedro a favorite tourist destination, and because the international Andean road through the Paso de Jama to Argentina is now paved. This road will likely become one of the main arteries between the continental heartland (northern Argentina, Paraguay and southern Brazil) and the Pacific Ocean. The use of urban lights will undoubtedly increase in San Pedro. However, the likelihood of tumultuous future development of San Pedro or of any of the neighboring villages into major desert centers, as has occurred in the American Southwest, is remote. Sizable sources of water in the region are absent. In spite of the high altitude of the Andean peaks, there are no extensive glaciers in this region, and precipitation is extremely rare. The villages in the Atacama Desert are unlikely to pose a serious light pollution threat in the foreseeable future.

The quality of services in the region is high, a result of the conspicuous presence of major mining interests. Roads are good, supply, communications and financial services are excellent, medical services abound and unique expertise in the special circumstances of high altitude physiology exists. For example, delivery of supplies, from water to cryogens, to remote, high altitude sites is a routine practice; engineering contracting companies expert in planning and construction of facilities at high altitude are numerous; and international meetings on high altitude medicine are held in the region (e.g. Iquique, November 2000).

The Llano de Chajnantor is located about 40 km to the east of San Pedro, and nearly 3000 m higher in elevation. The region is illustrated in Figure 2, an area of 1560 km2 roughly corresponding to that within the box outline in Figure 1. The Salar de Atacama lies to the southwest of the region displayed in Figure 2 and the town of San Pedro is at the northern end of the Salar, about one half map-width off the western margin of the map. Several notable features are labeled. The two volcanoes Licancabur (5950 m) and Juriques (5750 m, with the red–rimmed crater) are in the northwest. Licancabur (label 10), is a prominent, symmetric cone and marks the southwestern vertex of the Chile–Bolivia political border. To the northeast of the two volcanoes are the two lagoons jointly known as Laguna Verde, in Bolivian territory. Near the center is Cerro Chajnantor (label 5, 5700 m); to the southeast of it is Cerro Chascón (label 6, 5750 m) and to the northeast is Cerro Toco (label 7, 5650 m). A sulphur–rich ground surface, east of Toco’s summit, is responsible for the white coloring in that part of the image. Light blue implies the presence of snow. The red–colored ridge running northeast to southwest (label 4), is known as Cerros de Honar (5400 m), and the mountain labeled 8 is Cerro Negro (5100 m). The chain of hills separating Negro and Honar are known as Cerros de Macón (5000 m). The Llano de Chajnantor is the area between Chajnantor, Chascón, Honar and Negro. Its average elevation is 5000 m. Both NRAO and ESO maintain ALMA site testing equipment in the plateau, at the location identified by the label 2 in the map. The region north of Chascón and east of Chajnantor is known as Pampa La Bola. At an average elevation of 4800 m, it hosts testing equipment of the Nobeyama Radio Observatory for the LMSA project, of Japan, near the label ‘9’. Finally, label ‘1’ identifies Cerro Chico (5150 m), the site at which most of the seeing tests described in this report were conducted; and label ‘3’ identifies the location of the radiosonde launch facility, jointly operated by Cornell, NRAO, ESO, the Harvard–Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and the Nobeyama Radio Observatory (since 2000), which produced much of the atmospheric water vapor data discussed in Paper II.

For scale, the distance between the summits of Juriques and Chajnantor is 17.5 km. The study area is dominated by volcanic surfaces that range in age from approximately $`10^6`$ to $`10^7`$ years. These features are remarkably well-preserved due to the aridity of the region. The Llano de Chajnantor is part of a circular area about 12 km in diameter centered on Cerro Chajnantor, which is a Quaternary andesitic dome. The surrounding surfaces include Plio-Quaternary andesites and Quaternary ignimbrites. The drainages lead radially outward from Cerro Chajnantor. The topography rapidly loses elevation moving 30 km west from the edge of the Llano at 5000 m to the Salar at 2300 m. Among the peaks in the area, Honar rises 400 m above the plateau, Chico rises less than 150 m, Chajnantor and Toco both rise about 650 m, and Chascón is the highest local point at 800 m above the Llano. Images of the region can be viewed at http://www.astro.cornell.edu/atacama.

The northern Chilean Andes include a high concentration of geologically active volcanoes. In the vicinity of Chajnantor, the only conspicuous and current activity takes place at Volcán Láscar, located about 30 km south of Honar. Láscar’s last mayor eruption took place in 1993, producing a tephra cloud which the winds carried principally eastward. It produced volcanic ash deposits 3 cm thick 50 km downwind from its crater (González–Ferrán 1994). A minor eruption of the same volcano took place on July 20, 2000, during one of our campaign runs. The likelihood of other volcanic eruptions in the region are discussed by Gardeweg (1996), while a thorough survey of the volcanology in Chile is given by González–Ferrán (1994).

## 3 Remarks on Climate

### 3.1 Conditions at the Llano de Chajnantor

The work of Dieter Schmidt (1996) provides the most recent and complete compendium of climatological conditions of the Atacama. See also Cook (2000) and Fuenzalida (1984).

The large–scale climatological patterns of the region are associated with the persistence of the Southeast Pacific subtropical anticyclone. An important driving force of the regional weather pattern is the extremely high fraction of the solar radiation flux reaching the ground, due to the tropical location and the high atmospheric transparency. The heat input by radiation is released through convective and advective processes, due to the lack of humidity to form latent heat, with the wind playing an important role in heat transport. Low altitude winds in this region are generally driven by the temperature differences between the Pacific coast and the Andean region, exhibiting a clear diurnal cycle. Both the diurnal and seasonal cycles of the wind speed at the Llano de Chajnantor, as recorded at the ALMA site between 1995 and 2000, can be viewed in the composite figures of the continuously updated NRAO web site http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/mma/sites/Chajnantor/data.c.html (Radford 2000).

Between April 1995 and October 2000, the 25%, 50% and 75% wind speed quartiles were respectively 3.1, 6.4 and 10.3 m s-1 at the plateau level. Higher speeds occur during daytime hours, rising rapidly a few hours after sunrise in mid–winter and in the mid–afternoon during Summer. Sustained speeds can exceed 15 m s-1. The nighttime median wind speed at 4 meters off the ground is about 4 m s-1, a relatively benign condition which is, in fact, lower than that observed at Mauna Kea. In both Summer and Winter, wind speed drops precipitously about one or two hours after sunset. A seasonal pattern is also clear, with wind speeds decreasing in the austral Summer months. Wind direction is also tied to the seasonal cycle: the flow is nearly always from the west between April and early December, while the wind direction becomes more variable in the Summer months, when conditions locally referred to as “Bolivian Winter” often ensue. These are associated with the inflow of moist Amazonic air from the NE. Hence the local name. Wind storms lasting 1–2 days with wind speeds exceeding 25 m s-1 occur a few times per year, especially during winter months. These events are well correlated with high wind speeds at the 200 mb level, the occurrence of which can be anticipated several days in advance with good reliability. In that respect, the forecasts posted by M. Sarazin in http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/astclim/forecast/meteo/ECMWF/long/chajnantor have proved extremely valuable for our campaign activities.

High winds can be of hindrance to astronomical operation not only because of their mechanical effects, but also because they can increase the density of dust found in suspension in the atmosphere. Near valley floors, in fact, dust storms are frequent, due to the sandy characteristics of the soil. In the Chajnantor region, however, the ground is generally a mixture of rock and gravel, and little dust is raised even by the strong daytime winds. The valley dust layer is seldom seen to rise above the 4500 m level. Quantitative determinations of atmospheric dust content at Chajnantor are planned.

The ground temperature distribution at the Llano de Chajnantor, as recorded at the ALMA site testing station, can also be appreciated in Radford (2000) both in its seasonal and diurnal characteristics. The historical 25%, 50% and 75% quartile values for ground level temperature at the ALMA monitoring site are respectively 2.9 C, -2.6 C and -7.8 C. The diurnal cycle has an amplitude of 13–14 C, while the seasonal cycle has a slightly lesser amplitude of 10–12 C. The temperatures at the plateau are not extreme, reaching as high as 15 C during summer days and seldom falling below -15 C during winter nights. Night temperatures vary little: between 0 and 10 hours UT (approximately 7:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., local time), the average temperature drop is 2.5 C, i.e. approximately 0.25 C hr-1.

At San Pedro de Atacama, precipitation is extremely low, typically 50 mm or less per year. At the plateau it precipitates somewhat more frequently, generally in the form of snow and more likely when Bolivian Winter conditions occur. Snow accumulation seldom exceeds a few cm, although wind–driven drifts may accumulate layers of substantial thickness in sheltered depressions of the terrain. In shaded areas, melting and sublimation is slow and relatively small amounts of snow can last weeks or months.

El Niño–La Niña events, of 12 to 24 months duration, produce very significant alterations, superimposed on the annual cycle of atmospheric conditions. Severe El Niño events recur about once per decade, based on records of the last two centuries, while more moderate events take place about twice as frequently (Rodbell et al. 1999; see Neelin & Latif 1998 for a recent description of El Niño dynamics). The last El Niño–La Niña event took place between December 1997 and late 1998. It is reported to have been among the most severe since the middle of the XIX century (McPhaden 1999). During this event, the sea surface temperature anomaly in equatorial waters approached 5 C, while the average event produces deviations of 1.5 C or less. The effects of the 1997–98 episode resulted in higher humidity, increased atmospheric opacity and worse seeing conditions than normal, as we discuss later.

### 3.2 The Mean Atmosphere Above the Llano de Chajnantor

Since sites above the plateau will provide the best conditions for optical/IR telescopes, it is important to know what the differential meteorological conditions are between the relatively well sampled plateau level and the higher elevations. Continuous monitoring of the meteorological parameters at elevations above the Llano de Chajnantor has only started in October 2000, thus no reliable record exists of the differential conditions among sites. Some indications of the conditions that might be expected at higher elevations can however be garnered from radiosonde launches that have taken place since 1998, as we report elsewhere in greater detail (Paper II). In this Section, we restrict our presentation to median atmospheric profiles obtained from 106 radiosonde launches.

We have selected 30 sondes launched in nighttime hours (UT 01 to 11 hours; local midnight takes place at 04h 31m) and 65 sondes launched in daytime hours (UT 12 to 21 hrs). The sondes were launched between the months of April and early December, although the month of November is overrepresented (14 of 30 night launches and 25 of 65 day launches); thus they are representative of Winter and Spring, which is the period when the best astronomical observing conditions are found in the region.

The median atmospheric profiles these data yield are very instructional. Profiles are averaged over intervals of 10 m in altitude and shown in Figures 3 and 4, It should be kept in mind that these profiles refer to the free atmosphere and, due to prevailing winds, generally the sonde flights sample an inclined path that takes them to the east of the plateau. Conditions may thus be slightly different than over the Llano de Chajnantor proper. In addition, conditions at the peaks of mountains may be slightly different from those of the free atmosphere, as they will be affected by local topography. Nonetheless, these mean profiles give us at least a rough idea of the conditions we may encounter at various sites above the plateau.

Figure 3 indicates that at night there is a conspicuous inversion layer near the ground, which is at an elevation of 5000 m. The air temperature increases by several degrees up to about 100 m above the ground. This is a consequence of the rapid radiative cooling of the ground after sunset. Between 5100 and 6000 m, the median temperature profile is ragged, due to the frequent occurrence of temperature inversions. Above 6 km elevation, a closer to normal tropospheric cooling trend with altitude takes over, at a rate of about 0.7 C per 100 m, somewhat lower than the adiabatic lapse rate of 0.98 C per 100 m. Conditions at peaks a few hundred meters above the plateau will not be harshly different than conditions at the plateau itself. The lapse rate during daytime is steeper in the lower 500 m, but median Winter temperatures above -10 C can be expected at all accessible ground sites. Quartile profiles (dotted lines) in Figure 3 refer to nighttime.

Figure 4 illustrates the median wind profile. Day and night data show, overall, similar profiles from an altitude of 6 km up, the wind speed increasing from about 10 m s-1 at 6 km to about 25 m s-1 at 12 km. Differences are most important near the ground, especially between 5 and 6.5 km altitude. During day time, the median wind speed at the ground is 7–8 m s-1; it increases to about 10 m s-1 by 5.3 km, and to 12 m s-1 by 6.0 km. The night time profile is steeper. It rises from about 4 m s-1 near the ground to about 8 m s-1 at altitude 5.3 km, then hovers near 10–11 m s-1 up to 6.2 km. The wind speed at any peak fully exposed to the free atmosphere should not be any less than the free atmosphere wind shown in Figure 4. Thus, night time wind speeds at Cerro Honar (5400 m) should be expected near 8 m s-1, or twice as high as those at the plateau level, while at higher peaks such as Toco, Chajnantor and Chascón, mean speeds of the order of 10 m s-1 should be expected. Actual wind speeds will depend critically on the characteristics of the air flow and the local topography. The profile of the 75% quartile of night data does however indicate that most of the time median wind speeds should not exceed 12–15 m s-1. Such wind speeds are usually considered to be safely within operational limits at modern observatories, although direct testing of gusting conditions is necessary.

## 4 Seeing

### 4.1 Definitions and Terminology

Astronomical seeing is the distortion of the radiation wavefront of a cosmic source, produced by variations in the index of refraction of air. In conditions that are conducive to astronomical observations, pressure and water vapor fluctuations are negligible, thus variations in the index of refraction result primarily from thermal fluctuations associated with turbulent air flow. The temperature structure function of an atmospheric layer at altitude $`h`$ above the ground is defined in the form of a covariance

$$D_T(r,h)=<\mathrm{\Delta }T(r,h)^2>$$
(1)
where $`\mathrm{\Delta }T(r,h)`$ is the temperature difference between two points separated by a distance r, at constant altitude. Over a wide range of scales — between a minimum of a few mm below which turbulence is damped out and a maximum size of km, at which turbulence is injected for example by flow past an obstacle such as a mountain range — within the framework of Kolmogorov’s treatment $`D_T`$ is generally described by a power law of the form

$$D_T(r)r^\beta $$
(2)
where $`\beta 2/3`$ (Tatarski 1961). The proportionality in equation 2 is mediated by the scale–independent temperature structure parameter (Roddier 1981):

$$C_T^2(h)=\frac{D_T(r)}{r^{2/3}}$$
(3)
which relates to the refractive index structure parameter via

$$C_n^2(h)=C_T^2(h)\left[80\times 10^6P(h)/T^2(h)\right]^2$$
(4)
where the units of $`C_n^2`$, pressure $`P(h)`$ and temperature $`T(h)`$ are respectively m-2/3, mb and K.

The spatial coherence scale of atmospheric turbulence is expressed by the Fried parameter $`r_{}`$ (in m):

$$r_{}=\left[0.423k^2\mathrm{sec}(ZA)_h_{}^{\mathrm{}}C_n^2(h)𝑑h\right]^{3/5}$$
(5)
where $`k`$ is the wavenumber in m-1, $`ZA`$ the zenith angle of the line of sight and $`h_{}`$ the elevation of the telescope above the ground in m.

Finally, the full–width at half–maximum of a stellar image at a wavelength $`\lambda `$ is

$$\theta _{fwhm}=0.98\frac{\lambda }{r_{}}$$
(6)
In other words, for a telescope of diameter $`D`$ turbulence degrades the image resolution from $`\theta _{diff}\lambda /D`$ to the diffraction limit which would be observed with a telescope of aperture $`r_{}`$, i.e. $`\theta _{fwhm}\lambda /r_{}`$. Since $`r_{}k^{6/5}`$, as indicated by Equation 5, and $`\lambda =2\pi /k`$, then

$$\theta _{fwhm}\lambda ^{0.2}$$
(7)
All layers of the atmosphere contribute to seeing, as illustrated by Equation 5. Turbulence originating in the telescope enclosure is referred to as dome seeing. In our site survey measurements, dome seeing, as well as that arising from temperature differences between the mirror and the air, are null as our telescope has extremely small thermal capacity and it operates outdoors. The seeing that originates from convective flows between the ground and the few meters above it, and by turbulence arising from air flow between observatory buildings, is generally referred to as ground surface layer seeing. Seeing that originates from large scale interactions between the ground and the lower atmosphere, such as air flowing over topographic irregularities, is referred to as boundary layer seeing. Hereafter, we will often refer to the joint effect of ground surface layer and boundary layer turbulence as boundary layer seeing. The thickness of the boundary layer varies between 200 and 2000 m, depending on the local topography, latitude, wind velocity, amplitude of the diurnal thermal cycle and other environmental parameters. Katabatic flows — winds associated with the downhill flow of colder air from mountain tops — can be considered a subset of the boundary layer component. They primarily affect locations on the slopes and near the foot of substantial peaks. Finally, the contribution to seeing of that part of the atmosphere which is above the boundary layer, in which air flow is generally almost laminar, will be referred to as free atmosphere seeing.

### 4.2 Differential Image Motion and Seeing

Our seeing measurements are carried out with a device known as Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM). It measures wavefront slope differences between two pupils on a common telescope mount, as described by Sarazin & Roddier (1990). We have deployed two DIMMs in Atacama. The first was obtained on loan from the European Southern Observatory (hereafter DIMM–4, as referred to at ESO), thanks to the kind disposition of Marc Sarazin and Riccardo Giacconi. The second was assembled at Cornell University (hereafter DIMM–C1). They each consist of of an 11–inch Celestron (C11) telescope, an SBIG ST5 CCD camera, control equipment, an aperture mask and a laptop computer equipped with specialized software written by Peter Wood and ported to ST5 by Marc Sarazin. The aperture mask is placed at the entrance pupil of the telescope and consists of two holes, 8 cm in diameter each, with centers separated by 19.2 cm. The light through one of the holes is deflected by a wedge lens, so that a stellar wavefront produces two images in the focal plane of the telescope. The two visible images (camera response peaks at 0.5 $`\mu `$m) are recorded by the CCD camera (pixel size 10 $`\mu `$m, corresponding to 0.74” at f10) in frames taken in succession at the maximum rate allowed by the camera electronics, i.e. about once per second. The exposure time of each frame alternates between 10 and 20 msec. As turbulent eddies cross the line of sight of the stellar source, the two images move differentially as the optical paths through the two apertures sample different sections of the wavefront, with a separation which is commensurate with $`r_{}`$. On the other hand, tracking errors and wind buffeting of the telescope assembly affect equally the motion of the two stellar images in the CCD field. The fluctuations in the differential motion of the two images are related to $`r_{}`$ as follows.

Let $`d`$ be the separation between the two holes and $`D`$ the diameter of each hole. Image motion due to turbulence arises from the corrugation in the wavefront, as it reaches the aperture mask: the normal to the wavefront surface is the instantaneous angle of arrival. The covariance of the fluctuations of the angle of arrival can be related to the wavefront phase error fluctuations and, consequently, to the index of refraction structure parameter defined in the previous section, as discussed by Sarazin & Roddier (1990). The covariance in the fluctuations of the angle of arrival can be converted to a variance in the image motion, which along the direction connecting the two apertures (longitudinal) is shown by Sarazin & Roddier to be

$$\sigma _l^2=2\lambda ^2r_{}^{5/3}[0.179D^{1/3}0.097d^{1/3}]$$
(8)
while the variance in the orthogonal (transverse) direction is

$$\sigma _t^2=2\lambda ^2r_{}^{5/3}[0.179D^{1/3}0.145d^{1/3}]$$
(9)
Here, lengths are in cm and units of $`\sigma `$ are seconds of arc. If the observations are made at a zenith angle $`ZA`$, the full width at half maximum of the stellar image can be obtained independently from Equation 8 ($`i=l`$ below) and Equation 9 ($`i=t`$ below), as discussed in the mentioned source:

$$\theta _{fwhm}\lambda ^{1/5}[\sigma _i^2\mathrm{cos}(ZA)]^{3/5}$$
(10)
The variance of the image motion is obtained from $`N`$ short exposures, separately for the 10 msec and the 20 msec series (10 and 20 msec exposures are taken alternately). Since the statistical properties of the atmosphere do not change significantly over time scales on the order of 1–2 minutes, the $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ can be averaged over a fairly large number $`N`$ of exposures of each series. We thus can obtain seeing estimates derived from 10 msec exposures, from 20 msec exposures (which typically yield lower values of $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ because the image motion has been smeared by the longer exposure) and extrapolations to “zero exposure”, obtained by multiplying the 10 msec seeing by the ratio of the 10 and 20 msec measurements. This is based on the results of Martin (1987), where it is shown that for experimental configurations such as ours, the variation of the attenuation of the variance with exposure time is close to exponential. If we assume that $`\sigma ^2(t)=\sigma ^2(0)e^{at}`$, measurements at $`t`$ and $`2t`$ can be combined to obtain $`\sigma (0)=\sigma (t)[\sigma (t)/\sigma (2t)]`$. In the unusual instance in which the 10 msec $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ is smaller than the 20 msec $`\theta _{fwhm}`$, for the zero exposure $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ we take the average of the two nonzero exposure measurements. In the next Section, we will present statistics for the three exposure times separately, for ease of comparison with monitors that measure image motion at a fixed exposure time.

The technique assumes that the perturbed wavefront is swept across the aperture in its frozen form during the exposure (“Taylor’s hypothesis”). Since differential image motion is recorded by the DIMM, the instrument does not sense turbulent eddies much larger than $`d`$, which produce the same distortion over the two apertures. The differential image motion is thus determined by the flow, at the wind speed, of small–scale eddies, which takes place on short time scales. If $`w`$ is the wind velocity at the perturbing layer, ideally the exposure time should then be $`d/w`$; practical limitations are imposed by the clock resolution of the CCD and the necessity to detect enough photons so that centroiding of the stellar image is reliable with readily observable stars at any time. Note that an eddy of $`r_{}=20`$ cm ($`\theta _{fwhm}=0.5^{\prime \prime }`$ at $`\lambda =0.5`$ $`\mu `$m) will cross the line of sight in 20 msec, in a 10 m sec -1 wind. Alternating exposures of 10 and 20 msec, it is possible to obtain an indication on how far the atmosphere departs from the assumption mentioned above, and extrapolate to infer an approximation of the ideal case of “zero exposure seeing”. The accuracy of the final seeing figure depends on $`N`$, $`d`$, $`D`$, $`r_{}`$, the stability of the atmosphere and the precision of the instrumental setup, mainly the telescope focus which also determines the scale of the image in the focal plane.

As mentioned above, differential image motion is insensitive to turbulent scales significantly larger than $`d`$. This may introduce a bias in carrying the seeing estimates inferred from a DIMM to those expected for a large telescope of diameter close to the upper limit of the Kolmogorov inertial range. It appears clear now that a finite outer scale $`L_{}`$ of turbulence exists, varying principally between 10 and 25 m (Martin et al. 1999; Avila 2000; Bouzid 2000; Linfield et al. 2001), which is commensurate with the size of large telescopes. In fact, the seeing at the VLT is often significantly better than that obtained by a DIMM next to the telescope; that difference is 10% in the optical and even more in the NIR (Sarazin, personal communication).

From Sarazin & Roddier (1990), the error in the measurement of the image motion variance is given by

$$\frac{\delta \sigma _i^2}{\sigma _i^2}\sqrt{\frac{2}{N1}}$$
(11)
which can be converted to an error on $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ via equation 10:

$$\frac{\delta \theta _{fwhm}}{\theta _{fwhm}}\frac{3}{5}\sqrt{\frac{2}{N1}}$$
(12)
In mild wind conditions and for $`r_{}<40`$ cm ($`\theta _{fwhm}>0.25\mathrm{"}`$) errors on $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ smaller than 10% can be obtained from the DIMM, by averaging $`N100`$ exposures. The instrumental setup does however rapidly lose accuracy for $`r_{}>40`$. Martin (1987) has investigated thoroughly the accuracy of seeing derived from the differential image motion technique.

We average seeing measurements over intervals of up to 8 minutes in time ($`N100`$), providing a seeing figure to compare with those of astronomical imaging exposures of typical duration. Independently, longitudinal and transverse image motion is monitored and seeing derived from each; we verify that the two indications yield statistically the same seeing and then averaged together. All seeing figures mentioned in this report refer to a wavelength of 0.5 $`\mu `$m and are corrected to a zenithal line of sight. Both DIMM telescopes were mounted on a rigid platform which elevated the aperture to approximately 2.5 m above the ground. Every time measurements were made, the DIMMs were in thermal equilibrium with the ambient air.

### 4.3 Instrument Comparison

Comparisons were made between DIMM–4 and DIMM–C1 for two nights. The results of the two were identical to within the measurement errors, as should be expected because both the hardware and the software of the two devices are identical. More important was the comparison carried out during two nights in October 2000 between DIMM–C1 and a DIMM brought to Atacama by a Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory team (R. Blum, M. Boccas, E. Bustos and B. Gregory). The CTIO DIMM had a higher data rate but it only integrated at one exposure time, which was set to 20 msec on the first night and to 10 msec on the second. The seeing measurements could thus be compared between the two devices, which were different in both hardware and software. Figure 5 illustrates the comparison of the two sets of data. The two devices were placed to within 10 m of each other, at the summit of Cerro Honar, at 5400 m. The aperture of the CTIO DIMM was closer to the ground (approximately 1 m) than DIMM–C1 (approximately 2.5 m); both were within 5 m of the mountain edge, in the direction of the incoming wind. A wind screen of negligible thermal capacity protected the CTIO DIMM; no screen protected DIMM–C1, which was more vulnerable to wind shake; this produced numerous interruptions of data taking and consequent reduction in the number of averaged records $`N`$ and increased error in the DIMM–C1 measurements. The comparison between the two data sets reveals no noticeable bias and good agreement to within the expected errors. The split between the 10 msec and 20 msec seeing values is due in part to the fact that conditions were better during the night of 20 msec comparison, and in part to the fact that 20 msec exposures smear image motion and produce lower seeing values than those derived from image motion obtained from shorter exposures, as discussed in the preceding Section.

### 4.4 Measurement Strategy and Routines

The ultimate purpose of our measurements is to establish the statistical properties of $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ at the best sites in the National Science Preserve region in the Atacama. A number of constraints are imposed on our campaign strategy. Given the high altitude and budgetary restrictions, it is impractical to consider extended measurement campaigns on summits to which vehicular access is currently impossible. While the construction of a robotic DIMM is now under way in Ithaca, obtaining a device that will work reliably and unattended at a remote site requires extensive testing and substantial resources. A robotic device will also be less portable, so its use should be aimed at testing the long term characteristics of a well chosen site.

Transportation of equipment and power sources restricts the ability to perform measurements to locations on the plateau and to a few elevations surrounding them. The latter include (a) two locations (one on Cerro Toco and one on Cerro Chajnantor) at which now abandoned sulphur mines were operated in previous decades, (b) the summit of the chain of Cerros de Honar, to which we have recently opened a rudimentary access road and (c) Cerro Chico, to which a small communications repeater was installed by a gas pipeline construction company. Access can be negotiated with rental four–wheel drive vehicles to those four locations. Those in Toco and Chajnantor, however, do not lead to prime locations for seeing measurements: neither reaches the summit and, in both cases, the track is on the east side, and thus on the prevailing wind shadow of the mountain mass. In addition to strong disturbances in the air flow produced by that circumstance, katabatic winds are also a concern in those two cases. For Cerro Chico and Cerros del Honar, however, vehicular access to the summits is possible. Both have a relatively clear immediate western horizon, although Cerro Negro and Cerros de Macón, almost as high as Chico and only 300 m lower than Honar, are a few km away in the direction of prevalent incoming winds. Moreover, Chico is located only 2 km from the foot of Cerro Chajnantor, and the effect of katabatic winds from Chajnantor, a significantly more substantial and higher mountain mass, is a concern. Access to the other summits (Chajnantor, Toco, Negro and Chascón) at this time requires foot hikes several hours long. The construction of even a rudimentary drivable track to any of those summits would be expensive, as would the transportation of equipment by means of a helicopter suited for high altitude flight.

Given the aforementioned circumstances, a seeing campaign strategy was developed that would follow three phases:

I. We would first establish a reference frame for seeing statistics in the region at an easily accessible site, possibly above the local boundary layer. We would determine reliably the site’s average seeing properties and seasonal variations, by carrying out a series of seeing runs spread over the seasonal cycle. This phase requires the deployment of a single DIMM (DIMM–4).

II. Next, we would compare characteristics of potentially attractive sites by means of relatively brief runs of seeing measurements at those sites, simultaneous with measurements at the reference site. This phase requires the deployment of two DIMMs (DIMM–4 and DIMM–C1)

III. Finally, once the site with the best comparative characteristics is identified, a long–term campaign of continuous monitoring with a robotic DIMM would be carried out. This phase requires the deployment of a robotic DIMM, currently under construction.

Given its accessibility, possible partial emergence above the atmospheric boundary layer and central location in the Science Preserve Area, we chose Cerro Chico as the site at which a seeing reference standard for the region would be established (the road to Honar was not completed until August 2000). Observing consisted of runs of 8–10 days duration each, spaced by approximately two months. Seven such runs have been carried out, sufficient to fairly characterize the seeing at Chico. This series of runs was preceded by a single run at the plateau level in May 1998, in the course of which DIMM–4 was deployed at the NRAO testing site (“ALMA container”, position of label 2 in Figure 2), at an elevation of 5050 m. This decision was made in order to ascertain our and the equipment’s ability to effectively function at high altitude. Caution advised that such verification be made near a shelter. Successively, runs were carried out at the summit of Cerro Chico, some 2 km NW and about 100 m higher than the ALMA container. A list of the runs and their durations is given in Table 1. Columns 1 and 2 list the date of each run and the location; column 3 lists the number of nights ($`N_n`$) and the number of hours ($`N_h`$) in which useful data were collected; columns 4–12 list the 25%, 50% and 75% quartile values of $`\theta _{fwhm}`$, measured respectively for the extrapolated “zero exposure seeing” (cols. 4–6), the 10 msec exposures (cols. 7–9) and 20 msec exposures (cols. 10–12). The coordinates of the two sites are given in Table 2. Atacama is in the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) zone nr. 19.

During operation, the DIMM aperture stands some 2.5 m above the ground. During the May 1998 run, the DIMM was placed about 5 m away from the shipping container that serves as shelter for NRAO’s ALMA monitoring station. During observations, the DIMM was always upwind from the container. During the observations at Chico, the DIMM was placed on the summit of this modest orographic formation, at less than 5 m from its western edge, which slopes downhill rather steeply in the prevailing direction of incoming winds. This choice was motivated by the results of the simulations by De Young & Charles (1995) of airflow over telescope sites, and the experience of ESO at Paranal and La Silla, which indicates that the effect of ground layer turbulence can be minimized by placing the DIMM near the edge of a summit, facing the incoming direction of prevailing winds. According to Martin et al. (2000), the median contribution to the seeing of the ground boundary layer, between 2 m and 21 m above the ground, is 7% of the total, with most of it occurring between 2 and 7 m. For a median seeing near 0.7”, the contribution of the ground boundary layer alone would be on the order of 0.25”, assuming that each layer’s contribution adds quadratically. Given our telescope setup, some measure of degradation of the seeing due to ground boundary layer should then be expected. In normal conditions, such deterioration is probably below the 10% level. During exceptionally good nights, however, the effect of the ground boundary layer may be more important.

During measurements, we power the DIMM hardware off a regular automobile battery, which is charged daily by connecting it to the engine of a vehicle. Each evening after sunset, telescope setup takes approximately 30 minutes. Each observing shift involves two persons. A first or second magnitude star is acquired, preferably to the south of zenith, so that the tracking errors resulting from misalignment between the telescope’s and the Earth’s polar axis are minimized. No more than 2 target stars per night are necessary; they are tracked at air masses generally between 1.1 and 1.6. Automatic guiding is provided by the DIMM software, and in routine operation, no attention is required, except for the impact of exceptional environmental effects (wind gusts, frost forming on the telescope mask, etc.) or occasional electronic glitches. DIMM data consists of a time series of (a) image motions, both longitudinal and transverse to the direction of the axis of the two holes in the mask; these are converted to seeing figures via Equation 10; (b) a scintillation index, which is the variance of the flux associated with each image; (c) time, zenith angle, focus, image scale and ancillary instrumental parameters. Roughly one record per second is acquired. Exposures of 10 msec and 20 msec are taken alternately, and separately analyzed. Off–line, the data is extrapolated to “zero exposure”, as described in the preceding section, and averaged over intervals of between 2 and 8 minutes.

### 4.5 Seeing Measurements: Results

Figure 6 displays time series of “zero exposure seeing” data for each day of the December 1998 run. Similar plots for the other runs can be seen in http://www.astro.cornell.edu/atacama. Solid symbols identify 8 minute seeing averages on Cerro Chico, while the horizontal dashed lines indicate the daily median seeing. The thin solid line in each panel is a running mean of the Cerro Paranal seeing measurements obtained with a DIMM similar to DIMM–4, at the same time as our data. Note that local midnight is at UT $`=4.5^h`$.

As illustrated in Table 1, the statistical properties of each of the Cerro Chico runs are rather similar. The median values of the 0 ms seeing vary between 0.65” and 0.76”, those of the 10 msec seeing between 0.56” and 0.65” while those of the 20 msec seeing between 0.48” and 0.56”. Quartiles of 0.56”, 0.71” and 0.87” for the overall data set, including 38 nights and 153 hours of data, appeared to be closely mimicked by the corresponding values for each run. In contrast, the May 1998 run at the plateau level gave significantly higher quartile values of 0.93”, 1.09” and 1.28”.

Figure 7 displays a comparative summary of the seeing measurements at the ALMA container and at Cerro Chico. The distributions for the two sites are significantly different. It should be remarked that the Cerro Chico and ALMA container measurements are not simultaneous.

The seeing at the beginning of the evening tends to be of lower quality. Such measurements are generally made still in twilight conditions, as there are advantages to doing the telescope setup in sunlight. The observation of significant improvement occurring 1–2 hours later is also a common experience. This effect appears to be correlated with a decrease in the wind speed, which as we have seen usually occurs 1–2 hours after sunset. The second part of the night tends to have better seeing than the first; yet, the larger fraction of Cerro Chico data correspond to the first half of the night.

Some data exist of simultaneous seeing and precipitable water vapor measurements. The latter are discussed in Paper II. Eight reliable simultaneous measurements are currently available. Of those, the four with total precipitable water vapor PWV$`<1`$ mm correspond to an average seeing of 0.51” at 0.5 $`\mu `$m, while the other four, with PWV$`>1`$ mm, correspond to an average seeing of 0.84”. For the first set of four, the water vapor layer was tightly packed at low altitudes above the ground, 50% of PWV being in each case contained within 500 m from the plateau level. For the second set of measurements, those with high PWV, the water vapor was distributed more widely in the vertical direction, the 50% boundary being above 1000m in each case. This correlation is suggestive but statistically still quite weak.

While there should be no expectation for Cerro Chico to deliver the best seeing in the National Science Preserve region, it is useful to compare it to other prime astronomical sites. The established astronomical site with the best historical seeing record, as measured with a similar technique to our own is Cerro Paranal. Cerro Paranal boasts a “zero exposure seeing” median of $`\theta _{fwhm}=0.66`$”, over several years of systematic DIMM tests (see http://www.eso.org/gen-fac/pubs/astclim). The historical median at La Silla, by comparison, is 0.87”. The La Silla and Paranal measurements were obtained with a DIMM analogous to the one we used in Chajnantor and similarly calibrated. Cerro Paranal is located some 250 km to the west and 180 km to the south of the Llano de Chajnantor. Figure 8 shows a comparison of the seeing statistics for Cerro Chico and Cerro Paranal, for 34 simultaneous nights of observations. Cerro Chico’s seeing ($`\theta _{fwhm}=0.71`$”) is about 12% better than that at Paranal ($`\theta _{fwhm}=0.80`$”). During the period of these measurements, however, Cerro Paranal’s seeing was about 21% worse than its historical median. This circumstance has been noted by Sarazin & Navarrete (1999), and ascribed to the exceptional El Niño/La Niña anomaly discussed in Section 3, which should have affected the Chico seeing as much a it affected Paranal’s. There has been an improving trend in the Paranal seeing in the last few months of 2000, bringing it to match its historical performance. Such an improvement was not noticeable at Chico, at least for the limited duration of the October 2000 run.

## 5 Photometric Conditions

We have not conducted a strict, quantitative survey of the photometric conditions at Chajnantor. We have however kept a visual record of the sky conditions, based on the substantial, combined experience of participants at the seeing runs and anchored by the individual estimates of RG, who took part in all the runs. Of the 84 nights with good visual records, 53 (63%) were deemed photometric, 15 (18%) were not photometric, with partial cloudiness, but suitable for other astronomical work, and 16 (19%) were more than 60% overcast. This included a full run of 11 cloudy nights (March 1999).

This record of observations yields a lower fraction of clear nights than obtained from historical satellite data records by Erasmus (2000), whose results based on 6.7 $`\mu `$m GOES 8 satellite imagery indicate that the atmospheric layers above 7500 m altitude in the Chajnantor region were clear of clouds (cloud cover less than 70% of sky) more than 90% of the time between January 1995 and February 1996. The disparity between our visual record and the Erasmus’ results may reflect the El Niño/La Niña anomaly of 1998, the contribution of low lying clouds to sky cover, or poor statistics for our visual records. At any rate, it is unlikely that the fraction of photometric nights at Chajnantor can match the extraordinary record of Cerro Paranal.

## 6 Discussion and Future Work

We have obtained a reliable reference frame for measurements of seeing in the Chajnantor region. Provided by observations at Cerro Chico over 38 nights spread over the seasonal cycle, this reference frame is currently being used to compare different sites in the vicinity of the Llano de Chajnantor. While Cerro Chico does not qualify as a site expected to deliver the best observing conditions among astronomically attractive sites in the region, it has easy access, it produces results with repeatable statistics and is thus a good choice for benchmarking quality comparisons through simultaneous measurements at different sites. It also turns out to deliver high quality seeing, comparable with that of some of the best observatories on Earth. This allows for good expectations for the quality of other sites in the region. The next phase of our campaign involves a series of runs of simultaneous seeing measurements at Chico and other summits, in the course of which we will learn the differential qualities of the various sites, and we will be able to tie those to the increasingly more robust data sample for Cerro Chico itself.

The difference between the seeing measurements at the ALMA Container and at Cerro Chico, a mere 100 m above the plateau level, suggests that boundary layer contributions dominate seeing at the plateau. This result was partly expected, for air flow at the plateau level is strongly influenced by thermally driven effects which, during daytime, result in strong winds from the west and, during quiescent nights, in katabatic winds off the surrounding mountain slopes. As expressed by the Richardson number, the onset of turbulence depends on the temperature gradient and the wind shear: the inhibition of convection produced by the positive thermal gradient with increasing altitude normally occurring at night in the lower 100 m of the atmosphere (Figure 3), is counterbalanced by strong wind shear (Figure 4). While the derivation of $`C_n^2`$ from the coarse median profiles shown in Figures 3 and 4 is impossible due to their low resolution, it is well known (Hufnagel 1978) that the occurrence of temperature inversion layers in the troposphere tends to be accompanied with increased $`C_n^2`$ just below the inversion. While a good fraction of the boundary layer seeing clearly arises from the lowest 100 m over the plateau, as the comparison of the seeing measured at the ALMA Container and at Cerro Chico shows, an important fraction of it probably originates above the summit of Chico, for inversion layers between 200 and 1000 m above the ground are common, as shown by radiosonde data in Paper II. Thus, optimistic expectations for high quality seeing at higher altitude peaks in the region are justified.

The free atmosphere seeing arises mostly from temperature fluctuations associated with the tropopause and the jet stream; the median value of $`\theta _{fwhm}`$ has been estimated to vary between 0.31” at La Silla, 0.37” at the South Pole, and 0.40” to 0.46” at Mauna Kea, La Palma and Paranal. As for the boundary layer, Marks et al. (1999) give estimates of its thickness at various astronomical sites. They range between 220 m at the South Pole, 900 m at La Silla and 2000 m at Cerro Paranal. At the Llano de Chajnantor region, the combination of ground surface layer and orographic boundary layer seeing may be quite complex: while the mean ground level rises gradually but steeply between the 2300 m of the Salar and the 5000 m of the plateau to the east, several hill formations stand between them, reaching elevations of about 5000 m (Cerro Negro and Cerros de Macón). Their influence on the thermal stability of the air flow is likely to be important, and dependent on the specific direction of the wind. A study of the characteristics of the air flow in the region by means of computer simulations is being carried out by D. De Young.

At this stage, a few simple considerations can be made regarding expectations for potentially interesting sites in the region: (i) it is likely that by accessing higher sites, the quality of the seeing will improve, with respect to the already excellent values measured at Cerro Chico; (ii) the infrared transparency improves with elevation, as discussed in Paper II; (iii) such improvements will come with disadvantages, mainly that associated with progressively increasing high altitude discomfort and rapidly increasing wind speeds, which will place a burden on construction and operation of telescopes. The candidate sites for future testing include the summit of the Honar chain, Cerro Toco, Cerro Chajnantor, Cerro Chascón and Cerro Negro. Measurements at Honar are already under way.

The current, preliminary conclusions on the seeing conditions in the Chajnantor region are as follows:

* The median seeing at 0.5 $`\mu `$m over 7 nights, at the plateau level of 5050 m, is$`\theta _{fwhm}=1.1`$”. This is strongly affected by boundary layer contributions.
* The optical seeing measured at Cerro Chico, 100 m above the plateau level is $`\theta _{fwhm}=`$ 0.7” over 38 nights, between July 1998 and October 2000; this is 12% better than the seeing at Cerro Paranal. This result is likely to be an overestimate of the historical median for Cerro Chico, as in the same period the seeing at Paranal was 21% higher than its historical median.
* The percentage of optically photometric nights over the Chajnantor region is near 60%, while that of nights useful for astronomical observations is close to 80%.
* Cerro Chico can now provide a benchmark against which to test the quality of other sites in the region, via dual, simultaneous seeing measurements. Such efforts are under way.

Acknowledgments: The support of Don Randel, Yervant Terzian, Joseph Veverka and Bryan Isacks of Cornell University, Riccardo Giacconi, Angel Otarola, Peter Shaver and Alvio Renzini of ESO, Martha Haynes of Cornell and Associated Universities, Inc., Robert L. Brown, Eduardo Hardy, Simon Radford and Geraldo Valladares of NRAO, don Tomás Poblete Alay and the staff of La Casa de Don Tomás are thankfully acknowledged. This study was made possible by a grant of the Provost’s Office of Cornell University and a National Science Foundation grant AST–9910136.