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# Piecing Together the Biggest Puzzle of All

## 1  Gravity, General Relativity, Neutron Stars, and Black Holes

Central to many of these questions is gravity. It’s the governing force in the cosmos. It holds planets in their orbits, binds stars and galaxies, and determines the fate of our universe. Isaac Newton’s 17th century theoretical description of gravity remains accurate enough to program the trajectories of spacecraft on their journeys to Mars, Jupiter, and beyond. But ever since 1905, when Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity showed that instantaneous transfer of information was precluded, physicists accepted that Newton’s laws would be inadequate when the motions induced by gravity approached the speed of light. Einstein’s general relativity (published in 1916), however, copes quite consistently even with situations when gravity is overwhelmingly strong.

General relativity ranks as one of the two pillars of 20th century physics; the other is quantum theory, a conceptual revolution that presaged our modern understanding of atoms and their nuclei. Einstein’s intellectual feat was especially astonishing because, unlike the pioneers of quantum theory, he wasn’t motivated by any experimental enigma.

It took 50 years before astronomers discovered objects whose gravity was strong enough to manifest the most distinctive and dramatic features of Einstein’s theory. In the early 1960s, ultraluminous objects (quasars) were detected. They seemed to require an even more efficient power supply than nuclear fusion, the process by which stars shine; gravitational collapse seemed the most attractive explanation. The American theorist Thomas Gold expressed the exhilaration of theorists at that time. In an after-dinner speech at the first big conference on the new subject of relativistic astrophysics, held in Dallas in 1963, he said, “The relativists with their sophisticated work \[are\] not only magnificent cultural ornaments but might actually be useful to science! Everyone is pleased: the relativists, who feel they are being appreciated, who are suddenly experts in a field they hardly knew existed; the astrophysicists for having enlarged their domain. … It is all very pleasing, so let us hope it is right.”

Observation-using the novel techniques of radio and X-ray astronomy-bore out Gold’s optimism. In the 1950s, the world’s best optical telescopes were concentrated in the United States, particularly in California. This shift from Europe had come about for climatic as well as financial reasons. However, radio waves from space can pass through clouds, so Europe (and Australia) were able to develop the new science of radio astronomy without any climatic handicap.

Some of the strongest sources of cosmic radio noise could be readily identified. One was the Crab Nebula, the expanding debris of a supernova explosion witnessed by oriental astronomers in A.D. 1054. Other sources were remote extragalactic objects, involving, we now realize, energy generation around gigantic black holes. These detections were unexpected. The physical processes that emit the radio waves, although now well understood, were not predicted.

The most remarkable serendipitous achievement of radio astronomy was the discovery of neutron stars in 1967 by Anthony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell. These stars are the dense remnants left behind at the core of some supernova explosions. They were detected as pulsars: They spin (sometimes many times per second) and emit an intense beam of radio waves that sweeps across our line of sight once per revolution. The importance of neutron stars lies in their extreme physics-colossal densities, strong magnetic fields, and intense gravity.

In 1969, a very fast (30-Hz) pulsar was found at the center of the Crab Nebula. Careful observations showed that the pulse rate was gradually slowing. This was natural if energy stored in the star’s spin was being gradually converted into a wind of particles, which keeps the nebula shining in blue light. Interestingly, this pulsar’s repetition rate, 30 per second, is so high that the eye sees it as a steady source. Had it been equally bright but spinning more slowly-say, 10 times a second-the remarkable properties of this little star could have been discovered 70 years ago. How would the course of 20th century physics have been changed if superdense matter had been detected in the 1920s, before neutrons were discovered on Earth? One cannot guess, except that astronomy’s importance for fundamental physics would surely have been recognized far sooner.

Neutron stars were found by accident. No one expected them to emit strong and distinctive radio pulses. If theorists in the early 1960s had been asked the best way to detect a neutron star, most would have suggested a search for x-ray emission. After all, if neutron stars radiate as much energy as ordinary stars, but from a much smaller surface, they must be hot enough that the radiation from them is in X-rays. So it was x-ray astronomers who appeared best placed to discover neutron stars.

X-rays from cosmic objects get absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere, however, and so can only be observed from space. X-ray astronomy, like radio astronomy, received its impetus from wartime technologies and expertise. In this case it was scientists in the United States who took the lead, especially the late Herbert Friedman and his colleagues at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Their first x-ray detectors, mounted on rockets, each yielded only a few minutes of useful data before they crashed back to the ground. X-ray astronomy spurted forward in 1970 when NASA launched the first x-ray satellite, which could gather data for years at a time. Through this project and its many successors, x-ray astronomy has proved itself to be a crucial new window on the universe.

X-rays are emitted by unusually hot gas and by especially intense sources. X-ray maps of the sky consequently highlight the hottest and most energetic objects in the cosmos. Neutron stars, which pack at least as much mass as the sun in a volume little more than 10 kilometers in diameter, are among these. Their gravity is so strong that relativistic corrections amount to 30%.

Some stellar remnants, we now suspect, collapse beyond neutron-star densities to form black holes, which distort space and time even more than a neutron star does. An astronaut who ventured within the horizon around a black hole could not transmit any light signals to the external world-it is as though space itself is being sucked inward faster than light moves out through it. An external observer would never witness the astronaut’s final fate: Any clock would appear to run slower and slower as it fell inward, so the astronaut would appear impaled at the horizon, frozen in time.

The Russian theorists Yakov Zeldovich and Igor Novikov, who studied how time was distorted near collapsed objects, coined the term “frozen stars” in the early 1960s. The term “black hole” was coined in 1968, when John Wheeler described how “light and particles incident from outside … go down the black hole only to add to its mass and increase its gravitational attraction.”

The black holes that represent the final evolutionary state of stars have radii of 10 to 50 kilometers. But there is now compelling evidence that holes weighing as much as millions, or even billions, of suns exist at the centers of most galaxies. Some of them manifest themselves as quasars-concentrations of energy that outshine all the stars in their host galaxy-or as intense sources of cosmic radio emission. Others, including one at our own galactic center, are quiescent, but affect the orbits of stars passing close to them.

Viewed from outside, black holes are standardized objects: No traces persist to distinguish how a particular hole formed, nor what objects it swallowed. In 1963 the New Zealander Roy Kerr discovered a solution of Einstein’s equations that represented a collapsed rotating object. The “Kerr solution” acquired paramount importance when theorists realized that it describes space-time around any black hole. A collapsing object quickly settles down to a standardized stationary state characterized by just two numbers: those that measure its mass and its spin. Roger Penrose, the mathematical physicist who perhaps did the most to stimulate the renaissance in relativity theory in the 1960s, has remarked, “It is ironic that the astrophysical object which is strangest and least familiar, the black hole, should be the one for which our theoretical picture is most complete.”

The discovery of black holes opened the way to testing the most remarkable consequences of Einstein’s theory. The radiation from such objects comes primarily from hot gas swirling downward into the “gravitational pit.” It displays huge Doppler effects, as well as having an extra redshift because of the strong gravity. Spectroscopic study of this radiation, especially the x-rays, can probe the flow very close to the hole and diagnose whether the shape of space near it agrees with what theory predicts.

## 2 The Expanding Cosmos

Our own Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars, mainly in a disc orbiting a central hub. Nothing was known about any more remote parts of the universe until the 1920s, but it’s now recognized that our galaxy is one among billions.

Galaxies occur mostly in groups or clusters, held together by gravity. Our own Local Group, a few million light-years across, contains the Milky Way and Andromeda, together with 34 smaller galaxies. This group is near the edge of the Virgo Cluster, an archipelago of several hundred galaxies, whose core lies about 50 million light-years away. Clusters and groups are themselves organized in still larger aggregates. The so-called Great Wall, a sheetlike array of galaxies about 200 million light-years away, is the nearest and most prominent of these giant features.

Perhaps the most important single broad-brush fact about our universe is that all galaxies (except for a few nearby galaxies in our own cluster) are receding from us. Moreover, the redshift-a measure of the recession speed-is larger for the fainter and more distant galaxies. We seem to be in an expanding universe where clusters of galaxies get more widely separated-more thinly separated through space-as time goes on.

The simple relation between redshift and distance is named after Edwin Hubble, who first claimed such a law in 1929. Hubble could only study relatively nearby galaxies, whose recession speeds were less than 1% of the speed of light. Thanks to technical advances and larger telescopes, the data now extend to galaxies whose apparent recession amounts to a good fraction of the speed of light. It is conceptually preferable to attribute the redshift to “stretching” of space while the light travels through it. The amount of redshifting-in other words, the amount the wavelengths are stretched-tells us how much the universe has expanded while the light has been traveling toward us.

Models for an expanding, homogeneous universe, some based on Einstein’s general relativity, had been devised in the 1920s and 1930s. But there was then little quantitative evidence on the extent to which our universe was actually homogeneous. Still less was it possible to discriminate between alternative models.

Astronomers are now mapping many more clusters like Virgo and more features like the Great Wall. But deeper surveys don’t seem to reveal anything even larger. A box 200 million light-years on a side (a distance still small compared to the horizon of our observations, which is about 10 billion light-years away) can accommodate the largest aggregates. Such a box, wherever it was placed in the universe, would contain roughly the same number of galaxies, grouped in a statistically similar way, into clusters, filamentary structures, and so on.

Even the very biggest conspicuous cosmic structures are small compared with the largest distances our telescopes can probe. This makes the science of cosmology possible, by allowing us to define the average properties of our universe and to use simple, homogeneous models as a valid approximation.

In the 1950s, Allan Sandage was a lone pioneer in advocating how the 200-inch (5-m) Mount Palomar telescope could probe deep enough into space and, therefore, far enough back in the past, to test cosmological models. To detect changes in the expansion rate, or evolution in the galaxy population, it is necessary to look at objects so far away that their light set out billions of years ago.

In the last 40 years, the development of ever more capable and revealing telescopes and observational techniques has made this possible. Over a dozen telescopes with 4-meter mirrors were built during the 1970s and 1980s. Replacement of photographic plates, with 1% quantum efficiency, by solid-state detectors with efficiencies up to 80% hugely enhanced detectability of faint and distant objects. A new generation of still larger telescopes (of which the two Keck Telescopes in Hawaii are the first) is now coming into service. Perhaps most impressive of all is the unimaginatively named Very Large Telescope, a cluster of four telescopes, each with an 8.2-meter mirror, constructed in the Chilean Andes by a consortium of European nations. This instrument not only collects more light than any previous telescope but is also intended to yield sharper images, by compensating for the fluctuations in the atmosphere and linking the telescopes together so they can function as an interferometer.

There also have been dramatic advances in space-based observations. Although initially dogged by delays, flaws, and cost overruns, the Hubble Space Telescope has been fulfilling the hopes astronomers had for it. The Hubble Deep Field images-obtained by pointing steadily for several days at a small patch of sky-reveal literally hundreds of faint smudges, even within a field of view so small that it would cover less than 1/100 the area of the full moon. Each smudge is an entire galaxy, thousands of light-years in size, which appears so small and faint because of its huge distance. We are viewing these remote galaxies at a very primitive evolutionary stage. They have as yet no complex chemistry: There would have been very little oxygen, carbon, and other elements to make planets, and so scant chance of life.

We now have snapshots that take us billions of years back in time, to the era when the first galaxies were forming. The first stars may actually have formed even earlier, in aggregates smaller than present-day galaxies, which are too faint for even the largest existing telescopes to reveal.

## 3  “Fossils” of the Hot Beginning

What about still more remote epochs, before even the first stars had formed? In the later 1920s, the MIT-trained Belgian priest Georges Lema tre, along with Aleksandr Friedmann in Russia, was a pioneer of the idea that everything began in a dense state and that its structure unfolded as it expanded. Lema tre wrote: “The evolution of the universe can be likened to a display of fireworks that has just ended: some few wisps, ashes and smoke. Standing on a well-chilled cinder we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds.”

This “vanished brilliance” was revealed in 1965. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories striving to reduce the noise in an antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, serendipitously discovered that all space is slightly warmed by microwaves with no apparent source. In 1990, John Mather and his colleagues, using NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, showed that the spectrum obeys a “blackbody” or thermal law, with a precision of one part in 10,000-just what would be expected if it were indeed a relic of a “fireball” phase when everything in our universe was squeezed intensely hot, dense, and opaque. The cosmic expansion would have cooled and diluted the original radiation and stretched its wavelength, but it would still be around, pervading all of space.

The present background temperature is only 2.728 degrees above absolute zero, but this represents a surprising amount of heat: 412 million quanta of radiation (photons) in each cubic meter of the present-day universe. In contrast, all the observed stars and gas in the universe, if spread uniformly through space, would amount to only about 0.2 atoms per cubic meter-more than a billion times less than the photon density.

According to the big bang theory, everything would once have been compressed hotter than the center of a star-certainly hot enough for nuclear reactions. The most important of these reactions happen at a temperature of roughly a billion degrees. However, the universe cooled below this temperature within 3 minutes, and (fortunately for us) this didn’t allow time to process primordial material into iron, as in the hottest stars-nor even into carbon, oxygen, etc.

This was contrary to George Gamow’s conjecture that the entire Periodic Table was ”cooked” in the early universe. In the 1950s, Fred Hoyle, William Fowler, and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge-and, in parallel work, Alistair Cameron-developed an alternative scheme, which quantitatively explained almost the entire Periodic Table as the outcome of nuclear fusion in stars and supernovae. After later refinements, the calculated mix of atoms is gratifyingly close to the proportions now observed.

The oldest stars, which would have formed from gas early in galactic history, when it was less “polluted,” are indeed deficient in heavy elements, just as stellar nucleosynthesis theory would lead one to expect. However, even the oldest objects turned out to be 23% to 24% helium: No star, galaxy, or nebula has been found where helium is less abundant than this. It seems as though the galaxy started not as pure hydrogen but was already a mix of hydrogen and helium.

The “hot big bang” theory neatly solves this mystery. Reactions in the hot early phases would turn about 23% of the hydrogen into helium, but the universe cooled down so fast that there wasn’t time to synthesize the elements higher up the Periodic Table (apart from a trace of lithium). Attributing most cosmic helium to the big bang thus solved a long-standing problem-why there is so much of it, and why it is so uniform in its abundance-and emboldened cosmologists to take the first few seconds of cosmic history seriously.

Another product of the big bang is deuterium (heavy hydrogen). Deuterium’s abundance relative to hydrogen was until recently uncertain. But the ratio, measured in Jupiter, in interstellar gas, and in remote intergalactic clouds, is now pinned down to be about 1/50,000. The origin of even this trace poses a problem, because deuterium is destroyed rather than created in stars. As a nuclear fuel, it is easier to ignite than ordinary hydrogen, so newly formed stars destroy their deuterium during their initial contraction, before settling down in their long, hydrogen-burning phases.

If we assume a present universe-wide average density of 0.2 atoms per cubic meter and compute what mixture of atoms would emerge from the cooling fireball, we find that the proportions of hydrogen, deuterium, and helium (and, as a bonus, lithium as well) agree with observations. This is gratifying, because the observed abundances could have been entirely out of line with the predictions of any big bang; or they might have been consistent, but only for a density that was far below, or else far above, the range allowed by observation.

## 4 Should We Believe the Big Bang Scenario?

The extrapolation by astrophysicists and cosmologists back to a stage when the universe had been expanding for a few seconds deserves to be taken as seriously as, for instance, what geologists or paleontologists tell us about the early history of our Earth: Their inferences are just as indirect and generally less quantitative.

Moreover, there are several discoveries that might have been made over the last 30 years which would have invalidated the big bang hypothesis and which have not been made – the big bang theory has lived dangerously for decades and survived. Here are some of those absent observations:

* Astronomers might have found an object whose helium abundance was far below the amount predicted from the big bang – 23%. This would have been fatal, because extra helium made in stars can readily boost helium above its pregalactic abundance, but there seems no way of converting all the helium back to hydrogen.
* The background radiation measured so accurately by the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite might have turned out to have a spectrum that differed from the expected “blackbody” or thermal form. What’s more, the radiation temperature could have been so smooth over the whole sky that it was incompatible with the fluctuations needed to give rise to present-day structures like clusters of galaxies.
* A stable neutrino might have been discovered to have a mass in the range of 100 to 106 electron volts. This would have been fatal, because the hot early universe would have contained almost as many neutrinos as photons. If each neutrino weighed even a millionth as much as an atom, they would, in toto, contribute too much mass to the present universe-more, even, than could be hidden in dark matter. Experimental physicists have been trying hard to measure neutrino masses, but they are seemingly too small to be important contributors to dark matter.
* The deuterium abundance could have been so high that it was inconsistent with big bang nucleosynthesis (or implied an unacceptably low baryon density).

The big bang theory’s survival gives us confidence in extrapolating right back to the first few seconds of cosmic history and assuming that the laws of microphysics were the same then as now.

## 5  The Emergence of Structure

If our universe started off as a hot, amorphous fireball, how did it differentiate into the observed pattern of stars, galaxies, and clusters? This is actually a natural outcome of the workings of gravity, which leverages, over time, even very slight initial irregularities into conspicuous density contrasts.

Theorists can now follow virtual universes in a computer. Slight fluctuations are fed in at the start of the simulation. As the universe expands, incipient galaxies and larger structures emerge and evolve. The purely gravitational aspects of this process can be modeled fairly well. However, when gas contracts under gravity into a protogalaxy, its density has to rise by many powers of 10 before stars form, and complicated dynamics and radiative transfer determine what their masses are. Moreover, the energy output from the first stars exerts uncertain feedback on what happens later. This is too complicated to be computed and has to be approximated by plausible “recipes,” chosen in the light of local observations.

Despite these limitations, simulations of structure formation have achieved remarkable success in accounting for present-day morphology of galaxies and clusters. Moreover, these models can be checked by seeing how well they account also for the new high-redshift data, which tell us what the universe was like at earlier times.

There is another consistency check on computed scenarios. In these simulations, the predicted sizes and clustering of galaxies depend on the form and amplitude of the initial fluctuations. The microwave background should bear the imprint of these fluctuations and thus offers an independent line of evidence on their amplitude. This radiation in effect comes from a surface so far away that it is being observed at an era when the fluctuations were still of small amplitude. Radiation from an incipient cluster on that surface would appear slightly cooler, because it loses extra energy climbing out of the gravitational pull of an overdense region; conversely, radiation from the direction of an incipient void would be slightly hotter. The predicted fractional differences in the temperature over the sky due to this effect are about one part in $`10^5`$. On some scales, a somewhat larger Doppler fluctuation is predicted, due to the associated motions.

Measuring one part in 100,000 of background radiation, which is itself 100 times cooler than the atmosphere, is a daunting technical challenge. But it has now been achieved. Fluctuations were first measured by George Smoot and his colleagues, using 4 years of data gathered by the COBE satellite. These measurements were restricted to angular scales exceeding 7 degrees, however. They since have been supplemented and extended by ground-based and balloon experiments. The amplitudes are indeed consistent with what is required for galaxy formation. Within a few years, two new spacecraft – NASA’s Microwave Anisotropy Probe and the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite – will yield data precise enough to settle many key questions about cosmology, the early universe, and how galaxies emerged.

## 6  Dark Matter, Omega, and the First Microsecond

In about 5 billion years, the sun will die and Earth with it. At about the same time (give or take a billion years) the Andromeda galaxy, already falling toward us, may crash into our own Milky Way. But will the universe go on expanding forever? Or will the entire firmament eventually recollapse to a big crunch, where everything will suffer the same fate as an unwary astronaut who falls into a black hole?

The answer depends on how much the cosmic expansion is being decelerated by the gravitational pull that everything exerts on everything else. It is straightforward to calculate that the expansion can eventually be reversed if there is, on average, more than about five baryons in each cubic meter – the so-called critical density. (A baryon is the collective term for protons and neutrons, the heavy ingredients of all atoms.) That doesn’t sound like much. But if all the galaxies were dismantled, and their constituent stars and gas spread uniformly through space, they’d make an even emptier vacuum – one baryon in every 10 cubic meters. Add to that what seems to be a similar amount of material in diffuse intergalactic gas, and the resulting density amounts to 0.2 baryons per cubic meter.

That’s 25 times less than the critical density, which at first sight implies perpetual expansion. But the actual situation is less straightforward. Astronomers have discovered that galaxies, and even entire galaxy clusters, would fly apart unless held together by the gravitational pull of five to 10 times more material than we actually see. This is the famous “dark matter” mystery.

There are many candidates for dark matter. Earlier ideas included very faint stars (known as “brown dwarfs”), or the remnants of massive stars. However, most cosmologists suspect that dark matter is mainly exotic particles left over from the big bang and is not made of baryons at all.

There are two main reasons for this belief. First, the proportions of helium and deuterium that are calculated to emerge from the big bang are sensitive to the baryon density and would be discrepant with observations if the average baryonic density were, say, between 1 and 2, rather than 0.2 per cubic meter. Extra dark matter in exotic particles that do not participate in nuclear reactions, however, would not scupper the concordance with a baryon density of only 0.2 per cubic meter.

Second, the formation of galaxies would be hard to understand if the bulk of their mass were baryonic. Nonbaryonic matter can cluster more efficiently in the early universe because it does not feel the opposing influence of radiation pressure. If the universe were purely baryonic, it would be hard to reconcile its present highly structured state with the small amplitude of the primordial fluctuations implied by the microwave background anisotropies.

The dark matter mystery may yield to a three-pronged attack:

1. Direct detection. Using sensitive detectors in underground laboratories, searches are now under way for dark matter candidates, including heavy neutral particles and axions.
2. Progress in particle physics. If we knew more about the types of particles that could exist in the ultraearly universe, then we could confidently calculate how many should survive from the first microseconds of the big bang and how much dark mass they would contribute.
3. Simulations of galaxy formation and large-scale structure. When and how galaxies form and cluster depends on what their gravitationally dominant constituent is. It is possible to simulate the formation of galaxies on a computer, making alternative assumptions about the dark matter. If one assumption yielded an outcome that matched real galaxies especially closely, this would at least be corroborative evidence for one candidate rather than another.

Cosmologists denote the ratio of the actual density to the critical density by $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$. There is certainly enough dark matter to make $`\mathrm{\Omega }=0.2`$. Until recently, we couldn’t rule out several times this amount – comprising the full critical density, $`\mathrm{\Omega }=1`$ – in the space between clusters of galaxies. But it now seems that, in toto, atoms and dark matter don’t contribute more than about 30% of critical density.

We can never be sure of the long-term future: New physics may intervene, and domains beyond our observational range may be different from the part of the universe we can see. But with those provisos, the odds favor perpetual expansion. The galaxies will disperse, and they will fade as their stars all die and their material gets locked up in old white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes.

There is, moreover, tantalizing evidence for an extra repulsion force that overwhelms gravity on the cosmic scale. Studies of the redshift versus the apparent brightness of distant supernovae suggest that galaxies may disperse at an accelerating rate. Science rated this – perhaps prematurely – as the most important discovery of 1998, in any field. If this work is corroborated, the forecast is an even emptier universe. All galaxies beyond our local group will accelerate away, disappearing completely from view as their redshift rises exponentially toward infinity.

The idea of a cosmological repulsion goes back to 1917, when Einstein introduced an extra term into his equations, which he called the cosmological constant, or $`\lambda `$. His motive was to allow a static universe, in which the repulsive force counteracted gravity. He later abandoned the idea, calling it his “biggest blunder,” when Hubble discovered that the universe was actually expanding. However, from our modern perspective, $`\lambda `$ can be envisaged as dark energy latent in empty space. It leads to a repulsion because, according to Einstein’s equation, gravity depends on pressure as well as density, and if the pressure is sufficiently negative (as it has to be for vacuum energy), the net effect is repulsive.\*

The cosmological constant corresponds to a vacuum energy that is unchanging as the universe expands. Cosmologists have recently suggested variants – forms of dark energy, dubbed quintessence, with negative pressure that could gradually decay.

There is another line of evidence for some form of dark energy, quite independent of the indications from supernovae for an accelerating universe. Theory tells us that fluctuations or ripples in the microwave background should be biggest on a particular length scale that is related to the maximum distance a sound wave can travel. The angular scale corresponding to this length depends, however, on the geometry of the universe.

Measurements have now pinned down the angular scale of this Doppler peak with better than 10% precision. The results are consistent with a “flat” universe. In contrast, if there were no mass-energy apart from enough baryons and dark matter to yield 0.2 to 0.3 for $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, we would be in an open universe, where this angle would be smaller by a factor of 2 – definitely in conflict with observations. Reconciliation with the microwave background measurements would be achieved if dark energy made up the balance, so that the universe was, after all, flat; the dominant dark energy would then drive the accelerating expansion.

Within just the last 2 years, a remarkable concordance among several seemingly independent observations has emerged, leading to a preferred choice for the key parameters describing our universe. It seems that the universe is flat, with baryons providing 4% of the mass-energy, dark matter 20% to 30%, and dark energy the rest, i.e., 66% to 76%. The flatness vindicates a natural prediction of the “inflationary theory” (discussed below). The expansion accelerates because dark energy (with negative pressure) is the dominant constituent. But there seems nothing natural about the actual split between the three different contributions.

Is there any explanation for these numbers? For that matter, why do simple cosmological models based on precise homogeneity and isotropy fit so well? A completely chaotic and irregular universe would at first sight seem more probable. If there is an answer to these questions, it lies in the initial instants of cosmic history.

For the last 20 years, cosmologists have suspected that the uniformity is a legacy of something remarkable that happened in the ultraearly universe: A very fierce cosmical repulsion, it is claimed, could have accelerated the expansion, so that a tiny patch of space-time expanded exponentially and homogenized when it was, perhaps, no more than 10-35 seconds old.

The generic idea that our universe inflated from something microscopic is compellingly attractive. Rather than assuming the expansion as an initial condition, it accounts for it physically. It looks like “something for nothing,” but it isn’t really. That’s because our present vast universe may, in a sense, have zero net energy. Every atom has an energy because of its mass (Einstein’s $`mc^2`$). But it has a negative energy due to gravity. We, for instance, are in a state of lower energy on Earth’s surface than if we were up in space. And if we added up the negative potential energy we possess due to the gravitational field of everything else, it could cancel out our rest mass energy. Thus it doesn’t, as it were, cost anything to expand the mass and energy in our universe.

Alan Guth spelled out this concept of inflation in 1981, building on work by others. It invokes extreme, untested physics and so still has unsure foundations. But it isn’t just metaphysics. Its one generic prediction – that the universe would be stretched flat – seems to be borne out by observation. Moreover, observations can in principle firm it up. For instance, the slight ripples that are the seeds of galaxies and clusters could have been quantum fluctuations, imprinted when the entire universe was of microscopic size and stretched by inflationary expansion. The nonuniformities in the present universe depend, in a calculable way, on the physics of inflation, so observations will be able to probe this extreme physics and perhaps help us understand what caused inflation.

Some variants of the inflationary universe-espoused by Andrei Linde, Alex Vilenkin, and others-suggest that our big bang wasn’t the only one. This fantastic speculation dramatically enlarges our concept of reality. The entire history of our universe might just be an episode, one facet, of the infinite multiverse. Current ideas on superstring theory, and the possibility of extra spatial dimensions, suggest other equally fascinating scenarios.

## 7  The Universe as We Are Coming to Know It

Cosmologists are no longer starved of data: Current progress is owed far more to observers and experimentalists than to armchair theorists. Actual physical probes remain confined to our own solar system, but vicarious exploration with telescopes and other techniques has extended our horizons. These tools allow us to study galaxies whose light has been journeying toward us for 90% of the time since the big bang.

And we are making sense of what we see. Stars follow finite life cycles whose main features are now quite well understood. There is no equivalent understanding of galaxies. But observations of nearby galaxies, and ones so remote that they are being viewed as they form, are helping.

We’re witnessing a crescendo of discoveries that promises to continue throughout the next decade. It is something of a coincidence – of technology and funding, as well as of the way the intellectual discourse has developed – that there has, more or less concurrently, been an impetus on several fronts:

* Sensitive tools and techniques make it possible to intensively study the microwave background fluctuations.
* The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has been fulfilling its potential for observing deep-space phenomena; new 8- to 10-meter telescopes are on line; new x-ray telescopes in space, and radio arrays on the ground, now offer greater sensitivity. And a decade from now, new space telescopes should carry the enterprise beyond what the HST can achieve.
* Large-scale clustering and dynamics studies, and big surveys of galaxies, will permit sensitive statistical tests that should discriminate among theories for structure formation.
* Dramatic advances in computer technology have allowed increasingly elaborate numerical simulations, which now incorporate realistic gas dynamics as well as gravity.
* New fundamental physics offers the hope of putting the ultraearly universe on as firm a footing as the later eras.

Some debates have been settled; some earlier issues are no longer controversial. As the consensus advances, new questions, which couldn’t even have been posed earlier, are now being debated. Among them are: Why does our universe consist of the particular mix of baryonic matter and dark matter? What caused the initial favoritism for matter over antimatter? Is the dark matter composed of neutral particles surviving from the big bang, or is it something even more exotic? Are they the outcome of quantum fluctuations imprinted when our entire universe was of microscopic size? What is the mysterious dark energy that makes our universe flat, and how does this relate to inflation?

It will remain a challenge to understand the very beginning. This will require a new theory, perhaps a variant of superstrings, which unifies cosmos and microworld. Optimists hope for breakthroughs soon. But the aim of cosmology and astronomy is to map out how a simple fireball evolved, over 12 billion years, into the complex cosmic habitat we find around us. Understanding how the consequences of the basic laws have unfolded over cosmic history is an inexhaustible challenge for the new millennium.

## Reading

N. A. Bahcall, J. P. Ostriker, S. Perlmutter, P. J. Steinhardt, Science 284, 1481 (1999).

M. C. Begelman and M. J. Rees, Gravity’s Fatal Attraction: Black Holes in the Universe (W. H. Freeman & Company, New York, 1998).

R. Brawer and A. P. Lightman, Origins: The Lives and Worlds of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1992).

E. R. Harrison, Cosmology: The Science of the Universe (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ed. 2, 2000).

J. A. Peacock, Cosmological Physics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998). Reviews of Modern Physics 71(2), (1999).

American Physical Society. Special centenary issue with many authoritative reviews of history and current status of subject.


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# Anisotropic Antiferromagnetic Spin Chains in a Transverse Field: Reentrant Behavior of the Staggered Magnetization

## I Introduction

Recently, magnetization processes of one-dimensional (1D) quantum spin systems have been attracting much interest from theoretical and experimental view points. Particularly, various types of field-induced critical behavior in the magnetization process, such as a square-root behavior associated with the excitation gap , the magnetization plateau , the cusp singularity , etc. have been investigated intensively. In most of these theoretical analyses of the magnetization process, the external field is supposed to be applied in the longitudinal direction. For the case of a system having an anisotropy, however, magnetic properties of the system may be essentially different, depending on whether the external field is applied in the traverse or longitudinal directions. In this paper, we wish to make a quantitative analysis for the magnetic properties of antiferromagnetic quantum spin chains with easy-axis anisotropies in a transverse field.

In analyzing an anisotropic model in the transverse magnetic field, an essential point is that the “total $`S^z`$” of the system is not a conservative quantity, since the symmetry of the model is reduced to be $`Z_2`$. Then, the property of the system is characterized with the staggered magnetization. For example, the appearance of the staggered magnetization is known for the $`S=1/2`$ XXZ spin chain in the Ising limit, while the isotropic XXX model has no Néel order; The anisotropy favors the classical Néel order, whereas the transverse field term induces a quantum fluctuation in addition to the usual XY-term. What we are interested in here is how the system behaves between the Ising limit and the isotropic limit. We discuss the physics developed by the competition between the anisotropy and the quantum fluctuations, based on quantitative calculations of the staggered magnetization.

For the purpose of computing the magnetization curve, we employ the product wave function renormalization group(PWFRG) method, which is a variant of the density matrix renormalization group(DMRG) method. The PWFRG is successfully applied to various types of the magnetization process, and further it can treat a system without the total-$`S^z`$ conservation efficiently. We calculate the staggered magnetization in the easy-axis direction and the uniform magnetization in the transverse one, for the infinite-length chains. Here it should be noted that the lack of the total-$`S^z`$ conservation makes the exact diagonalization study difficult for the anisotropic models in the transverse field.

For the $`S=1/2`$ XXZ chain, we find the reentrant behavior of the staggered magnetization, which is partially supported by the exact results at some special parameters. We further discuss the $`S=1`$ XXZ spin chain and the $`S=1`$ Heisenberg spin chain with the single-ion anisotropy, where the existence of the Haldane gap makes the physics of the systems more fruitful. We verify that the phase transitions occur twice at the lower critical field and the higher critical one; The former field is associated with the Haldane gap, and the later one can be connected with the saturation field of the isotropic case adiabatically. We also discuss the critical behavior characterized by the staggered magnetizations.

This paper is organized as follows: In §II, we describe the $`S=1/2`$ XXZ spin chain in a transverse field. In §III, we consider the $`S=1`$ quantum spin chains with the XXZ-type anisotropy(§III-A) and the single-ion anisotropy(§III-B). The last section is devoted to the summary.

## II The $`S=1/2`$ case

The $`S=1/2`$ XXZ chain is one of the most fundamental models among spin chains of $`S=1/2`$. In this section, we consider the XXZ chain in a transverse field. We write the Hamiltonian $``$ as

$$=\underset{i}{}[J_{}(S_i^xS_{i+1}^x+S_i^yS_{i+1}^y)+J_{}S_i^zS_{i+1}^z]\mathrm{\Gamma }\underset{i}{}S_i^x,$$
(1)
where $`S_i^\alpha `$ is the $`\alpha `$ component of the $`S=1/2`$ spin operator at $`i`$-th site, and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is the strength of the transverse field. The exchange coupling constant in easy-plane($`xy`$-plane) is denoted by $`J_{}`$ and that of the easy-axis($`z`$-axis) direction by $`J_{}`$. We have set $`g\mu _\mathrm{B}=1`$ ($`g`$: $`g`$-factor, $`\mu _B`$: Bohr magneton) for simplicity. In this section, we discuss the system (1) in the range $`0J_{}1`$ with fixing $`J_{}=1`$.

The magnetic property of the Hamiltonian (1) has been studied for several years. . Particularly, it should be remarked that there is a special value of the transverse field called a disorder point, where the ground state is written down analytically.  In addition, Mori et al. have discussed how the excitation structure of eq. (1) is affected by the transverse field. However, the full magnetization process for general parameters of eq.(1) has not been calculated quantitatively, except for the exactly solved cases $`J_{}=0`$ (the Ising model in a transverse field) and $`J_{}=1`$ (the Heisenberg model).

In the following, we calculate the uniform magnetization in $`x`$-direction $`M_xS_i^x`$ and the staggered magnetization in $`z`$-direction $`M_{\mathrm{st}}|S_i^z|`$, by using the PWFRG method. Here we note that it is useful to consider the $`\pi `$-rotation of spins at every two sites(for example, at every even sites):

$$U\underset{k\{\mathrm{even}\mathrm{sites}\}}{}\mathrm{exp}[i\pi S_k^x],$$
(2)
since we can calculate the staggered magnetization as the uniform magnetization in the transformed system $`^{}=U^{}U`$. We have confirmed that the computed results for the transformed model agree with the staggered magnetization calculated directly for eq. (1).

Before proceeding to the detailed analysis of the XXZ chain, we consider the Ising model in a transverse field (ITF) ($`J_{}=0`$), for which the analytical solution is known as follows :

$$M_x=_0^\pi \frac{dk}{2\pi }\frac{(\mathrm{cos}k+2\mathrm{\Gamma })}{\sqrt{1+4\mathrm{\Gamma }\mathrm{cos}k+4\mathrm{\Gamma }^2}},$$
(3)
and,

$$M_{\mathrm{st}}=\frac{1}{2}(14\mathrm{\Gamma }^2)^{1/8}.$$
(4)
We can then check the efficiency of the PWFRG method, by comparing the obtained results with the above exact expressions. In Fig. 1, we can see that the computed results are in good agreement with the exact ones, where the PWFRG calculation is performed with the number of retained bases $`m=14`$. Thus, we can expect that the PWFRG method with a relatively small $`m`$ yields accurate results in the following analysis of the XXZ spin chain.

In Fig. 2, we display the PWFRG results of the magnetization in the $`x`$ direction $`M_x`$ for $`J_{}=0`$, $`0.2`$, $`0.4`$, $`0.6`$, $`0.8`$, $`1`$ and the staggered magnetization $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$ for $`J_{}=0`$, $`0.2`$, $`0.4`$, $`0.6`$, $`0.8`$. In Fig.2-(a), the $`M_x`$ grows monotonously as the field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is increased, whereas in Fig.2-(b), the staggered magnetizations $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$ for $`J_{}>0.4`$ exhibit the reentrant behavior. This reentrant behavior can be explained qualitatively in terms of the competition between the classical Néel order and two kinds of the quantum fluctuations. In the low-field region, the system is under influence of the quantum fluctuation from the XY-term($`J_{}S_i^xS_{i+1}^x+S_i^yS_{i+1}^y`$), while, in the high-field region, the effect of the transverse-field becomes dominant. Although both of them can decrease the classical Néel order, the staggered magnetization is rather enhanced in the middle-field region. This enhancement implies that the two quantum fluctuations conflict with each other rather than reduce the Néel order. This picture is consistent with the shape changes of the static structure factor in the transverse field, as was reported in Ref. .

Let us now proceed to analysis of details in the magnetization curve. In the zero transverse field limit, the staggered magnetization is calculated exactly:

$$M_{\mathrm{st}}|_{\mathrm{\Gamma }=0}=\frac{1}{2}\underset{k=1}{\overset{\mathrm{}}{}}\left(\frac{1q^{2k}}{1+q^{2k}}\right)^2,$$
(5)
where $`q=1/J_{}\sqrt{1/J_{}^21}`$. By comparing the PWFRG results at $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0`$ with the exact values of eq.(5), we have confirmed that the obtained data for $`J_{}0.6`$ agree with the exact values in 5 digits, within the numbers of the retained bases $`m=88`$.

There is another special value of a transverse field called disorder point, where the ground state can be calculated analytically. The disorder-point field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{dp}}`$ is given by

$$\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{dp}}=\sqrt{2J_{}(J_{}+1)},$$
(6)
and the exact values of the magnetizations are obtained as

$$M_x=\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\frac{2J_{}}{J_{}+1}},$$
(7)
and

$$M_{\mathrm{st}}=\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{\frac{1J_{}}{1+J_{}}}.$$
(8)
In Figs 2-(a) and (b) we have plotted the disorder point with the open circles, which are consistent with the curves calculated by the PWFRG.

Here we remark that we can obtain an inequality:

$$M_{\mathrm{st}}|_{\mathrm{\Gamma }=0}<M_{\mathrm{st}}|_{\mathrm{\Gamma }=\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{dp}}},$$
(9)
for $`J_{}>0.73`$, by comparing eq.(5) and eq.(8). This inequality (9) guarantees the reentrant behavior of the staggered magnetization analytically in the range $`J_{}>0.73`$. A precise numerical calculation of $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$(using maximum $`m=30`$) illustrates that the reentrant behavior emerges for $`J_{}0.3984`$.

We next discuss the critical behavior of eq. (1). The critical field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_s`$ is defined by the field at which the staggered magnetization vanishes. Since the symmetry of the system is $`Z_2`$, the universality class is expected to be the two-dimensional(2D) classical Ising one, where the staggered magnetization behaves as

$$M_{\mathrm{st}}(\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{s}\mathrm{\Gamma })^\beta \mathrm{for}\mathrm{\Gamma }<\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{s},$$
(10)
with $`\beta =1/8`$. For the case of $`J_{}=0`$, we can see $`\beta =1/8`$ from the exact solution (4) easily. For $`0<J_{}<1`$, we have checked the eq.(10) with the PWFRG result of the staggered magnetization. For example , we show the plot of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$-$`(M_{\mathrm{st}})^8`$ for $`J_{}=0.8`$ in Fig.3, where we can see the good linearity of the plotted data. We have performed the fitting of $`M_{\mathrm{st}}=A(\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{s}\mathrm{\Gamma })^\beta `$ with fitting parameters $`A`$, $`\beta `$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{s}`$, and then obtain the exponent $`\beta =0.124,0.124`$ and $`0.125`$, for $`J_{}=0.4,0.6`$ and $`0.8`$, respectively. These values are consistent with $`\beta =1/8`$. Thus, we have verified that the universality class of the XXZ model at the critical transverse field is the 2D Ising one.

## III  $`S=1`$ cases

In this section, we consider the $`S=1`$ XXZ spin chain and the $`S=1`$ Heisenberg spin chain with a single-ion anisotropy. In contrast to the $`S=1/2`$ XXZ model, the $`S=1`$ chains with small anisotropies have the Haldane gap. Then it is an interesting problem to clarify how the Haldane gap influences the competition between the classical Néel order and the transverse field.

### A the $`S=1`$ XXZ model

In this subsection, we consider the $`S=1`$ XXZ spin chain, whose Hamiltonian is written as

$$=\underset{i}{}[J_{}(S_i^xS_{i+1}^x+S_i^yS_{i+1}^y)+J_{}S_i^zS_{i+1}^z]\mathrm{\Gamma }\underset{i}{}S_i^x,$$
(11)
where $`S_i^\alpha `$ is the $`\alpha `$ component of the $`S=1`$ spin operator at $`i`$-th site. In this section, we fix $`J_{}=1`$ and vary $`J_{}`$ in $`J_{}1`$, for the later convenience.

In Fig.4, we show the staggered magnetization $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$ and the uniform magnetization $`M_x`$. The maximum number of the retained bases in the DMRG calculation is $`m=70`$. In the figures, we also plot the disorder points for the $`S=1`$ XXZ model, which is given by

$`M_x=\sqrt{{\displaystyle \frac{2}{1+J_{}}}}\mathrm{and}M_{\mathrm{st}}=\sqrt{{\displaystyle \frac{J_{}1}{J_{}+1}}},`$ (12)
with the disorder-point field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{\mathrm{dp}}=2\sqrt{2(1+J_{})}`$. We can see that they are in good agreement with the DMRG results. When the anisotropy is not so big($`J_{}<1.18`$), the Haldane state is maintained up to the critical value of the transverse field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$, where the phase transition occurs accompanying the spontaneous staggered order(Fig.4-(b)). As $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is increased above $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$, the staggered magnetization grows rapidly. However, as $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is further increased, $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$ turns to decrease and finally vanishes at the higher critical field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$. In Fig. 4-(a), we show the uniform magnetization $`M_x`$, where the anisotropy effect seems not to be significant. However, a notable point for this uniform magnetization is that $`M_x`$ has a small but finite value below the critical field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$, in contrast to the isotropic case where $`M_x`$ is exactly zero below $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ . In a real experiment, it may be important to distinguish such a behavior of $`M_x`$ from the finite temperature effect.

As $`J_{}`$ is increased, the lower-critical field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ becomes small and thus the region of the Haldane phase shrinks(see Fig.4-(a)). When $`J_{}`$ is increased above the critical value of the anisotropy $`J_c1.18`$, the spontaneous staggered magnetization appears at the zero transverse field, and $`M_{\mathrm{st}}(J_{}J_c)^{1/8}`$ is observed.

For $`J_{}>J_c`$ the staggered magnetization exhibits the week reentrant behavior, which is similar to the $`S=1/2`$ case. In the $`J_{}\mathrm{}`$ limit, the system becomes to the $`S=1`$ version of the Ising model in a transverse field, without the reentrance of $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$.

Let us next discuss the critical behavior at $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$, which are also expected to belong to the 2D Ising universality class. In Figs.5-(a) and (b), we show the plot of $`(M_{\mathrm{st}})^8`$ near the critical fields $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$, respectively. In these figures, we can recognize the good linearity. Near the lower critical field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$, we have estimated the critical exponent $`\beta =0.126`$ for $`J_{}=1.1`$. Also near the higher critical field $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$, we have $`\beta =0.126`$ and $`0.127`$ for $`J_{}=1.2`$ and $`1.4`$, respectively. These values of $`\beta `$ are consistent with the 2D Ising universality class. The critical behavior of $`M_x`$ should correspond to that of the internal energy of the 2D Ising model, as well. However it is difficult to estimate the exponent $`\alpha `$ with a direct calculation, since the expected value $`\alpha =0`$(log) is too weak to be detected numerically.

### B $`S=1`$ Heisenberg model with a single-ion anisotropy

For the case of the $`S=1`$ quantum spin chains, we can consider the single-ion-type crystal field as an origin of the anisotropy, which is actually observed in the real compounds. The Hamiltonian is given by

$$=\underset{i}{}\stackrel{}{S}_i\stackrel{}{S}_{i+1}+D\underset{i}{}(S_i^z)^2\mathrm{\Gamma }\underset{i}{}S_i^x.$$
(13)
If $`D<0`$, the $`D`$-term($`D_i(S_i^z)^2`$) stabilizes “$`\pm 1`$” spins equivalently and hence the $`D`$-term is expected to make the similar effect to the previous XXZ-type anisotropy. In the following, we thus consider $`D<0`$ region, where the staggered order in the $`z`$-direction is induced. The phase boundary of this model is investigated by Sakai and Takahashi, using the exact diagonalization up to 14 sites. However the magnetization curve of this model has not been calculated yet.

In Fig.6, we show the uniform magnetization $`M_x`$ and the staggered magnetization $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$. We can see that they exhibit the similar behavior to that of the $`S=1`$ XXZ models. For $`0.3<D<0`$, the system has the staggered order between the two critical fields $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$. In $`\mathrm{\Gamma }<\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$, the system is in the Haldane phase, but the uniform magnetization $`M_x`$ has a finite value due to the lack of the total-$`S^z`$ conservation law. As $`D`$ is decreased, $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ becomes small, and finally vanishes at the critical value of the anisotropy $`D_c0.3`$, which is consistent with $`D_c=0.29`$ calculated by Sakai et al. As $`D`$ is decreased further, the staggered magnetization appears at the zero transverse field, and then the reentrant behavior of the staggered magnetization can be seen.

Next, we plot $`(M_{\mathrm{st}})^8`$ near the critical fields in Fig. 7, where the good linearity can be seen. For example, the estimated critical exponent at the lower-critical field is $`\beta =0.127`$ for $`D=0.15`$, and the ones at the higher critical fields are $`\beta =0.127`$ and $`0.126`$ for $`D=0.15`$ and $`0.45`$ respectively. These values are also consistent with the universality class of the 2D Ising model.

## IV Summary

In this paper, we have considered the one-dimensional quantum spin chains with the easy-axis anisotropy in the transverse magnetic field. We have calculated the staggered magnetization $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$ in the $`z`$ direction and the uniform magnetization $`M_x`$ along the $`x`$ direction precisely, using a variant of the DMRG(the PWFRG method). For the $`S=1/2`$ XXZ chain, we have shown that the $`M_{\mathrm{st}}`$ exhibits the reentrant behavior when $`J_{}0.3984`$, where the competition between the classical Néel order and the quantum fluctuations from the transverse field and the $`XY`$-term plays an important role. We have also discussed the critical behavior associated with the staggered magnetization and verified that the universality class of the model is the two-dimensional(2D) Ising one.

For the $`S=1`$ XXZ model and the $`S=1`$ Heisenberg model with a single-ion anisotropy, we have shown that, if the anisotropies are not big($`J_{}<1.18`$ or $`D>0.30`$), the systems have the staggered order between the lower critical field associated with the Haldane gap($`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$) and the higher one connected to the saturation field of the isotropic case($`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$). When the anisotropies are big, the staggered order appears at the zero transverse field with the reentrant behavior, which is similar to that of the $`S=1/2`$ XXZ model. We have also investigated the critical behavior at $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c1}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_{c2}`$, by estimating the exponent $`\beta `$. As a result, we have verified that they are consistent with the class of the 2D classical Ising model.

In the actual one-dimensional compounds, various types of the anisotropy can be considered. When analyzing the magnetization processes of such matters, we believe that the present results are useful.

## Acknowledgments

One of authors (Y.H.) would like to thank T. Nishino for fruitful discussions. Y.H was supported by the Research Fellowships of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists.