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# 1 . Introduction

## 1 . Introduction

In the past decade astronomers witnessed a breathtaking progress in the search for extrasolar planets. The discovery of mysterious planet-like objects around pulsar PSR B1257+12 (Wolszczan and Frail 1992) was followed by the detection of the first solar type planets around nearby stars (Mayor and Queloz 1995, Marcy and Butler 1996). While the former type system seems to be unique and its origin and status remain mysterious, the solar type planets seem to be quite common in the solar neighborhood: up to now about 80 planetary systems have been reported (see http://www.obspm.fr/planets or http://exoplanets.org for the most recent information).

Apart from PSR B1257+12, whose discovery was based on radio wavelength pulse time delay measurements, ultra-precise measurements of the radial velocity shifts in the optical spectra of target stars were the main successful method of planet detection. Such measurements provided orbital periods and minimum masses of the companion (cf. Mazeh and Zucker 2002, and references therein).

Extensive spectroscopic searches of nearby dwarf stars revealed a large variety of planetary orbits. A distinct class is a group of several stars with Jupiter-mass planets orbiting their stars in several days ($`a<0.1`$ a.u.), and called “51 Peg-like” planets or “hot Jupiters”. A very important feature of this class is a relatively large probability that a planetary orbit has an inclination allowing a transit in front of the star. While for our solar system such a probability would be very small (Sackett 1999), it is about 10% for “51 Peg-like” planets. The expected depth of a transit is small, $`1\%`$ even for “Jupiters”. However, this is within reach of a careful ground-based photometry.

It is not surprising that the “51 Peg-like” planets were monitored photometrically. At the end of 1999 a spectacular discovery of the first transit of a planet around HD 209458 was announced by Henry et al. (2000) and Charbonneau et al. (2000). Combined spectroscopic data and photometry of the transit allow to determine the most important planet parameters, its mass and radius: $`0.7\mathrm{M}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$ and $`1.4\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$, respectively, for HD 209458 (Brown et al. 2001).

The discovery of HD 209458 transit proved that photometry may be used in search for planets. However, due to a small probability of transits, a photometric survey must monitor a large number of stars with high photometric accuracy every $`10`$ minutes for many nights. The most promising areas of the sky are the dense stellar regions like the Galactic disk, globular clusters etc. Ground-based accurate photometry used to be difficult in crowded fields. It has recently become possible thanks to the technique called “image subtraction” or “difference image analysis” (DIA) developed by Alard and Lupton (1998) and Alard (2000).

Several planetary transit monitoring programs are presently underway. Gilliland et al. (2000) monitored 47 Tuc globular cluster with the HST telescope. No transit was found in 34 000 stars monitored over the period of 8.3 days. The same cluster was also monitored from the ground (Sackett 2000, private communication). Other programs are focused on open clusters fields (Quirrenbach et al. 2000, Street et al. 2000, PISCES project – Mochejska et al. 2002), Galactic disk fields (EXPLORE project – Mallen-Ornelas et al. 2002), or brighter stars – STARE project (Brown and Charbonneau 2000), VULCAN project (Borucki et al. 2001). Also space missions for continuous photometric monitoring of nearby stars, capable to detect Earth-like planet transits, like COROT (Deleuil et al. 2000) and KEPLER (http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov) are planned. However, HD 209458 remains the only planetary transit system known.

The photometry alone cannot unambiguously distinguish between Jupiter size planets and other low-luminosity objects: brown dwarfs and late type M dwarfs, as all of them have the radii of the order of 0.1–0.2 R (1–2 RJup). Thus, a spectroscopic follow-up and a measurement of the radial velocity amplitude of the stars is needed to determine the masses of transiting companions.

Although detection of planets via transits is certainly the most exciting possibility, detection of any other type of low-luminosity objects is also very important. There appears to exist so called “brown dwarf desert”: absence of brown dwarfs with short period orbits around stars (cf. Tabachnik and Tremaine 2001, and references therein). The mass-radius relation for the lower main sequence is poorly known, and a serious discrepancy between the observations and models can be seen (Torres and Ribas 2001, O’Brien, Bond and Sion 2001, cf. Spruit 1982, Spruit and Weiss 1986, for a possible explanation). Summarizing, photometric detection of transits, combined with the spectroscopic follow-up, will provide valuable information about all three types of low-luminosity stellar companions.

The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) is a long term observational program started almost a decade ago (Udalski et al. 1992, Udalski, Kubiak and Szymański 1997) with the initial goal of detection of microlensing events via photometric monitoring of millions of stars in the densest stellar regions of the sky. The OGLE survey turned out to be very successful in discovering not only hundreds of microlensing events (Udalski et al. 1993, Woźniak et al. 2001) but also providing huge amount of data on the variable (Udalski et al. 1999, Żebruń et al. 2001, Woźniak et al. 2002) and non-variable (Udalski et al. 1998, Udalski et al. 2000) stars in the Galactic bulge and Magellanic Clouds and contributing to many other fields.

At the beginning of 2001, the OGLE project underwent its second major hardware upgrade. A single chip $`2048\times 2048`$ pixel CCD camera was replaced by the second generation eight chip $`8192\times 8192`$ pixel CCD mosaic. Also the old data reduction pipeline was replaced with the new one based on image subtraction. The data flow of the survey increased by almost an order of magnitude, and the accuracy of photometry reached the millimagnitude level for the brightest stars.

The third phase of the OGLE survey, OGLE-III, started on June 12, 2001. For the first 45 days three fields located in the densest stellar regions in the direction of the Galactic center were monitored continuously up to 35 times per night, on a total of 32 nights, for detection of short time-scale stellar variability. These data are ideal to search for planetary transits; this was one of the goals of the campaign. Such a pilot search was undertaken to answer the question whether planetary transit detection is possible and the program is worth continuing in the next observing seasons.

In this paper we present results of the OGLE-III search for planetary and low-luminosity object transits in the photometric data collected during the 2001 campaign. We discovered 185 individual transit cases in 46 objects from about 52 000 Galactic disk stars for which the photometric accuracy was 1.5% or better. These transits may be due to “Jupiters”, brown dwarfs or M dwarfs. The distinction will be possible when a spectroscopic follow-up will be done. The photometry of all OGLE-III stars with transits is available to the astronomical community from the OGLE Internet archive.

## 2 . Observational Data

Observations presented in this paper started the third phase of the OGLE experiment, OGLE-III. They were collected with the 1.3-m Warsaw telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, (operated by the Carnegie Institution of Washington) equipped with the new large field CCD mosaic camera, consisting of eight $`2048\times 4096`$ pixel SITe ST002A detectors. More detailed description of the OGLE-III instrumental system will be presented in the forthcoming paper. Here, we only highlight the most important features of the OGLE-III second generation camera and data reduction system.

The pixel size of each of the detectors is 15 $`\mu `$m giving the 0.26 arcsec/pixel scale at the focus of the Warsaw telescope. The full field of view of the camera is about $`35\times 35.5`$ arcmins. The reading of the entire array takes about 98 seconds and the size of a single full frame is about 137 MB. The gain of each chip is adjusted to be about 1.3 e-/ADU with the readout noise from about 6 to 9 e-, depending on the chip. The well depth of chips reaches from 60000 e- to 80000 e-. Contrary to the OGLE-II instrumentation, where the vast majority of images were taken in the “driftscan” mode, the new camera only works in the classical “still-frame” mode.

The vast majority of photometric data were taken during 32 nights spanning 45 days from June 12, 2001. After that period single observations of presented fields were done once every few nights up to the end of 2001 Galactic bulge season in October 2001. Equatorial coordinates (J2000.0) of the observed fields are listed in Table 1. Each of the fields overlaps slightly with the neighboring one for calibration purposes.

Almost all observations were made in the I-band filter. The exposure time of each image was set to 120 seconds. Altogether about 800 epochs were collected for each field during the 2001 season. Additionally, several V-band frames were also made to have color information for the observed objects. V-band images were exposed for 150 seconds.

Because of extremely high stellar density of the observed fields the observations were carried out only during good seeing conditions and were suspended when the seeing exceeded 1.8 arcsec. The median seeing of the presented dataset is 1.2 arcsec.

## 3 . Data Reduction

Similarly to the previous phases of the OGLE survey, data reduction in OGLE-III is supposed to be performed at the telescope in almost real time. However, during the 2001 campaign only the first part of the data reduction pipeline, namely the initial reduction like de-biasing and flat-fielding, was implemented. Photometric reductions of collected images were performed off-line, however, with the same pipeline which will be implemented on-line at the OGLE telescope in 2002 observing season.

The initial reduction procedures were based on the IRAFIRAF is distributed by National Optical Observatories, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with National Science Foundation. CCDRED package routines and were performed automatically when the new frame arrived from the telescope. To make data handling easier, each chip of the mosaic was treated separately. Flat-fielded data, were compressed with the RICE algorithm and stored on a few hundred GB partition of the hard disk, and finally dumped to the HP Ultrium tape (about 200 GB of raw data per tape).

The photometric data reduction was based on the difference image analysis (DIA) method (Alard and Lupton 1998, Alard 2000). The core of the system – image subtraction procedures were based on the implementation of this method by Woźniak (2000), with many software modifications for better performance and stability. Contrary to the Woźniak (2000) approach (which in principle works off-line, well after all images of the field are collected, while presented data pipeline is designed to analyze photometry on-the-fly) photometry on the subtracted image is performed for all objects identified earlier in the reference image at the position of their centroids. Subtracted image is also analyzed for stars which apparently changed their brightness above the preassigned threshold, so that the on-line information on the current variability is obtained. Objects which cannot be cross-identified with reference image stars on the subtracted image are treated as new objects in the current frame (although this list may contain artifacts like small traces of non-perfectly removed cosmic-rays etc.). The threshold for detection of the current variability is by definition too high for triggering by very small amplitude variations like transits. However, full photometric information on the brightness of all objects in the image is preserved in the file with the photometry of all objects.

Next, these files are used to feed the final photometric databases. We use the same database software as during the previous stages of the OGLE project (Szymański and Udalski 1993) with minor modifications due to somewhat different data input format. Separate databases are created for each chip in a given field, thus the complete set for a field consists of eight databases of about 1 GB each in the case of the Galactic bulge data collected in 2001 season.

The main advantage of the DIA photometry over the classical PSF approach is a much higher accuracy. This is achieved due to two main reasons. First, variability is measured very precisely on an almost empty subtracted image. Secondly, a much better quality profile photometry for constant part of the flux can be obtained from the reference image which has much higher S/N than a single frame, as it is obtained by stacking several (more than 10 in our case) single images. A large number of stars in the observed fields assures a very good match between the reduced and reference images before the subtraction is done.

Woźniak (2000) noted a significantly better quality of photometry obtained with the DIA over the standard OGLE-II data reduction pipeline based on profile photometry. The comparison of the DIA results for OGLE-III frames indicates that the quality of OGLE-III data is even superior over the DIA OGLE-II photometry. This is certainly due to a better sampling (0.26 vs. 0.42 arcsec/pixel) and better quality of images obtained in the “still-frame” mode. For the brightest stars rms of photometric measurements from all, more than 800, epochs is at a few millimagnitudes level.

Observations in the 2001 season were focused on a detection of rapid variability, and no calibration images with standard stars were collected. Therefore it was not possible to tie directly the photometry to the standard system with a very high precision. However, to have a crude estimate of the zero point of our photometry we compared our instrumental magnitude scale with the well calibrated photometry of OGLE-II fields (Udalski et al. 2002, in preparation). In many cases OGLE-II and OGLE-III fields overlap, hence a comparison was possible. If the object was observed during the OGLE-II phase we shifted OGLE-III magnitudes to fit OGLE-II calibrated values. In this case the zero point accuracy is better than 0.05 mag. If there was no OGLE-II/OGLE-III overlap then an average shift resulting from a comparison of other stars in the same field was applied. We believe that the zero point accuracy of our magnitude scale is about 0.1 mag in this case. It should be noted that although OGLE-II photometric measurements exist for large number of our transit objects, they are not suitable for search or even confirmation of transits because of much smaller number of observations, non-appropriate sampling (one observation per 1–3 days) and much worse photometric quality.

Astrometric solution for the observed fields was performed in identical manner as in the OGLE-II photometric maps case (Udalski et al. 1998), i.e., by cross-identification of about 2000 brightest stars in each chip reference image with the Digitized Sky Survey images of the same part of the sky. Then the transformation between OGLE-III pixel grid and equatorial coordinates of the DSS (GSC) astrometric system was calculated. The systematic error of the latter can be up to about 0.7 arcsec, while the internal error of the transformation is about 0.2 arcsec.

## 4 . Selection of Transit Candidates

A huge number of the observed stars requires a fully automatic method of selection of transit candidates for the work to be effective. We performed our search for transits as follows. The three observed fields contain more than 5 million stars, located both in the Galactic disk and in the Galactic bulge. Therefore, we first limited the sample to the stars located in the disk. To do this we observed our fields several times in the V-band. A preliminary reduction of these images was used to construct the photometric databases, similar to the main I-band databases. Next, we prepared the color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of the observed fields. One of such diagrams is presented in Fig. 1.

For brighter stars the separation of the disk main sequence stars (forming a clear sequence in Fig. 1) from the Galactic bulge stars (red giant and subgiant stars) is clear. Hence, further analysis was restricted to the stars from the region limited by bold lines in Fig. 1.

We further limited our sample to the stars with the standard deviation of all observed magnitudes $`0.015`$ mag. To avoid contamination of the standard deviation by outlying observations we ran $`5\sigma `$ clipping filter on the data prior to the calculations of the standard deviation. We were left with about 52 000 stars in the three fields which passed our initial filtering.

In the next step all these objects were subjected to the transit finding procedure. We constructed an artificial error-less transit light curve with an amplitude of 0.015 mag and the total duration of 0.03 phase. Next, the observations of the analyzed star were folded with a trial period and cross-correlated with the artificial light curve. If the cross-correlation coefficient was larger than a preselected threshold the star was marked as a candidate. The procedure was repeated for trial periods in the range of 1–10 days with the step of $`0.0001P`$.

After the initial tune-up of the cross-correlation coefficient threshold this algorithm worked very effectively. Practically all triggered cases turned out to be small amplitude eclipsing objects and the contamination by artifacts was minimal. The algorithm can easily be used to calibrate the efficiency of our detection procedure by running it on artificially prepared eclipsing light curves. This, however, has not been done yet. The algorithm is very sensitive even to single transit events during our observing run, as there is practically always a period (false, of course) which mimics a regular eclipsing light curve with some gaps in the observations. Such a light curve is easily detected by our search algorithm.

The final selection of candidates was done by a careful visual inspection of the photometric data, both in the day scale and phased. We left on the main list of candidates only those stars which have a significant probability of being true transits. We do not present here a large number of small amplitude events caused by grazing eclipses (V-shape eclipses, often with some shift of the secondary eclipse phase) or somewhat deeper ($`>0.1`$ mag) cases which occasionally passed our filters. However, one has to remember that a regular faint binary with a flat-bottomed eclipse may blend with a much brighter star, to mimic low amplitude transit. In our very dense stellar fields the probability of blending is non-negligible. Future spectroscopy will resolve this possible problem.

The final periods of our candidates were found by a careful examination of the eclipse light curve, by minimizing dispersion in the eclipse phases. For some objects only uncertain information on periodicity could be found, because only two or so, often incomplete eclipses were registered. When a small number of transits was registered we always adopted the shortest period consistent with our remaining data. The formal accuracy of the period is of the order of $`210^4P`$. In a few cases we observed only one transit event so that nothing can be said at this stage about the periodicity of these object.

## 5 . Results of 2001 Campaign

Forty six transit stars were found in the 2001 campaign data among 52 000 searched Galactic disk objects. The star entered the final list of transit objects when the amplitude of transit was smaller than 0.08 mag. With a completely dark transiting object such an amplitude still corresponds to $`1.4\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$ if the stellar radius is half the solar.

We present the results in the form of a catalog and atlas of light curves. Table 2 contains basic data for each star: abbreviation in the form OGLE-TR-NN, equatorial coordinates (J2000.0 epoch), orbital period, epoch of mid-eclipse, I-band magnitude and an approximate $`VI`$ color outside eclipse, the depth of eclipse, number of transits observed ($`N_{\mathrm{tr}}`$), and remarks. OII acronym in the remarks column indicates that the object was observed in the OGLE-II phase. For these stars both – the mean I-band magnitude and $`VI`$ color from OGLE-II photometric maps were used to set the zero point of photometry, and both values are accurate to better than 0.05 mag. In the remaining cases the accuracy of the magnitude scale and $`VI`$ color is not better than 0.1 mag.

Light curves in the graphical form are presented in Appendix: full phased light curve and close-up around the eclipse. Additionally we also print there a finding chart – $`60\times 60`$ arcsec subframe of the I-band template image centered on the star. North is up and East to the left in these images. For single transit stars, only the light curve around the transit and finding chart are presented.

## 6 . Discussion

Results of our 2001 planetary and low-luminosity object transit campaign clearly indicate that the OGLE project reached photometric accuracy of millimagnitudes while observing millions of stars in the most crowded fields of the Galactic disk and bulge. Transit events with the depth as small as 10–20 millimagnitude can routinely be detected in the data collected by the OGLE-III hardware and processed by the OGLE-III software data pipeline. This opens up a new discovery channel of low-luminosity companions by photometric monitoring of millions of stars. We note that with the spectroscopic follow-up observations it will soon be possible to determine all basic parameters of these faint objects: planets, brown dwarfs or low-luminosity end of the main sequence stars.

A limited analysis is possible even now, without spectroscopic data. We estimate sizes of our transiting objects by modeling their light curves assuming a completely dark companion and using formulae provided by Sackett (1999). These were numerically integrated at the appropriate phase points to produce model light curves.

We found a possible solution for each candidate with the known period by analyzing the $`\chi ^2`$ of the model fit {$`R_s/a`$, $`R_c/R_s`$, $`i`$} to the observational data, where $`a`$ is the semi-major axis of the orbit, $`R_s`$ – radius of the primary star, $`R_c`$ – radius of the low luminosity companion and $`i`$ – inclination of the orbit. In all cases we assumed the limb darkening coefficient $`u=0.5`$ (Al-Naimiy 1978).

As expected, many fits of similar quality can be obtained for an entire class of parameters. This corresponds to the fact that very similar shape of the eclipse can be obtained by a small companion with orbital inclination $`i=90^{}`$ or larger one with smaller $`i`$ transiting on the disk of larger star. However, the ratio of radii remains almost constant. Thus, if the stellar radius were known, the size of the companion and the inclination angle $`i`$ could be derived unambiguously. The semi-major axis of the orbit can be calculated from the determined orbital period, assuming that the stellar mass $`M_s=1\mathrm{M}_{}`$. The colors of our transit stars indicate that these stars have spectral types similar to, or later than the Sun.

The smallest size of the star and its companion is obtained when the transit is central, i.e., for the inclination $`i=90^{}`$. Non-central passage (smaller $`i`$) requires a larger size of both, the star and its companion. Table 3 lists the minimum size of the transiting companion and the corresponding size of the star to provide a feeling about the expected size of the observed objects. It should be remembered that the semi-major axis of the orbit scales as $`M^{1/3}`$, and therefore the same scaling is appropriate for the sizes of stars and companions listed in Table 3. In the close-up windows in the Appendix we show model light curves for central transit ($`i=90^{}`$) drawn with a continuous bold line.

Table 3 indicates that the companions cover a large range of sizes of low-luminosity objects. Many of them are certainly faint M-type stars. In several cases (e.g., OGLE-TR-5, OGLE-TR-16), the light curves exhibit an ellipsoidal variation, indicating that the primary is tidally distorted, i.e., the companion mass is not very small. There are eight objects (OGLE-TR-8, OGLE-TR-10, OGLE-TR-12, OGLE-TR-29, OGLE-TR-32, OGLE-TR-35, OGLE-TR-39, OGLE-TR-40) with companion radii of the order of 1.5 $`\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$ or less, which implies that they may by planets, or brown dwarfs or low-luminosity stars. Note that the radius of the “hot Jupiter” orbiting and transiting HD 209458 is about $`1.4\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$.

The most intriguing and exciting objects within this group are certainly OGLE-TR-40 and OGLE-TR-10. Three and four individual transits, respectively, were observed in these stars, so the orbital periods are sound. The radius estimates of the companions as given in Table 3, $`1.0\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$ and $`1.1\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$, respectively, are the smallest among our systems. Even if the transits were significantly non-central the radii of these objects would be smaller than $`1.5\mathrm{R}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$. These objects appear to be most similar to the “hot Jupiter” companion to HD 209458.

It is worth noting that the objects presented in Table 2 were selected by the presence of apparent transits only, with no knowledge on any other their properties. Thus, the sample is very well suited for general study of low- luminosity objects. The spectroscopic follow-up will provide a simple and very important clarification. The radial velocity amplitude should give an estimate of the companion mass accurate enough to determine its nature: a planet, a brown dwarf, or a low mass star. The spectrum of the primary will provide an estimate of its mass and luminosity, and a refinement of the companion mass. Finally, a very accurate future photometry may refine system parameters even more.

Note, that a detection of a brown dwarf companion on a short period orbit would be at least as interesting as a detection of Jupiter mass planet. There appears to be a “brown dwarf desert”, with very few objects in the mass range $`10\mathrm{M}_{\mathrm{Jup}}100\mathrm{M}_{\mathrm{Jup}}`$ (cf. Tabachnik and Tremaine 2001, and references therein). The spectroscopic follow-up of our 42 objects will either support or contradict the concept of the “desert”.

There is a major problem with the mass–radius relation for lower main sequence stars, with the observed radii being 10–20% larger than model predictions (Torres and Ribas 2001, O’Brien, Bond and Sion 2001). There is a plausible explanation in terms of long living huge star spots (Spruit 1982, Spruit and Weiss 1986), but there are too few accurate radius determinations for a verification of that theory. The sample of eclipsing systems with lower main sequence secondaries will increase substantially as soon as the OGLE-III data will be searched for deeper eclipses than those presented in this paper.

In addition to 42 stars for which multiple transits were observed, we found four objects with low luminosity companions, but only one transit event detected in our dataset. The lack of additional transits during our 2001 campaign indicates that the orbital periods of these objects are likely to be long.

The successful 2001 campaign proves that photometric detection of low-luminosity transiting objects is not only feasible but that transits can routinely be detected. Therefore it will be worthwhile to repeat similar observational campaigns in other directions of the Galactic disk. Such campaigns are planned in the coming seasons during the OGLE-III phase of our project.

The photometric data of OGLE-III transit objects presented in this paper are available in the electronic form from the OGLE archive:

http://www.astrouw.edu.pl/~ogle

ftp://ftp.astrouw.edu.pl/ogle/ogle3/transits

or its US mirror

http://bulge.princeton.edu/~ogle
ftp://bulge.princeton.edu/ogle/ogle3/transits

Acknowledgements. The paper was partly supported by the Polish KBN grant 2P03D01418 to M. Kubiak. Partial support to the OGLE project was provided with the NSF grant AST-9820314 to B. Paczyński. We acknowledge usage of The Digitized Sky Survey which was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute based on photographic data obtained using The UK Schmidt Telescope, operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

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# Cygnus A

## 1 Introduction

Cygnus A is a powerful radio galaxy that is unusually close to us (z = 0.0562, Stockton et al. 1994). Its radio luminosity is more than two orders of magnitude above the Fanaroff-Riley I/II boundary and 1.5 orders of magnitude more luminous than any other source at z $``$ 0.1 (Carilli & Barthel 1996). Most sources with similar radio luminosities are found at z = 1 and beyond. For these reasons, Cyg A is considered the archetypal powerful radio galaxy and has been extensively studied in all wavebands.

In this paper, we summarise results from a study of Cyg A with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Cyg A was observed with the spectroscopic array of CCDs, with the nucleus at the aim point on chip S3; the date of observation was chosen so that the extension some 15′ to the NW (Arnaud et al. 1984; Reynolds & Fabian 1996) was also imaged. An image of the 6 CCDs which were read out is shown in Fig. 1. The Cyg A cluster is the bright region near the center and the putative other cluster is seen to the NW.

An enlargement of the inner region, on the scale of the double radio source, is given in Fig. 2 and shows a wealth of structure. The brightest region, in the center, is the galaxy nucleus. The “hot spots” (two bright ones about 1′ to the NW and one bright and one faint one a similar distance to the SE) coincide with the radio hot spots. There are two diffuse, linear structures running from the nucleus towards each pair of hot spots; these quasi-linear features seem to be associated with the radio jets, though in X-rays the emission is more diffuse. The overall, prolate shape presumably represents the limb-brightened cavity inflated in the intracluster medium (ICM) by relativistic particles that have escaped from the hot spots, as predicted by Scheuer (1974). The whole structure is embedded in the ICM of the cluster of galaxies, which extends to a much larger scale (see Fig. 1). Lastly, curved “bands” run transversely (i.e. NE - SW) across the cavity and appear to be the projections of rings of gas which encircle it; if the plane of these rings is perpendicular to the radio axis, the rings must be predominantly on the far side of the cavity since the jet to the NW is the nearer. We discuss these various features in turn and refer the reader to Wilson et al. (2000, Paper I, about the “hot spots”), Young et al. (2002, Paper II, about the nucleus) and Smith et al. (2002, Paper III, about the cluster) for further details.

## 2 The nucleus

Fig. 3 shows a color representation of the Chandra X-ray image of the nuclear region. The data were divided into 3 bands, red representing 0.1 - 1.275 keV, green 1.275 - 2.2 keV and blue 2.2 - 10 keV. There is a hard X-ray, unresolved, core source, and extended bi-polar soft nebulosity, the latter correlating well with the optical bi-polar continuum and emission-line structures (e.g. Fig. 4) and being approximately aligned with the radio jet. The bi-polar X-ray morphology may be enhanced by absorption by the dust lane crossing the nucleus, suppressing the very soft X-ray emission.

We obtained quasi-simultaneous Chandra - RXTE observations in order to define the broad-band spectrum. The main spectral results are: 1) the compact nucleus is detected to 100 keV and is well described by a heavily absorbed power law spectrum with $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{h}`$ = 1.52$`\pm `$0.12 and equivalent hydrogen column NH (nuc) = 2.0$`{}_{0.2}{}^{}{}_{}{}^{+0.1}`$ $`\times `$ 1023 cm-2. This column is compatible with the dust obscuration to the near infrared source for a normal gas to dust ratio; 2) the soft ($`<`$ 2 keV) emission from the nuclear region may be described by a power law spectrum with a similar index ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{l}`$ $``$ $`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{h}`$). Narrow emission lines from highly ionized neon and silicon are observed in the soft X-ray spectrum of the NW and SE regions; 3) A “neutral” Fe K$`\alpha `$ line is detected in the nucleus and its vicinity (r $`<`$ 2 kpc). The equivalent width (EW) of this line is in good agreement with theoretical predictions for the EW versus NH(nuc) relationship in various geometries. An Fe K edge is also seen (Fig. 5). Comparing this edge with NH(nuc), the nuclear iron abundance is found to be essentially solar.

Extrapolation of the best power law model of the soft (0.5 – 2 keV), extended, circumnuclear emission to higher energies gives a 2 – 10 keV luminosity of $``$ 3.7 $`\times `$ 1042 erg s-1, which is 1% of that of the unabsorbed nuclear luminosity in the same band. As noted above, the photon index ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{l}`$) of this soft emission agrees with that ($`\mathrm{\Gamma }_\mathrm{h}`$) of the directly viewed hard X-ray emission, and so the soft emission is consistent with being electron-scattered X-rays from the nucleus. The scattering region must be ionized to ionization parameter $`\xi `$ $``$ 1 in order to be sufficiently transparent to soft X-rays. The column density of the scattering electrons is inferred to be much lower than that required to generate the extended polarized optical light by electron scattering, suggesting the optical light is, in fact, scattered by dust. The excellent spatial correlation between the extended soft X-ray emission and the ionized gas observed optically with HST (Fig. 4) is consistent with the soft X-ray emitting gas being photoionized.

## 3 The hot spots

Radio hot spots A, B, D and E are detected in the Chandra image (note that the originally defined ‘C’ is no longer considered a hot spot). Their location and morphology are essentially identical to those of the corresponding radio hot spots (e.g. Fig. 6). X-ray spectra have been obtained for the two brighter hot spots (A and D). Both are well described by a power law with photon index $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ = 1.8 $`\pm `$ 0.2 absorbed by the Galactic column in the direction of Cygnus A. Thermal X-ray models require too high gas densities and may be ruled out. The images and spectra (e.g. Fig. 7) strongly support synchrotron self-Compton models of the X-ray emission, as proposed by Harris, Carilli & Perley (1994) on the basis of ROSAT imaging observations. Such models indicate that the magnetic field in each of the brighter hot spots is 1.5 $`\times `$ 10-4 gauss, with an uncertainty of a few tens of percent. This value is close to the equipartition field strengths assuming no protons are present.

It is notable that the magnetic field cannot be less than 1.5 $`\times `$ 10-4 gauss since the SSC radiation would then exceed the observed X-radiation. The alternative is that B $`>`$ 1.5 $`\times `$ 10-4 gauss in which case the predicted SSC emission would be too weak to account for the observed X-ray emission. The X-rays would then have to be synchrotron radiation. However, we feel that the synchrotron self-Compton model is by far the more likely. Synchrotron self-Compton emission from hot spots in radio galaxies with magnetic fields close to equipartition has now been detected in 3C 123 (Hardcastle, Birkinshaw & Worrall 2001), 3C 295 (Harris et al. 2000) and Cygnus A. Thus the accumulating evidence is that equipartition between cosmic rays and magnetic fields is common in radio hot spots.

## 4 The cluster of galaxies

As discussed above, the dominant gaseous structure is a roughly “football shaped” (American useage) feature with semi-major axis $`1.^{}1`$ ($`100`$ kpc), which is presumably prolate spheroidal in three dimensions. This structure apparently represents intracluster gas which has been swept up and compressed by a cavity inflated in this gas by relativistic material which has passed through the ends of the radio jets. The X-ray emitting gas shows this prolate spheroidal morphology to $`1.^{}2`$ (110 kpc) from the radio galaxy, but is spherical on larger scales. The X-ray emission from the intracluster gas extends to at least $`8^{}`$ ($`720`$ kpc) from the radio galaxy, and a second, extended source of X-ray emission (probably associated with a second cluster of galaxies) is seen some $`12^{}`$ ($`1`$ Mpc) to the NW of Cygnus A. The X-ray spectrum of the integrated intracluster gas imaged on the S3 chip (dimensions $`8^{}\times 8^{}=720\times 720`$ kpc), excluding the contribution from the radio galaxy and other compact sources of X-ray emission, indicates a gas temperature, metallicity, and unabsorbed 2–10 keV rest-frame luminosity of $`7.7`$ keV, $`0.34`$ times solar, and $`3.5\times 10^{44}`$ erg s-1, respectively.

The observed spectral variations in the intracluster gas are illustrated in Fig. 8, which is a color map of the softness ratio (1–2 keV/2–8 keV). The color image shows that emission inside the central $`1^{}`$ is softer than that further out. The hardest emission is located at the position of the nucleus, which is heavily absorbed (Arnaud et al. 1987; Ueno et al. 1994; Sambruna et al. 1999; Paper II).

We have deprojected the emission from the ICM in order to measure the radial dependence of temperature, density, thermal pressure and abundance. The cluster was divided into 12 annuli, each centered on the radio galaxy. These annuli define shells in 3 dimensions. Each shell was modeled as two mekal plasmas. First, a uniform brightness mekal model (representing possible foreground Galactic emission) was added to a mekal model for the outer shell and the result was compared with the observed spectrum of the outer annulus. Both emission components were assumed to be absorbed by the same column and the model parameters for absorption and Galactic emission were subsequently fixed at their respective best-fit values. In this way, we derived the temperature, abundance, and emissivity for the outer shell of intracluster gas. Second, the spectra from the outer and adjacent shells were modeled in the same way. The temperature, abundance, and emissivity for the outer shell were fixed at the values already obtained, allowing us to derive the deprojected temperature, abundance, and emissivity for the shell adjacent to it. This procedure was repeated for the remaining shells. In Fig. 9, we show the resulting radial dependences of gas temperature, density, metal abundance and thermal gas pressure. It is notable that the cooling time is less than the Hubble time for radii $``$ 200 kpc.

Under the assumptions of hydrostatic equilibrium and spherical symmetry, we have calculated the radial dependence of enclosed mass M($`<`$ r) for radii 80 - 500 kpc (Fig. 10). From this analysis, we find the total mass of the cluster, within 500 kpc, is $`2.0\times 10^{14}M_{}`$ or $`2.8\times 10^{14}M_{}`$, depending on the precise temperature profile adopted (see Paper III). This compares favorably with the cluster mass of $`10^{14}M_{}`$, derived from the Einstein HRI data (Arnaud et al. 1984). Within 500 kpc, the total mass of the intracluster gas is $`1.1\times 10^{13}M_{}`$.

## 5 The Cavity and “Belts”

Fig. 11 is an image of the region of the cavity. Regions for which spectra have been extracted are indicated by the polygons. It is very interesting that all the regions in the limb-brightened edge of the cavity are hotter than the innermost shell of the cluster (4.9$`\pm `$0.6 keV, see Fig. 9, top), while all regions in the transverse “belts” are cooler. While these differences in temperature are modest - up to 2.1 keV above and 1.1 keV below that of the innermost cluster shell - we believe the systematic differences between the innermost cluster shell, the limb-brightened regions and the “belts” are real. The data thus suggest that the ICM just outside the cavity is being heated by its expansion, as expected (e.g. Begelman & Cioffi 1989). In contrast, the “belts” appear to represent cooling gas in disk-like structures around, or within, the cavity. The equatorial arrangement of the disks with respect to the cavity may be interpreted in two ways:

(a) It is natural to speculate that the Cygnus A galaxy is accreting these gas disks; the gas continuously cools, falls in and ultimately fuels the accretion disk around the black hole. In this case, the radio axis of Cyg A is determined by the angular momentum of the large scale ICM.

(b) Alternatively, the radio axis might be determined in some other way, such as the spin of the black hole, either primordial or after accretion of gas or another black hole in a galaxy merger (see Stockton et al. 1994 for evidence that Cyg A has undergone a merger). When switched on, the radio jets power the radio lobes and inflate the cavity, but in view of the concentration of the lobes near the hot spots (at least at cm wavelengths), the “robustness” of the cavity in the equatorial regions may be lower than near the hot spots, allowing ICM to fall into the cavity through Kelvin-Helmholtz or Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities (which will mix the heavy ICM with the light relativistic gas given the fact that gravity points inwards). Alternatively, even if the cavity pressure is uniform (as expected if only a relativistic gas is present, so the cavity has a short sound crossing time), the expanding equatorial region may be the most unstable.

This classic “chicken and egg” problem is arguably the most important outstanding issue.

It is also of interest to determine whether there is any X-ray emitting material inside the cavity (in addition to the obvious “diffuse” jet-like features and the hot spots). As noted above, such emission could result, for example from ICM gas that has entered the cavity through instabilities at the cavity - ICM contact discontinuity (e.g. Reynolds, Heinz & Begelman 2002). To investigate this matter observationally, it is necessary to subtract from the image the foreground and background contributions of the cluster gas. Using our cluster model (Section 4, see also Paper III), we assume that the axis of the prolate structure is in the plane of the sky, the emission is cylindrically symmetric about this axis and that the cavity is devoid of X-ray emitting gas. The resulting model projection of a full band (0.75 - 8 keV) image of the cluster is shown in Fig. 12, top. This image may then be subtracted from the observed image, the result being shown in Fig. 12, bottom. The latter image suggests that there is, indeed, diffuse gas within the cavity. Modelled as a thermal gas, its temperature appears higher than the inner regions of the cluster (which dominate the foreground and background emission). These findings should be regarded as preliminary and the work as in progress. The main concern is that the difference map is sensitive to systematic errors in the assumed cluster model and geometry.

We thank Patrick Shopbell for collaboration in the early part of this work. This project was supported by NASA through grants NAG 81027 and NAG 81755.


text:
# What exactly is a Skyrmion?

## I Introduction

Over a decade ago it was suggested that in heavy ion collisions classical pion field may be formed, this would lead to coherent pion production aa . Motivated by the Centauro events large fluctuation in the ratio of the number of charged-to-neutral pions was predicted to occur from event to event in heavy ion collisions aa ; bj1 ; bk . More careful investigation showed that large domains with different chiral orientations were necessary for any observably large fluctuations in the pion ratios to occur rw1 . Such a phenomenon was coined Disoriented Chiral Condensates (DCC) rw2 ; bkt . A number of papers were devoted to looking for DCC at the Tevatron bkt ; mmx  and a even greater number were devoted to finding them in heavy ion collisions. Unfortunately so far all searches for them ended in failure at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN wa98  and at the Fermilab Tevatron from the MiniMax experiment mmx . Facing these results it is all too easy to conclude that there is no DCC formation at all in these experiments. Nevertheless one has to bear in mind that in heavy ion collisions pions are the most copiously produced hadrons. In order to observe DCC a large number of coherent pions must be produced so that they can rise above this background. Large domains with fixed chiral orientation are required for this to happen rw1 ; gm .

Recently the possibility of baryon-antibaryon productions through small domain DCC was raised and connected to the $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ and $`\overline{\mathrm{\Omega }}`$ data from the SPS kw . This occurs through skyrmion and antiskyrmion formation sk . This possibility in the context of heavy ion collisions was previously raised in dg ; ehk ; ks . However it was first connected to DCC and data only recently in kw . In it a problem on how to confront experimental data was encountered. Although a skyrmion is generally known to be a baryon or nucleon, its exact identity has never been clear. However for serious phenomenological applications such inexactitude cannot be tolerated. In this paper the mystery to the exact identity of the skyrmion is revealed. They are coherent states of baryons and excited baryons. An outline will be given on how to connect and obtain the physical states for a skyrmion. The details will be presented elsewhere me .

## II The Skyrme Model

In 1962 Skyrme introduced the following lagrangian

$$_S=\frac{f_\pi ^2}{4}\text{tr}(_\mu U^\mu U^{})+\frac{1}{32g^2}\text{tr}[U^{}_\mu U,U^{}_\nu U]^2$$
(1)
where

$$U=\text{exp}\{i𝝉\varphi /f_\pi \}=(\sigma +i𝝉𝝅)/f_\pi ,$$
(2)
$`f_\pi `$ is the pion decay constant and $`g`$ is now known to be the $`\rho `$-$`\pi `$-$`\pi `$ coupling. The first term is the usual non-linear sigma model and the second part was introduced by Skyrme sk . This model belongs to a family of lagrangians that are known to approximate QCD at low energies. Skyrme found a family of classical static solutions to the equation of motion derived from $`_S`$. They can be written in the form

$$U=U_S=\text{exp}\{i𝝉\widehat{𝒓}F(r)\}$$
(3)
where $`F(r)`$ is a radial function which must satisfy certain specific boundary conditions. They are

$$F(r\mathrm{})0\text{ and }F(r=0)=N\pi $$
(4)
sk ; bha ; bmss . $`N`$ in the last expression is the integral valued topological charge or winding number. It has been identified as the baryon number sk ; wi  provided that the Wess-Zumino effective action wz  is included to eliminate the unphysical symmetry inherent in the non-linear sigma model. Only $`N=1`$ will be considered in this paper which corresponds to the case of one baryon. This connection of skyrmion to baryon has generated much applications: from being the model for studying baryon mass spectrum anw ; gu ; wk  to that for studying the quark, spin content and form factors of the nucleon med , from being a non-linear mechanism for baryon production in jets ek  to that in heavy ion collisions dg ; ehk . There are many more works for generalizing to more than two quark flavors. A nice review of many of these applications and generalization can be found for example in hw  and in references therein.

Although the identification of a skyrmion as a baryon was made early sk  and confirmed in wi ; bnrs , there was no direct link of a skyrmion to a nucleon. It was speculated in wi  that the ground state of the skyrmion is the nucleon. Indeed apart from the baryon number, a skyrmion has no quantum numbers whereas baryons have spin and isospin. To obtain these quantum numbers, a skyrmion has to be quantized.

## III Quantization of the $`N=1`$ Skyrme Hamiltonian

In this paper only flavor $`SU(2)`$ skyrmion will be considered. Quantization of skyrmion was done in anw  using the techniques of collective coordinate. This amounts to finding time-evolution about the static solution. Substituting the solution Eq. (3) for $`N=1`$ into the lagrangian density Eq. (1) and integrating over space gives the energy or mass of the static skyrmion $`M=d^3r_S`$. The collective coordinate is introduced by observing that if $`U_S`$ is a solution of the Euler-Lagrange equation to Eq. (1) so is $`U_S^{}=A(t)U_SA^{}(t)`$. Here $`A(t)`$ is an element of the group $`SU(2)`$, which may be more conveniently written as $`A=a_0+i𝒂𝝉`$. The $`a_i`$’s, $`i=0,1,2,3`$. satisfies the constraint $`a_0^2+`$$`𝒂`$$`{}_{}{}^{2}=1`$ as for any element of $`SU(2)`$. Substituting now the new $`U_S^{}`$ into Eq. (1) and integrating over space gives the lagrangian in terms of the $`a_i`$’s as

$$L=2\lambda \underset{i=0}{\overset{3}{}}(\dot{a}_i)^2M.$$
(5)
$`\lambda `$ and $`M`$ are two constants and their explicit forms are unimportant here. In this form, the conjugate momentum to $`a_i`$ is readily found to be $`\pi _i=4\lambda \dot{a}_i`$. A naive quantization procedure $`[a_i,\pi _j]=i\delta _{ij}`$ permits the equally naive representation $`\pi _i=i_i`$ fn1 ; di . $`_i`$ is short for $`/a_i`$. It works nevertheless if one is careful with the differentiation. The Hamiltonian becomes

$$H=\frac{1}{8\lambda }\underset{i=0}{\overset{3}{}}\pi _i^2+M=\frac{1}{8\lambda }\underset{i=0}{\overset{3}{}}_i^2+M$$
(6)
where the $`^2=_i_i^2`$ is understood to be acting on variables constrained on $`S^3`$. The wavefunctions of this Hamiltonian are in general polynomials of $`(a_i+ia_j)`$. For example with integral power $`l`$, $`^2(a_i+ia_j)^l=l(l+2)(a_i+ia_j)^l`$ anw . One could also write $`^2`$ in terms of the spin and isospin operators $`^2=2_{i=1}^3(J_i^2+I_i^2)`$. These are for $`i=1,2,3`$

$`I_i`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}i\left(a_0_ia_i_0\epsilon _{ijk}a_j_k\right)`$ (7)
$`J_i`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}i\left(a_i_0a_0_i\epsilon _{ijk}a_j_k\right).`$ (8)
The Hamiltonian commutes with any of these $`[H,J_i]=[H,I_i]=[I_i,J_k]=0`$, so simultaneous eigenstates of energy, spin and isospin can be found. Favoring the third direction as usual

$$J_3(a_1\pm ia_2)^l=I_3(a_1\pm ia_2)^l=\pm \frac{l}{2}(a_1\pm ia_2)^l$$
(9)
so odd integer $`l`$ gives half-integral spin and isospin states while even integer $`l`$ gives integral spin and isospin states. This system permits both bosonic and fermionic states. Since baryons are fermions so one can have only polynomials of odd degree $`l`$ for physical states. For example labeling states by their total $`j`$, spin $`m`$ and isospin $`n`$ quantum numbers $`|jmn`$, the simplest proton and neutron spin up wavefunctions are polynomials of degree 1

$`a|p`$ $`=`$ $`a|1/2,1/2,1/2={\displaystyle \frac{1}{\pi }}(a_1+ia_2)`$ (10)
$`a|n`$ $`=`$ $`a|1/2,1/2,1/2={\displaystyle \frac{i}{\pi }}(a_0+ia_3).`$ (11)
where the Dirac ket notation $`|a`$ is used to represent the position vector on $`S^3`$. In general the wavefunctions are holomorphic functions on $`S^3`$ in terms of the coordinate $`a_i`$. One could easily write down the wavefunctions for the $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$’s and other excited baryon states. With the collective coordinate, the quantization of this system is quite straightforward.

Although the physical states have been produced by quantization and they possess the required quantum numbers, this does not furnish a connection to the classical skyrmion. Quantization by itself does not connect the quantum mechanical to the classical but if one recalls the problem of the simple harmonic oscillator, Schrödinger showed a long time ago that classical-like solutions could be found among the quantum states. These are the so-called coherent states. They are the closest quantum equivalence to the classical solutions. Our task is now reduced to finding the coherent states which are superposition of the physical quantum states.

## IV The Criteria for Coherent States

Very unlike the n-dimensional harmonic oscillator where the space is $`R^n`$, our problem resides on the surface of the four-dimensional sphere which is a compact manifold. The techniques used in the harmonic oscillator problem cannot be applied straightforwardly. One should however be able to draw close analogy and use that as a guide. There are many works in the literature on coherent states, in curved space-time, compact manifold with various applications such as in quantum gravity, see for example ap ; c-pro ; tt ; hm  and references therein. There are a variety of ways to construct them and they are not all equivalent. It is therefore best to choose the method that is closest to the original and is an analog of that in compact spaces. In our case our space is $`S^3`$ and we would like to construct coherent states on it. The case of coherent states on a circle and a sphere have been done in kr  and generalized to $`S^n`$ in hm  using the techniques of the generalized Segal-Bargmann transform or “coherent state” transform tt ; hm .

According to tt ; hm  coherent states are defined as simultaneous eigenstates of some annihilation operators as in the usual harmonic oscillator problem. From quantum mechanics, we have

$$A_i=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2m\omega \mathrm{}}}(m\omega X_i+iP_i)$$
(12)
with $`A_i|\alpha =\alpha _i|\alpha `$. They are labeled by points in phase space. Again the same is true in the original because the usual coherent states are labeled by the set of eigenvalues $`\alpha _i`$’s. These are linked to the expectation values

$$X_i=\sqrt{\frac{\mathrm{}}{2m\omega }}(\alpha _i+\alpha _i^{}),P_i=i\sqrt{\frac{\mathrm{}m\omega }{2}}(\alpha _i\alpha _i^{})$$
(13)
which is equivalent to labeling by phase space points. In Euclidean space $`R^n`$ the method of constructing the annihilation operators should reduce to the well known form. This has been shown to be true in hm . Finally the equivalence of $`\mathrm{\Delta }X_i^2`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }P_i^2`$ should be constants independent of quantum numbers as in the simple harmonic oscillator. This was considered in kr  and they largely hold true. For these reasons it is most reasonable to apply their method for constructing the annihilation operators and the coherent states. Note that the construction advocated in ap  does not fulfill some of these criteria and the resulting coherent states are not direct generalization of those from the well known ones.

## V Problem in the Straight forward Coherent State Construction

The construction of coherent states can be summarized as follows. The method of tt ; hm  gives the annihilation operators on a compact manifold as

$$A_i=e^CX_ie^C$$
(14)
where $`X_i`$’s are the $`i`$ component of the coordinate operator on the compact manifold and $`C`$ is a dimensionless complexifier. The latter is so called because Eq. (14) is a transformation of real phase space coordinates ($`X_i`$,$`P_i`$) into the complex pair ($`X_i^{}`$,$`P_i^{}`$). $`A_i=X_i^{}`$ is the complexified $`X_i`$ and $`C`$ can be thought of as the generator of the transformation. On $`S^n`$ the $`A_i`$ operators can be rewritten in the form

$$A_i=\sigma _x(J)X_i+i\sigma _p(J)P_i$$
(15)
in analogy to Eq. (12). The angular momentum or spin $`J`$ dependent coefficients $`\sigma (J)`$ are a feature of the compact $`S^n`$ hm ; kr . Equipped with the annihilation operators, simultaneous eigenstates of them can be constructed from a fixed position state vector $`|x`$ on the manifold. By definition $`X_i|x=x_i|x`$, then if we let $`|\psi =e^C|x`$, this must be a simultaneous eigenstate of $`A_i`$ because $`A_i|\psi =x_i|\psi `$. The coherent state construction is almost complete. Because $`x_i`$ is real, one must now analytically continued $`|x`$ and $`x_i`$ to complex coordinates $`|x^{}`$ and $`x^{}`$. Once this last step is done, $`|\psi `$ is now the coherent state labeled by $`x^{}`$. Therefore there is one coherent state per phase space point as in the usual harmonic oscillator.

The actual application of this method to our problem is not so simple. Remember that on $`S^3`$ the coordinates are the $`a_i`$’s and we are interested in coherent states expanded in terms of physical states. This can be done by inserting a complete set of states, both integral and half integral quantum numbers ($`j,m,n`$), in the above $`|\psi `$

$$|\psi =e^C|a^{}=e^C\underset{j,m,n}{}|j,m,nj,m,n|a^{}.$$
(16)
$`j,m,n|a^{}`$ is the complex conjugate of the wavefunctions evaluated at the complex coordinate $`a^{}`$ and $`C`$ is related to the kinetic term of the Hamiltonian Eq. (6) me . This is highly undesirable because a skyrmion should not involve unphysical states. The simplest solution is to discard these from Eq. (16). Unfortunately this must fail. To see this, let us momentarily use a representation that states are wavefunctions and operators act by multiplication and/or differentiation. Then with only physical states, we have

$$\psi =e^C\underset{j,m,n+{\scriptscriptstyle \frac{1}{2}}}{}\psi _{jmn}.$$
(17)
Acting on this with the position operator $`\widehat{a}_i`$ gives $`\widehat{a}_i\psi =a_i\psi `$. Remember that physical state wavefunctions are odd degree polynomials. The above operator turns all odd into even polynomials. $`|\psi `$ without the unphysical states is no longer eigenstates of $`A_i`$ and therefore not a coherent state. So straightforward application of the method to our physical problem fails immediately.

## VI A Skyrmion is a Coherent State of Baryons and Excited Baryons

If we write the complete Hilbert space as a sum of fermionic and bosonic space $`=+`$, then the problem with the appearance of non-physical states is directly linked to the fact that $`\widehat{a}_i`$ maps $``$ to $``$ and $``$ to $``$: $`\widehat{a}_i|=|`$, $`\widehat{a}_i|=|`$. If only one could use the operator products $`\widehat{a}_i^2`$ or $`\widehat{a}_i\widehat{a}_j`$ as coordinate operators instead then the problem would disappear. These map $``$ to itself and likewise for $``$. This should allow us to discard $``$. How can one justify using such product operators? In any case instead of four $`\widehat{a}_i`$’s, there would be nine independent combinations of $`\widehat{a}_i\widehat{a}_j`$. The solution to this is instead of using the coordinate on $`SU(2)`$, one should use instead those of $`SO(3)`$. In other words, one first use the map of $`SU(2)`$ to $`SO(3)`$. An element of the former $`A`$ can be mapped to one of the latter using

$$A\tau _iA^{}=\tau _jR_{ji}(A)$$
(18)
bnrs . Here $`R`$ is the $`3\times 3`$ rotation matrix. This map gives

$$R_{ij}=2a_ia_j+\delta _{ij}(2a_0^21)2ϵ_{ijk}a_0a_k$$
(19)
where $`i,j=1,2,3`$ me . The new coordinate with nine components represents points on the $`SO(3)`$ manifold and is now combinations of products of $`a_ia_j`$ in disguise.

One will have to quantize the Hamiltonian again in terms of $`R`$ instead of the $`a_i`$’s me . With these new coordinates, one can now follow the above prescription to construct the coherent state involving only physical baryon and excited baryon states. The relative probability of the physical states depends on the operator $`e^C`$ which acts on the physical states and the wavefunction evaluated at a complex point $`R^{}`$. From the above discussion, these can be calculated. The make up of a skyrmion as well as the relative probability a physical baryon state will be produced from skyrmion formation through DCC in heavy ion experiments can now be determined me .

The solution to the identity of the skyrmions naturally generates a lot of questions in light of the many existing literature and applications. The detail construction of a skyrmion in terms of baryonic coherent state, their application to heavy ion collisions, as well as other related questions will be pursued elsewhere me . This completes the outline of how to arrive at a solution to the identity of a skyrmion. In brief a skyrmion is not a single baryon, but a quantum mechanical superposition of baryon and resonance states.

## Acknowledgments

The author thanks K. Kowalski and J. Rembieliński for pointing out ref. hm , B.C. Hall for clarifying the annihilation operators, P. Ellis, U. Heinz and J. Kapusta for comments. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant no. DE-FG02-01ER41190.


text:
# Elementary explanation of the inexistence of decoherence at zero temperature for systems with purely elastic scattering

## I I. Introduction

What diminishes the interference of, say, two waves (see Eq. 1 below) is an interesting fundamental question, some aspects of which are, surprisingly, still being debated. This process is called ”dephasing” or ”decoherence” footnote1 . Decoherence occurs due to an interaction of the interfering entity (henceforth referred to as ”the particle”) with the degrees of freedom (dubbed ”the environment”, examples for which are lattice vibrations, E-M fields, interactions with other particles, etc.) which are not measured in the interference experiment. More specifically, this interaction will eliminate the interference if and only if the two (in the simplest case) partial waves leave the environment in orthogonal states. The diminishing of the interference can then be described as due to either tracing over the environment’s states or to the random fields exerted by the fluctuating environment on the particle. These two descriptions are exactly equivalent FV ; SAI . After almost twenty years of research on Mesoscopic Physics book , it is now fully and universally accepted that purely elastic scattering, for example by static defects in solids, can modify the interference terms but does not cause decoherence. An extreme case occurs if one of the two interference paths is blocked. The interference obviously vanishes (as will a half of the classical contribution). But this is not decoherence. Likewise, one can diminish the interference by various averaging processes (For example, via a broad enough distribution of incident particle energies or wavelengths) but, again, this is not proper decoherence.

The issue of whether the zero point modes of an environment can dephase footnote1  a test particle which can not lose energy book , is still current in modern literature. An answer to the affirmative has been suggested theoretically in the case of the coupling of a conduction-electron in a solid to lattice vibrations (phonons) 14 years ago Kumar  and immediately refuted vigorously Schm-Berg . Interest in this problem has resurfaced due to experiments by Mohanty et al Webb  which determine the dephasing rate of conduction electrons by weak-localization magnetoconductance Berg . According to these rather careful experiments, the dephasing rate of a conduction electron does not vanish when the temperature $`T0`$, but rather goes to a finite limit which is then interpreted as due to the coupling with the zero-point electromagnetic fluctuations in the solid. For conductors, these fluctuations are mainly due to the fields produced by the other conduction electrons, hence this decoherence can also be described as due to electron-electron interactions. This dephasing rate has been calculated before AAK  and found to vanish at the zero temperature limit. An apparent contradiction between theory and experiment results.

This contradiction is not just with a specific model calculation. As mentioned above, decoherence is very generally understood as what may be called a ”which path” detection by the ”environment”, effected by the exchange of an excitation (i.e. an inelastic process) SAI  between the particle and the environment. Such excitation exchange processes can not occur when both the environment and the test particle are at zero temperature and in the linear transport regime (where the conduction electron has an excess energy which tends to zero) Zvi ; footnote2 . No excitation can be exchanged if neither the particle nor the environment can lose energy. It is assumed that, as is usually the case, the environment does not have a large degeneracy of the ground state. The above argument that no excitation can be exchanged between the test-particle and the environment can actually be formulated in terms of an integral over products of certain correlation functions, which can rather generally be proven to vanish as $`T0`$ CI ; isqm ; IFS ; book . The only exceptions being an environment having a pathologically increasing density of states at low energies and the above-mentioned case where the environment has a large ground state degeneracy. A viable model for the latter are uncompensated and isolated magnetic impurities at zero magnetic field.

However, the experimenters Webb  have taken great pains to eliminate the effect of magnetic impurities and have presented serious arguments as to why that was not an important effect in their samples. An assumed high enough density of other low-energy modes, such as two-level systems (TLS) was also shown IFS  to be able to account, in principle, for the observed anomalies. Such low-energy modes might depend on the metallurgy of a given sample. Other experiments kha  have reported a vanishing dephasing rate as $`T0`$ in a different material. Later experiments Norm  have in fact demonstrated that the $`T0`$ anomaly seems to depend on sample preparation. Thus some lattice defects such as the TLS might be relevant. Uncompensated magnetic impurities were also implicated in Ref. Norm  but that possibility was argued to have been negated for the experiments of Ref.Webb . Here we certainly do not attempt to pass judgement on the experimental controversy. Furthermore, as indicated by some of the early experiments Berg  one must use extremely small measurement currents to be in the linear transport regime. Ovadyahu Ov00  studied this issue very carefully. His findings can be summarized as showing that it may be possible to eliminate the anomalous decoherence by using extra-small probing currents. However, there is a large range of currents that do not heat the electrons, as found in Ref. Webb , but appear nevertheless not to be small enough for the transport to be in the truly linear regime. Finding the mechanism leading to this, which probably also involves some special low-frequency modes Ov00 , still presents an important unsolved problem in low-temperature metal Physics. Therefore, we again refrain from offering a verdict on what the final answer provided by all the experiments will be and we trust that that will be cleared up soon. From now on we confine ourselves to the, still hotly debated, theoretical question only, which ought to be decidable by applying known principles correctly.

That question has become controversial as well, due to reports of calculations zaikin  which claimed to have produced a finite dephasing rate as $`T0`$, in contradiction with refs. AAK ; SAI  and with the general arguments summarized above. Refs. ale ; alt  have disagreed strongly with these calculations. To which criticism the authors zaikin  have rebutted. The theoretical controversy is still going on ( e.g. vonDelft , Schoen  and KB ). Unlike the experimental situation, experience has shown that questions such as ”who has calculated the correct diagrams correctly” tend to linger and produce unnecessary controversy. This is compounded by further reports of the weakening of quantum interference, even truly at equilibrium, at $`T0`$, by a coupling to the environment But . It has been claimed that ”Vacuum fluctuations are a source of irreversibility and can decohere an otherwise coherent process”. That statement is of course trivially valid (if certain matrix-elements do not vanish) for a system that can lose energy to the vacuum fluctuations. However, that does not include an electron just on the Fermi-level. The persistent current in a mesoscopic ring was found But  to be weakened at $`T0`$ by coupling to harmonic oscillators in their ground state. Models invoking such oscillators with a specific coupling and density of states (DOS), chosen to mimic the dissipation Nyquist ; FV ; Zwan ; CL  can be used to describe a viscous resistance to the electron’s motion (although, at best, important modifications, such as a spatial distribution of these oscillators might be necessary Doron ; CI ).

Thus, the theoretical situation needs clarification, independently of the final experimental verdict. We shall attempt in this very informal note to clarify the possible misunderstandings that can lead to the belief in the $`T0`$ decoherence. We shall show that some of the confusion may be due to interpreting a reduction of interference as due to dephasing, when it really is something else. To explain that, we shall first treat in section II an elementary model, really a rehash of the arguments of Ref. Schm-Berg , which illustrates the whole issue very simply.

## II II. A simple model: two-wave interference with vibrating scatterers

Let us first imagine two elastic, rigid, point scatterers placed at points $`\stackrel{}{x}_1`$ and $`\stackrel{}{x}_2`$, separated from each other by a vector $`\stackrel{}{d}`$ along the x axis. A particle wave with wave vector $`\stackrel{}{k}_0`$ impinges upon these scatterers. We look at the (elastic) scattering into the state with a wavevector $`\stackrel{}{k}`$. We denote the momentum-transfer vector by $`\stackrel{}{K}=\stackrel{}{k}_0\stackrel{}{k}`$. If the scattering amplitude from each of the scatterers is $`A_K`$, the (lowest order) scattering probability from the system will be proportional to

$$S_K=2|A_K|^2+2\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}|A_K|^2\mathrm{exp}(i\stackrel{}{K}\stackrel{}{d})S_K^{cl}+S_K^{qu},$$
(1)
where the first and second terms are, in obvious notation, the classical and the interference contributions, bearing a strong similarity to the case of diffraction by a double slit. $`\stackrel{}{K}\stackrel{}{d}`$ is the phase shift due to the difference in the optical paths between the waves scattered by the two scatterers. Somewhat similarly to the Bohr discussion of diffraction from two fluctuating slits, we now let each scatterer be bound by a parabolic potential, so that the frequency of the motion in the x-direction of is $`\omega _0`$. The case of interest to us here is when the scatterers are at zero temperature, but the generalization is obvious. We write $`\widehat{x}_i=X_i+\widehat{u}_i`$, $`i=1,2`$. Each $`\widehat{x}_i`$ performs zero-point fluctuations (whose coordinate operator is $`\widehat{u}_i`$) around its equilibrium position $`X_i=x_i`$. To obtain the new scattering pattern we must average the scattered $`intensity`$ over the wavefunction of the scatterers. That wavefunction is a product of two gaussians, of $`u_1`$ and $`u_2`$. The standard deviation of each is $`\sigma `$, given by $`\sigma ^2=\frac{\mathrm{}}{2M\omega _0}`$, where $`M`$ is the mass of the scatterer. Using the fact that for a gaussian distribution of $`v`$ with an average $`v`$ and a variance $`\mathrm{\Delta }v^2`$,

$$\mathrm{exp}(iv)=\mathrm{exp}(iv\mathrm{\Delta }v^2/2)$$
(2)
(a similar result is valid also in the quantum case Kittel ; Messiah ), we obtain

$$S_K=S_K^{cl}+2\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}|A_K|^2\mathrm{exp}(i\stackrel{}{K}\stackrel{}{d})\mathrm{exp}(2W),$$
(3)
where $`2W`$ is the well-known Debye-Waller factor

$$2W=K_x^2\sigma ^2,$$
(4)
obtained by writing $`(u_1u_2)^2=2\sigma ^2`$, since the $`u^{}`$s are independent random variables with zero mean value each.

Thus, the quantum interference term is indeed reduced by the zero-point motion. One may (as several researchers have done) now jump to the wrong conclusion that the zero-point motion indeed reduces the quantum interference term without apparently affecting the classical terms. In other words, one would write:

$$S_K^{cl}=2|A_K|^2.$$
(5)
This would imply decoherence by the zero-point motion! The (superficially valid only) reason for the above mistaken conclusion is that in the classical terms one has $`e^{iK_xu}e^{iK_xu}=1`$.

The fallacy in the above naive thinking is in the application of the last seemingly innocuous equality, Eq. 5. Because it automatically includes all the inelastic scattering stat , which should not appear. This fact has been known for at least 45 years Zemach ; VH  and has been reinforced when the Mössbauer effect was discovered and understood (see, for example, Lipkin ; Kittel ). Next, we will explain this issue.

Let us review the derivation of the inelastic nature VH  of part of the above expressions. The exact elastic scattering amplitude $`A_K`$ of the isolated static scatterer is first parameterized in terms of a suitably defined pseudopotential $`V(r)`$, whose Fourier transform is $`V_K`$. As if anticipating the current sophisticated red-herring type discussions of the perturbative vs the ”nonperturbative” nature of the theory, Fermi in 1936 Fermi  defined a pseudopotential $`V(r)`$, so that the lowest-order Born approximation scattering amplitude due to it (which is proportional to $`V_K`$) equals the actual, correct, $`A_K`$. Therefore, using the Born approximation with the pseudopotential, already implies taking into account all the multiple scattering by the same multip  scatterer. Within this picture, van Hove considered in 1954 the (in general) inelastic Born approximation scattering, which for our system is proportional to

$`S(K,\omega )=|A_K|^2{\displaystyle \underset{f}{}}|f|[\mathrm{exp}(iK_x\widehat{x}_1)+`$
$`\mathrm{exp}(iK_x\widehat{x}_2)]|g|^2\delta (\mathrm{}\omega +E_fE_g)`$ (6)
where $`\mathrm{}\omega `$ is the energy, $`(\mathrm{}^2/2m)(k_0^2k^2)`$, lost by the scattered particle and $`E_f`$ and $`E_g`$ are the energies of the final state ($`|f`$) and initial one ($`|g`$) of the oscillators. The $`\delta `$ function simply gives total energy conservation in the process. Since the scatterers are at $`T0`$, the only possible initial state is the ground state, $`|g`$, of the two-oscillator system.

A slightly more advanced treatment of Eq. II will be given in the next section. Right now, we simply enforce the condition of no energy exchange in the scattering. We remind the reader that for electrons in metals, this most important condition follows from the fact that neither the oscillators (which are at their ground states) nor the conduction electron at the Fermi level have any states to go down to. This is valid for an arbitrary, interacting, system because there are no states below the ground state. In the noninteracting fermion picture, this would follow formally, from the Fermi-Pauli factors ($`n_g(1n_f)`$) that should then be included in Eq. II. This enforces the choice of only the term with $`f=g`$ in the sum. As a result, the $`\delta (\omega )`$ part of $`S(K,\omega )`$, which is the elastic scattering cross section and the only surviving part of $`S(K,\omega )`$, is given here by

$`S_K{\displaystyle }d\omega S^{el}(K,\omega )=|A_K|^2|g|[\mathrm{exp}(iK_x\widehat{x}_1)+`$
$`\mathrm{exp}(iK_x\widehat{x}_2)]|g|^2`$ (7)
We again have a classical term which is a sum of a term due to $`x_1`$ and one due to $`x_2`$, and the interference term which is the ground-state average of $`2\mathrm{R}\mathrm{e}|A_K|^2\mathrm{exp}(iK_x\widehat{x}_1)\mathrm{exp}(iK_x\widehat{x}_2)`$, yielding the Debye-Waller factor as before. The whole point is now, that each classical term is given by $`|A_Kg|\mathrm{exp}(iK_xx_i)|g|^2,i=1,2`$. Therefore, the classical terms too are reduced by the same Debye-Waller factors as the interference term. Thus, again, it is not that the classical terms stay unchanged and the interference is decreased, as would be the case for a true decoherence, but both the non-interfering classical part and the interference, ”quantum correction” part are renormalized in the same fashion. Therefore, the reduction of the interference part by the coupling to the environment has nothing to do with decoherence. Looking at the average of the classical terms, it is instructive to point out that the reduction of the scattering in a distributed scatterer is due to the addition of the scattering amplitudes from the various positions occupied by that scatterer. These amplitudes add coherently because the scattering is elastic. This amplitude addition is familiar from diffraction theory in optics or from antenna theory.

## III III. A more advanced treatment

For a fuller treatment, van Hove VH  started by writing Eq. II for N scatterers. The term in the square brackets is just $`_{i=1,N}\mathrm{exp}(i\stackrel{}{K}\widehat{\stackrel{}{x}}_i)`$, which is just the Fourier transform, $`n_K`$ of the particle density operator $`\widehat{n}(\stackrel{}{x})_{i=1,N}\delta (\stackrel{}{x}\widehat{\stackrel{}{x}}_i)`$. He then used a series of simple but ingenious manipulations (Fourier-representing the energy $`\delta `$ function, inserting a complete set of states and using the Heisenberg representation for the $`n_K`$) to write $`S(K,\omega )`$ as the Fourier transform of the temporal correlation function, $`n_K(0)n_K(t)`$. For phonon systems, where $`\stackrel{}{u}_i`$ (the fluctuation of $`\stackrel{}{x}_i`$ from its average position in the lattice) is a linear superposition of harmonic oscillators, the correlators relevant for inelastic neutron scattering and treated extensively in that literature in the late 50’s (of the last century) Kittel ), are therefore

$$\mathrm{exp}(J_{ij}(t))=\mathrm{exp}(i\stackrel{}{K}\widehat{\stackrel{}{x}}_i(t))\mathrm{exp}(i\stackrel{}{K}\widehat{\stackrel{}{x}}_j(0))$$
(8)
The elastic part of the scattering is given by the $`t\mathrm{}`$ limit (or time-independent) part of this, since the Fourier transform of a constant is a $`\delta `$ function. In the modern so-called $`P(E)`$ PE  theory of phase fluctuations, similar calculations have been done and similar functions appear with harmonic oscillators taken to represent the lossy environment. Looking at the interference between two paths, one again sees immediately that the two-path interference term is affected, but that at the same time the single-path terms are affected in the same fashion. This completes our demonstration that zero-point fluctuations do not decohere. Some details will still be presented below.

It is perhaps useful to point out that the mistake in neglecting the Debye-Waller factors in the first terms of Eqs. 1 and 3 occurs because there one looks at the equal-time correlators. These are related to the integrals of $`S(K,\omega )`$ over all frequencies stat . Now, the inelastic parts of $`S(K,\omega )`$ have to be discarded, as discussed above. The $`t=0`$ correlator (leading to Eq. 5), obtained by neglecting this important constraint, is very different from the relevant $`t\mathrm{}`$ limit of the correlator (leading to Eq. 7), which is related to the elastic scattering. We are now ready to discuss the question of what happens when the $`t\mathrm{}`$ limit of the above correlators vanishes. The answer depends on the physical situation considered. In the scattering problem, the vanishing of the Debye-Waller factor means that there is no strict Bragg-type scattering or Mössbauer effect (but interesting things can still happen, see for example Refs. GI ; IG ). If the inelastic scattering is blocked, no scattering remains and the particle can only go forward ”unscathed” through the system (remaining unscattered). However, other situations can exist. One can have a vibrating double-slit system that will stop transmitting altogether. An electron in a solid with phonons can also localize. A sizable increase of the electron’s effective mass was found by Holstein Holstein  in the small-polaron problem (which is also related to the issues discussed here). Later, Schmid Schmid  found that for the phonon problem similar to the one discussed here, with a suitable ”ohmic” spectrum, this mass renormalization is so severe that the mass diverges for a strong enough coupling, and the particle becomes localized. This effect appeared later, in the context of what has been called ”Macroscopic Quantum Coherence” Legg , for mesoscopic SQUIDS. It should perhaps be reemphasized that this mass renormalization and possible ensuing localization are due to an elastic ”orthogonalization catastrophe” and not to decoherence Stern . We shall discuss this further in the next section.

It has become customary to describe the finite resistance of an electron in a real metal as due to coupling with the Nyquist–Feynmann-Vernon–Zwanzig–Caldeira-Leggett oscillators expl . We put aside, for the time being, the serious question of how well can a resistance given physically when $`T0`$ by (mainly) elastic impurity scattering, be described by inelastic (and therefore phase-breaking) processes. Within this model the phase decay for an electron coupled to a dissipative bath is described by the temporal correlator $`\mathrm{exp}(i\widehat{\varphi }(t))\mathrm{exp}(i\widehat{\varphi }(0))`$. It is governed Im  when $`T0`$ by

$$\mathrm{exp}[const_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑\omega \eta (\omega )(\frac{1\mathrm{cos}\omega t}{\omega })],$$
(9)
where $`\eta (\omega )`$ is the dissipation constant, assumed to have a finite $`\omega 0`$ limit. We emphasize that this is the naive result, obtained by neglecting the fact that inelastic processes are absent. To set up an analogy with a real lattice dynamics problem we note that the ”self” correlator for the single-particle density $`\mathrm{exp}(iK\widehat{x}_i(t))\mathrm{exp}(iK\widehat{x}_i(0))=\mathrm{exp}(J_{ii}(t))`$ at $`T=0`$ for a 1D Debye lattice is also (see e.g. Ref. IG ) decaying (see Im ) via $`\mathrm{exp}[(const_0^{\omega _D}d\omega (\frac{1\mathrm{cos}\omega t}{\omega })]`$, Im . Thus, these two problems are mathematically similar. Both have, when $`T0`$, the same logarithmic long-time behavior of the exponent, which becomes a power-law decay of the correlator. However, in the latter case, these zero point-effects are very physical – for example, an atom emitting radiation can produce phonons (in the non-Mössbauer channels) in its recoil. However, as we explained, the electron on the Fermi level can not decay and produce an excitation. Its inelastic channels are blocked. The amplitude for the particle to go between two points is the sum of the amplitudes of a huge number, $`𝒩`$, of paths. The probability has two types of terms: $`𝒩`$ classical ones (the absolute value squared of the amplitude of a single path) and $`𝒩^2/2`$ interference terms (twice the real part of the product of a path amplitude with the complex conjugate of the amplitude of a different path). Once the constraint of no energy transfer is imposed, there is again no major difference between the (Debye-Waller type) reduction factors for the classical and the interference terms. Hence there is no intrinsic decoherence in the Physics of a particle coupled to a normal bath at $`T0`$. Unusual low-energy properties of the bath might of course still give anomalous decoherence at low temperatures. Such anomalies do not exist in the theoretical models on which the present controversy rages zaikin ; ale ; alt ; Schoen ; vonDelft ; KB .

## IV IV. Quantum effects in closed rings, ”antidecoherence”???

Besides real decoherence, there are other ways to reduce quantum interference effects. Averaging over the energy of the incoming particle is often confused with decoherence, but it should not book . Using a variable energy filter one may recover the many interference patterns belonging to different energies in the beam. This is impossible for decoherence via ”which path” identification. A rather aggressive way to kill quantum interference is, for example, to simply block (at least) one of the two interfering paths. Alternatively, if the Fermi-surface electron interacts with the $`T0`$ bath only when it goes via one of the interfering paths , the amplitude of that path will be reduced by a Debye-Waller type factor similar to Eq. 9 (see Im ),

$$\mathrm{exp}[const_0^{\mathrm{}}𝑑\omega \lambda (\omega )(\frac{1\mathrm{cos}\omega t}{\omega })],$$
(10)
where $`\lambda (\omega )`$ contains the coupling constants and the DOS of the oscillators at frequency $`\omega `$. The limit of effectively ”cutting” the path is achieved when this factor becomes very small. A similar reduction will be achieved if only one of the scatterers in the simple model of section II, is allowed to fluctuate. If the two paths are cut or severely weakened, a decrease of both the interference and the classical terms is obtained. It is hoped that the reader already understands very well that this reduction is distinct from decoherence.

One may now consider a case where, in a sense, there are no classical terms. The sensitivity of the energy levels of an electron on an Aharonov-Bohm (AB) ring to the AB flux is a good example. There is no such sensitivity in the classical case. This sensitivity (which determines for example the persistent current through the ring, see, for example, book ) follows from the phase shift experienced by the electron going around the ring enclosing the flux. This AB phase shift along such paths determines the flux sensitivity of, say, the energy levels and thence the persistent current. Obviously, if decoherence is strong enough, in the sense that the ring’s circumference $`L`$ is much larger than the electron’s coherence length $`L_\varphi `$, these purely quantum effects are exponentially reduced.

In the Holstein polaron model Holstein , the effective mass of the electron increases by the coupling with the zero-point environment. Imagine putting such an electron on an AB ring. The flux-sensitivity of the energy levels is proportional to the inverse mass. It will be reduced by the increase of the latter. In certain cases Schmid ; Legg  the effective mass diverges (see the previous section) and the flux sensitivity is altogether eliminated. However, describing this electron with the measured, renormalized, effective mass, will eliminate any need to even think about decoherence.

Likewise, the coupling of a Fermi-surface electron to a $`T0`$ oscillator bath will reduce the amplitude of its flux-encircling paths by the Debye-Waller type factor, Eq. 10. Other paths, not encircling the ring, will experience the corresponding reductions as well, which will just renormalize the physics of the ring. The magnitude of the AB oscillations will be suppressed by such factors for the relevant paths. This is the effect found in Ref. But . Quantum interference is indeed reduced, but this is not decoherence.

We now prove the incorrectness of identifying the Debye-Waller reduction of interference as decoherence by reductio ad absurdum. It is easy to devise couplings to an external bath which enhance the effects of quantum interference. In a diffusive real mesoscopic ring, the persistent current is well known book  to increase with the elastic mean free path $`\mathrm{}`$. The physics of the conduction electrons is governed by two Debye-Waller renormalizations, that of the scattering by the impurities (4), due to lattice vibrations and that of the electrons (9) due basically to the electron-electron interactions. Coming from different interactions, these two renormalizations are not strongly dependent (see below) on each other. Suppose, for simplicity, that all relevant atomic masses are light enough so that the former is more important for the renormalized conductivity than the latter. As found in section II, the elastic impurity scattering rate is proportional to the Debye-Waller factor (for further discussions of this, including the more complicated case of finite temperatures, see for example Refs. Kagan ; Misha ). Thus, the magnitude of the quantum interference for $`T0`$ will increase with the decreasing vibrational Debye-Waller factor (4) of the impurities. This increase at $`T=0`$ is real, can be huge and may be observable, in principle. Since the effects of the electron-electron interactions decrease with the elastic scattering strength AAK , the increasing electron mean free path will actually decrease the effect of the electronic Debye-Waller factor (9) and help the vibrational one (4) dominate. The analogy with the identification of the decrease of quantum effects via the Debye-Waller factor as ”decoherence” would now suggest to define this increase as ”antidecoherence” by a suitable coupling to zero-point modes of a bath. It is hoped that by now the reader does not have to resist the urge to rush to the word processor in order to produce an announcement of this increase of quantum interference by the coupling to the bath, as a revolutionary new physical phenomenon, with a range of important applications.

## V V. Conclusions, real metals

Obviously, the residual ($`T0`$) resistivity of the metal is determined by the elastic scattering off the defects, renormalized by a Debye-Waller type factor similar to the one discussed above, including both the electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions. All the low-temperature physics of the metal is given in terms of this renormalized mean-free-path (and mass). Strictly speaking, we have basically repeated and explained the arguments of refs Schm-Berg . These were devised to refute the ”zero temperature decoherence” by the phonons. While we presented the detailed discussion for a single ”Einstein model” oscillator (which is an excellent test-case for the theory), it is clear that the results are valid for an arbitrary set of harmonic oscillators to which the conduction electron is coupled, and for which the theorem about the gaussian distribution we used is of course valid as well. Nothing of principle will change in this argument if the phonon harmonic oscillators are replaced by another set of harmonic oscillators, such as those taken by Nyquist Nyquist , Feynmann and Vernon FV , Zwanzig Zwan  and Leggett and Caldeira CL  to represent the dissipation in the solid. Moreover, there is no need to use just an ”ohmic” model. An almost arbitrary set of oscillators can be used, including ”subohmic”, ”superohmic” or whatever one pleases (see below why we used the word ”almost”). These models are formally solvable as long as the coupling to the oscillators is linear, and the solution is elementary. In the same fashion as with the well-known fact that the observed physics of an electron in vacuum automatically includes the effect of the zero-point motion of the latter, the observed physics of the electron in a real piece of material automatically has all the renormalizations by whatever harmonic modes of that metal that are coupled to the electron. Special low energy excitations, such as TLS, magnetic modes, etc., can yield nontrivial IFS  low-temperature decoherence for linear response.

Of course, should there be special harmonic (or anharmonic) modes with an anomalously large DOS at low energies, the dephasing rate due to them would be anomalously large at the corresponding low temperatures. It, as well as that by the TLS, should however vanish at the strict $`T0`$ limit, unless a massive ground-state degeneracy or a pathologically increasing low energy DOS would exist. We used here a scattering picture, as in the Landauer description: an electron comes from the outside and its transmission by the system determines the conductance of the latter MW . The Fermi-surface electron comes and exits at the same energy. Its transmission amplitude across the system is given by a sum of amplitudes, each of which multiplied by a Debye-Waller type factor similar to Eqs. 9,10. Since no excitations can be left by this electron at the $`T0`$ metal whose ground state is non-degenerate, no decoherence (in the sense of the interference terms becoming smaller than the ”classical” terms) can follow. This also applies when the conventional low-temperature Fermi liquid picture is used for the electrons in the conductor. We found that unless further special ingredients are introduced FLT , this picture is theoretically stable at low enough temperatures and energies. It should be emphasized that such a scattering or a quasiparticle picture is convenient in order to have a clear definition of interference and decoherence. We did not mention the subtleties associated with models in which the interaction with the same environment is always on. How to define the interfering particle becomes a nontrivial issue in that case. Such subtleties are theoretically interesting but are hardly of much physical relevance. When the electron moves in a real solid the interactions are of finite range and hence it interacts with different degrees of freedom when it is at different positions Doron . Therefore the Physics is similar to the scattering situation CI  and not to models where the same interactions are on all the time.

We repeat that we did not rule out, and have not discussed, special situations where some additional new ingredient FLT  will cause anomalous decoherence/relaxation for the low-energy electrons; nor have we discussed the nontrivial experimental situation in depth. Regardless of all that, the statement that decoherence is due to ”inelastic” processes (change of state of the environment) is the valid guiding principle for this problem. No ingenious model or advanced technique can go around that. Delving deeper into models that are argued to violate that principle may only be useful in order to expose their limitations or as diagnostics for the calculation. We finally add that during the preparation of this note, the present interpretation was conveyed to F. Guinea and found to be completely consistent with his model calculations Paco . These are therefore consistent with the notion that there is no decoherence in the $`T0`$ limit.

The deep question of how good is the description of a real metal via coupling to harmonic oscillators was avoided here. Besides not distinguishing between resistance due to elastic or inelastic scattering, that picture is for sure not exact and corrections may well exist and be relevant Doron ; Paco . For example, in the real system, there will be (hopefully small) corrections to the gaussian approximation for the fluctuations Dima , which have not been seriously treated either here or elsewhere. Independently of that, the underlying statement that without transfer of excitation there will be no dephasing, should still be valid.

We briefly summarize the theoretical statements of this note. The coupling of a particle that can not lose energy to environmental degrees of freedom at $`T0`$, can modify, sometimes very seriously, the quantum behavior. This can go in either direction and is not decoherence. On the other hand, the experiments still point out to some nontrivial effects that are not understood as yet, in the low-temperature Physics of disordered metals.

Acknowledgements

The author was fortunate to learn about the Debye-Waller factor from Harry (Zvi) J. Lipkin and from the late Solly G. Cohen and Israel Pelah and to collaborate on decoherence with Yakir Aharonov and Ady Stern. Past discussions with Walter Kley and (later) with Ted Schultz and collaboration with Leon Gunther and Benny Gavish on these issues at low dimension have been very helpful as well. Gerd Schön is thanked for useful correspondence which helped clarify the issue. More recent discussions with Michael Tinkham, with Richard Webb, with Doron Cohen and with Zvi Ovadyahu, whose experiments have highlighted a very relevant issue which has been posed already in Ref. Webb ), as well as with Uri Gavish and Yehoshua Levinson, are gratefully acknowledged. The writing of this note began when the author was in the Nanoscience program at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara and was supported there by the NSF Grant PHY99-07949. Work at the Weizmann Institute was supported by a Center of Excellence of the Israel Science Foundation, Jerusalem and by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the Framework of the German-Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP).