format: text

text:
# Quantum Entanglement and Entropy

## I introduction

The entanglement is the fundamental quantum property behind the interesting process of quantum teleportation proposed some years ago by Bennett *et al*. . For this reason it is important to quantify entanglement . It has also been found that the fidelity of the quantum teleportation is always larger than that of any classical communication protocol even in the noisy environment. However, for the teleportation to take place perfectly, it is necessary for them to share a maximally entangled state. This generates the need for special purifications protocols. On the other hand, the statistical analysis of these protocols shares deep similarities with the second principle of thermodynamics.

In spite of the plausible conjecture that there exists a deep connection between quantum teleportation and thermodynamics, the entanglement is expressed by means of an entropic structure, the conventional von Neumann entropy, only in the case of pure states. In general the definitions of entanglement dictated by the purification protocol are not directly related to entropy indicators. Cerf and Adami show that the conditional von Neumann entropy can become negative, thereby pointing out the non-ordinary information aspects of quantum entanglement. However, the reason for the lack of a direct connection between quantum entanglement of mixed states and entropy indicator is probably that, as shown in this paper, the von Neumann entropy is not a reliable indicator of entanglement. The inadequacy of the Shannon information, and consequently of the von Neumann entropy as an appropriate quantum generalization of Shannon entropy, has already been pointed out by Brukner and Zeilinger. It is notable that according to these authors a new kind of entropy indicator is made necessary by the following deep difference between quantum and classical information. In classical measurement the Shannon information is a natural measure of our ignorance about property of a system, whose existence is independent of measurement. Quantum measurement, on the contrary, cannot be claimed to reveal system’s properties existing before the measurement is done.

In this paper we focus on the earlier mentioned quantum property, essential for teleportation of information: entanglement. Entanglement implies that a system cannot be divided into two uncorrelated subsystems, and this, in turn, makes useless the ordinary request for an additive form of entropy. Thus, in this paper we explore and discuss the possible benefits stemming from the adoption of the non-additive entropy indicator advocated years ago by Tsallis. The Tsallis entropy is applied to a large number of physical conditions, characterized by the existence of extended correlation. The use of this form of non-additive indicator in the field of quantum teleportation, to the best of our knowledge, has been discussed in only a few papers. The paper of Ref. claims to the realization of a greater sensitivity to the occurence of a dephasing process resulting in the annihilation of any form of entanglement. The papers of Refs.  point out the efficiency of Tsallis entropy for the detection of the breakdown of local realism. The paper of Ref. aims at proving that the Jaynes principle, applied to the non-extensive entropy, yields naturally the entangled state. The present paper, although based on the adoption of the Tsallis non-extensive entropy as the paper of Ref. , adopts a quite different perspective, which does not rest on the adoption of the Jaynes principle.

The outline of the paper is as follows. Section II is devoted to a concise illustration of the main properties of the non-extensive entropy at work in this paper. Section III, devoted to the entanglement of formation, shows that the von Neumann entropy, in general, is not a monotonic function of entanglement, while the non-extensive entropy is a monotonically increasing function of the entanglement for suitably large values of the entropy index. In Section IV we study the entanglement of a de-phasing process, and we extend the monotonic properties of non-extensive entropy to a condition more general than that of Section III. Section IV is devoted to concluding remarks.

## II The non-extensive entropy

The entropy indicator applied in this paper has the form

$$S_q(\rho )Tr\frac{\rho \rho ^q}{q1}.$$
(1)
This form has been originally proposed by Tsallis for the purpose of establishing the most convenient thermodynamic perspective for fractal processes. It is worth remarking that this is a generalization of the conventional Gibbs-Shannon entropy indicator, whose explicit form is recovered from Eq. (1) in the limiting case $`q1`$. This entropy indicator does not fit the additivity condition, namely, the requirement that the entropy of a system $`A+B`$, consisting of two statistically independent subsystems, $`A`$ and $`B`$, be the sum of the entropies of these two subsystems. In fact, the definition of Eq. (1) yields, in this case, the following equality

$$S_q(A+B)=S_q(A)+S_q(B)+(1q)S_q(A)S_q(B),$$
(2)
making it evident that the additive property is recovered only in the case $`q=1`$, which, as earlier noted, makes the non-extensive entropy of Eq. (1) become equivalent to the usual Shannon entropy.

According to Tsallis and to the advocates of this non-extensive entropy indicator (for a review, see Ref.), the violation of the additive condition turns into a benefit when this entropy indicator is used to the study cases where the ideal condition of statistical independence is prevented by the nature itself of the processes under study. Notable examples are the processes with the long-range correlation. We think that quantum entanglement, which is the basic property for teleportation, is probably the most evident example of a condition incompatible with the existence of uncorrelated subsystems. For this reason, the additivity condition can be safely renounced, and the adoption of an entropy index $`q1`$ might turn out to be beneficial. This paper is devoted to discussing to what an extent this conjecture proves to be correct.

## III The Tsallis entropy at work: Entanglement of formation

In this section we derive the central result of this paper. We show that in the case of initial and final states, both with non-vanishing entanglement, and described by a statistical density matrix diagonal in the Bell basis, the Tsallis entropy decreases upon increase of the entanglement of formation. The results of this section refer to the entanglement of formation  of a system of two qubits. Thus, to make this paper as self-contained as possible, we give here a concise illustration of this key measure of entanglement. The main point is that the entanglement property is defined without any ambiguity for pure states. The entanglement of formation extends to the statistical case the ordinary definition as follows. Let us denote with $`\rho `$ the statistical density matrix for the mixed state of a space $`S_{1/2}^{(1)}\times S_{1/2}^{(2)}`$ of two spin-1/2 particles. The *entanglement of formation* , denoted by the symbol $`E_F`$ throughout, is defined as the minimum average entanglement of every ensemble of pure states that represents $`\rho `$:

$$E_F\left(\rho \right)=\underset{\rho =_iP_i|\alpha _i\alpha _i|}{\mathrm{min}}\underset{i}{}P_iE\left(|\alpha _i\right),$$
(3)
where $`E(|\alpha _i)`$ denotes in fact the entanglement of a pure state, which is defined according to the usual prescription by the expression

$$E\left(|\alpha \right)=Tr\left(\rho _A\mathrm{log}_2\rho _A\right)=Tr\left(\rho _B\mathrm{log}_2\rho _B\right)$$
(4)
with

$$\rho _ATr_2\rho ,\rho _BTr_1\rho .$$
(5)
Wootters, in an enlightening article, derives an explicit formula for the entanglement of formation of any arbitrary mixed state of a system of 2 qubits. This formula reads:

$$E_F\left(\rho \right)=h\left(\frac{1+\sqrt{1C^2\left(\rho \right)}}{2}\right),$$
(6)
where

$$h(x)x\mathrm{log}_2x(1x)\mathrm{log}_2(1x).$$
(7)
The quantity $`C\left(\rho \right)`$, referred to by Wootters as *concurrence*, is defined by

$$C\left(\rho \right)\mathrm{max}\{0,\lambda _m\lambda _1\lambda _2\lambda _3\},$$
(8)
where $`\lambda _m`$, $`\lambda _1`$, $`\lambda _2`$ and $`\lambda _3`$ are the square roots of eigenvalues of the matrix $`\rho \stackrel{~}{\rho }`$, set in a decreasing order, with $`\lambda _m`$ being the maximum eigenvalue. The matrix $`\stackrel{~}{\rho }`$ denotes the spin-flipped state:

$$\stackrel{~}{\rho }\left(\sigma _y\sigma _y\right)\rho ^{}\left(\sigma _y\sigma _y\right).$$
(9)
The values of the entanglement of formation range from $`0`$ to $`1`$. Furthermore, $`E_F`$ is a monotonic increasing function of $`C`$. The values of the concurrence $`C`$, in turn, range from $`0`$ to $`1`$, as the values of $`E_F`$ do. Consequently, the concurrence itself can be considered as a proper measure of the entanglement of formation. Note that the entanglement of formation is the only kind of entanglement studied in the present paper. For simplicity, we shall often refer to it simply as entanglement.

### A On $`\mathrm{}`$, the working basis set for a system of 2 qubits

The most general expression  of a mixed state $`\rho `$ of the space $`S_{1/2}^{(1)}S_{1/2}^{(2)}`$ is:

$$\rho =\frac{1}{16}\left\{11+\left(\underset{i=1}{\overset{3}{}}r_i\sigma _i\right)1+1\left(\underset{i=1}{\overset{3}{}}s_i\sigma _i\right)+\underset{i=1}{\overset{3}{}}\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}t_{ij}\sigma _i\sigma _j\right\},$$
(10)
where $`r_i,s_i`$ and $`t_{ij}`$ are real parameters. Due to the excessive number of involved parameters, the direct use of this expression would make the calculation too complicated. For this reason we decided to limit our investigation to the set defined by:

$$\mathrm{}\{\rho :C(\rho )=2P_m1>0\},$$
(11)
where $`P_m`$ denotes the greatest eigenvalue of the density matrix $`\rho `$ describing the quantum state. On behalf of future developments, we remark that the condition $`P_m>1/2`$ makes this maximum value unique. The adoption of the set $`\mathrm{}`$, as our working set, does not rule out the possibility of considering physical conditions of interest for the field of quantum teleportation. In fact, the set $`\mathrm{}`$ contains the states with positive entanglement of formation $`\left(E_F\left(\rho \right)>0\right)`$ that are described by density matrices corresponding to the solution of the equation

$$\rho \stackrel{~}{\rho }=\rho ^2.$$
(12)
These density matrices, recently used by Bennett and co-workers (see also), become diagonal when expressed in the Bell basis set. The set $`\mathrm{}`$ contains the entangled Werner states as well as the maximally entangled states. We also note that any mixed state can be brought into a diagonal form in the Bell basis set by random bilateral rotations. This implies that, in spite of the simplification made, our discussion is still rather general. The problem here under discussion is the significance of the Tsallis entropy as a measure of entanglement. The working set of states that we select, $`\mathrm{}`$, does not conflict with the possibility of discussing this issue with reference to one of the relevant physical conditions that have been recently examined by the investigators of this field of research. In fact, we shall study the change of the Tsallis entropy indicator upon the entanglement change of a given pair of particles. This change might be the result of a purification process such as that studied by Bennett and co-workers. These authors have discussed the purification of a couple of Werner states, showing how to increase the entanglement of formation of a pair at the price of decreasing that of the other. Here, we discuss the problem of detecting this increased entanglement with the Tsallis entropy. We found to be relatively easy to establish this important result within the set $`\mathrm{}`$. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that this property is shared by any other set of states resulting in the concurrence being an increasing function of $`P_m`$. In all these cases we might find the same property of the entropy being proportional to the inverse of the entanglement.

It is worth to anticipate an aspect of fundamental importance. The plausible reason why, as we shall see, the inverse of the Tsallis entropy indicator is a successful measure of entanglement, in the set $`\mathrm{}`$, is the following fundamental fact. The non-extensive nature of Tsallis entropy would make sense only in a world where it were impossible to create uncorrelated systems, and consequently, a vanishing entanglement. In fact, the Tsallis entropy is not the sum of the entropies of the parts, not even when these parts are uncorrelated. The condition that we set, of non vanishing entanglement, as earlier said, is equivalent to ruling out the occurrence of the splitting of the system into two uncorrelated parts. Therefore, it corresponds to an ideal condition for the application of the Tsallis entropy. We shall come back to this important issue in Section IV.

### B Parametrization of the eigenvalues of the statistical density matrix

Here we adopt a perspective of thermodynamic kind, inspired to the lines proposed by Plenio and Vedral. We assume that a purification protocol yields an entanglement change, $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F`$. We aim at establishing the change of the non-extensive entropy corresponding to the same ”thermodynamic” transformation. To solve this delicate problem we imagine the statistical density matrix $`\rho `$, belonging to the set $`\mathrm{}`$, to be a function of a real parameter $`\xi `$, belonging to an interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$, which can be thought of as playing the same role as that of variables like pressure, temperature and volume in the state transformations in ordinary thermodynamics. We assume that the initial and final conditions correspond to $`\rho \left(\xi _1\right)`$ and $`\rho \left(\xi _2\right)`$, respectively, so that $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_FE_F\left(\rho \left(\xi _2\right)\right)E_F\left(\rho \left(\xi _1\right)\right)`$. We set the dependence of $`\rho `$ on $`\xi `$ in such a way as to fulfill the constraint imposed by the norm conservation $`Tr\rho =1`$, and among the infinitely large number of possibilities fitting these conditions, we select the form most convenient for the purpose of evaluating $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_qS_q\left(\rho \left(\xi _2\right)\right)S_q\left(\rho \left(\xi _1\right)\right)`$. Let $`P_m`$ be the largest of the four eigenvalues of the statistical density matrix $`\rho `$ and let us denote with $`P_1,P_2`$ and $`P_3`$ the other three eigenvalues. These eigenvalues are assumed to be functions of the parameter $`\xi `$ with the following condition: in the whole interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$ we have

$$P_m\left(\xi \right)>\frac{1}{2}.$$
(13)
The derivatives $`dP_m/d\xi `$ and $`dP_j/d\xi `$ with $`j`$ ranging from $`1`$ to $`3`$, are assumed to be finite. The norm conservation constraint enforces the condition

$$\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }=\frac{dP_1}{d\xi }\frac{dP_2}{d\xi }\frac{dP_3}{d\xi }.$$
(14)
As earlier pointed out, the *concurrence* is equivalent to the entanglement of formation and, in the set $`\mathrm{}`$, the concurrence is a strictly increasing monotonic function of $`P_m`$. Thus, the change of $`P_m`$ will be either positive or negative according to whether the entanglement change is positive or negative.

We shall assume that in the whole interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$ the derivative $`dP_m/d\xi `$ is either always positive or always negative. As earlier stressed, this convenient choice is legitimated by the fact that, as we do in ordinary thermodynamics, we are considering a state transformation, and consequently both the entanglement and entropy changes depend only on the initial and final states, and are independent of the paths used to connect these two states.

### C Failure of the von Neumann entropy

Here we show that the von Neumann entropy, namely, the quantum version of the Shannon information, turns out to be inadequate as an entanglement indicator. It is so because, as we hereby see, the von Neumann entropy can either increase or decrease, in correspondence of the entanglement change, $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F`$, regardless of whether the entanglement change is positive or negative. This conclusion agrees with the remarks of the recent work by Brukner and Zeilinger.

We note that to prove the inadequacy of the von Neumann’s entropy as an indicator of entanglement it is enough to find a case where the sign of the entropy change is not strictly determined by that of the entanglement change. Thus, let us consider the special physical condition corresponding to:

$$\frac{dP_3}{d\xi }=0$$
(15)
in the whole interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$. The von Neumann’s entropy, corresponding to $`q=1`$, and consequently denoted as $`S_1`$, reads

$$S_1\left(\rho \right)=P_m\mathrm{ln}P_m\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}P_j\mathrm{ln}P_j$$
(16)
and its dependence upon the parameter $`\xi `$ is given by:

$$\frac{dS_1}{d\xi }=\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_m}{P_1}\right)+\frac{dP_2}{d\xi }\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_2}{P_1}\right).$$
(17)
Let us consider, for example, the case $`dP_m/d\xi <0`$. As earlier noted, in this case the entanglement of the mixed state is a strictly decreasing function of $`\xi `$, and the entanglement change $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F`$ must be negative. However, using Eq. (15) and Eq. (14) we see that the sign of $`dS_1/d\xi `$ depends on the special values selected for the parameters $`P_m,P_1,P_2`$ and for the corresponding $`\xi `$-derivatives. Thus, it is possible to realize either the inequality

$$\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }<\frac{dP_2}{d\xi }\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_1}{P_2}\right)/\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_m}{P_1}\right),$$
(18)
which would lead to an entropy increase, or the opposite inequality, which would yield an entropy decrease. This proves that the sign of the von Neumann’s entropy change is not correlated to that of the entanglement, and that consequently the von Neumann’s entropy is not an adequate entanglement indicator.

### D Search for a critical entropy index

The theoretical developments of this subsection show that the failure of the von Neumann’s entropy is the consequence of the fact that the von Neumann’s entropy means $`q=1`$ and this entropy index is smaller than, or equal to, a critical value $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$, where $`\rho _1`$ and $`\rho _2`$ denote the initial and the final state, respectively. Hereby we show, in fact, that for $`q>Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$ the non-extensive entropy becomes a monotonic function of the entanglement strength, inversely proportional to it.

For this purpose, let us study the $`\xi `$-derivative of the non-extensive entropy. This quantity reads:

$$\frac{dS_q}{d\xi }=\frac{qP_m^{q1}}{q1}\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\left\{1+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}\left(\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right)^1\left(\frac{P_j}{P_m}\right)^{q1}\frac{dP_j}{d\xi }\right\}.$$
(19)
We remind the reader that $`P_m`$ is the largest eigenvalue of $`\rho `$, thereby implying the property

$$0\frac{P_j}{P_m}<1.$$
(20)
By using these inequalities and the assumption made in Section III B that the derivatives $`dP_j/d\xi `$ and $`dP_m/d\xi `$ are finite, we obtain

$$\underset{q+\mathrm{}}{lim}\left[1+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}\left(\frac{P_j}{P_m}\right)^{q1}\left(\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right)^1\left(\frac{dP_j}{d\xi }\right)\right]=1.$$
(21)
This simple result implies that *great enough* values of the entropy index yield the important property

$$sign\left(\frac{dE_F}{d\xi }\right)=sign\left(\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right)=sign\left(\frac{dS_q}{d\xi }\right),$$
(22)
which, in turn, means that increasing entanglement yields a decreasing entropy, and vice-versa.

At this stage of our path towards the detection of $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$ we explore two distinct cases concerning the behavior of $`E_F\left(\xi \right)`$ in the whole interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$: $`(a)`$ $`dE_F/d\xi <0`$; $`(b)`$ $`dE_F/d\xi >0`$. As earlier mentioned, the arbitrary choice of a $`\xi `$-derivative, either always positive or always negative, is legitimate since the entanglement and the entropy changes are independent of the path connecting the initial to the final state. In cases $`(a)`$ and $`(b)`$ we shall identify the important auxiliary functions $`q^{}\left(\xi \right)`$ and $`q^{}\left(\xi \right)`$, respectively. These auxiliary functions will be used first to build up the functions $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ and $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$, and finally the key quantity $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$.

Let us consider case $`(a)`$ first. As a consequence of $`dE_F/d\xi <0`$, from the limit of Eq. (21) we naturally obtain that a critical value $`q^{}(\xi )`$ exists such that $`q>q^{}(\xi )`$ yields

$$1+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}\left(\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right)^1\left(\frac{P_j}{P_m}\right)^{q1}\left(\frac{dP_j}{d\xi }\right)>0.$$
(23)
The critical value $`q^{}(\xi )`$ fulfilling the condition of Eq. (23) is not unique. We therefore adopt a criterion to estimate one of the possible critical values. This will imply that the resulting $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$ is not unique either, but, as shown later, we shall be able to find at least one of them fulfilling the earlier mentioned properties of $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$. The choice that we adopt to find one of the possible $`q^{}(\xi )`$’s is as follows. We set the inequality

$$\left|\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right|^1\left(\frac{P_j}{P_m}\right)^{q1}\frac{dP_j}{d\xi }<\frac{1}{3},$$
(24)
with the subscript $`j`$ running from $`1`$ to $`3`$. We assume that this property holds true for any $`q>q^{}\left(\xi \right)`$. This set of conditions, after an easy algebra, yields

$$q^{}\left(\xi \right)=\mathrm{max}\{1,\alpha _1^{}\left(\xi \right),\alpha _2^{}\left(\xi \right),\alpha _3^{}\left(\xi \right)\}.$$
(25)
As to the definition of $`\alpha _j^{}\left(\xi \right)`$, with the subscript $`j`$ running from $`1`$ to $`3`$, we must distinguish two cases. The first is the case when the constraints

$$P_j\left(\xi \right)>0\text{and}dP_j/d\xi >0$$
(26)
hold true. In this case, we set

$$\alpha _j^{}1+\left(\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_m}{P_j}\right)\right)^1\mathrm{ln}\left(3\left|\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right|^1\frac{dP_j}{d\xi }\right).$$
(27)
If the constraints of Eq. (26) do not apply, we set $`\alpha _j^{}\left(\xi \right)=1`$. This implies that for any $`q>q^{}\left(\xi \right)`$ the condition

$$\frac{d}{d\xi }E_F\left(\xi \right)<0$$
(28)
yields

$$\frac{d}{d\xi }S_q\left(\xi \right)>0.$$
(29)
On the basis of this result we define now the function $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ as follows:

$$Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)\underset{\xi [\xi _1,\xi _2]}{sup}\left\{q^{}(\xi )\right\}.$$
(30)
Using Eq. (28) and the ensuing inequality for $`dS_q/d\xi `$ we conclude immediately that for any $`q`$ fulfilling the inequality $`q>Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ the condition $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F<0`$ yields $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_q>0`$. In fact, in this case $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_q`$ can be written under the form of integrals in the interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$ with integrands always negative and positive, respectively.

In case $`(b)`$ we adopt the same procedure which yields, in this case,

$$q^{}\left(\xi \right)\mathrm{max}\{1,\alpha _1^{}\left(\xi \right),\alpha _2^{}\left(\xi \right),\alpha _3^{}\left(\xi \right)\}.$$
(31)
As to the term $`\alpha _j^{}\left(\xi \right)`$, in the case where the constraints

$$P_j(\xi )>0\text{and}dP_j/d\xi <0$$
(32)
hold true, we set

$$\alpha _j^{}\left(\xi \right)1+\left(\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_m}{P_j}\right)\right)^1\mathrm{ln}\left(3\left(\frac{dP_m}{d\xi }\right)^1\left|\frac{dP_j}{d\xi }\right|\right).$$
(33)
If the constraints of the Eq. (32) do not apply we set $`\alpha _j^{}\left(\xi \right)=1`$. The counterpart of Eq. (30) becomes

$$Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)\underset{\xi [\xi _1,\xi _2]}{sup}\left\{q^{}(\xi )\right\}.$$
(34)
Of course, the condition $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F>0`$ yields $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_q<0`$.

Note that we have not discussed the problem of the possible divergence of $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ or $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$. We shall come back to this issue in the following section where we will consider a special parametrization of the eigenvalues, without losing any generality, within which, as we shall see, this critical index will be proved to be finite.

### E Searching a critical value of the entropy index, beyond which the Tsallis entropy exhibits a correct dependence on the entanglement strength

Now let us see how to use the earlier results to make predictions in the case where the transformation, and the ensuing entanglement change as well, is defined only by the initial and the final states, $`\rho _1`$ and $`\rho _2`$, with the density matrix belonging to the set $`\mathrm{}`$ defined by Eq. (11). The main idea is to build up auxiliary states, $`\rho _B^{(1)}`$ and $`\rho _B^{(2)}`$, equivalent to $`\rho _1`$ and $`\rho _2`$ as far as their entanglement and entropy are concerned, but fulfilling the condition of being connected the one to the other by the $`\xi `$-transformation of Section III C. This makes these states compatible with the earlier prescriptions, and thus with the earlier results. These two states are defined as follows:

$$\rho _B^{(1)}P_m^{(1)}|e_me_m|+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}P_j^{(1)}|e_je_j|$$
(35)
and

$$\rho _B^{(2)}P_m^{(2)}|e_me_m|+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}P_j^{(2)}|e_je_j|,$$
(36)
where the set $`\left\{|e_m,|e_j,j=1,2,3\right\}`$ is the Bell basis set , no matter what the order is. The symbols $`P_j^{(1)}`$ and $`P_m^{(1)}`$ denote the eigenvalues of the density matrix $`\rho _B^{(1)}`$, and, obviously, the symbols $`P_j^{(2)}`$ and $`P_m^{(2)}`$ denote the eigenvalues of the density matrix $`\rho _B^{(2)}`$. These quantum states have the following properties: (i) They belong to the set $`\mathrm{}`$; (ii) $`E_F(\rho _1)=E_F\left(\rho _B^{(1)}\right)`$, $`E_F(\rho _2)=E_F\left(\rho _B^{(2)}\right)`$; (iii) $`S_q(\rho _1)=S_q\left(\rho _B^{(1)}\right)`$, $`S_q(\rho _2)=S_q\left(\rho _B^{(2)}\right)`$.

Now let us introduce the transformation $`\mathrm{\Xi }_\xi [\rho _B^{(1)},\rho _B^{(2)}]`$ defined by:

$$\mathrm{\Xi }_\xi [\rho _B^{(1)},\rho _B^{(2)}]\left(\rho _B^{(1)}\right)P_m\left(\xi \right)|e_me_m|+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}P_j(\xi )|e_je_j|,$$
(37)
where the $`\xi `$-evolutions of $`P_m(\xi )`$ and $`P_j(\xi )`$ are given by

$$P_m\left(\xi \right)P_m^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}\right)$$
(38)
and

$$P_j\left(\xi \right)P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right),$$
(39)
with $`j`$ running from $`1`$ to $`3`$, respectively, and $`\xi [0,1]`$. The transformation $`\mathrm{\Xi }_\xi `$ has the required properties: (a) It keeps the state $`\mathrm{\Xi }_\xi [\rho _B^{(1)},\rho _B^{(2)}]\left(\rho _B^{(1)}\right)`$ within the set $`\mathrm{}`$ for every value of $`\xi `$ belonging to the interval $`[0,1]`$; (b) $`\mathrm{\Xi }_0[\rho _B^{(1)},\rho _B^{(2)}]\left(\rho _B^{(1)}\right)=\rho _B^{(1)}`$; (c) $`\mathrm{\Xi }_1[\rho _B^{(1)},\rho _B^{(2)}]\left(\rho _B^{(1)}\right)=\rho _B^{(2)}`$. Note that the functions $`P_m(\xi ),P_1(\xi ),P_2(\xi )`$ and $`P_3(\xi )`$, are defined in the interval $`[\xi _1,\xi _2]`$. They fulfill the properties of Eq. (13), the parameter conditions of Section IIB, the relation $`dP_m/d\xi >0`$, in the case $`P_m^{(1)}<P_m^{(2)}`$, and the relation $`dP_m/d\xi <0`$, in the case $`P_m^{(1)}>P_m^{(2)}`$. This makes it possible for us to use $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ of Eq. (30) and $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ of Eq. (31), and the relations on which these quantities rest as well, to derive $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$. This is done as follows. We write the explicit forms that $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ and $`Q^{}(\xi _1,\xi _2)`$ get when $`\xi _1=0`$ and $`\xi _2=1`$. Using the transformation of Eq. (38) and Eq. (39), we obtain for $`Q^{}(0,1)`$ the following expression:

$$Q^{}(0,1)\underset{\xi [0,1]}{sup}\mathrm{max}\{1,\beta _1^{}\left(\xi \right),\beta _2^{}\left(\xi \right),\beta _3^{}\left(\xi \right)\}.$$
(40)
If the constraints

$$P_j^{(2)}\left(\xi \right)>P_j^{(1)}\left(\xi \right)\text{and}P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right)>0$$
(41)
hold true, we set

$$\beta _j^{}\left(\xi \right)1+\frac{\mathrm{ln}\left(3\frac{P_j^{(1)}P_j^{(2)}}{P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}}\right)}{\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_m^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}\right)}{P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right)}\right)}.$$
(42)
If the constraints of Eq. (45) do not apply, we set $`\beta _j^{}\left(\xi \right)=1`$.

Note that this mathematical definition must be interpreted as follows. First of all, we consider a given value of $`\xi `$ belonging to the interval $`[0,1]`$. Then we make the index $`j`$ run from $`1`$ to $`3`$. We select the indexes $`j`$ fulfilling the conditions $`P_j^{(2)}\left(\xi \right)>P_j^{(1)}\left(\xi \right)`$ and $`P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right)>0`$ and calculate $`\beta _j^{}\left(\xi \right)`$ using the above definitions. Then we take the maximum of the values of a set whose components are given by $`\beta _j^{}\left(\xi \right)`$ and by $`1`$. Then, we make $`\xi `$ explore all the possible values of the interval $`[0,1]`$. Thus, we get an infinite set of maxima, from which we select the supremum. The resulting number defines the critical index of the left hand side of Eq. (40).

The resulting critical index is finite. To prove this important property we proceed as follows. We note that the term that could make $`Q^{}(0,1)`$ diverge is $`\frac{P_m^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}\right)}{P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right)}`$. We denote this term by $`\gamma \left(\xi \right)`$. The special condition resulting in the divergence of the critical index would be given by $`\gamma 1^+`$. We observe that $`\gamma \left(\xi \right)`$ is either an increasing (decreasing) or a constant function of $`\xi `$ depending on whether the quantity $`P_j^{(1)}P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}P_j^{(2)}`$ is positive (negative) or equal to $`0`$. So the minimum value of $`\gamma \left(\xi \right)`$ is $`\gamma (0)=P_m^{(1)}/P_j^{(1)}`$, in the case of $`d\gamma /d\xi >0`$, and $`\gamma (1)=P_m^{(2)}/P_j^{(2)}`$, in the case of $`d\gamma /d\xi <0`$. In the remaining case $`d\gamma /d\xi =0`$, the two minima get the same value. From this properties we obtain the following inequality

$$Q^{}(0,1)\underset{j=1,2,3}{\mathrm{max}}\left\{1+\left(\mathrm{ln}\left(\underset{j=1,2,3}{\mathrm{min}}\{\frac{P_m^{(1)}}{P_j^{(1)}},\frac{P_m^{(2)}}{P_j^{(2)}}\}\right)\right)^1\left|\mathrm{ln}\left(3\left|\frac{P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}}{P_m^{(1)}P_m^{(2)}}\right|\right)\right|\right\},$$
(43)
proving that $`Q^{}(0,1)`$ is *finite*.

As to $`Q^{}(0,1)`$, we get

$$Q^{}(0,1)\underset{\xi [0,1]}{sup}\mathrm{max}\{1,\beta _1^{}\left(\xi \right),\beta _2^{}\left(\xi \right),\beta _3^{}\left(\xi \right)\}.$$
(44)
If the constraints

$$P_j^{(1)}\left(\xi \right)>P_j^{(2)}\left(\xi \right)\text{and}P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right)>0$$
(45)
hold true, we set

$$\beta _j^{}\left(\xi \right)1+\frac{\mathrm{ln}\left(3\frac{P_j^{(1)}P_j^{(2)}}{P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}}\right)}{\mathrm{ln}\left(\frac{P_m^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}\right)}{P_j^{(1)}+\xi \left(P_j^{(2)}P_j^{(1)}\right)}\right)}.$$
(46)
If the constraints of Eq. (45) do not apply, we set $`\beta _j^{}\left(\xi \right)=1`$.

The criterion adopted to define this critical index is the same as that earlier illustrated to properly define the critical index of Eq. (40). Thus, we can prove that $`Q^{}(0,1)`$ is *finite* adopting a procedure analogous to that used for $`Q^{}(0,1)`$. In this case we arrive at the following inequality:

$$Q^{}(0,1)\underset{j=1,2,3}{\mathrm{max}}\left\{1+\left(\mathrm{ln}\left(\underset{j=1,2,3}{\mathrm{min}}\{\frac{P_m^{(1)}}{P_j^{(1)}},\frac{P_m^{(2)}}{P_j^{(2)}}\}\right)\right)^1\left|\mathrm{ln}\left(3\left|\frac{P_j^{(1)}P_j^{(2)}}{P_m^{(2)}P_m^{(1)}}\right|\right)\right|\right\},$$
(47)
which shows in fact that also $`Q^{}(0,1)`$ is *finite*.

At this stage we can finally define the critical value $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$. This is given by

$$Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)\mathrm{max}\{Q^{}(0,1),Q^{}(0,1)\}.$$
(48)
On the basis of the earlier described theoretical treatment we can conclude that $`Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)`$ is *finite* and that for any initial and final states, $`\rho _1`$ and $`\rho _2`$, respectively, belonging to the set $`\mathrm{}`$, with different entanglement, $`E_F\left(\rho _1\right)E_F\left(\rho _2\right)`$, the corresponding entropy change $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_q`$ is positive or negative, according to whether $`\mathrm{\Delta }E<0`$ or $`\mathrm{\Delta }E>0`$. Note that we have found $`+\mathrm{}>Q(\rho _1,\rho _2)1`$. As a consequence of the pseudoadditivity of Eq. (2), the adoption of a value of the entropy index larger than the unity makes the entropy of the whole system smaller than the sum of the entropies of the two parts. However, in this paper we never make a direct use of this property, since, as earlier stressed, our treatment is valid only in the case of non vanishing entanglement, which rules out the possibility of realizing the factorized condition behind Eq. (2).

### F From the non-extensive entropy to the entanglement of formation

As a purpose of this subsection, we try to prove a property that is the reverse of that discussed in Section III E. Ideally, the reverse of the property of Section III E should be expressed as follows. Let us focus our attention on a transformation from an initial state $`\rho _1`$ to a final state $`\rho _2`$, both belonging to the set $`\mathrm{}`$. Let us consider a case where this transformation makes the non-extensive entropy $`S_q`$ increase (decrease). Then, the entanglement decreases (increases) if an entropy index $`q`$ larger than the critical value $`Q`$ is adopted. Unfortunately, we cannot prove this property in this attractive form, but only under weaker conditions. This is so because a transformation resulting in an entropy change does not necessarily imply an entanglement change. We notice that the entanglement, expressed in the set $`\mathrm{}`$, is a function of the eigenvalue $`P_m`$ only, while the non-extensive entropy is a function of all four eigenvalues. Thus, the entropy can change without implying a corresponding entanglement change. The same difficulty is shared by the non-extensive entropy. However, upon increase of the entropy index $`q`$ the dependence of the non-extensive entropy on the other three eigenvalues becomes weaker and weaker. In the case of *enough great* values of the entropy index $`q`$ the non-extensive entropy becomes virtually independent of the other three eigenvalues. This is the reason why in Section III we could find a way to make the non-extensive entropy become a monotonic function of entanglement. We want to remark that in general the entropy critical index is not the same as that used in Section III.

We think that one of the benefits resulting from the adoption of the set $`\mathrm{}`$, and of very large entropy indices as well, is that the margin of entanglement dependence on entropy is significantly reduced. Nevertheless, we are forced to make a weaker request for the reverse of the property discussed in Section E. We shall show, in fact, that if the entropy increases (decreases), *and the entanglement changes*, then the entanglement decreases (increases), for entropy indices $`q`$ larger than a critical value $`Q^{(S)}`$, *not necessarily equal to $`Q`$*. The conditions emphasized by the adoption of italics make the property weaker than we would wish. Even in this case we have to assume the entropy index to be larger than a critical value. We denote this critical value with the symbol $`Q^{(S)}`$ because, as earlier mentioned, we cannot prove that it is identical to the critical entropy index $`Q`$ of Section III.

In the case of entropy increase, by expressing the non-extensive entropy as a function of its four eigenvalues, we get

$$\left(\frac{P_m^{(2)}}{P_m^{(1)}}\right)^q<1+\underset{j=1}{\overset{3}{}}\left(\left(\frac{P_j^{(1)}}{P_m^{(1)}}\right)^q\left(\frac{P_j^{(2)}}{P_m^{(1)}}\right)^q\right).$$
(49)
Since the two eigenstates have different entanglement we have $`P_m^{(2)}/P_m^{(1)}1`$. Since the inequality of Eq. (49) must hold true in the case of entropy indices arbitrarily larger than $`Q^{(S)}`$, and consequently, must hold true also for values much larger than the unity, we reach the conclusion that $`P_m^{(2)}<P_m^{(1)}`$, which in the set $`\mathrm{}`$ is equivalent to $`\mathrm{\Delta }E_F<0`$. The opposite conclusion would be reached in the case of a negative $`\mathrm{\Delta }S_q`$.

In spite of the earlier restrictions, we can use the obtained results to illustrate one of the most interesting findings of this work. This is as follows. Let us consider a generic subset $`\mathrm{}^{}`$, of the set $`\mathrm{}`$, only fulfilling the request of containing a *finite* number of states, with *different* entanglements. Then, we can conclude that these entanglements are *equivalent* to the *inverse* of the non-extensive entropy, provided that entropy indices $`q`$ are larger than a given value $`Q_{\mathrm{}^{}}`$, which is given by the following formula

$$Q_{\mathrm{}^{}}\mathrm{max}\{Q(\rho _i,\rho _j),\rho _i,\rho _j\mathrm{}^{},ij\}.$$
(50)
In the set $`\mathrm{}^{}`$ for entropy indices larger than the critical value the ordering in the direction of increasing (decreasing) entanglement is equivalent to ordering in the direction of decreasing (increasing) entropy. A significant consequence of this is that entropy minimization yields the maximally entangled state and the entropy maximization the minimally entangled state.

An attractive, albeit heuristic way, of illustrating the same conclusions is given by the following formula:

$$E_q^{(eff)}\left(\rho \right)\frac{2}{\pi }\mathrm{arctan}\left\{\underset{i=1}{\overset{4}{}}\mathrm{\Theta }\left(P_i\underset{ki}{}P_k\right)\left(34S_2\left(\rho \right)4\underset{ki}{}P_k^2\right)S_q^1\right\},$$
(51)
which establishes a direct connection between entanglement and entropy. The quantity $`E_q^{(eff)}`$ is “equivalent” to the entanglement, in the sense that it increases or it decreases upon increasing or decreasing the entanglement strength. Furthermore, it is equal to $`1`$ when the entanglement is $`1`$ and tends to vanish with the entanglement measure tending to zero. The key ingredient of this heuristic formula is the term $`\mathrm{arctan}`$ and the factor $`_{i=1}^4\mathrm{\Theta }\left(P_i_{ki}P_k\right)\left(34S_2\left(\rho \right)4_{ki}P_k^2\right)`$. Without the first one, the condition $`P_m1^{}`$ would generate divergencies. Furthermore with $`P_m(1/2)^+`$ the inverse of the entropy would tend to a minimum, which would be different from $`0`$, which is the right value. With the factor $`_{i=1}^4\mathrm{\Theta }\left(P_i_{ki}P_k\right)\left(34S_2\left(\rho \right)4_{ki}P_k^2\right),`$ we get rid of the divergencies and we do succeed in ensuring that the quantity $`E_q^{(eff)}`$ tends to vanish with the entanglement tending to zero. Note that this *ad hoc* factor is nothing but the square of the concurrence. In principle one could express the concurrence in terms of $`S_2`$, but this would not afford the attractive condition of the entanglement being a monotonical increasing function of the inverse of the non-extensive entropy.

In conclusion, we find that entanglement increase implies entropy decrease and vice versa. This property must be compared with the results of the work of Abe and Rajagopal. These authors adopt the principle of entropy maximization under suitable constraints to infer a plausible form of physical state, and conclude that the entangled states are the important result of this maximization process. Here we adopt a different perspective, based on the fact that the definition of entanglement of formation is already inspired to statistical mechanics. Within this perspective the state of maximum entanglement corresponds to the minimum amount of information necessary to describe the state. Within this same perspective, the amount of information necessary to describe the state becomes increasingly larger upon reducing the entanglement strength. From an intuitive point of view, the occurrence of de-coherence, that is judged by many authors to be the key condition to derive classical from quantum physics, implies a significant entropy increase. However, de-coherence, as a form of real wave function collapse, implies the breakdown, in the long-time limit, of the entanglement condition, and, as a consequence, the breakdown of the theory itself of the present paper. The result of this paper has to be considered within this perspective. As it appears from the literature on this new and exciting subject, the thermodynamic significance of the processes of quantum teleportation is a very delicate and difficult issue. We are inclined to believe that the adoption of a non-extensive form of entropy might be of some relevance, under specific restrictions. The first is that real wave function collapses are ignored, and the second is that, in a world dominated by quantum entanglement, the condition of maximum entanglement is perceived as that requiring the minimum amount of information. In other words, increasing entanglement means smaller, rather than larger, entropy values.

## IV The Tsallis entropy at work: Dephasing processes in the Bell basis set

Before ending this paper, it is convenient to illustrate another interesting result that does not require a restriction to the set $`\mathrm{}`$. This has to do with an important result obtained by Bennett *et al*. These authors studied the entanglement changes as a function of a dephasing process. More precisely, they focused their attention on the transformation

$$D_B=\frac{1}{4}\underset{i=0}{\overset{3}{}}U_i^{}\rho U_i,$$
(52)
which brings the initial condition described by the density matrix $`\rho `$, expressed in the Bell basis, into the diagonal form

$$\left[D_B\right]_{ij}\delta _{ij}\left[\rho \right]_{ij},$$
(53)
where the operators $`U_i,i=0,1,2,3`$ are respectively $`I,B_xB_x,B_yB_y,B_zB_z`$ and $`B_i`$ is the bilateral rotation of $`\pi /2`$ around the $`ith`$ axis of the space $`S_{1/2}^{(1)}\times S_{1/2}^{(2)}`$. This bilateral rotation is defined by these authors as

$$B_i=\frac{1}{2}\left(I_{2\times 2}i\sigma _{1i}\right)\times \left(I_{2\times 2}i\sigma _{2i}\right).$$
(54)
Note that the matrix $`D_B`$ of Eq. (53) is the ”diagonal” of the statistical density matrix $`\rho `$ expressed in the Bell basis and that it results from a random application of four local unitary transformations, so that moving from the initial state $`\rho ^{(1)}`$ to the state described by $`D_B^{(1)}`$ the entanglement cannot increase. Consequently, we have

$$E_F\left(\rho ^{(1)}\right)E_F\left(D_B^{(1)}\right).$$
(55)
We shall analyze these theoretical results by means of the non-extensive entropy. The first analysis is made by focusing our attention on the natural values $`n>1`$ of the entropy index $`q`$. In this special case the non-extensive entropy reads as follows

$$S_n\left(\rho \right)=\frac{1Tr\left(U\rho U^{}\right)^n}{n1}=Tr\frac{\rho \rho ^n}{n1}.$$
(56)
Let us define the auxiliary function

$$g_n\left(x\right)\frac{xx^n}{n1}.$$
(57)
We note that this is a concave function. On the other hand, several years ago Wehrl noticed that in that case we can write

$$Trg_n\left(D_B\right)Trg_n\left(\rho \right).$$
(58)
We notice that $`S_n(\rho )=Trg_n\left(\rho \right)`$ and $`S_n\left(D_B\right)=Trg_n\left(D_B\right)`$. Consequently, we can write:

$$S_n\left(D_B\right)S_n\left(\rho \right)$$
(59)
The results of the dephasing process makes it possible for us to generalize the results of Section III. Let us consider a transformation from an initial state described by a generic density matrix. As to the final state, we set the condition that it belongs to the set $`\mathrm{}`$. Let $`p_m^{(1)}`$ be the maximum of the diagonal elements of the initial state $`\rho ^{(1)}`$, expressed in the Bell basis set. Let us suppose also that $`p_m^{(1)}`$ is larger than the maximum eigenvalue of the density matrix $`\rho ^{(2)}`$, referring to the final state. This condition is expressed by the relation:

$$p_m^{(1)}\underset{i=1,2,3,4}{\mathrm{max}}\left[\rho ^{(1)}\right]_{ii}>P_m^{(2)}>\frac{1}{2}.$$
(60)
As a consequence of this relation we have

$$E_F\left(\rho ^{(1)}\right)E_F\left(D_B^{(1)}\right)>E_F\left(\rho ^{(2)}\right)>0.$$
(61)
This is a transformation with a decreasing entanglement. On the basis of the results of Section III and of Eq. (59), we are in a position to find values of the entropy index $`q`$ such that the non-extensive entropy of the final state is larger than that of the initial state. This is done as follows. We move from the initial condition $`\rho ^{(1)}`$ to $`D_B^{(1)}`$, through the dephasing process earlier described. As we have seen, with the adoption of natural values, larger than the unity, for the entropy indices, the entropy does not decrease. This means

$$S_n\left(D_B^{(1)}\right)S_n\left(\rho ^{(1)}\right).$$
(62)
According to our assumptions, $`D_B^{(1)}`$ and $`\rho ^{(2)}`$ belong to the set $`\mathrm{}`$. Thus, we know, on the basis of the results of Section III, that there exists a critical value of the entropy index, $`Q(D_B^{(1)},\rho ^{(2)})`$, beyond which the non-extensive entropy increases. If we choose critical values of the entropy index that are natural numbers larger than

$$N\left[Q(D_B^{(1)},\rho ^{(2)})\right],$$
(63)
we conclude that the non-extensive entropy increases. As earlier anticipated, this has the effect of making more general the results of Section III.

## V conclusions

This paper shows that in the set $`\mathrm{}`$, enforcing the important condition of a non vanishing entanglement, the Tsallis entropy is a monotonic and decreasing function of the increasing entanglement. The entanglement is, in turn, a monotonic and decreasing function of the increasing entropy under the key restriction of transformations yielding an entanglement change. This conclusion was reached adopting a perspective taking the warning of a recent paper by Horodecki *et al* into account. As a matter of fact, these authors show that the principle of entropy maximization yields fake entanglement, and consequently becomes questionable. We share the conviction of these authors and adopt in fact an approach that does not rest on the Jaynes principle. Thus we establish a comparison between entanglement and non-extensive entropy without invoking the Jaynes principle. We do not need to maximize entropy after minimizing entanglement, as they do, and the monotonic dependence of entropy on entanglement is a natural consequence of the adoption of suitably large entropy indices.

This means that we share the view of Rajagopal and Abe that a non-extensive form of entropy can prove to be a convenient tool to study quantum teleportation. In this sense, this paper contributes deepening our understanding about the significance of the Tsallis entropy. This entropy indicator does not split into the sum of two independent contributions, when applied to a system consisting of two uncorrelated subsystems. This suggests that this kind of entropy might be a proper theoretical tool only when applied to cases where the re-partition into two uncorrelated systems is impossible. Quantum mechanical systems, in principle, are significant examples of where this condition applies, if environmental de-coherence, or other kind of de-coherence processes, are ignored. In this condition the Tsallis entropy, according to the main result of this paper, seems to work properly, provided that the warning of Ref. is taken into account. This is where our procedure departs from the point of view of Rajagopal and Abe. Their approach is still based on the Jaynes principle, supplemented by the choice of a suitable additional constraint, concerning the fluctuations around the average, as well as the ordinary constraint on the mean value (see also Ref.). This procedure yields convincing, although non general conclusions. Our approach, which unfortunately shares the lack of generality of Ref., is based on a different perspective, aiming at identifying the inverse of entanglement with the non-extensive entropy.

We think that the alternative perspective adopted in the present paper might contribute, as Refs. do, to a better understanding of the thermodynamic nature of entanglement. We are afraid that the non-extensive entropy might become inefficient when we leave the physical condition where the no-cloning theorem and the principle of no-increasing entanglement, recently found by Horodecki and Horodecki, is broken. According to these authors the occurrence of real wave function collapses, incompatible with the restriction of adopting unitary transformations, provokes the breakdown of this equivalence. In our opinion, the occurrence of real wave function collapses is incompatible with the restriction of working on the set $`\mathrm{}`$, which enforces the condition of a non vanishing entanglement. Thus, we expect that in that case the theory of this paper, and with it the non-extensive entropy, does not work. To explore the uncertain border between quantum and classical mechanics we probably need to adopt a still more advanced perspective.


text:
# A study of the core of the Shapley Concentration: VI. Spectral properties of galaxies. based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory, La Silla, Chile.

## 1 Introduction

Since the discovery that galaxies in clusters are different from those in the field (Hubble & Humason 1931), it has been recognized that the environment must play an important role in determining the characteristics of the galaxy population. In fact, at present the existence of a morphology-density relation, spanning a large range of densities from rich clusters (Dressler 1980) to groups (Postman & Geller 1984), is generally accepted.

More intriguing is to determine whether the star formation is influenced by the environment or the different galaxy population in clusters is merely a consequence of the morphology-density relation, and which mechanism is responsible for the change of the morphological mix.

From the observational point of view, other indications of differences between field and cluster galaxies come from the Butcher-Oemler effect (i.e. the bluening of cluster galaxies as a function of redshift; Butcher & Oemler 1984) and from the observation of “anaemic” or “HI deficient” spirals (i.e. with reduced content of HI with respect to field galaxies of the same morphological type; Bothun 1982) in local clusters.
Very recently, analysing the CNOC1 cluster sample in the redshift range $`0.20.5`$, Balogh et al. (1998) found that the cluster environment not only affects the morphological mix but also suppresses the star formation.
Various physical mechanisms (as for example galaxy harassment, tidal stripping, ram pressure) have been proposed to explain the differences between field and cluster galaxies: however, the influence of these phenomena on the changes in star formation rate remains still uncertain.

In this context, an interesting point is that to compare properties of field galaxies with those of galaxies which reside in rich superclusters, but outside clusters.
In fact, considering that up to scales of 2 h-1 Mpc superclusters as the Great Wall are dominated by galaxy groups (Ramella, Geller & Huchra 1992), a morphology-density relation may exist also in these lower density environments, leading to a difference in the morphological mix between field and supercluster galaxies. On the other hand, Hoffman, Lewis & Salpeter (1995) found that the luminosity function of late type objects in the Great Wall does not differ from that of field galaxies.

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the morphology-density relation in a wide range of densities, using an homogeneous sample of $`1300`$ spectra of galaxies in different environments, like rich cluster cores, supercluster, field. Our sample cover the central region of the Shapley Concentration, which has an average density excess in galaxies of $`{\displaystyle \frac{N}{\overline{N}}}=11.3\pm 0.4`$ on a scale of $`10`$ h-1 Mpc (Bardelli et al. 2000). This region is dynamically very active and is characterized by the presence of two high density complexes formed by merging clusters (Bardelli et al. 1994, 1998a, 1998b, 2001). These complexes are embedded in a planar structure of $`{\displaystyle \frac{N}{\overline{N}}}4`$, which resembles the Great Wall and represents the supercluster environment. Finally, a subsample of galaxies from the ESP survey (Vettolani et al. 1997) is used to derive the reference values for the “true” field environment $`({\displaystyle \frac{N}{\overline{N}}}1)`$.

The paper is organized as follows. In Sect. 2 we present our classification technique, based on the Principal Components Analysis, in Sect. 3 we describe our data and in Sect. 4 we show the results of the spectral classification. In Sect. 5 we analyze the relations between the spectral morphology and the local environment and in Sect. 6 we present the results about the emission line properties and the star formation rates. Finally, the results are discussed and summarized in Sect. 7.

## 2 Spectral classification

Morphological classification of galaxies from optical images (Hubble 1936; de Vaucouleurs & de Vaucouleurs 1961; Sandage 1975) is generally performed analysing the luminosity profile of a galaxy. This method requires a very careful study of the images which implies a parametric fit of the luminosity profile: in fact it is necessary to fit the luminosity profile of a galaxy to distinguish between a bulge and an exponential disk. Moreover a galaxy may have a different appearance if observed using different filters or at different redshifts (O’Connell & Marcum 1997).
Even the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope does not prevent every existing method of morphological classification to be strongly dependent on the image resolution, on the adopted filters and on the redshift of the galaxy.

An alternative approach to the morphological classification can be made if we consider the spectral energy distribution (SED), which resumes the main physical features of a galaxy. In fact, for a given galaxy, the SED measures the relative contribution of the various stellar populations and gives constraints to the amount of gas and to the mean metallicity.
The spectral energy distribution is then useful to classify the galaxies in a spectral sequence rather than in a morphological one. Generally, a galaxy is formed by three main components: gas, young stars and old stars. These components contribute to outline both the main morphological features (bulge, spiral arms, etc.) and the spectral ones (continuum shape, absorption and emission lines). Moreover, dealing with big amounts of data, spectra are easier to handle than bidimensional images, allowing an automatized classification of galaxies.
In the past decade, such an automatization has been attempted by many authors. The most used technique, applied to surveys of galaxy spectra, is the Principal Components Analysis (hereafter PCA, Connolly et al. 1995; Folkes, Lahav & Maddox 1996; Sodré & Cuevas 1997; Galaz & de Lapparent 1998; Sodré, Cuevas & Capelato 1998; de Theije & Katgert 1999). Using this technique, although with different approaches, these authors found that the whole distribution of spectral types can be described by only two parameters.
Zaritsky, Zabludoff & Willick (1995) assumed instead the a priori hypothesis that each spectrum can be represented as a linear combination of three components: one representing old stellar populations (typical K star spectrum), one representing young stellar populations (typical A star spectrum) and an emission lines component. Anyhow this approach has given results very similar to those obtained with the application of PCA.

### 2.1 The PCA technique

The method we have chosen to perform the spectral classification of our galaxy sample is the Principal Components Analysis. An exhaustive description of the PCA technique can be found in Murtagh & Heck (1987) or in Kendall (1980): here we underline only its main features of interest for our work.
The PCA applies to a sample of $`N`$ objects (in our case $`N`$ spectra) which can be described by $`M`$ coordinates (in our case, for each spectrum, the fluxes of single pixels). In this $`M`$-dimensional hyperspace, each object is represented by a point and the sample is a cloud of points. The main idea of the PCA is to find an orthonormal base of eigenvectors (of dimension $`P<\mathrm{min}[N,M]`$) whose linear combination represents the sample. The eigenvectors are found by minimizing the euclidean distance of the points from the new base: these new axes are called Principal Components (PCs). The eigenvalues give the variance of each PC. An higher value of the variance indicates a lower distance between the cloud of points and the new axis relative to the eigenvalue, then a better description of the sample.
Each spectrum S is normalized by its norm as:

$$𝐒^{norm}=\frac{𝐒}{\sqrt{_{j=1}^M𝐒_j^2}}$$
(1)
Other methods of normalization can be used (for instance a flux normalization at a given wavelength), but Connolly et al. (1995) have demonstrated that the various methods of normalization do not have relevant effects onto the PCA results.
The techniques generally used to reduce the input matrix are three: the sum of squares and cross product matrix method (SSCP), the variance-covariance matrix method (VC) and the correlation matrix method (C). The first method (SSCP) does not apply any rescaling on the data nor centre the cloud of points. The normalized spectra then lie on the surface of an $`M`$-dimensional hypersphere of radius 1, and the first PC has the same direction of the average spectrum. The second method (VC) places instead the new origin onto the centroid of the sample. The latter method (C) centres the cloud of points and rescales the data in such a way that the distance between variables is directly proportional to the correlation between them.
It is worth to stress that neither the PCs nor the projections on them obtained with the three different methods are the same. However, if the cloud of points is concentrated in a small portion of the hypersphere of radius 1, then the first PC obtained with VC method will have almost the same direction of the second PC obtained from SSCP method (Galaz & de Lapparent 1998).
After performing the PCA, it becomes possible to reconstruct each spectrum Snorm as:

$$𝐒_{approx}=\underset{k=1}{\overset{N_{PC}}{}}\alpha _k𝐄_k$$
(2)
where Sapprox is the Snorm spectrum reconstructed using only the first $`N_{PC}`$ PCs and $`\alpha _k`$ is the projection of Snorm onto the eigenspectrum (principal component) Ek.

### 2.2 Application of the PCA to the data

The three methods described in the previous section have been tested on our dataset. We decided to use the SSCP method for the following reasons. First, the first three PCs are sufficient to reconstruct $``$99% in flux of the sample, i.e. at the same percentage of reconstructed flux, a lower number of components is enough. As a comparison, the VC method gives a percentage of $``$87% and the C method gives a percentage less than 80% for the first three principal components. Moreover, plotting $`\alpha _1`$ vs. $`\alpha _2`$, which are the projections onto the first two PCs, the diagram has a smaller scatter, indicating a better definition of a spectral sequence (see below). Finally, the first three principal components have a straightforward physical interpretation, although this is not an objective criterion for choosing a method.
Using the SSCP method it is then possible to perform a spectral classification dependent only on three parameters. Moreover, following Galaz & de Lapparent (1998), we can apply a change of coordinates, from ($`\alpha _1`$, $`\alpha _2`$, $`\alpha _3`$), the projections onto the PCs, to ($`r`$, $`\delta `$, $`\theta `$), the radius, the azimuth and the polar angle measured from the equator, respectively:

$`\alpha _1`$ $`=`$ $`r\mathrm{cos}\theta \mathrm{cos}\delta `$ (3)
$`\alpha _2`$ $`=`$ $`r\mathrm{cos}\theta \mathrm{sin}\delta `$ (4)
$`\alpha _3`$ $`=`$ $`r\mathrm{sin}\theta `$ (5)
It is then possible to isolate the values of $`\delta `$ and $`\theta `$ from $`r`$ (which is equal to 1, because of the applied normalization):

$`\delta `$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{arctan}\left({\displaystyle \frac{\alpha _2}{\alpha _1}}\right)`$ (6)
$`\theta `$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{arctan}\left\{\left({\displaystyle \frac{\alpha _3}{\alpha _2}}\right)\mathrm{sin}\left[\mathrm{arctan}\left({\displaystyle \frac{\alpha _2}{\alpha _1}}\right)\right]\right\}`$ (7)
The parameters used to perform the spectral classification are then reduced to only two: we have in fact eliminated the magnitude parameter (represented by $`r`$) having performed a normalization of the spectra. In general, morphological types do depend on the magnitude, because of the differences in luminosity functions of galaxies going from ellipticals to irregulars (see f.i. Binggeli, Sandage & Tammann 1988); however, as described below, we have a very small range in magnitudes that allows us to neglect this parameter.
Moreover it is possible to associate a physical meaning to $`\delta `$ and $`\theta `$. In fact, $`\delta `$ represents the contribution of the blue over the red part of the spectrum, i.e. of the young stellar population relative to the older one, while $`\theta `$ represents the importance of emission lines in a galaxy spectrum and could then be an indicator of star formation (see below).

## 3 The data

The photometric data catalogue is the COSMOS/UKST galaxy catalogue of the southern sky (Yentis et al. 1992) obtained from automated scans of UKST $`J`$ plates by the COSMOS machine.
Spectroscopic observations were obtained using the ESO 3.6-m telescope in La Silla equipped with the OPTOPUS multifibre spectrograph (Lund 1986), for observations in the regions of cluster complexes, and with the MEFOS multifibre spectrograph (Bellenger et al. 1991; Felenbok et al. 1997) for observations in the intercluster region. In Figure 1 we show the position of the observed OPTOPUS and MEFOS fields, superimposed on the galaxy isodensity contours.
A further spectral sample from the ESO Slice Project (ESP) galaxy redshift survey (Vettolani et al. 1997) has been considered in order to have a comparison of supercluster spectra with those of “true” field galaxies.
From all these samples, we have considered only galaxies in the velocity range $`1000022500`$ km/s, in order to limit the spectral analysis to the physical extension of the Shapley Concentration (Bardelli et al. 2000). Moreover, given the fact that the intercluster survey is limited to the magnitude range 17 $``$ $`b_J`$ $``$ 18.8, when we compare the cluster galaxy properties with the intercluster ones, we use subsamples with these magnitude limits. This choice avoids possible biases deriving from sampling of luminosity functions of various morphological types at different magnitudes. On the contrary, when we consider only properties of cluster galaxies, we use the samples in the whole magnitude range ($`b_J19.5`$).

In Table 1 the relevant numbers for each sample are given. In column (1) we give the sample name, in column (2) the number of COSMOS/UKST galaxies inside the survey area and in column (3) the number of galaxies with redshift (including literature measurements). Column (4) reports the number of objects belonging to the Shapley Concentration: among these, we could classify only objects with spectra observed by us. This number is reported in column (5).

### 3.1 The A3528 complex

The region considered to sample the A3528 complex is part of the UKST $`J`$ plate 443 and has a dimension on the plane of the sky of $`\alpha \times \delta 2\stackrel{}{.}7\times 3\stackrel{}{.}8`$, in the range $`12^h51^m<\alpha (2000)<13^h15^m`$ and $`31^o36\mathrm{}<\delta (2000)<28^o00\mathrm{}`$ (Bardelli, Zucca & Baldi 2001).
The spectroscopic observations were performed with the OPTOPUS multifibre spectrograph; we used the ESO grating $`\mathrm{\#}15`$ allowing a resolution of $`12`$ Å in the wavelength range $`37006024`$ Å. The detectors were Tektronic $`512\times 512`$ CB CCDs (ESO $`\mathrm{\#}16`$ for 1991 run; ESO $`\mathrm{\#}32`$ for 1993 run) with a pixel size of $`4.5`$ Å. Detector $`\mathrm{\#}32`$ has a particularly good responsive quantum function in the blue ($`70\%`$ at $`4000`$ Å), if compared with detector $`\mathrm{\#}16`$.
All the details on the reduction steps can be found in Bardelli et al. (1994): however, it could be important to stress that we normalized the fiber transmission rescaling the spectra in order to have the same continuum–subtracted flux of the sky emission line \[OI\]$`\lambda `$5577.

### 3.2 The A3558 complex

The region considered to sample the A3558 complex lies on the UKST $`J`$ plate 444 and has a dimension on the plane of the sky of $`\alpha \times \delta 3\stackrel{}{.}2\times 1\stackrel{}{.}4`$, in the range $`13^h22^m06^s<\alpha (2000)<13^h37^m15^s`$ and $`32^o22\mathrm{}40\mathrm{}<\delta (2000)<30^o59\mathrm{}30\mathrm{}`$ (Bardelli et al. 1994, Bardelli et al. 1998a).
The spectroscopic observations were performed with the same instruments and the setup used for the A3528 complex survey (see above). It is worth noting from Table 1 that the number of spectra available for the classification in this sample is lower than in the sample relative to the A3528 complex: this is due to the large number of galaxies with a redshift determination in the literature for the A3558 complex and then not re-observed in our survey.

### 3.3 The intercluster sample

The intercluster survey, described and analyzed in detail in Bardelli et al. (2000), has been performed in order to study the distribution of galaxies in the Shapley Concentration outside the clusters. The spectroscopic observations covered part of the UKST $`J`$ plates 443, 444 and 509 and were obtained with the MEFOS spectrograph. In order to maximize the performances of this instrument, we adopted the magnitude range $`1718.8`$.
The spectra, obtained with the CCD TEK512 CB # 32 and the ESO grating $`\mathrm{\#}15`$, have a resolution of $`12`$ Å and a pixel size of $`4.6`$ Å: data were reduced and cross-correlated in the same way as done for the cluster complexes.

### 3.4 The ESP sample

The ESP galaxy redshift survey (Vettolani et al. 1997) extends over a strip of $`\alpha \times \delta `$=$`22^{}\times 1^{}`$, plus a nearby area of $`5^{}\times 1^{}`$, five degrees west of the main strip, in the South Galactic Pole region. The whole ESP sample, together with the detailed description of the survey, is available in Vettolani et al. (1998).
To our aims it is sufficient to remember that the spectroscopic observations were performed at the ESO 3.6-m telescope in La Silla, using the multifibre spectrographs OPTOPUS and MEFOS with the same instrumental setup used for our surveys on the Shapley Concentration. However, given the fact that the wavelength coverage of some ESP spectra is limited to 3900 - 6100Å, in order to include the \[OII\]$`\lambda `$3727 line in all the rest frame spectra we are forced to use only galaxies with $`v>15800`$ km/s, instead $`v>10000`$ km/s as done for all the other samples. Applying also the $`1718.8`$ magnitude cut, we obtained a sample of $`300`$ galaxies. The mean galaxy density in this sample is consistent with that of the whole ESP survey.
The ESP galaxies are supposed to be “true” field galaxies and should represent a well defined reference sample to analyse the variations in morphological mixing inside the Shapley supercluster.

### 3.5 Preparing the data for the PCA algorithm

The spectral sample described in previous sections has been prepared for the application of the PCA via the SSCP method. The spectra have been de-redshifted to the rest frame, reduced at the same rest frame dispersion (4.5 Å/pix) and cut in the same wavelength range (3705 - 5500 Å). This wavelength band has been chosen in order to observe all the spectral features between the \[OII\] $`\lambda `$3727 emission line and the Ca+Fe $`\lambda `$5269 absorption line. The number of pixels (i.e. the number of coordinates describing each spectrum in the PCA) is 400.
In order to have a link between our PCA spectral classification and the classical morphologies of galaxies, we added to our sample a set of spectra of nearby galaxies from the spectrophotometric atlas of Kennicutt (1992a): these spectra are of good quality and refer to galaxies with known morphology. From the original atlas, we used the 26 normal galaxies listed in Table 2. These spectra have been reduced to the same wavelength range and dispersion of our sample: indeed, it is necessary to run the PCA procedure at the same time for all the spectra (our data plus Kennicutt’s data) in order to obtain a relative scale to define the spectral sequence.

## 4 Results from the PCA

The PCA classification has been applied to the sample of spectra from the cluster complexes, the intercluster field, the ESP survey subsample and the Kennicutt’s atlas, in the magnitude range $`17b_J18.8`$. In order to make a relative comparison between the morphological mix of the two cluster complexes, we ran the PCA also in the whole magnitude range ($`b_J19.5`$) for these samples, finding similar results.
The first three principal components are represented in Figure 2. The first principal component (PC1) contributes to 96.7% in flux of the sample and is characterized by a prominent red continuum relative to the blue one. It shows spectral features like a clear 4000Å break, a number of absorption lines like the pair K $`\lambda `$3934 and H $`\lambda `$3969, H$`\delta `$ $`\lambda `$4102, G $`\lambda `$4304 and MgI $`\lambda `$5175, and the forbidden emission line of \[OII\] $`\lambda `$3727. The continuum of this spectrum resembles closely that of an early-type galaxy like an E or an S0: however, the presence of the \[OII\] emission line indicates that this PC has also some characteristics of early spirals, like Sa and Sb. The contribution of PC1 is dominant because our sample is mainly composed by early-type galaxies.
The second principal component (PC2) contributes on average to 2.0% in flux of the sample. The blue part of the spectrum is enhanced with respect to the red one and the \[OII\] emission line is clearly more prominent than in PC1; moreover, the emission features of H$`\beta `$ $`\lambda `$4861 and of \[OIII\] $`\lambda \lambda `$4959,5007 clearly appear. This eigenspectrum is characterized by less important absorption features and resembles the spectrum of a galaxy with star formation activity, where the dominant population is constituted by the blue young stars, which dominates the continuum. The ongoing star formation activity in such a type of galaxy can be detected by the presence of nebular emission lines too.
The third principal component (PC3) contributes on average to 0.3% in flux of the spectral sample. Its continuum is almost flat and dominated by the emission lines, stronger than in PC2, of \[OII\], H$`\beta `$ and \[OIII\]: it presents also the H$`\gamma `$ $`\lambda `$4341 emission line, although not so prominent like the others, which is not present in PC2. Hence this eigenspectrum represents essentially the emission features in a galaxy spectrum, which can be related, expecially in the case of \[OII\], to the presence of an ongoing star formation activity (Kennicutt 1992b).
The other principal components contribute marginally to the flux of our spectral sample (0.12% for the fourth, 0.07% for the fifth, etc.) and have not a straightforward physical interpretation. Therefore we have decided to neglect them and to perform the spectral classification using only the first three eigenspectra, which contribute together to $``$99% in flux of the sample.
Then, as described in Sect. 2.2, we applied a change of coordinates from ($`\alpha _1`$, $`\alpha _2`$, $`\alpha _3`$) to ($`\delta `$, $`\theta `$): the $`\delta `$-$`\theta `$ plot is shown in Figure 3, for all the spectra of the sample in the Shapley Concentration. The Kennicutt’s galaxies are plotted with big points and with different symbols for each Hubble type. To simplify the figure, we have decided to put barred and normal spirals (like Sa and SBa) in the same category and intermediate types have been put in the earliest category (for instance, an Sab galaxy has been marked as Sa). The two galaxies labelled Ir (irregulars) are Sm/Im.

From this figure, it is clearly visible that the galaxies follow a well defined sequence and that the Kennicutt’s objects are located in a succession of increasing values of $`\delta `$, going from the ellipticals to the irregulars. For this reason, in the following we will use $`\delta `$ to classify galaxies. A similar result has been found by Sodré & Cuevas (1997) which, applying the PCA (although not with SSCP method) to the entire Kennicutt’s sample, found that, for normal galaxies, only one parameter is necessary to discriminate among morphological types along the Hubble sequence.
This behaviour can be understood remembering that $`\delta `$ represents the importance of the blue part of the continuum with respect to the red one. The $`\theta `$ parameter is an indicator of the emission line strength in a galaxy spectrum: this fact explains the increasing spread in $`\theta `$ moving along the sequence toward late types.
The few objects which strongly deviate from the sequence have mostly very low signal-to-noise spectra, except for a galaxy in the A3528 complex (located at $`\delta 5^{}`$ and $`\theta 7^{}`$) which has a spectrum characterized by a red (elliptical-like) continuum and by the contemporary unusual presence of very strong \[OIII\] emission lines.
It is worth noting that the separation in $`\delta `$ between two different Hubble types is smaller for earlier types than for later ones: in fact , as shown by Kennicutt (1992a, 1992b), the difference between the spectrum of an E/S0 and an Sb is very subtle and consists only in a slight decreasing of the 4000Å break importance and in a progressive growth of the H$`\alpha `$+\[NII\] equivalent width, which often reflects in a growth of the \[OII\] equivalent width. The differences become more important starting from Sc spirals.
However it is important to note that this “compression” in the early type region of the sequence may be due, at least in part, to the fibre angular dimension. In fact both OPTOPUS and MEFOS fibres have a dimension projected on the plane of the sky of $`2.5\mathrm{}`$. This means that, at the average distance of the Shapley Concentration ($`z0.05`$), they cover only the central $``$2 h-1 kpc of a galaxy, i.e. for early spirals they can observe only their bulge region, where the stellar population and the gas component are more similar to those of E/S0 galaxies than in the spiral arms. Hence this may result in a “compression” of the spectral sequence until we reach the intermediate spiral region, where a smaller bulge extension allows to observe part of the spiral arms too.

### 4.1 Relation between the $`\delta `$ parameter and the galaxy colours

Metcalfe, Godwin & Peach (1994) give photometric colours for many galaxies in the A3558 complex. Hence, we have decided to compare our classification parameter $`\delta `$ with galaxy colours, in order to possibly extrapolate a value of $`\delta `$ for the galaxies not observed in our spectroscopic survey.
In the magnitude range 17 $``$ $`b_J`$ $``$ 18.8, there are 230 galaxies with both a $`(UB)`$ colour and a spectral classification: they are plotted with solid triangles in Figure 4 in a diagram $`\delta `$ vs. $`(UB)`$. As expected, a relation between the two quantities is clearly evident: lower values of $`(UB)`$ correspond to higher values of $`\delta `$. The vertical lines in this figure represent the mean value of $`\delta `$ corresponding to different Hubble types of the Kennicutt’s galaxies, while the horizontal lines correspond to the mean $`(UB)`$ colours expected for each Hubble type from Fukugita, Shimasaku & Ichikawa (1995). Note that Fukugita et al. (1995) do not give a mean colour for each distinct class of spirals, as we do for the Kennicutt’s galaxies, but colours for intermediate classes of spirals from Sab to Scd.

The existence of such a relation allows us to use the photometric data from Metcalfe et al. (1994) to roughly classify galaxies in the A3558 complex with redshift from the literature but without an available spectrum. This addition has become necessary in order to have a more uniform coverage, especially in the central parts of A3558, where the majority of literature data are located, and results in an increase of $`45\%`$ of the sample size.

## 5 Spectral morphology vs. environment

### 5.1 Global properties

The first step is the study of the morphological mix in the various samples described in Sect. 3, which represent different environments. In order to maximize the statistics, we have divided the galaxies in three broad morphological classes (early, intermediate and late types), defined by ranges in $`\delta `$ and $`(UB)`$ values.
The first interval, which refers to early-type galaxies, is relative to values of $`\delta 4^{}`$, i.e. to the region of the spectral sequence of E/S0 Kennicutt’s galaxies. The corresponding color limit (for galaxies in the A3558 complex) is $`(UB)0.35`$. The second interval is defined by $`4^{}<\delta 6^{}`$ and $`0(UB)<0.35`$, and corresponds to early spirals, from Sa to Sbc. The last interval includes the late part of the spectral sequence, from Sbc to irregular galaxies, and is defined by $`\delta >6^{}`$ and $`(UB)<0`$.

In Figure 5 the fractions of galaxies in the three morphological bins are shown for each sample. As expected, cluster galaxies show a completely different morphological distribution with respect to ESP and intercluster galaxies, being the fraction of early-type galaxies dominant in such high density environment.
More interesting, this figure shows a broad agreement between the intercluster and the ESP sample: this fact suggests that the galaxies located in the intercluster regions of the Shapley supercluster have a morphological mix not different from field galaxies. This agreement is confirmed also by a more detailed analysis of the histograms of the $`\delta `$ distributions (Figures 6a and 6b): applying a K-S test, the probability that they have been extracted from the same distribution is more than 40%. Therefore, although the mean overdensity of intercluster galaxies is of the order of $`(N/\overline{N})4`$ (Bardelli et al. 2000), their morphological mix has not changed significantly from that corresponding to lower density field galaxies (i.e. ($`N/\overline{N})1`$).
For what concerns cluster galaxies, there is a complete agreement between the A3528 and A3558 complex morphological mix (Figure 5). Small differences in the left part of the histograms in Figures 6c and 6d are due to the incompleteness of the A3558 complex survey: literature redshift data (present in the Figure 5 through the use of $`(UB)`$ colors but not in the histograms) mainly covers the central region of the A3558 cluster, rich of early-type galaxies. As a consequence of this incompleteness, the $`\delta `$ distributions of the two complexes are not consistent with the hypothesis of having been extracted from the same distribution: however, limiting the analysis to $`\delta >11^o`$, the K-S probability rises to $`20\%`$.
For what concerns the $`\theta `$ parameter, it is clear from Figure 3 that a degeneracy is present along the sequence: two galaxy spectra of very different type (for instance an elliptical and an Sc spiral) can have the same value of $`\theta `$. Given the fact that this parameter is mainly related to the emission line strength, we have analysed the $`\theta `$ distributions only for late-type galaxies ($`\delta >6^{}`$). Applying a K-S test to the $`\theta `$ distributions in each sample, we find that they are all consistent each other. Therefore, although the morphological mix in the cluster environment is significantly different from that in the field, it seems that the spectral properties of the late-type galaxy population do not change in the different environments.

### 5.2 Spectral morphology vs. local density

A more detailed analysis of environmental effects on galaxy morphology can be performed relating the local density with the spectral type. A reliable estimate of the density field is possible only for the cluster complexes: in fact, the sampling of the intercluster region is too sparse and non-uniform to allow a precise description of the local density point by point. For what concerns the ESP galaxies, we consider them as a reference sample with local density consistent with the mean density of the Universe.
For the cluster complexes we have adopted the three-dimensional densities estimated in Bardelli et al. (1998b, 2001) using the DEDICA algorithm (Pisani 1993, 1996). These densities are in units of galaxies per arcmin2 per km/s/100: given the fact that the two structures are at different redshifts ($`v`$$`{}_{A3558}{}^{}14600`$ km/s and $`v`$$`{}_{A3528}{}^{}16400`$ km/s), it is necessary to rescale the densities in order to allow a meaningful comparison of the samples. We chose to rescale all the values to the A3528 complex, multiplying the A3558 densities by a factor ($`v`$$`{}_{A3528}{}^{}/`$$`v`$$`{}_{A3558}{}^{})^21.3`$.
For what concerns the A3528 complex, the dynamical and substructure analysis performed in Bardelli et al. (2001) revealed the presence of a number of clumps at $`v20000`$ km/s which are not dynamically part of the main structure, mainly associated to the presence of the A3535 cluster. Therefore, we decided to eliminate galaxies with $`v19000`$ km/s in the A3528 complex analysis.
We have divided the density range in three bins, roughly equally populated: within these intervals we have calculated the fraction of galaxies with $`\delta >2^{}`$ and $`(UB)<0.2`$ (for literature spectra in the A3558 complex). This value of $`\delta `$ is located near the boundary between Sa and Sb galaxies (see Figure 3) and therefore we measure the variations with local density of the fraction of intermediate and late spirals and irregulars. The results are shown in Figure 7.

A decreasing of the late-type galaxies fraction with increasing values of density is clearly visible, both in the A3528 and in the A3558 complexes, reflecting the well-known morphology–density relation. Moreover, for every density value, these fractions remain significantly below the mean field value ($`53.1\pm 5.3\%`$), derived from ESP galaxies and reported as a solid horizontal line in Figure 7. Note that the mean value from intercluster galaxies is very similar ($`54.7\pm 7.3\%`$).
For what concerns galaxies with $`v19000`$ km/s in the A3528 complex, mainly belonging to the poor cluster A3535, there is not a dependence of the morphological mix on the local density: the fraction of late-type spectra remains almost constant (from lower to higher densities: 50%, 48% and 52%) and with values in agreement with those found for the field population. This means that although the densities are rather high, the dynamical mechanisms have not been able to modify the population. This may suggest that A3535 is a young structure, perhaps formed as a consequence of the tidal forces generated by the merging in the A3528 complex.

Looking in more detail at Figure 7 we note that, although the A3528 and the A3558 complexes show a general agreement, the fraction of late-type galaxies at intermediate density is significantly different in the two samples. The A3558 complex distribution appears more regular and smoothly decreasing, while for the A3528 complex there is a sudden drop from the first to the second bin: at intermediate densities the fraction of late-type galaxies is even lower than at high densities (although within the errors). This lack of late-type objects (or, correspondingly, excess of early-type galaxies) is not a consequence of the chosen magnitude bin. Indeed, using the whole sample ($`b_J19.5`$) we find a morphology-density relation well consistent with the results of Figure 7.
Looking at the spatial distribution of intermediate density early-type galaxies, we find that the excess in the A3528 cluster complex is mainly located in the Southern part, in the A3530-A3532 cluster pair.

Finally, we checked the existence of the morphology-density relation in the complexes considering only galaxies in the regions between clusters, where possibly the shock fronts are located. Although with large error bars, the trend found in these regions is consistent with the global one: taken at face value, this fact seems to be in contradiction with the results of Bardelli et al. (1998b), who found an excess of blue galaxies in the region between A3562 and A3558. However this discrepancy can be understood considering the limited spectral range of our spectra ($`\lambda 3700`$ Å), which do not allow to fully sample the $`U`$ band. Looking in detail the spectra of the objects responsible of the blue excess, we find that they are classified as early-type galaxies: the fact that these objects have $`(UB)<0.3`$ implies that their spectra have a significant rise in the ultraviolet region (which is outside our spectral range).

## 6 Equivalent width of \[OII\] and Star Formation Rate

Other classical properties which are often used to study the galaxy characteristics as a function of the environment are the equivalent width of the \[OII\]$`\lambda 3727`$ emission line and the star formation rate. Among the various estimators for the star formation rate we adopted the formula of Kennicutt (1992b), as reported by Balogh et al. (1998)

$$SFR=6.75\times 10^{12}\frac{L}{L_{}}EQW([\mathrm{OII}])M_{}/yr$$
(8)
where $`{\displaystyle \frac{L}{L_{}}}`$ is the galaxy B-band luminosity normalized to the solar value and $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ is the equivalent width of the \[OII\] line (in Å). The exact value of the constant, related to the dust absorption, is not relevant in this context because we want to make a comparison between the star formation rates of field and cluster galaxies placed at the same distance.

### 6.1 Equivalent width of \[OII\]

We measured the \[OII\] equivalent width for each galaxy fitting a Gaussian to the \[OII\] line on the spectrum normalized to its continuum (fitted with a spline3 function). Given the typical signal to noise ratio of our spectra the detection of a line implies an equivalent width larger than about 5 Å. This procedure is the same which was applied to ESP spectra (Zucca et al. 1997).

Analysing the distribution of \[OII\] equivalent widths in the various samples, we found that the percentage of galaxies with $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`>5`$ Å is, as expected, different for field and cluster galaxies, ranging from 44% for the ESP sample and 57% for the intercluster sample, to 14% for the A3528 complex. For the A3558 complex this percentage rises to 31%, but this higher value is a consequence of the fact that the literature redshift data (for which spectra are not available) are mainly concentrated in the core of A3558, rich of early-type galaxies (see also Sect. 4.1): missing the equivalent width measurement of these objects, the fraction of emission line galaxies is artificially increased.

In Figure 8 we show the mean rest frame $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ in the various samples as a function of the local density: as a comparison, the field values are shown as horizontal lines. Note that the mean values were derived considering the total samples, including also galaxies with $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$=0. A clear decrease of the mean $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ as the density increases is visible in both cluster complexes, although the values for the A3558 sample are always higher. This fact can be, at least in part, a consequence of the missing spectra of early-type galaxies (see above). Also the cluster A3535 follows a similar trend, but with higher values. Moreover, all these samples are always well below the field: note also that no differences are present between ESP and intercluster galaxies.

We can compare our $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ values with those given by Balogh et al. (1997), who analyzed a sample of 15 rich clusters from the CNOC1 survey, with redshift in the range $`0.20.55`$ and $`M_R<18.5`$. These authors give the $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ values as a function of the distance from the cluster center: for innermost cluster members ($`R<0.3R_{200}`$) $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`=0.3\pm 0.4`$ Å, for outer cluster members ($`0.3R_{200}<R<2R_{200}`$) $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`=3.5\pm 0.4`$ Å, where $`R_{200}1.25`$ h-1 Mpc . Using these limits also for our cluster galaxies, in the same luminosity range of Balogh et al., we find $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`=0.82\pm 0.61`$ Å and $`3.28\pm 0.59`$ Å for the innermost and outer members, respectively. The very good agreement between our estimates (which refer to low redshift clusters) and those of CNOC1 means that there is no significant evolution in the $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ value up to $`z0.5`$.

The dependence of $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ on the local density can be due to a real intrinsic variation of the line strength with the environment, but can be also simply induced by the existence of a morphology-density relation. In fact, there is a significant correlation between $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ and the classification parameter $`\delta `$: the highest is the value of $`\delta `$ for a galaxy, the highest is its line strength.

In order to better investigate this point, we restrict our analysis to late-type galaxies (i.e. with $`\delta >2^{}`$): in this case, we find that there are no significant variations of $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ with the local density, for all samples. The mean values, in the whole density range, are: $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`{}_{A3528}{}^{}=12.71\pm 1.96`$ Å, $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`{}_{A3558}{}^{}=17.64\pm 2.02`$ Å, $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`{}_{A3535}{}^{}=11.87\pm 1.76`$ Å, $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`{}_{ESP}{}^{}=16.63\pm 1.32`$ Å and $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$$`{}_{INTERCL}{}^{}=15.88\pm 1.58`$ Å.
All these values are consistent each other within $`2\sigma `$ and in some cases already within $`1\sigma `$: therefore, it seems that the environment has not a strong effect on the line strength of late-type galaxies. This fact confirms the result found using the $`\theta `$ distribution of late-type galaxies (see Sect. 5.1).

However, to better understand the role of the environment on the galaxy properties we need to take into account also their luminosities, and therefore to analyse their star formation rate.

### 6.2 Star Formation Rate

We computed the star formation rate for each galaxy with measured $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$, following eq.(8), after having corrected our $`b_J`$ magnitudes for galactic absorption and having transformed them to the B-band.

In Figure 9 we show the mean star formation rate in the various samples as a function of the local density: as a comparison, the field values are shown as horizontal lines. Again the mean values are derived using also galaxies with $`SFR=0`$. Also in this case there is a clear decrease of the star formation rate with increasing densities, with values well below the field ones. The decrease has a $`3.3\sigma `$ and $`2.6\sigma `$ significance level for the A3528 and A3558 samples, respectively. The cluster A3535 is the only exception, being its $`SFR`$ higher than the field one and almost independent of the local density.

However, as noted before for the $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$, this behaviour can be induced by the existence of a morphology-density relation: in order to check this point we extrapolated the expected star formation rate for each sample following the method of Balogh et al. (1998).
First we derived from the field sample the mean star formation rate of early-type ($`SFR_{early}`$) and late-type ($`SFR_{late}`$) galaxies and for each sample we computed in each density bin the fraction of early-type ($`f_{early}`$) and late-type ($`f_{late}`$) galaxies. The expected mean star formation rate is then obtained as

$$SFR=f_{early}SFR_{early}+f_{late}SFR_{late}$$
(9)
Note that Balogh et al. (1998) use a photometric classification (bulge or disk dominated) for their galaxies, while we apply a spectroscopic classification ($`\delta >2^{}`$).

We find that for the cluster complexes the extrapolated $`SFR`$ is always higher than the real one, of a factor $`2`$ for the A3528 complex and $`1.5`$ for the A3558 complex. This trend is qualitatively similar to the results of Balogh et al. (1998), but it has a very low statistical significance ($`1\sigma `$): in fact, these authors found a difference of a factor $`5`$ between the extrapolated and the real values of the star formation rate.

For what concerns the cluster A3535, we find an opposite behaviour: the extrapolated $`SFR`$ is lower than a factor $`0.8`$ with respect to the real one, although these two values are consistent each other at $`1\sigma `$ level. This fact indicates that in this particular cluster the star formation rate has not been depressed.

## 7 Discussion and Summary

In this paper we studied the morphological properties of galaxies in the central part of the Shapley Concentration, covering an extremely wide range of densities, from the rich cluster cores to the supercluster environment \[$`(N/\overline{N})4`$\]. Moreover, these results were compared with galaxies from the ESP survey, which represent the reference value for the “true” field \[$`(N/\overline{N})1`$\].

Given the fact that we are using galaxies at the same distance and in a well defined magnitude range, we are not biased by evolutionary effects and by the sampling of different parts of the luminosity function. Moreover, all the spectra in our survey were taken with the same telescope and instrumental set up and therefore our sample is highly uniform. All these characteristics allowed us to perform an accurate spectral classification based on a Principal Components Analysis technique.

We found that all spectra can be well reconstructed using only three components, representing a) an early-type galaxy spectrum, b) a spectrum with very prominent blue continuum and emission lines, and c) an emission line dominated spectrum. This classification can be parametrized using two parameters: $`\delta `$, which represents the contribution of the blue over the red part of the spectrum, and $`\theta `$, which represents the importance of the emission lines. In the $`\delta \theta `$ plane the galaxies follow a well defined sequence, and it results that $`\delta `$ is enough to discriminate among the various morphological types.

This spectral classification, together with the \[OII\] equivalent widths and the star formation rates, has been used to study the properties of galaxies at different densities: cluster, intercluster (i.e. galaxies in the supercluster but outside clusters) and field environment.

The first result is that no significant differences are present between samples at low density regimes (i.e. intercluster and field galaxies): the morphological mix, the $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ and the $`SFR`$ have consistent values in these two environments. This result, although not completely unexpected, has been proved here for the first time.

Cluster galaxies not only have values significantly different from the field ones, but also show a dependence on the local density. A well defined morphology-density relation is present in the cluster complexes: the existence of this relation is not obvious a priori in merging clusters, because the dynamical phenomena could have shuffled galaxies from different local densities.
A possible explanation of the persistence of the relation after a major merging (as in the case of the A3558 complex) is that the shuffling regarded only the peripherical galaxies (i.e. in low density regions), while the cores have potential wells deep enough to retain the original galaxies and to be not influenced by this phenomenon.

Also the $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ shows a trend with the local environment, decreasing at increasing densities. This trend can be probably induced by the existence of a morphology-density relation: in fact, if we consider only late-type galaxies, we find no significant dependence of $`EQW([\mathrm{OII}])`$ on the local density. Moreover, both field and cluster samples have values consistent each other (within the statistical uncertainties): therefore it seems that the environment has not a strong effect on the line strength of late-type galaxies.

Finally we analyzed the $`SFR`$ as a function of the density, finding again a decreasing trend. In order to verify if also this trend is a consequence of the morphology-density relation, we extrapolated the star formation rate expected on the basis of the field $`SFR`$ values, taking into account the morphological mix of the clusters \[see Sect. 6.2 and eq.(8)\]. The extrapolated values are higher than a factor $`1.52`$ than the observed ones: this result (although with low statistical significance) is consistent with the claim of Balogh et al. (1998) that the star formation rate in clusters is depressed.

Note that the cluster A3535, which is in the background of the A3528 complex, deviates from these trends: it is spiral rich, with a morphological mix similar to the field values, and shows a $`SFR`$ consistent with the extrapolated one. This indicates that in this particular cluster the star formation rate has not been depressed.

In this paper we investigated the properties of the galaxy population in a particular, extreme environment: a significant improvement of these studies will be achieved by wide area spectroscopic survey, like 2dFGRS and SDSS, which will allow to homogeneously sample a variety of environments, with high statistics.

## Acknowledgements

The authors thank B. Marano, G. Zamorani and G. Vettolani for discussions. AB acknowledges the hospitality of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna. We also thank the referee (M.Drinkwater) for useful comments which improved the presentation of the results.
This work has been partially supported by the Italian Space Agency grant ASI-I-R-105-00.