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# Collective Excitations of a “Gravitationally” Self-Bound Bose Gas

## Abstract

We investigate the collective excitations of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate in the self-binding regime produced by electromagnetically induced “gravity” ($`1/r`$ attraction). Analytical expressions for the frequencies of the monopole and quadrupole modes are obtained at zero temperature, using the sum-rule approach, and compared with the exact results available in the Thomas-Fermi limit. The low-energy dynamics of such condensates is shown to be dominated by the effective “plasma” frequency. An analog of the Jeans gravitational instability is analyzed.

PACS number(s): 03.75.Fi, 34.20.Cf, 34.80.Qb, 04.40.–b

*Introduction* — Recently, a new kind of atomic Bose-Einstein condensates has been proposed . It has been shown that particular configurations of intense, off-resonant electromagnetic fields mimic the gravitational attraction between atoms located well within the wavelength of these fields, giving rise to scenarios very different from the ones characterizing usual Bose-Einstein condensates . The interatomic potential is of the form $`u/r`$, where the gravitational coupling $`u=Gm^2`$ is replaced by

$$u=\frac{11}{60\pi ϵ_0^2c}\alpha ^2q^2I.$$
(1)
Here the total laser intensity and wavenumber are denoted by $`I`$ and $`q`$, respectively, and $`\alpha `$ is the atomic polarizability at the frequency $`cq`$ . For a sufficiently strong induced “gravity” the BEC becomes self-bound, i.e. stable in the absence of an external confining potential . Such a self-bound system may become a laboratory analog of a non-relativistic Bose star , a self-gravitating system that balances gravity with the ”quantum pressure” corresponding to the zero-point kinetic energy fluctuation. In the self-bound condensate considered in Ref.  the induced “gravity” can be also balanced by the short-range interatomic repulsion.

It is known that the long-wavelength collective excitations of a *spatially-uniform* system of both fermions (e.g., the electron gas) and bosons , interacting via a *repulsive* potential of the form $`u/r`$, are characterized by a spectral gap, fixed by the “plasma” frequency

$$\omega _p^2=4\pi un/m,$$
(2)
where $`n`$ is the particle density. In this paper we show that also in the case of a *self-bound* atomic BEC, interacting via an *attractive* $`u/r`$ potential, the collective oscillations are characterized by an effective “plasma” frequency $`\omega _p`$ of the form (2), with a spatially-averaged density $`n`$ and the positive coupling constant $`u`$ \[Eq. (1)\]. Its correspondence with the fundamental oscillation frequency of white dwarfs and neutron stars  is pointed out and the analog of the Jeans gravitational instability is explicitly analyzed.

*Generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation* — The Gross-Pitaevskii equation  for the order parameter $`\mathrm{\Psi }(𝐫,t)`$ can be obtained starting from

$$i\mathrm{}\frac{\mathrm{\Psi }}{t}=\frac{\delta }{\delta \mathrm{\Psi }^{}}H_{\mathrm{tot}}.$$
(3)
Here the total mean-field energy functional $`H_{\mathrm{tot}}=H_{\mathrm{kin}}+H_{\mathrm{ho}}+H_{\mathrm{grav}}+H_\mathrm{s}`$ consists of: (a) the kinetic energy, $`H_{\mathrm{kin}}=𝑑𝐫(\mathrm{}^2/2m)|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2`$; (b) the harmonic-trap energy, $`H_{\mathrm{ho}}=V_{\mathrm{ho}}n𝑑𝐫`$, where $`n=|\mathrm{\Psi }(𝐫,t)|^2`$ is the atomic density and $`V_{\mathrm{ho}}=m\omega _0^2r^2/2`$ is an isotropic harmonic external potential; (c) the mean-field energy due to the electromagnetically induced “gravity”, $`H_{\mathrm{grav}}=(1/2)n\mathrm{\Phi }𝑑𝐫`$, where $`\mathrm{\Phi }`$ is the ”gravitational potential” solution of the Poisson equation

$$^2\mathrm{\Phi }=4\pi un,$$
(4)
with the boundary condition $`\mathrm{\Phi }=0`$ for $`|r|\mathrm{}`$; (d) the mean-field contribution due to the short-range scattering, $`H_\mathrm{s}=(g/2)n^2𝑑𝐫`$, where $`g=4\pi a\mathrm{}^2/m`$, $`a`$ being the s-wave scattering length.

By expressing the complex BEC order parameter through the condensate density $`n`$ and phase $`\varphi `$ as $`\mathrm{\Psi }=\sqrt{n}\mathrm{exp}(i\varphi )`$, we can write Eq. (3) as a coupled set of collisionless hydrodynamic equations:

$$\frac{n}{t}+(n𝐯)=0,$$
(5)
$$m\frac{𝐯}{t}+\left(\frac{mv^2}{2}\frac{\mathrm{}^2^2\sqrt{n}}{2m\sqrt{n}}+gn+V_{\mathrm{ho}}+\mathrm{\Phi }\right)=0.$$
(6)
The last equation establishes the irrotational property of the superfluid velocity field defined by $`𝐯=\mathrm{}\varphi /m`$. Similar equations have been derived in the case of harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensates interacting via zero-range forces .

*Jeans-like instability* — In the absence of external potentials, Eqs. (5) and (6) admit a stationary solution with constant density $`n`$. Such a solution is, however, dynamically unstable, as can be seen directly from the Bogoliubov dispersion relation  corresponding to (5) and (6):

$$\omega _k^2=\frac{\mathrm{}^2k^4}{4m^2}+c_s^2k^2\omega _p^2.$$
(7)
In (7) $`c_s=\sqrt{gn/m}`$ is the Bogoliubov speed of sound and the plasma frequency $`\omega _p`$ is given by (2). The occurrence of imaginary frequencies $`\omega _k`$ for small values of $`k`$ reveals the existence of an instability, which resembles the Jeans gravitational instability . Assuming $`\omega _pmc_s^2`$, the minimal wavelength ensuring a real value for the frequency (7) is given by

$$\lambda _J=2\pi c_s/\omega _p=2\pi (\mathrm{}^2a/mu)^{1/2}.$$
(8)
In a “self-gravitating” BEC, both $`\omega _p`$ and $`c_s`$ scale as $`n^{1/2}`$, so that the critical wavelength $`\lambda _J`$ is *i*ndependent of the density, as explicitly revealed by (8).

Besides these unstable solutions, Eqs. (5) and (6) admit a stable self-bound solution for any finite number N of atoms. In this case long-wavelength fluctuations, which can trigger the Jeans instability, are excluded by the finite size of the system. Remarkably, the ground-state density of a self-bound Bose cloud, in the limit in which the kinetic energy can be neglected (Thomas-Fermi limit for Bose gases), has the analytic profile

$$n_0(𝐫)=\frac{N}{4R_0^2}\frac{\mathrm{sin}(\pi r/R_0)}{r}\theta (R_0r)=0,$$
(9)
where the *radius* $`R_0=\lambda _J/2`$ is *fixed by the Jeans wavelength* and $`\theta `$ is the Heaviside function.

*Sum rule approach* — The quadrupole and monopole excitation frequencies at zero temperature can be estimated using a sum-rule approach . The calculation of the oscillation frequencies $`\omega `$ is based on the ratio

$`\mathrm{}^2\omega ^2=m_3/m_1`$ (10)
between the third moment (cubic-energy weighted) and the first moment (energy-weighted) of the dynamic structure factor: $`m_p=_n(\mathrm{}\omega _{n0})^p<0Fn>^2`$ $`(p=1,3)`$. Here $`\mathrm{}\omega _{n0}`$ is the excitation energy of the state $`|n>`$ and $`F`$ is an excitation operator chosen similarly to : $`F=_{i=1}^Nr_i^2`$ or $`F=_{i=1}^Nr_i^2Y_{2m}`$, for the monopole or quadrupole operators, respectively. The moments $`m_1`$ and $`m_3`$ can be reduced to the form of commutators involving the Hamiltonian of the system and evaluated in terms of ground-state expectation values. One then obtains the following results:

$`\omega _M^2`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{4H_{\mathrm{kin}}+4H_{\mathrm{ho}}+H_{\mathrm{grav}}+9H_\mathrm{s}}{Nmr^2}}`$ (11)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2H_{\mathrm{kin}}+6H_{\mathrm{ho}}+6H_\mathrm{s}}{Nmr^2}},`$ (12)
$`\omega _Q^2`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{4H_{\mathrm{kin}}+4H_{\mathrm{ho}}4/5H_{\mathrm{grav}}}{Nmr^2}},`$ (13)
where, in deriving the second equation (12), we have used the virial identity

$$2H_{\mathrm{kin}}2H_{\mathrm{ho}}+H_{\mathrm{grav}}+3H_\mathrm{s}=0.$$
(14)
The frequencies $`\omega _M`$ and $`\omega _Q`$, given by (12) and (13), are always real for positive values of the scattering length. If the expectation values of Eqs. (12) and (13) are evaluated using the *exact* ground state, they provide a *rigorous upper bound* to the lowest excitation frequencies for a given multipole. This approach has been shown to provide an excellent description of the crossover between the non-interacting and the Thomas-Fermi regimes in the case of condensates interacting via zero-range forces .

A useful analytical estimate for the expectation values of Eqs. (12) and (13) can be obtained by replacing the exact ground state with the *gaussian wavefunction* $`\mathrm{\Psi }=N^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{exp}(r^2/2w^2))/\pi ^{\frac{3}{4}}w^{\frac{3}{2}}`$. Here $`w`$ is a variational parameter that can be calculated by minimizing the total energy $`H_{\mathrm{tot}}`$ and is related to the expectation value $`r^2=(3/2)w^2`$. The various contributions to the energy $`H_{\mathrm{tot}}`$ then take the form: $`H_{\mathrm{kin}}`$ $`=`$ $`3N\mathrm{}^2/4mw^2`$, $`H_{\mathrm{ho}}`$ $`=`$ $`Nm\omega _0^2w^2/4`$, $`H_\mathrm{s}`$ $`=`$ $`a\mathrm{}^2N^2`$ $`/`$ $`\sqrt{2\pi }mw^3`$ and $`H_{\mathrm{grav}}=(1/\sqrt{2\pi })uN^2/w`$. The gaussian ansatz allows us to describe analytically the various regimes in the ”phase diagram” of the problem . It is noteworthy that the monopole and quadrupole frequencies obtained by the gaussian ansatz coincide with the ones derivable from a time-dependent variational calculation in a gaussian basis .

*Low-energy excitations in a self-bound BEC* — In the following we calculate the monopole and quadrupole excitation frequencies for a self-bound BEC from Eqs. (12) and (13), using, for the ground state, either the *e*xact solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation or the gaussian approximation. In these calculations we are interested in the effects of s-wave scattering, measured by the dimensionless parameter

$$s=muN^2a/\mathrm{}^2.$$
(15)
Upon neglecting the role of the external trap, the width of the ground state, within the gaussian ansatz, is given by $`w=(3/2)\sqrt{\pi /2}\left(1+\sqrt{1+(8/3\pi )s}\right)\mathrm{\Lambda }`$, where $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=\mathrm{}^2/muN`$ is the effective ”gravitational” radius which fixes the size of the condensate in the absence of $`s`$-wave interaction ($`a=0`$). This expression for $`w`$ allows for the analytical evaluation of the monopole and quadrupole frequencies (12) and (13) that are plotted in Fig 1 in units of the ”gravitational” frequency $`mu^2N^2/\mathrm{}^3`$. Comparison with the results obtained using the exact ground state shows that the gaussian ansatz provides indeed a good approximation, for both positive and negative values of $`s`$, provided one is far from the critical value $`s_c1`$, where the condensate exhibits collapse .

The order of magnitude of $`\omega _M`$ and $`\omega _Q`$ is given by the “plasma” frequency $`\omega _p`$, *irrespective* of the scattering parameter $`s`$. This can be simply seen by using the virial identity (14). Assuming $`s>0`$ and setting $`H_{\mathrm{ho}}=0`$ (absence of external trapping), we derive the inequalities $`0<2H_{\mathrm{kin}}<H_{\mathrm{grav}}`$ and, hence, from (12) and (13), we obtain $`1<\omega _M^2/\overline{\omega }^2<2`$ and $`(4/5)<\omega _Q^2/\overline{\omega }^2<(14/5)`$. Here $`\overline{\omega }^2H_{\mathrm{grav}}/Nmr^2`$ turns out to be always proportional to the plasma frequency $`\omega _p^2=4\pi un/m`$. Similarly, assuming $`s_c<s0`$, we obtain $`0<\omega _M^2/\overline{\omega }^21`$ and $`(14/5)\omega _Q^2/\overline{\omega }^2<(24/5)`$. The proximity of the monopole frequency $`\omega _M`$ to the “plasma” frequency $`\omega _p`$ breaks down upon approaching the critical value $`s_c1`$, where $`\omega _M^20`$ (whereas $`\omega _Q^2(24/5)\overline{\omega }^2`$).

The limits of large and small values of the scattering parameter $`s`$ (denoted as the TF-G and G self-bound regimes, respectively ) will now be discussed separately:

(a) *TF-G-regime* — In the TF-G-regime (self-bound Thomas-Fermi “gravitational” regime)  “gravity” is balanced by the s-wave interaction (large-$`s`$ limit), while both the kinetic energy $`H_{\mathrm{kin}}`$ ($`\mathrm{}^2`$), and the external trap potential are negligible. In this regime the monopole and quadrupole frequencies in (12) and (13) are given, using the ground state profile (9), by $`\omega _M=0.6225\omega _p`$, $`\omega _Q=0.3928\omega _p`$, where

$$\omega _p=0.5642m^{\frac{1}{4}}u^{\frac{5}{4}}N^{\frac{1}{2}}\mathrm{}^{\frac{3}{2}}a^{\frac{3}{4}}$$
(16)
is the plasma frequency evaluated at the central density. The ratio $`\omega _M/\omega _Q`$ turns out to be equal to $`\sqrt{5/2}`$. Remarkably, this is the same result holding for a *harmonically* trapped BEC in the Thomas-Fermi limit in the absence of the $`1/r`$ interaction . In the TF-G regime, the chemical potential $`\mu =(H_{\mathrm{kin}}+H_{\mathrm{ho}}+2H_{\mathrm{grav}}+2H_\mathrm{s})/N`$ has the value $`\mu =mc_s^2>>\mathrm{}\omega _p`$.

It is interesting to note that in the Thomas-Fermi limit the sum-rule expression (12) for the monopole frequency reduces to $`\omega _M^2=2|H_{\mathrm{grav}}|/Nmr^2`$ and coincides with the value derived in politropic stars using classical hydrodynamics .

In the TF-G regime the static linear response for the monopole operator $`F=_{i=1}^Nr_i^2`$ can be calculated analytically. This allows for an alternative way to estimate the monopole frequency through the ratio $`\mathrm{}^2\omega ^2=m_1/m_1`$, where the inverse-energy weighted moment $`m_1`$ is directly related to the static response . In the limit of a small harmonic perturbation $`\lambda r^2`$, the induced density fluctuation takes the analytic form

$$\delta n=\frac{\lambda }{2\pi u}\left(\frac{\mathrm{sin}(\pi r/R_0)}{r/\pi R_0}3\right)\theta (R_0r),$$
(17)
and the inverse-energy weighted moment becomes $`m_1=\delta r^2/2\lambda =(6\pi ^3(2/5)\pi ^5)m^{\frac{5}{2}}u^{\frac{7}{2}}\mathrm{}^5a^{\frac{5}{2}}`$. In terms of the plasma frequency (16), we finally find $`\omega _M=0.6181\omega _p`$, a value slightly smaller than the one derived from the ratio $`m_3/m_1`$.

(b) *G-regime* — We turn now to the asymptotic G-regime (self-bound “gravitational” regime) , in which the s-wave interaction and the external trap potential are negligible, and “gravity” is balanced by the kinetic energy $`H_{\mathrm{kin}}`$. In this case the monopole and quadrupole frequencies (12), (13) are given by $`\omega _M=0.3022\omega _p`$, $`\omega _Q=0.5057\omega _p`$, respectively, where

$$\omega _p=0.2351mu^2N^2/\mathrm{}^3$$
(18)
is the plasma frequency (2) evaluated at the central density in the same regime. The ratio between these frequencies is now $`\omega _M/\omega _Q=\sqrt{5/14}<1`$. The chemical potential $`\mu =(H_{\mathrm{kin}}+H_{\mathrm{ho}}+2H_{\mathrm{grav}}+2H_\mathrm{s})/N`$ in this regime has the value $`\mu =0.6922\mathrm{}\omega _p`$. This shows that both the monopole and quadrupole oscillation frequencies are smaller than $`\mu /\mathrm{}`$. Consequently, these oscillations are *stable* against the ejection of atoms from the condensate.

Also in the G-regime the evaluation of the static monopole response can be used to estimate the monopole frequency through the ratio $`\mathrm{}^2\omega ^2=m_1/m_1`$. The calculation yields $`\omega _M=0.2928\omega _p`$. Similarly to the the TF-G regime the monopole frequencies evaluated through the ratios $`m_3/m_1`$ and $`m_1/m_1`$ are remarkably close, confirming the validity of the method.

*Collisionless hydrodynamics* — In the Thomas-Fermi (TF-G) regime, *exact results* for the oscillation frequencies are obtainable by solving explicitly the equations of collisionless hydrodynamics (5), (6). These results allow us to improve the sum-rule estimate, which in general provides only an upper bound. The equations of motion (5) and (6) can be simplified in this regime, since the quantum pressure term, proportional to $`\mathrm{}^2`$, can be safely ignored. After linearization they yield the equation of motion for the density fluctuations $`\delta n`$

$$\frac{^2}{t^2}\delta n=\left[c_s^2\left(\delta n+\delta \mathrm{\Phi }/g\right)\right],$$
(19)
where the “local” sound velocity $`c_s(r)=\sqrt{gn(r)/m}`$ is calculated at the equilibrium density (9). The time dependence of $`\delta n`$ is chosen in the form of $`\mathrm{exp}(i\omega t)`$, and (19) is transformed, with the help of (4), into

$$\stackrel{~}{\omega }^2\stackrel{~}{}^2\xi +\stackrel{~}{}\left[\frac{\mathrm{sin}(2\pi \stackrel{~}{r})}{2\pi \stackrel{~}{r}}\stackrel{~}{}\left(\frac{\stackrel{~}{}^2\xi }{4\pi ^2}+\xi \right)\right]=0,$$
(20)
where we have introduced the ”gravitational” fluctuation variable $`\xi =\delta \mathrm{\Phi }/g`$ and used the dimensionless coordinate $`\stackrel{~}{𝐫}=𝐫/\lambda _J`$ and frequency $`\stackrel{~}{\omega }=\omega /\omega _p`$, with $`\omega _p`$ given by (16).

To solve this equation, we set $`\xi =\xi _l(\stackrel{~}{r})Y_{lm}(\vartheta ,\phi )`$, where $`Y_{lm}`$ are the usual spherical harmonics. The boundary conditions can be derived from the tailoring of the inner and outer solutions on the condensate surface, i.e. at $`\stackrel{~}{r}=\pi `$ . The conservation of the total number $`N`$ of atoms implies that the radial derivative of the potential perturbation vanishes at $`\stackrel{~}{r}\pi `$ for the monopole mode. For the modes with $`l=1,2,3,\mathrm{}`$ the function $`\xi _l`$ instead decreases as $`r^{(l+1)}`$. Hence, the boundary conditions are $`(d\xi _0/d\stackrel{~}{r})|_{\stackrel{~}{r}=\pi }=0`$ for $`l=0`$ and $`(d\xi _l/d\stackrel{~}{r})|_{\stackrel{~}{r}=\pi }=(l+1)\xi _l/\pi `$ for $`l>0`$ .

The numerical solutions of (20) for the monopole and quadrupole frequencies yield $`\omega _M=0.6168\omega _p`$, $`\omega _Q=0.392\omega _p`$ with $`\omega _p`$ as in (16). Hence, the sum-rule estimates given above, for these frequencies turn out to be *very close* (within $`1\%`$) to the exact numerical values. Furthermore, they satisfy the inequalities predicted by the general formalism of sum rules .

*Conclusions* — In this paper we have mainly dealt with the oscillations of a “gravitationally” self-bound bosonic cloud, in the framework of the (generalized) Gross-Pitaevskii approach. The Jeans wavelength (8), which is the shortest wavelength to ensure stability, has been shown to be the diameter of the self-bound cloud in the Thomas-Fermi limit \[Eq. (9)\]. We have derived here simple, analytical expressions for the frequencies of the lowest monopole and quadrupole modes, which are the most relevant collective excitations of such a system, through a sum-rule approach. We have also numerically calculated the eigenfrequencies of the linearized generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the Thomas-Fermi limit of a self-bound BEC and demonstrated that the results are very close to the sum-rule values.

The studied excitations substantially differ from those of harmonically trapped gases interacting via zero-range forces . For harmonically-trapped bosons, all the low-energy excitations (monopole, dipole, quadrupole etc.) are fixed by the oscillator frequency $`\omega _0`$ of the confining trap. By contrast, in the self-bound regimes, only the frequency of the lowest dipole mode, associated with the center of mass oscillations, is fixed by the external trap frequency $`\omega _0`$, whereas all the other low-energy excitations are dominated by the effective “plasma” frequency $`\omega _p`$ (2).

Since the repulsive short-range (s-wave) force can drastically change the size of the self-bound atomic cloud , the explicit values of $`\omega _p`$ and the corresponding monopole and quadrupole frequencies are determined by the central density and, consequently, by the regime considered \[Eqs. (18) and (16)\]. The dependence of the low-frequency collective modes on the plasma frequency resembles the oscillations of compact stars, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, where the frequency scale $`\omega _p^24\pi G\rho `$ provides the universal relation between the oscillation timescale and the mass density $`\rho `$ .

This work was supported by the German-Israeli Foundation (GIF), the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project 99–02–17076) and the State Program ”Universities of Russia” (project 015.01.01.04).


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# Cosmic Shear Statistics and Cosmology Based on observations obtained at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) which is operated by the National Research Council of Canada (NRCC), the Institut des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the University of Hawaii (UH)

## 1 Introduction

Cosmological gravitational lensing produced by large-scale structure (or cosmic shear) has been advocated as a powerful tool to probe the mass distribution in the universe (see the reviews from Mellier (1999); Bartelmann & Schneider (2001) and references therein). The first detections reported over the past year (Van Waerbeke et al. (2000); Bacon et al. (2000); Kaiser et al. (2000); Wittman et al. (2000); Maoli et al. (2001); Rhodes et al. (2001)) confirmed that the amplitude and the shape of the signal are compatible with theoretical expectations, although the data sets were not large enough to place useful constraints on cosmological models. Maoli et al. (2001) combined the results from different groups to obtain constraints on the power spectrum normalization $`\sigma _8`$ and the mean density of the universe $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$: Their result is in agreement with the cluster abundance constraints, but they were not yet able to break the degeneracy between $`\sigma _8`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$.

The physical interpretation of the weak lensing signal can be made more securely using detections of cosmic shear from different statistics and angular scales on the same data set (as in Van Waerbeke et al. (2000)). Unfortunately, their joint detection of the variance and the correlation function using the same data was not fully conclusive: the sample was too small to enable a significant detection of the cosmic shear from variances with different weighting schemes and $`2`$-points statistics over a wide range of scales. The use of independent approaches is nevertheless necessary and it is a crucial step to validate the reliability of cosmic shear, to check the consistency of the measurements against theoretical predictions and to understand the residual systematics. A relevant example is the aperture mass statistic (defined in Schneider et al. (1998)). It is a direct probe of the projected mass power spectrum, and it is not sensitive to certain type of systematics (like a uniform PSF anisotropy) which may corrupt the top-hat smoothed variance, or the shear correlation function. Even the shear correlation function can be measured in several ways, by splitting the tangential and radial modes for instance.

In this paper we report the measurement of the top-hat smoothed variance, the aperture mass, the shear correlation function, and the tangential and radial shear correlation functions on a new homogeneous data set covering an effective area of 6.5 square-degrees (deg2). The depth and the field of view are well suited for a comprehensive analysis using various statistics. We show that the amplitude of residual systematics is very low compared to the signal and discuss the consistency of these measurements against the predictions of cosmological models.

We also discuss alternative interpretations. It has been suggested recently that intrinsic alignments of galaxies caused by tidal fields could contribute to the lensing signal (Croft & Metzler (2000); Heavens, Réfrégier & Heymans (2000); Catelan et al. (2000); Crittenden et al. 2000a ; Crittenden et al. 2000b ). This type of systematic is problematic because its signature on different $`2`$-points statistics mimics the lensing effect. A mode decomposition in electric and magnetic types (or $`E`$ and $`B`$ modes), similar to what is performed for the polarization analysis in the Cosmic Microwave Background, can separate lensing from intrinsic alignment (see Crittenden et al. 2000a ; Crittenden et al. 2000b ). The $`E`$ and $`B`$ mode analysis is the subject of a forthcoming paper; the aperture mass statistic presented in this paper is a similar analysis to the $`E`$ and $`B`$ mode decomposition, and allows us to put an upper limit on the contamination of our survey by the intrinsic alignments.

This paper is organized as follow: Section 2 describes our data set, and highlights the differences in the data preprocessing from our previous analysis (Van Waerbeke et al. (2000)). The measurement of the shear from this imaging data is discussed in Section 3. Section 4 summarizes the theoretical aspects of the different quantities we measure, and lists the statistical estimators used. The results and comparison to a few standard cosmological models are shown in Section 5. In Section 6 we perform a maximum likelihood analysis of cosmological models in the $`(\mathrm{\Omega }_0,\sigma _8)`$ parameter space. The results on very small scales are shown separately in Section 7, and we conclude in Section 8.

## 2 The data set

The DESCART weak lensing project111http://terapix.iap.fr/Descart is a theoretical and observational program for cosmological weak lensing investigations. The cosmic shear survey carried out by the DESCART team uses the CFH12K data jointly with the VIRMOS survey222http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/virmos/ to produce a large homogeneous photometric sample which will eventually contain a catalog of galaxies with redshifts as well as the projected mass density over the whole field (Le Fèvre et al (2001)). In contrast to Van Waerbeke et al. (2000), the new sample presented in this work only uses I-band data taken with the CFH12K camera and is therefore more homogeneous. It is worth noting that our new CFH12K sample only uses half of the data of the previous one. A comparison of the results will also permit to check the consistency and the robustness of the cosmic shear analysis.

The CFH12K data was obtained during dark nights in May 1999, November 1999 and April 2000 following the standard observation procedure described in Van Waerbeke et al (2000). The fields are spread over 4 independent $`2\times 2`$ deg2 areas of the sky identified as F02, F10, F14 and F22. Each field is a compact mosaic of 16 CFH12K pointings named P\[n\]n=1-16. Once the survey is completed each of them will cover 4 deg2. Currently, of the final 16 deg2, only 8.38 deg2 is available for the analysis – most of the pointings are located in three different fields (F02, F10, F14 listed in Table 1). This total field of view gets significantly reduced by the masking and selection procedures described below. A summary of the data set characteristics are listed in Table 1.

The data reduction was done at the TERAPIX data center333http://terapix.iap.fr. More than 1.5 Tbytes of data were processed in order to produce the final stacked images. The reduction procedure is the same as in Van Waerbeke et al. (2000), so we refer to this paper for the details. However, in order to improve the image quality prior to correction for the PSF anisotropy and to get a better signal-to-noise ratio on a larger angular scale than in our previous work, all CFH12K images were co-added after astrometric corrections.

The astrometric calibration and the co-addition were done using the MSCRED package in IRAF. Some tasks have been modified in order to allow a fully automatic usage of the package. For each pointing, we first started with the images in the I band. An astrometric solution was first found for one set of exposures in the dither sequence using the USNO-A 2.0 as reference, which provides the position of $`\times 10^8`$ sources with an RMS accuracy of 0.3 arcsec. The astrometric solution was then transferred to the other exposures in the sequence. All object catalogs were obtained using SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts (1996))444ftp://ftp.iap.fr/pub/from\_users/bertin/sextractor/ and a linear correction to the world coordinate system was computed with respect to the initial set. Finally, all images were resampled using a bi-cubic interpolation and then stacked together.

At this stage, each stacked image was inspected by eye and all areas which may potentially influence the later lensing analysis signal were masked (see Van Waerbeke et al. (2000) and Maoli et al. (2001)). Since we adopted conservative masks, this process had a dramatic impact on the field of view: we lost 20% of the total area and ended up with a usable area of 6.5 deg2.

The photometric calibrations were done using standard stars from the Landolt’s catalog (Landolt (1992)) covering a broad sample of magnitude and colors. A full description of the photometric procedure is beyond the scope of this work and will be discussed elsewhere (Le Fèvre et al, in preparation). In summary, we used the SA110 and SA101 star fields to measure the zero-points and color equations of each run. From these calibrations, we produced the magnitude histograms of each field in order to find out the cut off and a rough limiting magnitude. Although few fields have exposure time significantly larger than 1 hour, the depth of the sample is reasonably stable from field to field and reaches $`I_{AB}=24.5`$. Up to this magnitude, 1.2 million galaxies were detected over the total area of 8.4 deg2.

## 3 Shear measurements

### 3.1 Shape measurement

The details of our shape measurement procedure and Point Spread Function (hereafter PSF) correction have been extensively described in two previous papers (Van Waerbeke et al. (2000); Maoli et al. (2001)), and tested against numerical simulations (Erben et al. (2001)). Therefore we will not reproduce these details here, but only give a short overview of the procedure. The shape measurement pipeline uses the IMCAT software (Kaiser et al. (1995))555kindly made available by Nick Kaiser at http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/$``$kaiser/ combined with the SExtractor package. The different steps in the procedure are as follows:

* Object detection with Sextractor.
* The shape parameters defined in Kaiser et al. (1995) are calculated using IMCAT.
* Stars are identified in the stellar branch of the size-magnitude diagram. Stars brighter than 1 magnitude below the saturation level are excluded. Objects smaller than the PSF size are discarded as galaxy candidates (because a shape correction below the PSF size is meaningless).
* The PSF is measured from the stars, and interpolated continuously over the CCD’s using a third order polynomial.
* Galaxy shapes are corrected using the scheme developed in Kaiser et al. (1995), modified and adapted to our problem as described in Erben et al. (2001). The shape correction is a two-step process: first we remove the anisotropic contribution of the PSF, then the isotropic contribution is suppressed according to Luppino & Kaiser (1997).
* A weight $`w`$ is calculated for each galaxy, which depends on the level of noise in the shape correction (see Eq.(7) in Van Waerbeke et al. (2000)).
* For each galaxy pair with members closer than 15 pixels (3 arcsec), one member is removed, in order to avoid the problem of overlapping isophotes reported in Van Waerbeke et al. (2000).
* Each CCD is visualized by eye, and the bad areas are masked (star spikes and ghost images, blank lines or columns, fringe residuals). After the whole process of cleaning and object selection, 420,000 galaxies were effectively used for the weak lensing analysis.

The raw ellipticity $`𝐞`$ of a galaxy is measured from the second moments $`I_{ij}`$ of the surface brightness $`f(\theta )`$:

$$𝐞=(\frac{I_{11}I_{22}}{Tr(I)};\frac{2I_{12}}{Tr(I)}),I_{ij}=\mathrm{d}^2\theta W(\theta )\theta _i\theta _jf(\theta ).$$
(1)
The window function $`W(\theta )`$ suppresses the noise at large distances from the object center. The procedure described above gives a corrected galaxy ellipticity $`𝐞^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ calculated from the $`𝐞`$’s. According to Kaiser et al. (1995), the ensemble average of $`𝐞^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ is equal to the shear $`\gamma `$ at the galaxy location. Figure 1 shows the level of systematics in $`𝐞^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ with and without the anisotropic PSF correction. After the PSF correction, the average galaxy ellipticity is bounded between $`0.005`$ and $`0.005`$, and the variance of the residual systematics is less than $`10^5`$. As we shall see later this is much less than the measured signal. As quoted in Van Waerbeke et al. (2000), the galaxy ellipticities show a small offset $`(0.008,0.003)`$, which has been corrected in this figure (the origin of this offset is still unclear). However it is worth to mention that the aperture mass is not sensitive to this offset.

## 4 Statistical measures of shear correlations

### 4.1 Theory

We summarize the different statistics we shall measure, and how they depend on cosmological models. We concentrate on 2-points statistics and variances, since higher order moments are more difficult to measure, and will be addressed in a forthcoming paper.

Let us assume a source redshift distribution parameterized as:

$$n(z_s)=\frac{\beta }{z_0\mathrm{\Gamma }\left(\frac{1+\alpha }{\beta }\right)}\left(\frac{z_s}{z_0}\right)^\alpha \mathrm{exp}\left[\left(\frac{z_s}{z_0}\right)^\beta \right],$$
(2)
where the parameters $`(z_0,\alpha ,\beta )=(0.8,2,1.5)`$, which is consistent with a limiting magnitude $`I_{AB}=24.5`$ given by Cohen et al. (2000) (it corresponds to a mean redshift of $`1.2`$). We define the power spectrum of the convergence as (following the notation in Schneider et al. (1998)):

$`P_\kappa (k)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{9}{4}}\mathrm{\Omega }_0^2{\displaystyle _0^{w_H}}{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{d}w}{a^2(w)}}P_{3D}({\displaystyle \frac{k}{f_K(w)}};w)\times `$ (3)
$`{\displaystyle _w^{w_H}}dw^{}n(w^{}){\displaystyle \frac{f_K(w^{}w)}{f_K(w^{})}},`$
where $`f_K(w)`$ is the comoving angular diameter distance out to a distance $`w`$ ($`w_H`$ is the horizon distance), and $`n(w(z))`$ is the redshift distribution of the sources given in Eq.(2). $`P_{3D}(k)`$ is the non-linear mass power spectrum, and $`k`$ is the 2-dimensional wave vector perpendicular to the line-of-sight. For a top-hat smoothing window of radius $`\theta _c`$, the variance is:

$$\gamma ^2=\frac{2}{\pi \theta _c^2}_0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{\mathrm{d}k}{k}P_\kappa (k)[J_1(k\theta _c)]^2,$$
(4)
where $`J_1`$ is the first Bessel function of the first kind.
The aperture mass $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ was introduced in Kaiser et al. (1994):

$$M_{\mathrm{ap}}=_{\theta <\theta _c}\mathrm{d}^2\theta \kappa (\theta )U(\theta ),$$
(5)
where $`\kappa (\theta )`$ is the convergence field, and $`U(\theta )`$ is a compensated filter (i.e. with zero mean). Schneider et al. (1998) applied this statistic to the cosmic shear measurements. They showed that the aperture mass variance is related to the convergence power spectrum by:

$$M_{\mathrm{ap}}^2=\frac{288}{\pi \theta _c^4}_0^{\mathrm{}}\frac{\mathrm{d}k}{k^3}P_\kappa (k)[J_4(k\theta _c)]^2.$$
(6)
$`M_{\mathrm{ap}}^2`$ can be calculated directly from the shear $`\gamma `$ without the need for a mass reconstruction.
For each galaxy, we define the tangential and radial shear components ($`\gamma _t`$ and $`\gamma _r`$) with respect to the center of the aperture:

$`\gamma _t`$ $`=`$ $`\gamma _1\mathrm{cos}(2\varphi )\gamma _2\mathrm{sin}(2\varphi )`$
$`\gamma _r`$ $`=`$ $`\gamma _2\mathrm{cos}(2\varphi )+\gamma _1\mathrm{sin}(2\varphi ),`$ (7)
where $`\varphi `$ is the position angle between the x-axis and the line connecting the aperture center to the galaxy. It is then easy to show that the aperture mass is related to the tangential shear by:

$$M_{\mathrm{ap}}=_{\theta <\theta _c}\mathrm{d}^2\theta \gamma _t(\theta )Q(\theta ),$$
(8)
where the filter $`Q(\theta )`$ is given from $`U(\theta )`$:

$$Q(\theta )=\frac{2}{\theta ^2}_0^\theta d\theta ^{}\theta ^{}U(\theta ^{})U(\theta )$$
(9)
If $`\gamma _t`$ is replaced by $`\gamma _r`$ in Eq.(8), then the lensing signal vanishes, due to the curl-free property of the shear field (Kaiser et al. (1994))666Curl modes are produced by non-linear lensing effects, but these are very small (Bernardeau et al. (1997)).. This remarkable property constitutes a test of the lensing origin of the signal. The change from $`\gamma _t`$ to $`\gamma _r`$ can simply be accomplished just by rotating the galaxies by $`45`$ degrees in the aperture (i.e. changing a curl-free field to a pure curl field). Hereafter we call the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistic measured with the 45 degrees rotated galaxies the $`R`$-mode ($`R`$ for radial mode), and $`M_{}^2`$ the corresponding variance. It is interesting to note that the $`R`$-mode is not expected to vanish if the measured signal is due to intrinsic alignments of galaxies (Crittenden et al. 2000b ). Therefore it can be used to constrain the amount of residual systematics as well as the degree of the intrinsic alignment of galaxies.
From the shear $`\gamma `$ and its projections defined in Eq.(7) we can also define various galaxy pairwise correlation functions related to the convergence power spectrum. Note that the tangential and radial shear projections in what follows are performed using the relative location vector of the pair members, not from an aperture center. The following correlation functions can be defined (Miralda-Escudé (1991); Kaiser (1992)):

$$\gamma \gamma _\theta =\frac{1}{2\pi }_0^{\mathrm{}}dkP_\kappa (k)J_0(k\theta ),$$
(10)
$$\gamma _t\gamma _t_\theta =\frac{1}{2\pi }_0^{\mathrm{}}dkP_\kappa (k)[J_0(k\theta )+J_4(k\theta )],$$
(11)
$$\gamma _r\gamma _r_\theta =\frac{1}{2\pi }_0^{\mathrm{}}dkP_\kappa (k)[J_0(k\theta )J_4(k\theta )],$$
(12)
where $`\theta `$ is the pair separation angle. The cross-correlation $`\gamma _t\gamma _r_\theta `$ is expected to vanish for parity reasons (there is no preferred orientation on average).

It is easy to see that the Eqs.(4,6,10,11,12) are different ways to measure the same quantity, that is the convergence power spectrum $`P_\kappa (k)`$. Ultimately the goal is to deproject $`P_\kappa (k)`$ in order to reconstruct the 3D mass power spectrum from Eq.(3), but this is beyond the scope of this paper. Here we restrict our analysis to a joint detection of these statistics, and show that they are consistent with the gravitational lensing hypothesis. We will also examine the constraints on the power spectrum normalization $`\sigma _8`$ and the mean density of the universe $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$.

### 4.2 Estimators

Let us now define the estimators we used to measure the quantities given in Eqs.(4,6,10,11,12).

The variance of the shear is simply obtained by a cell averaging of the squared shear $`\gamma ^2(\theta _i)`$ over the cell index $`i`$. An unbiased estimate of the squared shear for the cell $`i`$ is:

$$E[\gamma ^2(\theta _i)]=\frac{{\displaystyle \underset{\alpha =1}{\overset{2}{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{kl}{\overset{N_i}{}}}w_kw_le_\alpha ^{\mathrm{gal}}(\theta _k)e_\alpha ^{\mathrm{gal}}(\theta _l)}{{\displaystyle \underset{kl}{\overset{N_i}{}}}w_kw_l},$$
(13)
where $`w_k`$ is the weight for the galaxy $`k`$, and $`N_i`$ is the number of galaxies in the cell $`i`$. The cell averaging over the survey is then an unbiased estimate of the shear variance $`\gamma ^2`$. However, due to the presence of masked areas (mentioned in Section 4.1), some cells may have a very low number of galaxies compared to others. Instead of applying an arbitrary sharp cut off on the fraction of the apertures filled with masks (as it was in previous works) we decided to keep all the cells, and to weight each of them with the squared sum of the galaxy weights located in the cell. The cell averaging is now defined as:

$$E[\gamma ^2]=\frac{{\displaystyle \underset{\mathrm{cells}}{}}\left[E[\gamma ^2(\theta _i)]\left({\displaystyle \underset{k=1}{\overset{N_i}{}}}w_k\right)^2\right]}{{\displaystyle \underset{\mathrm{cells}}{}}\left[\left({\displaystyle \underset{k=1}{\overset{N_i}{}}}w_k\right)^2\right]},$$
(14)
where $`i`$ identifies the cell. One potential problem with this procedure is that the sum of the weights is related to the number of objects in the aperture, which is affected by magnification bias, and therefore correlated with the shear signal measured in the same aperture. Fortunately the first non-vanishing contribution of this weighting scheme is a third order effect (of order $`1\%`$), and is therefore negligible777Moreover the slope of number counts in our I-band is $`0.3`$, which makes the magnification effect very small (see Moessner, et al. (1998) for an application of the effect to the angular correlation function).. The advantage is that we can use all cells without wondering about their filling factor, and it naturaly down-weights the cells which contain a large fraction of poorly determined galaxy ellipticities. The weighting scheme Eq.(14) has been tested against numerical simulation, using a simulated survey with exactly the same survey geometry as our data: it gave unbiased measures of the lensing signal applied to the galaxies.

The $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistic is calculated from a similar estimator, although the smoothing window is no longer a top-hat but the $`Q`$ function defined in Eq.(9). An unbiased estimate of $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}^2(\theta _i)`$ in the cell $`i`$ is:

$$E[M_{\mathrm{ap}}^2(\theta _i)]=\frac{{\displaystyle \underset{kl}{\overset{N_i}{}}}w_kw_le_t^{\mathrm{gal}}(\theta _k)e_t^{\mathrm{gal}}(\theta _l)Q(\theta _k)Q(\theta _l)}{{\displaystyle \underset{kl}{\overset{N}{}}}w_kw_l},$$
(15)
where $`e_t^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ is the tangential galaxy ellipticity, and $`Q`$ is given by (see Schneider et al. (1998)):

$$Q(\theta )=\frac{6}{\pi }\left(\frac{\theta }{\theta _c}\right)^2\left[1\left(\frac{\theta }{\theta _c}\right)^2\right].$$
(16)
The estimation of $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}^2`$ over the survey is then given by the same expression as in Eq.(14), with $`E[\gamma ^2(\theta _i)]`$ replaced by $`E[M_{\mathrm{ap}}^2(\theta _i)]`$. We emphasize that the this filter probes effective scales $`\theta _c/5`$, and not $`\theta _c`$ (see Figure 2 in Schneider et al. (1998)). Therefore we have to be careful when comparing the signal at different scales between different estimators.

The shear correlation function $`\gamma \gamma _\theta `$ at separation $`\theta `$ is obtained by identifying all the pairs of galaxies falling in the separation interval $`[\theta d\theta ,\theta +d\theta ]`$, and calculating the pairwise shear correlation:

$$E[\gamma \gamma ;\theta ]=\underset{\alpha =1}{\overset{2}{}}\frac{{\displaystyle \underset{pairs}{}}w_kw_le_\alpha ^{\mathrm{gal}}(\theta _k)e_\alpha ^{\mathrm{gal}}(\theta _l)}{{\displaystyle \underset{pairs}{}}w_kw_l}.$$
(17)
The tangential and radial correlation functions $`\gamma _t\gamma _t_\theta `$ and $`\gamma _r\gamma _r_\theta `$ are measured also from Eq.(17) by replacing $`𝐞^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ with $`e_t^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ and $`e_r^{\mathrm{gal}}`$ respectively and dropping the sum over $`\alpha `$. It is worth noting that the estimators given here are independent of the angular correlation properties of the source galaxies.

## 5 Results and comparison to cosmological models

In this section we present our measurements of the 2-point correlations of the shear using the different estimators defined above. Figures 2 to 7 show the results for the different estimators: the variance in Figure 2, the mass aperture statistic in Figure 3, the shear correlation function in Figure 4, the radial and tangential shear correlations in Figure 5, and the cross-correlation of the radial and tangential shear in Figure 7. Along with the measurements we show the predictions of three cosmological models which are representative of an open model, a flat model with cosmological constant, and an Einstein-de Sitter model. The amplitude of mass fluctuations in these models is normalized to the abundance of galaxy clusters. The three models are characterized by the values of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0,\mathrm{\Lambda }`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ as follows:

* short-dashed line: $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0.3`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$, $`\sigma _8=0.9`$
* solid line: $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=0.3`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0.7`$, $`\sigma _8=0.9`$
* long-dashed line: $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=1`$, $`\mathrm{\Lambda }=0`$, $`\sigma _8=0.6`$

The power spectrum is taken to be a cold dark matter (CDM) power spectrum with shape parameter $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0.21`$. The predictions for shear correlations are computed using the non-linear evolution of the power spectrum using the Peacock & Dodds (1996) fitting formula. The source redshift distribution follows Eq.(2) with $`(z_0,\alpha ,\beta )=(0.8,2,1.5)`$, which corresponds to a mean redshift of 1.2.

It is reassuring that the different statistics agree with each other in their comparison with the model predictions. These statistics weight the data in different ways and are susceptible to different kinds of systematic errors. The consistency of all the 2-point estimators suggests that the level of systematics in the data is low compared to the signal. A further test for systematics is provided by measuring the cross-correlation function $`\gamma _t\gamma _r_\theta `$, which should be zero for a signal due to gravitational lensing. Figure 7 shows the measured cross-correlation function, which is indeed consistent with zero on all scales. The figure also shows the cross-correlation obtained when the anisotropic contamination of the PSF is not corrected – clearly such a correction is crucial in measuring the lensing signal.

The lower panel of Figure 3 shows the R-mode of the mass aperture statistic. As this statistic uses a compensated filter, the scale beyond which the measured R-mode is consistent with zero ($`5^{}`$ on the plot) corresponds to an effective angular scale $`\theta 1^{}`$. This places an upper limit on measured shear correlations due to the intrinsic alignment of galaxies, given the redshift distribution of the sources. The vanishing of $`M_{}^2`$ for effective angular scales larger than $`1^{}`$ strongly supports our conclusion that the level of residual systematics is low: this is a very hard test to pass, as it means that the signal is produced by a pure scalar field, which need not be the case for systematics. We checked that $`M_{}^2`$ is Gaussian distributed with a zero average all over the survey, as what we would expect from a pure noise realisation. For scales below $`5^{}`$ on the plot, the $`R`$-mode is not consistent with zero at the 2-$`\sigma `$ level. Since the cross-correlation $`\gamma _t\gamma _r_\theta `$ is consistent with zero at this scale, the source of the $`R`$-mode is probably not a residual systematic. It might be due to the effect of intrinsic alignments (Crittenden et al. 2000b ), but it is difficult to be sure without further tests.

The error bars shown in Figures 2 to 7 are calculated from a measurement of the different statistics in $`200`$ realizations of the data set, with randomized orientations of the galaxies. We measured the sample variance from ray-tracing simulations (Jain et al. (2000)) and find that it is smaller than $`20\%`$ of the noise error bars shown here (see Van Waerbeke et al. (1999) where the sample variance has been calculated for surveys with similar geometry), therefore we have not included it in our figures. Figure 6 shows an estimate of the sample variance for the r.m.s. shear using a compact $`6.5`$ sq. degree ray-tracing simulation (Jain et al. (2000)). This figure shows that the sample variance is about order of magnitude smaller than the signal for the range of scales of interest. Hence our errors are not dominated by sample variance, as was the case in the first detections of cosmic shear. As the probed angular scales approach the size of the fields (which is $`30^{}`$ with the CFH12K camera) the sample variance becomes larger. This could be responsible for the small fluctuations in the measured correlations in Figures 4 and 5 for scales larger than $`24^{}`$.

## 6 Cosmological constraints

As noted elsewhere (e.g. Bernardeau et al. (1997); Jain & Seljak (1997)), the parameters that dominate the 2-point shear statistics are the power spectrum normalization $`\sigma _8`$ and the mean density $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$. We investigate below how the statistics measured in Figures 2 to 5 constrain these parameters. Our parameter estimates below rely on some simplifying assumptions; a more detailed analysis over a wider space of parameters will be presented elsewhere.

We assume that the data follow Gaussian statistics and neglect sample variance since it is a very small contributor to the noise for our survey, as discussed above. We compute the likelihood function $``$:

$$=\frac{1}{(2\pi )^{n/2}\left|𝐒\right|^{1/2}}\mathrm{exp}\left[\frac{1}{2}\left(𝐝𝐬\right)^T𝐒^1\left(𝐝𝐬\right)\right],$$
(18)
where $`𝐝`$ and $`𝐬`$ are the data and model vectors respectively, and $`𝐒:=\left(𝐝𝐬\right)^T\left(𝐝𝐬\right)`$ is the noise correlation matrix. $`𝐒`$ was computed for the different statistics from 200 random realizations of the survey, therefore effects associated with the survey geometry are included in our noise matrix. The model $`𝐬`$ was computed for a grid of cosmological models which covers $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0[0,1]`$ and $`\sigma _8[0.2,1.8]`$ with a zero cosmological constant. The prior is chosen to be flat over this grid, and zero outside. We also fixed $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0.21`$ and used the redshift distribution of Eq.(2). We discuss below the impact of this choice of priors.

Figure 3 (bottom panel) shows that for effective scales smaller than $`1^{}`$ there is a non-vanishing R-mode which could come either from a residual systematic, or from an intrinsic alignment effect. Therefore it is safer to exclude this part from the likelihood calculation. Thus for the top-hat variance, we excluded the point at $`1^{}`$, for the correlation functions the points below $`2^{}`$, and for the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistic the points below $`5^{}`$. For the correlation function, we also excluded the points at scales larger than $`20^{}`$ because of the small fluctuations in the measured correlations. The constraints on the cosmological parameters are not significantly affected whether these large scale points are excluded or not.

Figures 8 to 12 show the $`(\mathrm{\Omega }_0,\sigma _8)`$ constraints for each of the statistics shown in Figures 2 to 5. The contours show the $`99.9\%`$, $`95.0\%`$ and $`68.0\%`$ confidence levels. The agreement between the contours is excellent, though the $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ statistic and the radial correlation function do not give as tight constraints as the other statistics. The correlation function measurements below $`2^{}`$ may be considered by using error bars that include a possible systematic bias: this is equivalent to adding a systematic covariance matrix $`𝐒^{sys}`$ to the noise covariance $`𝐒`$ matrix in Eq.(18). The new contours computed with the enlarged error bars888The enlarged error bars were computed from the estimation of our $`B`$-mode analysis which will be presented elsewhere are shown in Figure 13. The maximum of the likelihood in the variance and correlation function likelihood plots is at $`\sigma _80.9`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_00.3`$. Note that compared to a similar plot in Maoli et al. (2001) (Figure 8), here the contours are narrower, and are obtained from a homogeneous data set. Moreover, the degeneracy between $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ is broken.

The partial breaking of degeneracy between $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ was expected from the fully non-linear calculation of shear correlations (Jain & Seljak (1997)). In the non-linear regime the dependence of the $`2`$-points statistics on $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ becomes sensitive to angular scale. For example, as shown in Jain & Seljak (1997), the shear r.m.s. measures $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.5}`$ on scale between $`2^{}5^{}`$, and $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.8}`$ on scales $`\stackrel{>}{}10^{}`$. Therefore a low $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ universe should see a net decrease of shear power at large scale compared to a $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0=1`$ universe (for a given shape of the power spectrum), as evident in Figure 2. Note that the aperture mass $`M_{\mathrm{ap}}`$ is still degenerate with $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ (Figure 9) because it probes effective scales up to $`2.6^{}`$ only, which is not enough to break the degeneracy.

It seems that the aperture mass (Figure 9) gives a slightly larger $`\sigma _8`$ for a large $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ compared to the other statistics, while they all agree for $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0<0.7`$. This could be an indication for a low $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ Universe, however in practice, the probability contours for the different statistics cannot be combined in a straightforward way because they are largely redundant. The best strategy here is to concentrate on one particular statistic. We expect the best constraints from the shear correlation function (since it contains all the information by definition), and therefore base our parameter estimates on the likelihood contours obtained from it. The contours in the $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ plane in Figure 13 closely follow the curve $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.6}`$. This allows us to obtain the following measurement of $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.6}`$ (from this figure alone):

$$\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.6}=0.43_{0.05(0.07)}^{+0.04(0.06)},$$
(19)
where the uncertainties correspond to the $`95\%`$ ($`99.9\%`$) confidence levels. The result in equation (19) is fairly robust against different values of $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$.

If we fix $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=0.21`$, we can constrain the two parameters separately; we get, at the $`95\%`$ confidence level: $`0.2<\mathrm{\Omega }_0<0.5`$ and $`0.6<\sigma _8<1.1`$ for open models and $`\sigma _8>0.65`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0<0.4`$ for flat ($`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$-CDM) models. This result however is sensitive to the prior choosen for $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$. In particular, if we use the relation $`\mathrm{\Gamma }=\mathrm{\Omega }_0h`$ for a cold dark matter model, then some extreme combinations of $`\sigma _8`$, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ cannot be ruled out from lensing alone. The degeneracy between $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ is broken only if we take $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ to lie in a reasonable interval. Such interval can be motivated by galaxy surveys for instance, which give $`0.19<\mathrm{\Gamma }<0.37`$ at $`68\%`$ confidence level for the APM (Eisentsein & Zaldarriaga (2001)). Therefore the separate constraints on $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$ given above require some prior assumptions and must be taken with precaution, while the constraint on $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.6}`$ is much more robust. The redshift distribution of the sources is likely to be the main source of uncertainty in our estimate of equation (19); a rough guide is given by the scaling $`\sigma _8\mathrm{\Omega }_0^{0.6}z_0^{0.5}`$ (Jain & Seljak (1997)). A more detailed analysis of parameter estimation is left for a later study.

## 7 Small scale signal

Our correlation function measurements extend to much smaller scales than shown in the figures above. The limit is set only by the fact that we reject one member of all pairs closer than $`3`$ arcsec. Figures 14 and 15 show the tangential, radial and total shear correlation functions. The pair separation bins are much smaller than in Figures 4 and 5, which explains why the error bars are larger. Even at the smallest scales, the shear correlation function $`\gamma \gamma _\theta `$ is consistent with the model predictions.

The surprising result for the small scale correlations is the behavior of the tangential and radial shear correlation functions: at scales smaller than $`5^{\prime \prime }`$ we find an increased amplitude for $`\gamma _t\gamma _t_\theta `$, and a $`\mathrm{𝑛𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒}`$ $`\gamma _r\gamma _r_\theta `$. Though surprinsing, a negative $`\gamma _r\gamma _r_\theta `$ is not unphysical: for instance in Kaiser (1992) (Table 1) a shallow mass power spectrum ($`n>1`$) implies such an effect. In terms of halo mass profile, it corresponds to a projected profile steeper than $`1.5`$. However, regardless of the nature of this signal, it is important to note that this is a very small scale effect which has no effect on the statistics discussed in preceding sections. The contribution of the increased signal from $`\gamma _t\gamma _t_\theta `$ to the variance at $`1^{}`$ is less than $`1\%`$; moreover since $`\gamma \gamma _\theta `$ is not affected at all, the variance is also unaffected. As an explicit test, we checked that by removing one member of the pairs closer than $`7^{\prime \prime }`$ the measured signal in Figures 2,3,4,5 is unchanged. In a similar cosmic shear analysis using the Red-sequence Cluster Survey (Gladders & Yee (2000)) another group finds a similar small scale behavior, though at lower statistical significance (H. Hoekstra, private communication).

The cross-correlation $`\gamma _t\gamma _r_\theta `$ vanishes down to $`3^{\prime \prime }`$, therefore no obvious systematic is responsible for this effect. The effect is unlikely to be caused by overlapping isophotes, or close neighbors effects because $`\gamma _t_\theta ^2<<\gamma _t\gamma _t_\theta `$: if it were a close neighbor alignment we would expect that $`\gamma _t_\theta `$ (the average tangential ellipticity for all the pair members in each pair separation bin $`\theta `$) carries all of the signal, which is not the case. In fact we find $`\gamma _t_\theta ^20.2\gamma _t\gamma _t_\theta `$, which means that close neighbor effect can hardly exceed $`20\%`$ of the small scale signal.

A forthcoming paper using the same data set will be devoted to the measurement of $`E`$ and $`B`$ modes (as defined in Crittenden et al. 2000a ), and we will study this small scale signal in more detail. At this stage of the analysis we cannot exclude a possible residual systematic. However, a preliminary analysis shows that the $`B`$ mode down to $`3^{\prime \prime }`$ is much smaller than the $`E`$ mode, which is hard to have if the signal comes from residual systematics.

## 8 Conclusion

Using $`6.5`$ sq. deg. of the VIRMOS survey in progress at the CFHT, we were able to measure various $`2`$-points correlation statistics of cosmic shear. The top-hat variance, the aperture mass statistic and different shear correlation functions gave consistent results over a wide range of scales. Further tests of the lensing origin of the signal exploiting the scalar nature of the gravitational potential were also convincingly verified. We demonstrated that the level of systematics, in particular the intrinsic alignment of galaxies, is likely to be small, and does not contribute to the signal for scales larger than $`1^{}`$. We believe that these results demonstrate the significance of our detection of shear correlations due to gravitational lensing. The quality of the data and the adequate size of our survey allow us to constrain cosmological models of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe.

We have obtained tight constraints on the cosmological parameters $`\mathrm{\Omega }_0`$ and $`\sigma _8`$. These results suggest that high precision measurements can be made with larger surveys on a much larger set of cosmological parameters. The final stage of the VIRMOS survey is to accomplish $`16`$ sq. deg. in patches of $`4`$ sq. deg., $`4`$ colors each, thus allowing the possibility to use the photometric redshifts of the galaxies. The use of photometric redshift will not only improve the scientific interpretation of cosmic shear (e.g. doing tomography as in Hu (1999)) but will be useful to measure the intrinsic alignment itself (which can be used to constrain galaxy formation models for instance).

The constraints obtained so far are within a framework of structure formation through gravitational instability with Gaussian initial conditions and Cold Dark Matter. As the amount of observations increases and the measurement quality improves, the first hints of the shape of the power spectrum will be soon available. It opens new means of really testing the formation mechanisms of the large-scale structure and the cosmological parameters beyond the standard model (Uzan & Bernardeau (2000)).

Over the last two years, we have seen the transition from the detection of the weak lensing signal to the first measurements of cosmological parameters from it. The agreement between theoretical predictions and observational results with such a high precision indicates that the measurement of cosmic shear statistics is becoming a mature cosmological tool. Many surveys are under way or scheduled for the next 5 years. They will use larger panoramic cameras than the CFH12K, and will cover solid angles 10 to 100 times wider than this work. The results of this work give us confidence that cosmic shear statistics will provide valuable measurements of cosmological parameters, probe the biasing of mass/light, produce maps of the dark matter distribution and reconstruct its power spectrum.

###### Acknowledgements.

We are grateful to Stéphane Colombi, Ue-Li Pen, Dmitri Pogosyan, Simon Prunet, Istvan Szapudi and Simon White for useful discussions related to statistics. We thank Henk Hoekstra for sharing his results prior to publication. This work was supported by the TMR Network “Gravitational Lensing: New Constraints on Cosmology and the Distribution of Dark Matter” of the EC under contract No. ERBFMRX-CT97-0172, and a PROCOPE grant No. 9723878 by the DAAD and the A.P.A.P.E. We thank the TERAPIX data center for providing its facilities for the data reduction of CFH12K images.


text:
# Using Gravitational Lensing to study HI clouds at high redshift

## 1 Introduction

Quasar spectra reveal a variety of absorption features superposed on the continuum emission, indicating the existence of HI clouds with a wide range of neutral hydrogen column densities distributed at different redshift. Among these the damped Lyman- clouds (DLA) which have HI column densities in the range $`2\times 10^{20}N_{\mathrm{HI}}(\mathrm{cm}^2)10^{22}`$ are the main repository of neutral hydrogen at high redshift $`(z3)`$. It has been speculated that these systems are the progenitor of present day spiral galaxies (for details see Wolfe 1995 and references therein).

In addition to the column densities, absorption studies have determined the detailed velocity structure of the DLAs (Prochaska & Wolfe 1998), and different models have been proposed for DLAs in order to explain these observations. The DLAs have been modeled as thick rotating disks with rotation velocities in the range $`200\text{}300\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ (Prochaska & Wolfe 1998). Another model proposes that DLAs are made up of gaseous protogalactic clumps undergoing in-fall (Haehnelt, Steinmetz & Rauch 1997).

Despite very detailed absorption studies, the exact nature of the DLAs is still not fully understood. A part of the uncertainty arises from the fact that absorption studies give information along a single line of sight through a DLA, and this cannot be used to determine the total HI content or the physical extent of these systems. In a few cases there exist multiple lensed images of a quasar from which we can infer that the angular size of the DLAs is $`3^{\prime \prime }`$ (Smette 1995 and reference therein). Observations of DLAs in HI absorption and deep-imaging of the DLA fields in the optical band have also been used to infer the size of DLAs (Lane et al. 2000; Fynbo et al. 2000; Fynbo et al. 1999; Moller et al. 1998; Warren & Moller 1996; Moller & Warren 1993; Briggs et al. 1989; Briggs 1988), but such observations only give lower limits on the physical size of DLAs.

In a few cases it has been possible to use deep optical imaging and spectroscopy to identify counterparts (in emission) of the systems that produce the damped Lyman- lines. While most of these observations have been performed on low redshift DLA fields (see e.g. Brun et al. 1997 and references therein) there also exist several cases of positive detection of DLAs at high redshift (Kulkarni et al. 2000; Djorgovski et al. 1996; Fynbo et al. 2000; Fynbo et al. 1999; Moller et al. 1998; Warren & Moller 1996; Moller & Warren 1993).

Here we consider the possibility of detecting HI emission from hydrogen clouds whose column densities are sufficiently high to qualify as DLAs, if they were located along the line of sight to quasars. This allows the properties of the HI clouds to be inferred from the observed properties of DLAs. These observations will also enable the total HI content of the DLAs to be determined. Unfortunately, the very small angular extent of the DLAs leads us to expect HI flux from these clouds to be below the detection threshold of existing radio telescopes.

Optical observations of background galaxies (typically $`\stackrel{<}{}1^{\prime \prime }`$) lensed by cluster of galaxies reveal arc-like images which could be as large as $`20^{\prime \prime }`$ (see e.g. Schneider et al.  1992). Detailed models have been constructed for these cluster lenses; and it is possible to predict the magnification of the image of HI clouds if they were located at different positions behind the cluster. The lensing of HI clouds by clusters of galaxies holds the possibility of magnifying them sufficiently, rendering the HI emission detectable by presently available radio telescopes. In this paper we investigate the possibility of detecting the redshifted $`1420\mathrm{MHz}`$ HI emission from lensed HI clouds by carrying out deep radio observations centered on known cluster lenses.

Our investigation is largely motivated by the fact that the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT; G. Swarup et al. 1991) which has several bands in the frequency range $`150\text{}1420\mathrm{MHz}`$ has recently started functioning. In this paper we consider frequency bands of width $`16\mathrm{MHz}`$ centered at $`233,\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}320}`$ and $`620\mathrm{MHz}`$. These correspond to the redshifted $`1420\mathrm{MHz}`$ emission from HI at $`z1.3,\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}3.4}`$ and $`5.1`$ respectively. Most of the discussion in this paper refers to $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$ which we have used as the fiducial frequency. In addition we use a spatially flat $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m=1`$ model, and a Hubble parameter $`H_0=100h\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$. We shall use $`h=0.5`$ whenever a numerical result is reported.

The absorption studies of DLAs have yielded a maximum HI column density of $`\stackrel{<}{}10^{22}`$ (Lanzetta, Wolfe & Turnshek 1995). It is possible that clouds with higher column densities contain larger amount of dust that obscures the background quasar, in which case these clouds would not be detected in absorption (Fall & Pei 1995). This possibility has been taken into account while analyzing the possibility of detecting the HI emission by setting the maximum HI column density of the clouds to a value which is a few times larger than the maximum HI column densities observed in absorption.

In § 2 we review the observed properties of HI clouds which are relevant for our analysis and describe two simple models for the HI cloud mass and flux distribution. In § 3 we briefly discuss a few relevant features of gravitational lensing by a cluster of galaxies and outline the method of our calculation. We present our results in §4 and in §5 we give our conclusions.

## 2 Mass and flux distribution of HI clouds

We begin this section with a brief discussion of some of the observational features of DLAs which we use to determine the properties of the distribution of HI clouds.

Absorption studies directly give the velocity dispersion $`\mathrm{\Delta }V`$ of the HI along lines of sight through DLAs and these observations indicate rotational velocities in the range $`200\text{}250\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ (Prochaska & Wolfe 1998). This along with the HI column density can be used to calculate the specific intensity of the redshifted $`1420\mathrm{MHz}`$ emission from the HI along the line of sight through a HI cloud. This gives (for derivation see Appendix A):

$$I_\nu =40\mu \mathrm{Jy}\mathrm{arcsec}^2(1+z)^3\left(\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}\right)\left(\frac{200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1}{\mathrm{\Delta }V}\right).$$
(1)
Integrating the specific intensity over the angular extent of the HI cloud gives the total flux from the cloud:

$$F_\nu N_{\mathrm{HI}}(𝜷)d^2\beta ,$$
(2)
where $`𝜷`$ (in arc-seconds) refers to different angular positions on the sky, and the integral is over the angular extent of the HI cloud.

In a situation where there is gravitational lensing a source which would otherwise appear at $`𝜷`$ is seen at a different angular position $`𝜽`$ (see e.g. Schneider et al. 1992), and the flux from the lensed image of the HI cloud can be calculated by performing a similar integration over the angular extent of the image as in Eq. (2).

Estimating the flux expected from a HI cloud (lensed or unlensed) requires knowledge about its angular extent and the variation in the column density across the HI cloud. As these facts are not available, we have adopted two simple models for our calculations in this paper. We describe these models below.

### 2.1 Uniform disk (UD)

In this model the HI clouds are assumed to be face on circular disks, all of the same physical radius $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}`$ and with uniform column density across the disk. We consider different values of $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}`$ in the range $`10\mathrm{kpc}`$ to $`30\mathrm{kpc}`$. The solid angle subtended by a HI cloud is $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{DLA}}=\pi r_{\mathrm{DLA}}^2/d_s^2(z)`$ where $`d_s(z)`$ is the angular diameter distance to the HI cloud (see e.g. Peebles 1993). In this model the flux from an unlensed HI cloud is $`F_\nu =I_\nu \mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{DLA}}`$ and we have, for $`\nu =320\mathrm{MHz}`$,

$$F_\nu =12\mu \mathrm{Jy}h^2\left(\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}\right)\left(\frac{200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1}{\mathrm{\Delta }V}\right)\left(\frac{r_{\mathrm{DLA}}}{10\mathrm{kpc}}\right)^2.$$
(3)
The distribution of the column densities of the HI clouds is assumed to be a power law $`F(N_{\mathrm{HI}})=BN_{\mathrm{HI}}^{}`$ with values in the range $`2\times 10^{20}\mathrm{cm}^2<N_{\mathrm{HI}}<10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$, where $`F(N_{\mathrm{HI}})dN_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ gives the number of HI clouds per unit volume with column density in the range $`dN_{\mathrm{HI}}`$. Observations indicate that the column density distribution changes with redshift implying that both and $`B`$ change with $`z`$. The DLA population shows a marked increase in the HI column densities at higher redshifts (Lanzetta et al. 1995) and $`75\%`$ of the DLAs in the redshift range $`3z3.5`$ have column densities $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}10^{21}\mathrm{cm}^2`$. This is consistent with $`=0.5`$. In our work we consider values of in the range $`0.5`$ to $`1.0`$.

In this model the HI mass of a cloud is given by

$$M_{\mathrm{HI}}=2.5\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}\left(\frac{r_{\mathrm{DLA}}}{10\mathrm{kpc}}\right)^2\left(\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}\right).$$
(4)
This relation permits us to interchangeably use either a column density distribution function or a HI mass distribution function $`f(M_{\mathrm{HI}})=AM_{\mathrm{HI}}^{}`$ where $`f(M_{\mathrm{HI}})dM_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ is the number of HI clouds per unit volume with HI mass in the range $`dM_{\mathrm{HI}}`$. The mass range corresponding to the column density range $`2\times 10^{20}\mathrm{cm}^2<N_{\mathrm{HI}}<10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ depends on the value of $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}`$, and for $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}=10\mathrm{kpc}`$ we have $`M_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{min}]=5\times 10^8\mathrm{M}_{}`$ and $`M_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{max}]=2.5\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}`$. At any redshift $`z`$ the HI mass distribution function can be used to calculate the HI density

$$_{M_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{min}]}^{M_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{max}]}M_{\mathrm{HI}}f(M_{\mathrm{HI}})𝑑M_{\mathrm{HI}}=\rho _c\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}},$$
(5)
where $`\rho _c`$ is the critical density at redshift $`z`$ and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ is the contribution to the density parameter from the HI in DLAs at that redshift. Absorption studies (Lanzetta et al. 1995) have shown that in a flat cosmological model, in the redshift range $`z\stackrel{<}{}3.5`$, the total mass density contributed by the HI in DLAs can be fitted by the function

$$\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}(z)=0.19\times 10^3h^1\mathrm{exp}(0.83z).$$
(6)
We use this to fix the normalization constant $`A`$ for the HI mass distribution function.

### 2.2 Exponential disk (ED)

Recent studies of the velocity structure of the DLAs show that the HI density across the cloud is consistent with a thick, rotating disk of exponential profile (Prochaska & Wolfe 1998)

$$n(R,Z)=n_0\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{R}{R_\mathrm{d}}\frac{|Z|}{Z_\mathrm{d}}\right),$$
(7)
where $`n(R,Z)`$ is the number density of HI atoms in the disk, $`R`$ is the radial coordinate in the plane of the disk and $`Z`$ is the coordinate along the thickness of the disk. Observations suggest that disks have $`R_\mathrm{d}/Z_\mathrm{d}3`$, and are rotating with $`v_c200\text{}250\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$. Excluding the effect of rotation, the gas in the disks has negligible velocity dispersion. Absorption studies do not fix $`R_\mathrm{d}`$ and they are only mildly dependent on the central column density $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)=2Z_\mathrm{d}n_0`$. In our analysis we assume that all the disks are observed face-on. As a consequence the column density distribution in each HI cloud is circularly symmetric around the center and falls off exponentially in the radial direction. For $`\nu =320\mathrm{MHz}`$, the flux from a HI cloud is

$$F_\nu =24\mu \mathrm{Jy}h^2\left(\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}\right)\left(\frac{200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1}{\mathrm{\Delta }V}\right)\left(\frac{R_\mathrm{d}}{10\mathrm{kpc}}\right)^2,$$
(8)
and the HI mass is

$$M_{\mathrm{HI}}=6\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}\left(\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}\right)\left(\frac{R_\mathrm{d}}{10\mathrm{kpc}}\right)^2.$$
(9)
We choose the central column density, $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)`$ to have a fixed value in the range $`5\times 10^{21}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ to $`2\times 10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ and allow $`R_\mathrm{d}`$ to vary from $`2\mathrm{kpc}`$ to $`10\mathrm{kpc}`$. For a fixed value of $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)=10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ this corresponds to a mass range $`M_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{min}]=2\times 10^9\mathrm{M}_{}`$ and $`M_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{max}]=5\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}`$. The treatment of the mass distribution function for the ED model has been carried out in exactly the same way as for the UD model, and we consider values in the range $`0.5`$ to $`1.0`$ for the slope .

### 2.3 The flux distribution of HI clouds

For both the UD and the ED model the HI mass distribution function can be converted to a flux distribution function using either Eqs. (3) and (4) or Eqs. (8) and (9). This requires assuming a value for $`\mathrm{\Delta }V`$ which we take to be $`200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$. The GMRT channel at $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$ $`(z=3.4)`$ has a bandwidth of $`16\mathrm{MHz}`$. This corresponds to a redshift range of $`3.33`$ to $`3.55`$. We use the flux distribution function to calculate the number of clouds per unit flux per $`\mathrm{arcsec}^2`$ within the redshift range covered by the GMRT bandwidth.

For the UD model where the value of $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}`$ is fixed this gives us

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d^2n}{dF_\nu d\mathrm{\Omega }}}1.2\times 10^3\mu \mathrm{Jy}^1\mathrm{arcsec}^2\times `$
$`(2)\left({\displaystyle \frac{r_{\mathrm{DLA}}}{10\mathrm{kpc}}}\right)^{4+2}\left({\displaystyle \frac{F_\nu }{1\mu \mathrm{Jy}}}\right)^{}.`$ (10)
For this model the different fluxes correspond to different values of the column density. For the ED model where the central column density $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)`$ is fixed, the number of clouds per unit flux per $`\mathrm{arcsec}^2`$ is

$`{\displaystyle \frac{d^2n}{dF_\nu d\mathrm{\Omega }}}4.25\times 10^4\mu \mathrm{Jy}^1\mathrm{arcsec}^2\times `$
$`(2)\left({\displaystyle \frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}}\right)^{2+}\left({\displaystyle \frac{F}{1\mu \mathrm{Jy}}}\right)^{}.`$ (11)
(In Eqs. (10) and (11) the normalization has a weak dependence on the parameter , which is not shown for brevity) In this model the variation of flux corresponds to different values of the radial scale length $`R_\mathrm{d}`$. For $`\nu =320\mathrm{MHz}`$, the total number of clouds expected above a given flux in a $`1^{}\times 1^{}`$ region of the sky and within the GMRT bandwidth is shown in Figure 1 for the UD and ED models.

## 3 Gravitational Lensing by clusters

Here we give a brief summary of the salient features of gravitational lensing relevant to this work. A more thorough exposition can be found in Schneider et al.  (1992).

An object which is gravitationally lensed appears at a position which is different from its unlensed position. This information is encoded in the lens equation which relates the unperturbed position of the source to its perturbed position. If the angular coordinates of the source are $`𝜷`$ and the angular coordinates of the image are $`𝜽`$, then the lens equation is given by

$$𝜷=𝜽\mathbf{}\psi (𝜽).$$
(12)
The dimensionless relativistic lens potential $`\psi `$ satisfies the two-dimensional Poisson equation $`^2\psi (𝜽)=2\kappa (𝜽)`$, where the convergence $`\kappa (𝜽)=\mathrm{\Sigma }(𝜽)/\mathrm{\Sigma }_{\mathrm{cr}}`$ and $`\mathrm{\Sigma }(𝜽)`$ is the two-dimensional surface mass density of the lens, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }_{\mathrm{cr}}=(c^2/4\pi G)(d_s/d_ld_{ls})`$ being the critical density. The quantities $`d_s`$, $`d_l`$, and $`d_{ls}`$ are the angular-diameter distances from the observer to source, the observer to lens, and the lens to source respectively. Gravitational lensing does not effect the specific intensity along a light ray. The flux received by an observer is proportional to the solid angle subtended by the image at the observer; and since the solid angle of the image after lensing is, in general, different from that of the source, an observer can receive more (or less) flux in the lensed case than in the unlensed case.

The shape and size of the image are related to those of the source by the transformation matrix $`M_{ij}^1=\beta _i/\theta _j`$. The infinitesimal area $`d^2\theta `$ in the image plane is mapped to an area $`d^2\beta =\mu ^1(𝜽)d^2\theta `$ in the source plane, where $`\mu =\mathrm{det}[M_{ij}]`$ is the magnification. The regions (curves) in the source plane where $`det[\beta _i/\theta _j]=0`$ are called caustics. Magnification is infinite for point sources which are placed on the caustics. For finite sources the amplification remains finite, though the caustics still remain the points in the source plane where the magnification is large.

For this paper we model clusters of galaxies as single component Pseudo Isothermal Elliptical Mass Distribution (PIEMD) after Kassiola & Kovner (1993). These are characterized by a core radius $`R_\mathrm{c}`$, one-dimensional velocity dispersion $`\sigma `$, and ellipticity parameter $`ϵ`$. In addition to these parameters, the lens redshift $`z_l`$ and the source redshift $`z_s`$ completely specify the dimensionless potential $`\psi `$. Real clusters can have substantial sub-structure and are best modeled as multi-component PIEMDs, but for simplicity we consider only single component lenses.

For our case the source redshift, $`z_s=\nu _e/\nu _o1`$ with $`\nu _e=1420\mathrm{MHz}`$, and $`\nu _o=\{233,\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}320},\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}620}\}\mathrm{MHz}`$. For our study we consider the following range of parameters: $`1200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1\sigma 1800\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$; $`40\mathrm{kpc}R_\mathrm{c}60\mathrm{kpc}`$; $`0ϵ0.3`$, and $`0.1z_l0.3`$. This choice of parameters is motivated by the observed properties of known clusters and their abundances (e.g. Mazure et al., 1996).

### 3.1 Lensing of HI clouds

The flux from a lensed HI cloud can be expressed in terms of the source coordinates $`𝜷`$ and the magnification $`\mu (𝜷)`$ as:

$`F_\nu `$ $`=`$ $`40\mu \mathrm{Jy}\mathrm{arcsec}^2(1+z)^3\left({\displaystyle \frac{200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1}{\mathrm{\Delta }V}}\right)`$ (13)
$`\times {\displaystyle }\left({\displaystyle \frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}(𝜷)}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}}\right)\mu (𝜷)d^2\beta .`$
This can be expressed in terms of the flux of the unlensed source

$$F_\nu [\mathrm{Lensed}]=F_\nu [\mathrm{Source}]\times \overline{\mu },$$
(14)
where $`\overline{\mu }`$ is the magnification averaged over the angular extent of the source

$$\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)=d^2\beta ^{^{}}\mu (𝜷𝜷^{})W(𝜷^{},R).$$
(15)
The normalized window function $`W(𝜷,R)`$ represents the radial profile of the HI cloud and for the UD and ED models we use

$`W(𝜷,r_{\mathrm{DLA}})`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{d_s^2}{\pi r_{\mathrm{DLA}}^2}}\mathrm{\Theta }\left(|𝜷|{\displaystyle \frac{r_{\mathrm{DLA}}}{d_s}}\right)(\mathrm{UD})`$
$`W(𝜷,R_d)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{d_s^2}{2\pi R_\mathrm{d}^2}}\mathrm{exp}\left({\displaystyle \frac{|𝜷|}{R_d/d_s}}\right)(\mathrm{ED}),`$ (16)
where $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$ is the Heaviside step function. In our calculations we have evaluated $`\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)`$ by first calculating $`\mu (𝜷)`$ on a finely-spaced grid in the source plane. This is then convolved with the window function using the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm (Press et al.  1992) to obtain $`\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)`$. We have tested the convergence of this procedure with respect to variation of the grid size. In situations where there are multiple images we have added up the magnification of all the magnified images; because the typical image separation is less than the beam width of the GMRT and the observations which we are discussing here will not be able to resolve the multiple images.

We use the procedure discussed above to calculate $`\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)`$ on a grid. This is used to calculate $`A(>\overline{\mu }_0)`$ ($`\overline{\mu }_0`$ is any fiducial average magnification) which is the area (in $`\mathrm{arc}\text{-}\mathrm{second}^2`$) in the source plane for which the condition $`\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)>\overline{\mu }_0`$ is satisfied. For observations with a detection threshold of $`F_\nu [\mathrm{min}]`$, a HI cloud with unlensed flux $`F_\nu `$ will have a lensed flux greater than $`F_\nu [\mathrm{min}]`$ for any position within the area $`A(>F_\nu [\mathrm{min}]/F_\nu )`$. Summing up the contributions from HI clouds with all possible values of the unlensed flux gives us $`𝒩(>F_\nu [\mathrm{min}])`$ the total number of HI clouds that can be detected in the field of a cluster

$$𝒩(>F_\nu [\mathrm{min}])=𝑑F_\nu \frac{d^2N}{d\mathrm{\Omega }dF_\nu }A\left(>F_\nu [\mathrm{min}]/F_\nu \right).$$
(17)
It should be pointed out that throughout the analysis we have assumed all the HI clouds to be oriented face-on. In reality the HI clouds will occur at all possible angles. In this case the mean magnification $`\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)`$ will differ with the orientation of the cloud. However, the projected area is maximum when the cloud is face-on and the mean magnification will be lower relative to the situation where the cloud is located at the same position with an edge-on orientation. This means that our analysis gives an underestimate of the magnification and we may expect larger magnifications when all possible orientations are taken into account.

## 4 Results

We first discuss our results for observations centered at $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$. The results for $`620`$ and $`233\mathrm{MHz}`$ are summarized at the end of this section.

We have calculated $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ and $`𝒩(>F_\nu [\mathrm{min}])`$ for several cluster parameters with the disk parameters varying over the allowed range discussed earlier for the UD and ED models. The effect of varying the cluster parameters is to change $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ which in turn affects the number of detected HI clouds. The regions of high magnification ($`\mu >10`$) are restricted along the caustics and all the contribution to $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ is from a narrow strip along the caustics. Although the length of the caustic curve increases as the ellipticity $`ϵ`$ is increased, this is accompanied by a fall in the values of the magnification. The value $`ϵ=0.1`$ is a good compromise between these two effects and the results are presented for this value. The $`ϵ`$ dependence of the results is rather weak in the range $`0.1ϵ0.3`$. The values of $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ and $`𝒩(>F_\nu [\mathrm{min}])`$ decrease by around $`10\%`$ as the value of $`ϵ`$ changes from $`0.1`$ to $`0.3`$. Amongst the cluster parameters, changing the velocity dispersion $`\sigma `$ has the strongest effect on $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ and this is shown in Figures 2 and 3. Varying the cluster redshift from $`0.1`$ to $`0.5`$ causes $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ to decrease by nearly $`30\%`$.

Varying the radius of the HI clouds has a few distinct effects. First, an increase in the size of the HI clouds decreases the average magnification $`\overline{\mu }(𝜷,R)`$. The area $`A(>\overline{\mu })`$ also decreases as the radius of the HI cloud is increased and this is clearly seen in Figures 2 and 3. The second effect is that a larger cloud radius gives a larger value of the unlensed flux (Eqs. ( 3) and (8)). The third effect is that as the radius of the HI clouds is increased, the number of clouds in the field decreases. This is seen in Figure 1 for the UD model. All these effects combine to determine how the number of detected HI clouds depends on the radius of the clouds. As is seen in Figure 4 for the UD model, an increase in the cloud radius generally increases the number of detected HI clouds. Only for large values of $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}`$ do we find a decrease in the number of HI clouds causing a decrement in the number of detections. The results for the ED model shown in Figure (5) are qualitatively similar to those for the UD model. In this case the parameter that controls the number of clouds in a field is $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)`$, and the number of clouds in a field falls as $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)`$ is increased (Figure 1). As in the UD case, this generally leads to an increase in the number of detected clouds because a fall in the number of clouds is often over-compensated by an increase in the unlensed flux. An important parameter in both the cloud models is the spectral index, (Eqs. (10) and (11)). The number of detected clouds decreases by $`\stackrel{<}{}25\%`$ as is increased from $`0.5`$ to $`1`$.

For a detection threshold of $`50\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$, for observations centered on a cluster with $`\sigma =1200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$, the expected number of detected clouds is in the range $`0.1`$ to $`0.5`$ for $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}10\mathrm{kpc}`$ in the UD model and for $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}(0)5\times 10^{21}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ in the ED model. For both the UD and the ED models the lower limit for detection approximately corresponds to the mass range $`5\times 10^8\mathrm{M}_{}M_{\mathrm{HI}}2.5\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}`$.

The number of detections will go up if the observations are centered on a cluster with a higher velocity dispersion, since $`𝒩(>50\mu \mathrm{Jy})`$ goes up by a factor of $`2`$ to $`3`$ if $`\sigma =1800\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ instead of $`\sigma =1200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ (Figures 4 and 5). In addition it will be possible to detect the HI clouds even if they have lower HI masses.

Future radio telescopes will reach sensitivities of around $`2\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$. Eqs. (3) and (8) show that it may then be possible to detect the HI clouds without the aid of gravitational lensing. In the UD model if $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}20\mathrm{kpc}`$ then a substantial fraction of the HI clouds will be detected without any gravitational lensing. While a small fraction of the HI clouds may be detected without gravitational lensing if $`10\mathrm{kpc}<r_{\mathrm{DLA}}<20\mathrm{kpc}`$, it will not be possible to observe the clouds without the aid of gravitational lensing if $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}10}\mathrm{kpc}`$. Figure 6 shows that observations with a detection threshold of $`2\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$ centered on a cluster with $`\sigma =1200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ are expected to have a few detections even if the cloud radius is as small as $`r_{\mathrm{DLA}}=2\mathrm{kpc}`$. This corresponds to a mass range $`2\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}M_{\mathrm{HI}}10^9\mathrm{M}_{}`$.

The discussion until now has been restricted to $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$. The main differences which arise at other frequencies are: (a) the flux from HI clouds changes (Eq. (2)), (b) the total number of clouds is different owing to changes in $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ (Eq. (6)) and $`\mathrm{\Delta }z`$ and, (c) the magnification of sources changes owing to change in the source redshift (§3).

At $`z1.3`$ $`(610\mathrm{MHz})`$ observations indicate $`2.5`$ and $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}[\mathrm{max}]10^{21}\mathrm{cm}^2`$ (Lanzetta et al. 1995). Also, $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ falls considerably from its value at $`z3.4`$ However, owing to obscuration of quasar light by the dust present in HI clouds (Fall & Pei 1995) these values may not be representative of the population of HI clouds and it is possible that the observed $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ is underestimated by a factor of 3 (Fall & Pei 1995) at this redshift . Given the uncertainty in the HI content we have used several values of spectral indices and $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}`$. Figure (7) shows the results for just one set of cluster parameters.

The value of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{\mathrm{HI}}`$ at $`z5.10`$ ($`233\mathrm{MHz}`$) is not known. For the purposes of this paper we use the value given by Storrie-Lombardi et al. (1996) which is valid for $`z4.7`$. For $`\nu =233\mathrm{MHz}`$ the number of detectable clouds in a cluster field is shown in Figure (7).

## 5 Discussion and Conclusions

In this paper we have investigated the possibility of detecting the redshifted $`21\mathrm{cm}`$ emission from HI clouds at high redshift. Such observations are not possible with existing radio telescopes unless we observe the cloud through a cluster gravitational lens which magnifies the HI flux. However, this method has the disadvantage that it will work only for clouds which lie very close to the caustics of cluster lenses.

Given the lack of a clear picture about the nature of these objects we have used two simple models, namely the UD and the ED models (§2). The results are similar for both the models (Figures 4 and 5). Both the models have free parameters which effectively allow us the freedom of distributing the total HI available in the HI clouds at high redshift into either a large number of clouds with a small amount of HI each or a small number of clouds with large amounts of HI each. In the former scenario the probability of a cloud being located very close to the caustic of a gravitational lens and experiencing a large magnification is higher but this is offset by the fact that the unlensed flux of the HI clouds will be very small and a magnification of $`50`$ may not be sufficient to render the lensed flux above the threshold value for detection. The parameter range where the probability of a detection is maximum changes with the threshold flux and this may lead to the possibility of using such observations to constrain the distribution of the HI masses of the clouds. This possibility has not been studied here in any detail.

We find that for observations at $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$ with a detection threshold of $`50\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$ centered on a cluster with $`\sigma =1200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$, the chance of detecting a HI cloud is greater than $`10\%`$ provided the minimum HI content of these clouds is in the mass range $`5\times 10^8\mathrm{M}_{}M_{\mathrm{HI}}2.5\times 10^{10}\mathrm{M}_{}`$. The chances of detecting an HI cloud increases for a cluster with a higher velocity dispersion, and a single deep image in the field of a cluster such as Abell 1689 (Tyson et al.1990; Pierre et al.1991; Smail et al.1991), which has $`\sigma =1989\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ and $`z_l=0.196`$, might either reveal a cloud or put meaningful bounds on the mass range and mass spectral index of the HI clouds.

At $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$ the GMRT will reach a sensitivity of $`50\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$ with $`100\mathrm{hrs}`$ of integration at a frequency resolution of $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu =1.25\times 10^5\mathrm{Hz}`$ corresponding to a velocity width $`\mathrm{\Delta }V115\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$. An alternative strategy would be to observe several clusters to a threshold flux of $`100\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$. The latter strategy may be superior for a part of the parameter range shown in Figures 4, 5 and 7, i.e. the number of expected detections will be higher for the same total observation time.

Future radio telescope Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will reach sensitivity $`2\mu \mathrm{Jy}`$ at $`\nu 320\mathrm{MHz}`$ for $`\mathrm{\Delta }V200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ in an integration time of $`8\mathrm{hrs}`$ <sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1for details see http://www.nfra.nl/skai/science. In this case observations centered on clusters with $`\sigma =1200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1`$ are expected to detect a few HI clouds even if the clouds have low HI masses in the range $`2\times 10^7\mathrm{M}_{}M_{\mathrm{HI}}10^9\mathrm{M}_{}`$.

Our results indicate that the probability of detecting a gravitationally lensed HI cloud at $`233`$ and $`610\mathrm{MHz}`$ is generally lower than the probability at $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$. However, it should be borne in mind that there are larger uncertainties in our predictions at $`233`$ and $`610\mathrm{MHz}`$ as compared to the predictions for $`320\mathrm{MHz}`$.

We conclude by noting that the strategy of carrying out deep radio observations centered on known cluster lenses will make it possible to detect the redshifted 21 cm emission from lensed HI clouds with either the GMRT or the SKA, depending on the HI content of these clouds. Such observations will shed new light on these objects whose HI content has been observed only in absorption to date.

The authors would like to thank Jasjeet Bagla, Jayaram Chengalur, Divya Oberoi, and Somak Raychaudhury for useful discussions and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. T.D.S thanks CSIR for providing financial support.

## Appendix A

Here we present a derivation of Eq. (1) which gives the specific intensity of the redshifted HI emission from a cloud which has HI column density $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}`$, velocity dispersion $`\mathrm{\Delta }V`$ and is at a redshift $`z`$.

The HI contained in a part of the cloud which subtends a solid angle $`\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega }`$ at the observer is $`N_{\mathrm{HI}}r_A^2(z)\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega }`$, where $`r_A^2(z)`$ is the angular diameter distance to the HI cloud. In the rest frame of the cloud the total luminosity of the HI emission is

$$\mathrm{\Delta }L=A_{21}h_P\nu _efN_{\mathrm{HI}}r_A^2(z)\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega },$$
(18)
and it will be distributed over the frequency interval $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu _e=\mathrm{\Delta }V\nu _e/c`$. Here $`\nu _e=1420\mathrm{MHz}`$ is the rest frame frequency of the HI emission, $`h_P`$ is the Planck constant, $`f`$ is the fraction of HI atoms in the excited state and $`A_{21}=2.85\times 10^{15}s^1`$ is the Einstein coefficient for the spontaneous emission.

At the observer the radiation will be redshifted to a frequency $`\nu =\nu _e/(1+z)`$ and it will be distributed over the frequency interval $`\mathrm{\Delta }\nu =\mathrm{\Delta }\nu _e/(1+z)`$ The flux $`\mathrm{\Delta }F`$ is given by

$$\mathrm{\Delta }F=\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }L}{4\pi r_L^2(z)},$$
(19)
where $`r_L(z)`$ is the luminosity distance to the HI cloud. We use this to calculate the specific intensity

$$I_\nu =\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }F}{\mathrm{\Delta }\nu \mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{\Omega }}.$$
(20)
Using Eqs. (18) and (19) and the relation (see e.g. Peebles 1993)

$$\frac{r_A(z)}{r_L(z)}=(1+z)^2,$$
(21)
we obtain

$$I_\nu =\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}fA_{21}h_Pc}{4\pi (1+z)^3\mathrm{\Delta }V}.$$
(22)
In a situation where the spin temperature $`T_s`$ is high ($`T_sh_P\nu _e/k_B)`$ we have $`f=3/4`$, where $`k_B`$ denotes the Boltzmann constant. Equation (22) can be evaluated to give

$$I_\nu =40\mu \mathrm{Jy}\mathrm{arcsec}^2(1+z)^3\left(\frac{N_{\mathrm{HI}}}{10^{22}\mathrm{cm}^2}\right)\left(\frac{200\mathrm{km}\mathrm{s}^1}{\mathrm{\Delta }V}\right).$$
(23)