Imagery and long-slit spectroscopy of the Polar-Ring Galaxy AM2020-504

Interactions between galaxies are very common. There are special kinds of interactions that produce systems called Polar Ring Galaxies (PRGs), composed by a lenticular, elliptical, or spiral host galaxy, surrounded by a ring of stars and gas, orbiting in an approximately polar plane. The present work aims to study AM2020-504, a PRG with an elliptical host galaxy, and a narrow and well defined ring, probably formed by accretion of material from a donor galaxy, collected by the host galaxy. Our observational study was based on BVRI broad band imagery as well as longslit spectroscopy in the wavelenght range 4100--8600\AA, performed at the 1.6m telescope at the Observat\'orio do Pico dos Dias (OPD), Brazil. We estimated a redshift of z= 0.01683, corresponding a heliocentric radial velocity of 5045 +/-23 km/s. The (B-R) color map shows that the ring is bluer than the host galaxy, indicating that the ring is a younger structure. Standard diagnostic diagrams were used to classify the main ionizing source of selected emission-line regions (nucleus, host galaxy and ring). It turns out that the ring regions are mainly ionized by massive stars while the nucleus presents AGN characteristics. Using two empirical methods, we found oxygen abundances for the HII regions located in the ring in the range 12+log(O/H)=8.3-8.8 dex, the presence of an oxygen gradient across the ring, and that AM2020-504 follows the metallicity-luminosity relation of spiral galaxies. These results support the accretion scenario for this object and rules out cold accretion as source for the HI gas in the polar ring

A remark on the BRST symmetry in the Gribov-Zwanziger theory

We show that the soft breaking of the BRST symmetry arising in the Gribov-Zwanziger theory can be converted into a linear breaking upon introduction of a set of BRST quartets of auxiliary fields. Due to its compatibility with the Quantum Action Principle, the linearly broken BRST symmetry can be directly converted into a suitable set of useful Slavnov-Taylor identities. As a consequence, it turns out that the renormalization aspects of the Gribov-Zwanziger theory can be addressed by means of the cohomology of a nilpotent local operatorComment: 11 pages, final version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Off-diagonal mass generation for Yang-Mills theories in the maximal Abelian gauge

We investigate a dynamical mass generation mechanism for the off-diagonal gluons and ghosts in SU(N) Yang-Mills theories, quantized in the maximal Abelian gauge. Such a mass can be seen as evidence for the Abelian dominance in that gauge. It originates from the condensation of a mixed gluon-ghost operator of mass dimension two, which lowers the vacuum energy. We construct an effective potential for this operator by a combined use of the local composite operators technique with algebraic renormalization and we discuss the gauge parameter independence of the results. We also show that it is possible to connect the vacuum energy, due to the mass dimension two condensate discussed here, with the non-trivial vacuum energy originating from the condensate , which has attracted much attention in the Landau gauge.Comment: 15 pages. Revtex. 1 .eps figure. Talk given by D.Dudal at XXV Encontro Nacional de Fisica de Particulas e Campos, Caxambu, Minas Gerais, Brasil, 24-28 Aug 2004. To appear in Brazilian Journal of Physic