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Appendix A: Quantitative analysis of the sharp appearance of the blueshifted components

The Gaussian decomposition into components is extremely uncertain because of the strong laser peaks. For this reason, we used velocity ranges to describe the different velocity components observed in the RL profiles. For the laser peaks, we use velocity ranges with a width of 14 km s^-1, which are consistent with the width of the Gaussian fit of the laser peaks.

To quantitatively show the abrupt appearance of the two new revealed blueshifted components with respect to the laser peaks, we compare in this appendix the integrated line fluxes from these two new components and from the two laser peaks (see Table A.1). The integrated line fluxes of the blue and red laser peaks, S_{(−24, −10)} and S_(26,40), are measured in the radial velocity range between –24 and –10 km s^-1 and 26 and 40 km s^-1. On the other hand, based on visual inspection of the RL profiles (Figs. 1 and 2), we decided to measure the integrated line fluxes of the two new blueshifted components with respect to the laser peaks, S_{(−50, −30)} and S_(10,25), in radial velocity ranges between –50 and –30 km s^-1 and 10 and 25 km s^-1 respectively.

In Fig. A.1 we illustrate the relative increase of the integrated line fluxes of every component with respect to the measured value for the H23α, ΔS, as a function of the principal quantum

number. We focus mainly on Hnα RLs with n ≥ 18 because their signal-to-noise ratios for all velocity ranges are higher than one order of magnitude. This figure clearly shows the trend of the integrated line fluxes of the two new blueshifted components, which are relatively uniform for the H23α and H22α RLs (with a variation smaller than 5.1%). This ratio increases to 55% and 80% for these velocity components for the H21α. Then, the ratios are relatively constant from the H21α to the H18α. This behaviour is very different from that shown by the two laser peaks. Unlike the two new blueshifted components, the blue and red laser peaks do not show similar trend as expected, since their intensities are highly sensitive to local physical conditions (Báez-Rubio et al. 2013). While the integrated line fluxes of the red laser peak increase slowly for decreasing n, the blue laser peak does not show any regular trend. Thus we conclude that the sharp increase of the integrated line fluxes of the two new blueshifted components is a clear effect independent of the behaviour of the laser peaks.

Fig. A.1 Relative percentage increase of the integrated line fluxes of Hnα RLs compared to the H23α, ΔS, for four components: the blue and red main laser peaks (blue and red thin lines), and the two new blueshifted components with respect to the blue and red laser peaks (magenta and green thick lines). In the upper right corner we show the radial velocity ranges (in units of km s-1) integrated within each component.

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© ESO, 2014