English

For SIRs, CIRs, and Beyond: Polarization Ratio to Feature Location

Space Physics 2026-07-25 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

The Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will remotely observe solar wind transients with high signal-to-noise ratio, high-cadence, high-resolution polarized white-light images. Using different polarization states, an important PUNCH data product will be polarization ratio images. In the small-Sun limit, and using two simple line-of-sight density distributions with a finite angular width that can approximate a stream or corotating interaction region (SIR/CIR), we analytically investigate how the polarization ratio will provide three-dimensional location information and what the uncertainty in this estimated location is.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.23043,
  title  = {For SIRs, CIRs, and Beyond: Polarization Ratio to Feature Location},
  author = {Curt A. de Koning and Dusan Odstrcil and Sarah Gibson and Craig DeForest and Vic Pizzo and Christopher J. Scott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.23043},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

65 pages, 30 figures. A review article submitted to Solar Physics, special edition "The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) Mission: An Overview"