English

Plane Polarization in Comptonization process : a Monte Carlo study

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-01-25 v2

Abstract

High energies emissions observed in X-ray binaries (XRBs), active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are linearly polarized. The prominent mechanism for X-ray is the Comptonization process. We revisit the theory for polarization in Compton scattering with unpolarized electrons, and note that the (k×kk \times k')-coordinate (in which, (k×kk \times k') acts as a zz-axis, here kk and kk' are incident and scattered photon momentum respectively) is more convenient to describe it. Interestingly, for a fixed scattering plane the degree of polarization PD after single scattering for random oriented low-energy unpolarized incident photons is \sim0.33. At the scattering angle θ\theta = 0 or θ\theta \equiv [0,25o^o], the modulation curve of kk' exhibits the same PD and PA (angle of polarization) of kk, and even the distribution of projection of electric vector of kk' (kek'_e) on perpendicular plane to the kk indicates same (so, an essential criteria for detector designing). We compute the polarization state in Comptonization process using Monte Carlo methods with considering a simple spherical corona. We obtain the PD of emergent photons as a function of θ\theta-angle (or alternatively, the disk inclination angle ii) on a meridian plane (i.e., the laws of darkening, formulated by \citealp{Chandrasekhar1946}) after single scattering with unpolarized incident photons. To explore the energy dependency we consider a general spectral parameter set corresponding to hard and soft states of XRBs, we find that for average scattering no. Nsc\langle N_{sc}\rangle \sim1.1 the PD is independent of energy and PA 90o\sim 90^o (kek'_e is parallel to the disk plane), and for Nsc\langle N_{sc}\rangle \sim5 the PD value is maximum for i=45oi=45^o. We also compare the results qualitatively with observation of IXPE for five sources.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.08023,
  title  = {Plane Polarization in Comptonization process : a Monte Carlo study},
  author = {Nagendra Kumar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.08023},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

16 figures, 3 tables (Key words: X-rays: individual: 4U 1630-47, Cyg X-2, GX 9+9, XTE J1701-462, Cyg X-1); Accepted for publication in PASA

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:31:42.129Z