English

Tracing Magnetic Field with Synchrotron Polarization Gradients: Parameter Study

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2019-05-15 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We employ synthetic observations obtained with MHD simulations to study how to trace the distribution of turbulent magnetic fields using the synchrotron polarization gradient techniques suggested by Lazarian \& Yuen (2018). Both synchrotron polarization gradients and its derivative gradients with regard to the squared wavelength λ2\lambda^2 are used to explore the probing ability of the technique in magnetic fields from sub- to super-Alfv{\'e}nic turbulence. We focus on studies that involve multi-frequency measurements in the presence of strong Faraday rotation and show the ways of how to recover the projected mean magnetic fields in the plane of the sky and the local magnetic fields within a tomographic slice. We conclude that the new techniques can successfully reconstruct the 3D magnetic field within our Milky Way and other galaxies. This paper opens an avenue for applying our new techniques to a large number of data cubes such as those from the Low Frequency Array for Radio astronomy and the Square Kilometer Array.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.11939,
  title  = {Tracing Magnetic Field with Synchrotron Polarization Gradients: Parameter Study},
  author = {Jian-Fu Zhang and Alex Lazarian and Ka Wai Ho and Ka Ho Yuen and Bo Yang and Yue Hu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.11939},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures and 1 table. Accepted by MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:50:41.571Z