Related papers: Polarimetry from the Ground Up
Science opportunities and recommendations concerning optical/infrared polarimetry for the upcoming decade in the field of cosmology. Community-based White Paper to Astro2010 in response to the call for such papers.
A standard procedure to achieve accurate, precise, and fast polarization measurement is to choose analyzing and generating polarization states that yield an $\ell^2$-condition number optimized instrument matrix. This strategy works well for…
This is a review of a decade-long effort to develop novel tools for exploring magnetism in cold astrophysical media and to establish a new field of molecular spectropolarimetry since Berdyugina et al. (2000). It is most directly applicable…
In undergraduate optics courses, diffraction gratings are studied extensively, generally within the scalar approximation. When the vector nature of light is taken into account, so-called polarization diffraction gratings have been proposed,…
X-Ray Polarimetry can be now performed by using a Micro Pattern Gas Chamber in the focus of a telescope. It requires large area optics for most important scientific targets. But since the technique is additive a dedicated mission with a…
We report on the experimental implementation of a polarimeter based on a scheme known to be optimal for obtaining the polarization vector of ensembles of spin-1/2 quantum systems, and the alignment procedure for this polarimeter is…
X-ray Polarimetry is almost as old as X-ray Astronomy. Since the first discovery of X-ray sources theoretical analysis suggested that a high degree of linear polarization could be expected due either to the, extremely non thermal, emission…
Chromospheric magnetic fields are of paramount importance in understanding the dynamics of energetic events in the solar atmosphere. At the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory, several polarimeters were developed in the past to study the active…
X-ray polarimetry is now providing a new way to look at the high energy sky. The addition of two observables, polarization fraction and angle, reveals crucial new information on the structure of accretion flows and magnetic fields in…
Instruments for radio astronomical observations have come a long way. While the first telescopes were based on very large dishes and 2-antenna interferometers, current instruments consist of dozens of steerable dishes, whereas future…
Photons preferentially Compton scatter perpendicular to the plane of polarisation. This property can be exploited to design instruments to measure the linear polarisation of hard X-rays ($\sim$10 - 100 keV). Photons may undergo two…
This paper discusses some of the challenges of spectro-polarimetric observations with a large aperture solar telescope such as the ATST or the EST. The observer needs to reach a compromise among spatial and spectral resolution, time…
Polarimetry is widely considered a powerful observational technique in X-ray astronomy, useful to enhance our understanding of the emission mechanisms, geometry and magnetic field arrangement of many compact objects. However, the lack of…
Polarization is a basic property of light and is fundamentally linked to the internal geometry of a source of radiation. Polarimetry complements photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging analyses of sources of radiation and has made possible…
Aims: To propose a method for the polarimetric calibration of large astronomical mirrors that does not require use of special optical devices nor knowledge of the exact polarization properties of the calibration target. Methods: We study…
Astronomical X-ray polarimetry was first explored in the end of the 60's by pioneering rocket instruments. The craze arising from the first discoveries on stellar and supernova remnant X-ray polarization led to the addition of X-ray…
We present a method based on Mueller calculus to calibrate linear polarimetric observations. The key advantages of the proposed way of calibration are: (1) that it can be implemented in a data reduction pipeline, (2) that it is possible to…
Polarimetric radio observations of the Sun can provide rich information about emission mechanisms and the propagation medium. For the past five decades, solar polarimetric studies at low radio frequencies have almost always assumed the…
To meet the scientific goals of the Thirty Meter Telescope Project, full diffraction-limited performance is required from the outset and hence the entire observatory is being designed, as a system, to achieve this. The preliminary design…
Material classification is a fundamental problem in computer vision and plays a crucial role in scene understanding. Previous studies have explored various material recognition methods based on reflection properties such as color, texture,…