Related papers: Polarimetry from the Ground Up
We are developing a concept of a "thin" detector as a high-angular-precision telescope and polarimeter for cosmic gamma-rays above the pair-creation threshold.
The ability of NICMOS to perform high accuracy polarimetry is currently hampered by an uncalibrated residual instrumental polarization at a level of 1.2-1.5%. To better quantify and characterize this residual we obtained observations of…
Solar astrometry deals with the accurate measumerent of the solar diameter, and in general with the measurement of the shape of the Sun. During the last decades several techniques have been developed to monitor the radius and the irradiance…
Several on-going and future experiments use a Stokes polarimeter (i.e. a rotating wave plate followed by a steady polarizer and by an unpolarized detector) to measure the small polarized component of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The…
A mathematical framework is presented for use in the experimental determination of the polarimetric response of observatory instrumentation. Elementary principles of linear algebra are applied to model the full matrix description of the…
The POLAR-2 mission consists of 3 instruments designed with the combined aim of producing a deeper understanding of Gamma-Ray Bursts. To achieve this, POLAR-2 relies on polarisation measurements and, for the first time will provide these…
The problems caused by the gap between system- and software-level architecting practices, especially in the context of Systems of Systems where the two disciplines inexorably meet, is a well known issue with a disappointingly low amount of…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…
For the planned International Linear Collider it is intended to have both -- electron and positron -- beams polarised. This offers a great benefit for many physics studies, but also provides a challenge for the engineering of the machine. A…
All commercial electron spin polarimeters work in single channel mode, which is the bottleneck of researches by spin-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. By adopting the time inversion antisymmetry of magnetic field, we developed a…
The POLAR detector is a space based Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) polarimeter with a wide field of view, which covers almost half the sky. The instrument uses Compton scattering of gamma rays on a plastic scintillator hodoscope to measure the…
Polarization measurements of the gamma-ray component of transient sources are of great scientific interest, they are however, also highly challenging. This is due to the typical low signal to noise and the potential for significant…
A telescope polarization model for the SST [Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope] is developed and the parameters of this model are fitted to polarization measurements made with a 1-meter linear polarizer in front of the entrance window. In this…
This paper describes a concept for the high-accuracy absolute calibration of the instrumental polarization introduced by the primary mirror of a large-aperture telescope. This procedure requires a small aperture with polarization…
We present first results of Hertz/VPM, the first submillimeter polarimeter employing the dual Variable-delay Polarization Modulator (dual-VPM). This device differs from previously used polarization modulators in that it operates in…
The Gas Pixel Detector was designed and built as a focal plane instrument for X-ray polarimetry of celestial sources, the last unexplored subtopics of X-ray astronomy. It promises to perform detailed and sensitive measurements resolving…
Accurate astrophysical polarimetry requires a proper characterization of the polarization properties of the telescope and instrumentation employed to obtain the observations. Determining the telescope and instrument Muller matrix is…
We address the problem of calibrating a polarimetric backscattering setup that includes a beamsplitter, taking its optical properties into account. Using Fisher information, we justify a specific calibration configuration involving…
Polarimetry in the far-infrared and submillimeter has been valuable in tracing magnetic fields in bright Galactic Clouds. We discuss the techniques we have developed and trends we have found in polarization vs column density, and vs…
We review the systematic uncertainties that have plagued attempts to obtain high precision and high accuracy from ground-based photometric measurements using CCDs. We identify two main challenges in breaking through the 1% precision…