Related papers: Comparative study of different scattering geometri…
The discrepancy between polarized and unpolarized measurements of the proton's electromagnetic form factors is striking, and suggests that two-photon exchange (TPE) may be playing a larger role in elastic electron-proton scattering than is…
This dissertation elaborates on X-ray polarisation features of astrophysical environments near accreting black holes. Although the work was originally assigned to supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, the results are also…
High precision polarization measurements open new opportunities for the study of the magnetic field structure as traced by polarimetric measurements of the interstellar dust emission. Polarization parameters suffer from bias in the presence…
Compton telescope is a promising technology to achieve very high sensitivity in the soft gamma-ray band (0.1-10 MeV) by utilizing Compton kinematics. Compton kinematics also enables polarization measurement which will open new windows to…
A new window is opening in high-energy astronomy: X-ray polarimetry. With many missions currently under development and scheduled to launch as early as 2021, observations of the X-ray polarisation of accreting X-ray pulsars will soon be…
A new technical method is developed for soft x-ray spectroscopy of near-edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS). The measurement is performed with continuously rotating linearly polarized light over 2$\pi$, generated by a segmented…
The traditional Thomson scattering diagnostic is based on measurement of the wavelength spectrum of scattered light, where electron temperature measurements are inferred from thermal broadening of the scattered laser light. At sufficiently…
Many of the most luminous extragalactic radio sources are located at the centers of X-ray clusters, and so their radiation must be scattered by the surrounding hot gas. We show that radio observations of the highly-polarized scattered…
We develop two new highly efficient estimators to measure the polarization (Stokes parameters) in experiments that constrain the position angle of individual photons such as scattering and gas-pixel-detector polarimeters, and analyse in…
Energetic X-ray radiations emitted from various accretion systems are widely considered to be produced by Comptonization in the hot corona. The corona and its interaction with the disc play an essential role in the evolution of the system…
Geant4 low energy extensions have been used to simulate the X-ray spectra of industrial X-ray tubes with filters for removing the uncertain low energy part of the spectrum in a controlled way. The results are compared with precisely…
Polarimetry is an area of high energy astrophysics which is still relatively unexplored, even though it is recognized that this type of measurement could drastically increase our knowledge of the physics and geometry of high energy sources.…
We investigate the intensity and polarization of reflected light from planetary atmospheres. We present a large grid of Monte Carlo simulations for planets with Rayleigh scattering atmospheres. We discuss the disk-integrated polarization…
This paper presents a new method to model X-ray scattering on random rough surfaces. It combines the approaches we presented in two previous papers -- \zs\cite{zhao03} \& \pz\cite{zhao15}. An actual rough surface is (incompletely) described…
Thermal emission from the accretion disc around a black hole can be polarized, due to Thomson scattering in a disc atmosphere. In Newtonian space, the polarization angle must be either parallel or perpendicular to the projection of the disc…
Many objects on the sky exhibit a centrosymmetric polarization pattern, particularly in cases involving single scattering around a central source. Utilizing a novel liquid crystal device (the ``theta cell'') that transforms the coordinate…
In this paper, we systematically calculate the polarization in soft X-rays emitted from magnetized neutron stars, which are expected to be observed by the next-generation X-ray satellites. Magnetars are one of the targets for these…
Was the Milky Way galaxy a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus (AGN) in the past? Can we find traces of remnant structures supporting this idea? What is the three-dimensional arrangement of matter around our central supermassive black…
X-ray polarization is a powerful tool to investigate the geometry of accreting material around black holes, allowing independent measurements of the black hole spin and orientation of the innermost parts of the accretion disk. We perform…
We investigate the polarization of Compton scattered X-rays from relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei using Monte Carlo simulations. We consider three scenarios: scattering of photons from an accretion disk, scattering of cosmic…