Related papers: Inversion of Stokes Profiles with Systematic Effec…
The Fourier spectral techniques that are common in Astronomy for analyzing periodic or multi-periodic light-curves lose their usefulness when they are applied to unsteady light-curves. We review some of the novel techniques that have been…
Optics labs are an integral part of the advanced curriculum for physics majors. Students majoring in other disciplines, like chemistry, biology or engineering rarely have the opportunity to learn about the most recent optical techniques and…
A large set of high precision full-Stokes spectropolarimetric observations of the He-D3 line in spicules has been recorded with the ZIMPOL polarimeter at the Gregory-Coude Telescope in Locarno. The observational technique allow us to obtain…
A high-precision two-dimensional stellar evolution code has been developed for studying solar variability due to structural changes produced by varying internal magnetic fields of arbitrary configurations. Specifically, we are interested in…
This work aims to identify the relevant physical processes in shaping the intensity and polarization patterns of the solar K I D lines through spectral syntheses, placing particular emphasis on the D2 line. The theoretical Stokes profiles…
It is crucial to know the polarization properties of coherent radio waves that escape from pulsar polar caps to calculate the radiative transfer through the magnetosphere and to predict observable radio properties. We describe pair cascades…
The modeling of stellar spectra is pervasive in astronomy. Conventionally, the shapes of absorption lines are modeled by convolving thermal profiles (computed given some model stellar atmosphere and line list) with broadening kernels…
Among the statistical mechanical frameworks able to describe systems in non-equilibrium steady states such as collisionless plasmas, self-gravitating systems and other complex systems, superstatistics have gained recent attention.…
The realism of current models of the penumbra is assessed by comparing their predictions with the plasma properties of penumbral filaments as retrieved from spectropolarimetric observations. The spectropolarimeter onboard Hinode allows us…
An electromagnetic wave can be uniquely characterized by the four Stokes parameters: I, Q, U, and V. Typical observations in astronomy rely solely on total intensity measurements of the incoming radiation (Stokes I). However, a significant…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Absorption imaging and spectroscopy can probe the dynamics of an ultracold neutral plasma during the first few microseconds after its creation. Quantitative analysis of the data, however, is complicated by the inhomogeneous density…
Many natural systems undergo critical transitions, i.e. sudden shifts from one dynamical regime to another. In the climate system, the atmospheric boundary layer can experience sudden transitions between fully turbulent states and…
Sphere packings are essential to the development of physical models for powders, composite materials, and the atomic structure of the liquid state. There is a strong scientific need to be able to assess the fit of packing models to data,…
The self-consistent description of Langmuir wave and ion-sound wave turbulence in the presence of an electron beam is presented for inhomogeneous non-isothermal plasmas. Full numerical solutions of the complete set of kinetic equations for…
Accurate atomic models for astrophysical plasma can be very complex, requiring thousands of states. However, for a variety of applications such as large-scale forward models of the Stokes parameters of a spectral line in the solar corona,…
This paper provides testable predictions about starlight polarizations to constrain the geometry of the Galactic magnetic field, in particular the nature of the poloidal component. Galactic dynamo simulations and Galactic dust distributions…
The calculation of the transfer matrix for a large non-periodic multilayered system may become unstable in the presence of absorption. We discuss the origin of this instability and we explore two methods to overcome it: the use of a total…
We investigated the effect of inverse Compton scattering in mildly relativistic static and moving plasmas with low optical depth using Monte Carlo simulations, and calculated the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in the cosmic background radiation.…
To interpret observations of astrophysical disks it is essential to understand the formation process of the emitted light. If the disk is optically thick, scattering dominated and permeated by a Keplerian velocity field, Non-Local…