Related papers: A note on polarized light from Magnetars
The launch of IXPE telescope in late 2021 finally made polarization measurements in the 2-8 keV band a reality, more than 40 years after the pioneering observations of the OSO-8 satellite. In the first two years of operations IXPE targeted…
In this letter we study the propagation of light in the neighbourhood of magnetised neutron stars. Thanks to the optical properties of quantum vacuum in the presence of a magnetic field, light emitted by background astronomical objects is…
Photons propagating in strong magnetic fields are subject to a phenomenon called the "vacuum birefringence" where refractive indices of two physical modes both deviate from unity and are different from each other. We compute the vacuum…
Vacuum polarization, an effect predicted nearly 70 years ago, is still yet to be directly detected despite significant experimental effort. Previous attempts have made use of large liquid-helium cooled electromagnets which inadvertently…
Extremely strong magnetic fields change the vacuum index of refraction. Although this polarization dependent effect is small for typical neutron stars, it is large enough to decouple the polarization states of photons traveling within the…
We suggest an experiment to observe vacuum birefringence induced by intense laser fields. A high-intensity laser pulse is focused to ultra-relativistic intensity and polarizes the vacuum which then acts like a birefringent medium. The…
Among the many different classes of stellar objects, neutron stars provide a unique environment where we can test (at the same time) our understanding of matter with extreme density, temperature, and magnetic field. In particular, the…
Through polarization observations masers are unique probes of the magnetic field in a variety of different astronomical objects, with the different maser species tracing different physical conditions. In recent years maser polarization…
Through polarization observations water masers are excellent probes of magnetic fields in the maser region. Magnetic field strengths, such as those in the water masers regions of the envelopes of late-type stars and star-forming regions,…
The effect of vacuum birefringence in a magnetic field generated by a laser-driven capacitor-coil generator as well as in field of an electromagnetic wave in a radioguide has been theoretically considered. The resulting ellipticity of a…
We calculate the vacuum polarization-induced ellipticity acquired by a linearly polarized laser beam of angular frequency $\bar \omega$ on traversing a region containing a transverse magnetic field rotating with a small angular velocity…
Magnetars are believed to host the strongest magnetic fields in the present universe ($B\gtrsim10^{14}$ G) and the study of their persistent emission in the X-ray band offers an unprecendented opportunity to gain insight into physical…
Vacuum birefringence produces a differential phase between orthogonally polarized components of a weak electromagnetic probe in the presence of a strong electromagnetic field. Despite representing a hallmark prediction of quantum…
Probing vacuum structures deformed by high intense fields is of great interest in general. In the context of quantum electrodynamics (QED), the vacuum exposed by a linearly polarized high-intensity laser field is expected to show…
We study the effects of strong magnetic fields on the neutron star structure. If the interior field of a star is on the same order of the surface field currently observed, the influences of the magnetic field on the star mass and radius are…
Possible extensions of the standard model of elementary particle physics suggest the existence of particles with small, unquantized electric charge. Photon initiated pair production of millicharged fermions in an external magnetic field…
X-ray photons emitted from the surface or atmosphere of a magnetized neutron star is highly polarized. However, the observed polarization may be modified due to photon propagation through the star's magnetosphere. For photon frequencies…
The polarization of light is a critically under-utilized, rich source of information in astronomy. For stars in particular, surface magnetism polarization that can be detected and measured with spectro-polarimetry. Many questions about…
Our main goal in this work is to study magnetized neutron stars by using a fully general$-$relativity approach presented in the LORENE package\footnote{http://www.lorene.obspm.fr}. Here we have adopted a non-uniform magnetic field profile…
Thermal surface emissions have now been detected from more than a dozen isolated neutron stars, including radio pulsars, radio-quiet neutron stars and magnetars. These detections can potentially provide important information on the interior…