Related papers: Polarization-Sensitive Imaging in Magnetic Environ…
The cosmic microwave background polarization is rich of cosmological information complementary to those from temperature anisotropies. Linear polarization can be decomposed uniquely in two components of opposite parities, called E and B.…
We present an in-situ method to measure the birefringence of a single vacuum window by means of microwave spectroscopy on an ensemble of cold atoms. Stress-induced birefringence can cause an ellipticity in the polarization of an initially…
Optimally extracting information from measurements performed on a physical system requires an accurate model of the measurement interaction. Continuously probing the collective spin of an Alkali atom cloud via its interaction with an…
Recently, we have used, pulsar polarisation datasets, on circular polarisation degree & linear polarisation position angle, to relate with well established theories, on ellipticity parameter and linear polarisation position angles, accrued…
Exploiting the azimuthal angle dependence of the density matrices we construct observables that directly measure the spin of a heavy unstable particle. A novelty of the approach is that the analysis of the azimuthal angle dependence in a…
Polarization carries information about the magnetic fields in interstellar clouds. The observations of polarized dust emission are used to study the role of magnetic fields in the evolution of molecular clouds and the initial phases of…
Aligned interstellar grains produce polarized extinction (observed at wavelengths from the far-ultraviolet to the mid-infrared), and polarized thermal emission (observed at far-infrared and submm wavelengths). The grains must be quite…
Our aim is to study the polarization of thermal dust emission to see if the alignment of grain by radiative torques could explain the observed relation between the degree of polarization and the intensity in dense cores. Predictions are…
Despite the fact that the physics of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is most naturally expressed in Fourier space, pixelised maps are almost always used in the analysis and simulation of microwave data. A complementary approach…
We use polarization observations of a circumbinary disk to investigate how the polarization properties change at distinct frequency bands. Our goal is to discern the main mechanism responsible for the polarization through comparison between…
Cosmic birefringence (CB) is a promising probe of parity-violating physics beyond the Standard Model, characterized by the rotation of the linear polarization plane of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons. This effect, quantified by…
Cosmic birefringence is an effect where the plane of polarisation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is rotated by an angle $\beta$ through coupling to a hypothetical parity-violating field. We analyse the Planck Public Release 4 (PR4…
Cosmological birefringence, a rotation by an angle $\alpha$ of the polarization of photons as they propagate over cosmological distances, is constrained by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to be $|\alpha|\lesssim1^\circ$ ($1\sigma$)…
Motivated by recent interest in low dimensional arrays of atoms, we experimentally investigated the way cold collisional processes are affected by the geometry of the considered atomic sample. More specifically, we studied the case of…
Birefringence is one of the fascinating properties of the vacuum of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in strong electromagnetic fields. The scattering of linearly polarized incident probe photons into a perpendicularly polarized mode provides a…
We discuss the experimental techniques used to date for measuring the changes in polarization state of a laser produced by a strong transverse magnetic field acting in a vacuum. We point out the likely artifacts that can arise in such…
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…
Interstellar linear polarization occurs when starlight passes through elongated dust grains aligned by interstellar magnetic fields. The observed polarization can come from different dust structures along the line of sight (LOS). By…
In the presence of strong magnetic fields, the vacuum becomes a birefringent medium. We show that this QED effect couples the direction of the polarization of photons leaving the NS surface, to the direction of the magnetic field along the…
We derive a simple expression for the photon helicity and polarisation-flip probabilities in arbitrary background fields, in the low energy regime. Taking the background to model a focused laser beam, we study the impact of pulse shape and…