Related papers: Polarimetry in Planetary Sciences and Astronomy
Animal vision spans a great range of complexity, with systems evolving to detect variations in optical intensity, distribution, colour, and polarisation. Polarisation vision systems studied to date detect one to four channels of linear…
The properties of coherence and polarization of light has been the subject of intense investigations and form the basis of many technological applications. These concepts which historically have been treated independently can now be…
Ascertaining the physical state of a system is vital in order to understand and predict its behaviour. Tomography is a standard approach used to determine the form of an unknown state. Here we show that an alternative approach, based on…
Due to its location and climate, Antarctica offers unique conditions for long-period observations across a broad wavelength regime, where important diagnostic lines for molecules and ions can be found, that are essential to understand the…
In undergraduate optics courses, diffraction gratings are studied extensively, generally within the scalar approximation. When the vector nature of light is taken into account, so-called polarization diffraction gratings have been proposed,…
Direct detection of extrasolar planets will require imaging systems capable of unprecedented contrast. Apodized pupils provide an attractive way to achieve such contrast but they are difficult, perhaps impossible, to manufacture to the…
It is becoming clear that the atmospheres of the young, self-luminous extrasolar giant planets imaged to date are dusty. Planets with dusty atmospheres may exhibit detectable amounts of linear polarization in the near-infrared, as has been…
Astrophysical research into exoplanets has delivered thousands of confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. These planets span a wide ranges of size and composition, with diversity also being the hallmark of system configurations, the great…
One objective of the Polstar spectropolarimetry mission is to characterize the degree of nonconservative mass transfer that occurs at various stages of binary evolution, from the initial mass reversal to the late Algol phase. The proposed…
Polarimetry is about to become a powerful tool for determining the atmospheric properties of exoplanets. To provide the basis for the interpretation of observational results and for predictive studies to guide future observations,…
The obliquity of a terrestrial planet is an important clue about its formation and critical to its climate. Previous studies using simulated photometry of Earth show that continuous observations over most of a planet's orbit can be inverted…
Context: Polarimetry is a very powerful tool to uncover various properties of astronomical objects that remain otherwise hidden in standard imaging or spectroscopic observations. However, the reliable measurement of the low polarization…
The surfaces of neutron stars are likely sources of strongly polarized soft X rays due to the presence of strong magnetic fields. Scattering transport in the surface layers is critical to the determination of the emergent anisotropy of…
Chirality is ubiquitous from microscopic to macroscopic phenomena in physics and biology, such as fermionic interactions and DNA duplication. In photonics, chirality has traditionally represented differentiated optical responses for right…
Significance: The depolarization of circularly polarized light caused by scattering in turbid media reveals structural information about the dispersed particles, such as their size, density, and distribution, which is useful for…
We consider the polarization arising from scattering in an envelope illuminated by a central anisotropic source. Spherical harmonics are used to describe both the light source anisotropy and the envelope density distribution functions of…
Depolarization of circularly polarized light scattered from biological tissues depends on structural changes in cell nuclei, which can provide valuable information for differentiating cancer tissues concealed in healthy tissues. In this…
Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) is a powerful astrophysical probe. Not only is it ubiquitous at high redshifts, it is also a resonant line, making Ly$\alpha$ photons scatter. This scattering process depends on the physical conditions of the gas…
Water ice has a strong spectral feature at a wavelength of approximately $3~\mu$m, which plays a vital role in our understanding of the icy universe. In this study, we investigate the scattering polarization of this water-ice feature. The…
X-ray polarimetry promises to deliver unique information about the geometry of the inner accretion flow of astrophysical black holes and the nature of matter and electromagnetism in and around neutron stars. In this paper, we discuss the…