Issue |
A&A
Volume 609, January 2018
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A68 | |
Number of page(s) | 19 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201630301 | |
Published online | 09 January 2018 |
Full-Stokes polarimetry with circularly polarized feeds
Sources with stable linear and circular polarization in the GHz regime⋆
1 Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hügel 69, 53121 Bonn, Germany
e-mail: imyserlis@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de
2 Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR, Fraunhoferstrasse 20, 53343 Wachtberg, Germany
3 IAPS-INAF, via Fosso del Cavaliere 100, 00133 Roma, Italy
4 Department of Astronomy, University of Michigan, 311 West Hall, 1085 S. University Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
Received: 21 December 2016
Accepted: 30 May 2017
We present an analysis pipeline that enables the recovery of reliable information for all four Stokes parameters with high accuracy. Its novelty relies on the effective treatment of the instrumental effects even before the computation of the Stokes parameters, contrary to conventionally used methods such as that based on the Müller matrix. For instance, instrumental linear polarization is corrected across the whole telescope beam and significant Stokes Q and U can be recovered even when the recorded signals are severely corrupted by instrumental effects. The accuracy we reach in terms of polarization degree is of the order of 0.1–0.2%. The polarization angles are determined with an accuracy of almost 1°. The presented methodology was applied to recover the linear and circular polarization of around 150 active galactic nuclei, which were monitored between July 2010 and April 2016 with the Effelsberg 100-m telescope at 4.85 GHz and 8.35 GHz with a median cadence of 1.2 months. The polarized emission of the Moon was used to calibrate the polarization angle measurements. Our analysis showed a small system-induced rotation of about 1° at both observing frequencies. Over the examined period, five sources have significant and stable linear polarization; three sources remain constantly linearly unpolarized; and a total of 11 sources have stable circular polarization degree mc, four of them with non-zero mc. We also identify eight sources that maintain a stable polarization angle. All this is provided to the community for future polarization observations reference. We finally show that our analysis method is conceptually different from those traditionally used and performs better than the Müller matrix method. Although it has been developed for a system equipped with circularly polarized feeds, it can easily be generalized to systems with linearly polarized feeds as well.
Key words: polarization / techniques: polarimetric / galaxies: active / radio continuum: galaxies / methods: data analysis / galaxies: jets
The data used to create Fig. C.1 are only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/609/A68
© ESO, 2018
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.