Papers › Polarization and Polarimetry: A Review
Polarization and Polarimetry: A Review
S. Trippe
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Polarization is a basic property of light and is fundamentally linked to the internal geometry of a source of radiation. Polarimetry complements photometric, spectroscopic, and imaging analyses of sources of radiation and has made possible multiple astrophysical discoveries. In this article I review (i) the physical basics of polarization: electromagnetic waves, photons, and parameterizations; (ii) astrophysical sources of polarization: scattering, synchrotron radiation, active media, and the Zeeman, Goldreich-Kylafis, and Hanle effects, as well as interactions between polarization and matter (like birefringence, Faraday rotation, or the Chandrasekhar-Fermi effect); (iii) observational methodology: on-sky geometry, influence of atmosphere and instrumental polarization, polarization statistics, and observational techniques for radio, optical, and X/gamma wavelengths; and (iv) science cases for astronomical polarimetry: solar and stellar physics, planetary system bodies, interstellar matter, astrobiology, astronomical masers, pulsars, galactic magnetic fields, gamma-ray bursts, active galactic nuclei, and cosmic microwave background radiation.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections