paper

Properties of Intrinsic Polarization Angle Ambiguities in Faraday Tomography

arXiv:1402.0612 · doi:10.1093/pasj/psu030

Abstract

Faraday tomography is a powerful method to diagnose polarizations and Faraday rotations along the line of sight. The quality of Faraday tomography is, however, limited by several conditions. Recently, it is reported that Faraday tomography indicates false signals in some specific situations. In this paper, we systematically investigate the condition of the appearance of false signals in Faraday tomography. We study this by pseudo-observing two sources within a beam, and change in the intrinsic polarization angles, rotation measures, intensities, and frequency coverage. We find that false signals arise when rotation measure between the sources is less than 1.5 times the full width at half maximum of the rotation measure spread function. False signals also depend on the intensity ratio between the sources and are reduced for large ratio. On the other hand, the appearance of false signals does not depend on frequency coverage, meaning that the uncertainty should be correctly understood and taken into consideration even with future wide-band observations such as Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

21 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in PASJ

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