Polarized scattering of light for arbitrary magnetic fields with level-crossings from the combination of hyperfine and fine structure splittings

Abstract

Interference between magnetic substates of the hyperfine structure states belonging to different fine structure states of the same term influences the polarization for some of the diagnostically important lines of the Sun's spectrum, like the sodium and lithium doublets. The polarization signatures of this combined interference contain information on the properties of the solar magnetic fields. Motivated by this, in the present paper, we study the problem of polarized scattering on a two-term atom with hyperfine structure by accounting for the partial redistribution in the photon frequencies arising due to the Doppler motions of the atoms. We consider the scattering atoms to be under the influence of a magnetic field of arbitrary strength and develop a formalism based on the Kramers--Heisenberg approach to calculate the scattering cross section for this process. We explore the rich polarization effects that arise from various level-crossings in the Paschen--Back regime in a single scattering case using the lithium atomic system as a concrete example that is relevant to the Sun.

Published in the ApJ

References in corpus (4)

• Frequency Redistribution Function for the Polarized Two-Term Atom
• Polarized scattering with Paschen-Back effect, hyperfine structure, and partial frequency redistribution in magnetized stellar atmospheres
• Polarized light scattering with Paschen-Back effect, level-crossing of fine structure states and partial frequency redistribution
• Physics of polarized scattering at multi-level atomic systems

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The transfer of resonance line polarization with partial frequency redistribution in the general Hanle-Zeeman regime
• The transfer of polarized radiation in resonance lines with partial frequency redistribution, J-state interference, and arbitrary magnetic fields. A radiative transfer code and useful approximations
• Collisional effects in modeling solar polarized lines