Polarization of radiation of electrons in highly turbulent magnetic fields

Abstract

We study the polarization properties of the jitter and synchrotron radiation produced by electrons in highly turbulent anisotropic magnetic fields. The net polarization is provided by the geometry of the magnetic field the directions of which are parallel to a certain plane. Such conditions may appear in the relativistic shocks during the amplification of the magnetic field through the so-called Weibel instability. While the polarization properties of the jitter radiation allows extraction of direct information on the turbulence spectrum as well as the geometry of magnetic field, the polarization of the synchrotron radiation reflects the distribution of the magnetic field over its strength. For the isotropic distribution of monoenergetic electrons, we found that the degree of polarization of the synchrotron radiation is larger than the polarization of the jitter radiation. For the power-law energy distribution of electrons the relation between the degree of polarization of synchrotron and jitter radiation depends on the spectral index of the distribution.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Linear polarization in gamma-ray burst prompt emission
• Violation of synchrotron line of death by the highly polarized $GRB160802A$
• Linear Polarization, Circular Polarization, and Depolarization of Gamma-ray Bursts: A Simple Case of Jitter Radiation
• Electron transport with re-acceleration and radiation in the jets of X-ray binaries
• Polarization radiation with turbulent magnetic fields from X-ray binaries
• Time-averaging Polarimetric and Spectral Properties of Gamma-Ray Bursts