Faraday Conversion in Turbulent Blazar Jets

Abstract

Low ($\lesssim 1\%$) levels of circular polarization (CP) detected at radio frequencies in the relativistic jets of some blazars can provide insight into the underlying nature of the jet plasma. CP can be produced through linear birefringence, in which initially linearly polarized emission produced in one region of the jet is altered by Faraday rotation as it propagates through other regions of the jet with varying magnetic field orientation. Marscher has begun a study of jets with such magnetic geometries using the Turbulent Extreme Multi-Zone (TEMZ) model, in which turbulent plasma crossing a standing shock in the jet is represented by a collection of thousands of individual plasma cells, each with distinct magnetic field orientations. Here we develop a radiative transfer scheme that allows the numerical TEMZ code to produce simulated images of the time-dependent linearly and circularly polarized intensity at different radio frequencies. In this initial study, we produce synthetic polarized emission maps that highlight the linear and circular polarization expected within the model.

17 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (6)

• Turbulent, Extreme Multi-Zone Model for Simulating Flux and Polarization Variability in Blazars
• Multiwaveband Polarimetric Observations of 15 Active Galactic Nuclei at High Frequencies: Correlated Polarization Behavior
• The internal structure of overpressured, magnetized, relativistic jets
• POLAMI: Polarimetric Monitoring of Active Galactic Nuclei at Millimetre Wavelengths. II. Widespread circular polarisation
• Full-Stokes polarimetry with circularly polarized feeds - Sources with stable linear and circular polarization in the GHz regime
• Evolution of Global Relativistic Jets: Collimations and Expansion with kKHI and the Weibel Instability

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• Ray-Tracing in Relativistic Jet Simulations: A Polarimetric Study of Magnetic Field Morphology and Electron Scaling Relations
• Evidence for a toroidal magnetic field in the core of 3C 84
• A multi-frequency study of sub-parsec jets with the Event Horizon Telescope
• Runko: Modern multiphysics toolbox for plasma simulations
• Leaking Outside the Box: Kinetic Turbulence with Cosmic-Ray Escape
• Probing Lorentz violation effects via a laser beam interacting with a high-energy charged lepton beam
• Circular polarisation in compact radio sources: Constraints on particle acceleration and electron-positron pairs
• Monte-Carlo Applications for Partially Polarized Inverse External-Compton Scattering (MAPPIES) II -- Application to the UV/Soft X-ray Excess in Blazar Spectra
• Circular polarisation from inhomogeneous synchrotron sources
• Constraints on magnetic field and particle content in blazar jets through optical circular polarization
• From electrons to Janskys: Full stokes polarized radiative transfer in 3D relativistic particle-in-cell jet simulations