The RoboPol Program: Optical Polarimetric Monitoring of Blazars

Abstract

After three years of polarimetric monitoring of blazars, the RoboPol project has uncovered several key characteristics of polarimetric rotations in the optical for these most variable sources. The most important of these is that polarization properties of the synchrotron emission in the optical appear to be directly linked with gamma-ray activity. In this paper, we discuss the evidence for this connection, as well as the broader features of polarimetric behavior in blazars that are key in making progress with theoretical modeling of blazar emission.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Two Flares with One Shock: the Interesting Case of 3C 454.3
• Optical polarization properties of AGN with significant VLBI-Gaia offsets
• Repeated pattern of gamma-ray flares in the lightcurve of the blazar 3C 279
• The Repeating Flaring Activity of Blazar AO 0235+164
• The flaring activity of blazar AO 0235+164 during year 2021
• Investigating the origin of optical flares from the TeV blazar S4 0954+65
• The Method of Searching for Rotations of the Polarization Position Angle of Quasars
• Science with a large field-of-view polarization survey: The Large Array Survey Telescope Polarization Node (LAST-P)
• Automating the detection of polarization angle rotations in blazars. Re-analysis of RoboPol data reveals 27 new rotations