On the theory of astronomical masers – II. Polarization of maser radiation |
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| Authors: | Dinh-V-Trung † |
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| Institution: | Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, PO Box 23-141, Taipei 10617, Taiwan |
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| Abstract: | In this paper, we investigate the polarization property of the radiation amplified by astronomical masers in the presence of a strong magnetic field. Our model explicitly takes into account the broad-band nature of the radiation field and the interaction of the radiation with the maser transition J = 1–0 . The amplification of different realizations of the background continuum radiation by the maser is directly simulated and the Stokes parameters of the radiation field are then obtained by averaging over the ensemble of emerging maser radiation. For isotropic pumping and partially saturated masers, we find that the maser radiation is linearly polarized in two representative cases where the magnetic field B makes an angle θ= 30° and 90° to the maser axis. The linear polarization for maser radiation obtained in our simulations for both cases is in agreement with the results of the standard model. Furthermore, no instability during amplification is seen in our simulations. Therefore, we conclude that there is no problem with the previous numerical investigations of maser polarization in the unsaturated and partially saturated regime. |
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| Keywords: | masers polarization radiative transfer |
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