Faraday Rotation Measure Synthesis for Magnetic Fields of Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper advances RM Synthesis by applying it to extended sources like galaxies, introducing symmetry and wavelet techniques to better extract magnetic field information from polarized emission data.

Contribution

It presents a novel application of RM Synthesis to extended sources, incorporating symmetry arguments and wavelet methods for improved magnetic field analysis.

Findings

Traditional RM Synthesis is a special case of the new method.

The approach allows analysis of small-scale magnetic field contributions.

It enables separation of small-scale magnetic effects from polarization data.

Abstract

RM Synthesis was recently developed as a new tool for the interpretation of polarized emission data in order to separate the contributions of different sources lying on the same line of sight. Until now the method was mainly applied to discrete sources in Faraday space (Faraday screens). Here we consider how to apply RM Synthesis to reconstruct the Faraday dispersion function, aiming at the further extraction of information concerning the magnetic fields of extended sources, e.g. galaxies. The main attention is given to two related novelties in the method, i.e. the symmetry argument in Faraday space and the wavelet technique. We give a relation between our method and the previous applications of RM Synthesis to point-like sources. We demonstrate that the traditional RM Synthesis for a point-like source indirectly implies a symmetry argument and, in this sense, can be considered as a particular case of the method presented here. Investigating the applications of RM Synthesis to polarization details associated with small-scale magnetic fields, we isolate an option which was not covered by the ideas of the Burn theory, i.e. using quantities averaged over small-scale fluctuations of magnetic field and electron density. We describe the contribution of small-scale fields in terms of Faraday dispersion and beam depolarization. We consider the complex polarization for RM Synthesis without any averaging over small-scale fluctuations of magnetic field and electron density and demonstrate that it allows us to isolate the contribution from small-scale field.