Polarimetric studies of magnetic turbulence with interferometer

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the polarization spectrum of synchrotron radiation, affected by MHD turbulence, can be used to extract detailed statistical properties of turbulent magnetic fields and electron densities from radio observations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the agreement of simulations with theoretical predictions and shows how polarization spectra can recover turbulence statistics, including effects of noise and beam size.

Findings

Spectrum of synchrotron polarization reveals turbulence properties.

Simulations match theoretical predictions of Lazarian & Pogosyan (2016).

Interferometric observations can recover turbulence statistics despite noise.

Abstract

We study statistical properties of synchrotron polarization emitted from media with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. We use both synthetic and MHD turbulence simulation data for our studies. We obtain the spatial spectrum and its derivative with respect to wavelength of synchrotron polarization arising from both synchrotron radiation and Faraday rotation fluctuations. In particular, we investigate how the spectrum changes with frequency. We find that our simulations agree with the theoretical predication in Lazarian \& Pogosyan (2016). We conclude that the spectrum of synchrotron polarization and it derivative can be very informative tools to get detailed information about the statistical properties of MHD turbulence from radio observations of diffuse synchrotron polarization. Especially, they are useful to recover the statistics of turbulent magnetic field as well as turbulent density of electrons. We also simulate interferometric observations that incorporate the effects of noise and finite telescope beam size, and demonstrate how we recover statistics of underlying MHD turbulence.