# Can Turbulence Dominate Depolarization of Optical Blazars?

## TL;DR

This paper investigates whether magnetohydrodynamic turbulence can explain the optical and near-infrared depolarization observed in blazars, finding that turbulence likely plays a significant role and exhibits diverse characteristics across sources.

## Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis linking MHD turbulence to blazar depolarization and identifies the applicability of Kolmogorov scaling in observational data.

## Key findings

- Depolarization in blazars roughly follows 3D anisotropic Kolmogorov scaling.
- The effective Faraday rotation window length scale is insufficient to resolve polarization correlation.
- Depolarization features vary among different blazar sources.

## Abstract

We carefully examine the depolarization feature of blazars in the optical and near-infrared bands using the sample of Mead et al. Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) turbulence could be one possible reason for the depolarization of optical/infrared blazars when we apply the theoretical analysis of Lazarian and Pogosyan. We further identify in the sample that the depolarization results shown in most blazars roughly obey the form of the three-dimensional anisotropic Kolmogorov scaling. The effective Faraday rotation window length scale is not small enough to resolve the polarization correlation length scale in the blazar sample. The depolarization and the related turbulent features show diversities in different blazar sources. We suggest more simultaneous observations in both the optical/infrared and the high-energy bands for the study of the blazar polarization.