# NICSPol: A Near Infrared polarimeter for the 1.2 m telescope at Mount Abu Infrared Observatory

## TL;DR

NICSPol is a newly developed near-infrared imaging polarimeter for the 1.2 m telescope at Mount Abu, capable of measuring polarization with ~1% accuracy for sources brighter than magnitude 16 in JHKs bands, enabling diverse astrophysical studies.

## Contribution

The paper introduces NICSPol, the first imaging near-infrared polarimeter in India, detailing its design, calibration, and performance on standard sources.

## Key findings

- NICSPol can constrain polarization within ~1% for sources brighter than magnitude 16.
- The instrument successfully observed polarized and unpolarized standards across J, H, and Ks bands.
- NICSPol is suitable for studying various astrophysical objects like AGNs, pulsars, and supernovae.

## Abstract

NICSPol is a near infrared imaging polarimeter developed for the Near Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (NICS), one of the back end instruments of the 1.2 m Cassegrain telescope at the Mount Abu Infrared Observatory (MIRO), India. The polarimeter consists of a rotating wire grid polarizer which is mounted between the telescope optics and NICS. The polarimetric observations are carried out by rotating the polarizer using a motorized mechanism to determine the Stokes parameters, which are then converted into the polarization fraction and polarization angle. Here we report the details of the instrument and the results of observations of IR polarimetric standards. A set of polarized and unpolarized standards were observed using NICSPol over J, H and Ks bands covering 0.8 to 2.5 micro m. The observations of polarized standards using NICSPol show that, NICSPol can constrain polarization within ~1% for sources brighter than ~16 magnitude in JHKs bands. NICSPol is a general purpose instrument which could be used to study variety of astrophysical sources such as AGNs, Pulsars, XRBs, Supernovae, star forming regions etc. With few NIR polarimeters available world-wide so far, NICSPol would be the first imaging NIR polarimeter in India.