Analytical techniques for polarimetric imaging of accretion flows in Schwarzschild metric

TL;DR

This paper derives an exact analytical formula for polarization rotation in Schwarzschild spacetime, enabling fast, accurate calculations of polarization signatures from accretion disks without heavy ray-tracing.

Contribution

It provides a novel analytical expression for polarization rotation in Schwarzschild metric, simplifying and accelerating polarization modeling in accretion flow studies.

Findings

Analytical formula accurately predicts polarization rotation angles.

Fast computation of flux and polarization parameters without ray-tracing.

Applicable to current and future high-energy astrophysical polarization observations.

Abstract

Emission from an accretion disc around compact objects, such as neutron stars and black holes, is expected to be significantly polarized. The polarization can be used to put constraints on geometrical and physical parameters of the compact sources -- their radii, masses and spins -- as well as to determine the orbital parameters. The radiation escaping from the innermost parts of the disc is strongly affected by the gravitational field of the compact object and relativistic velocities of the matter. The straightforward calculation of the observed polarization signatures involves computationally expensive ray-tracing technique. At the same time, having fast computational routines for direct data fitting becomes increasingly important in light of the currently observed images of the accretion flow around supermassive black hole in M87 by the Event Horizon Telescope, infrared polarization signatures coming from Sgr A*, as well as for the upcoming X-ray polarization measurements by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer and enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry mission. In this work, we obtain an exact analytical expression for the rotation angle of polarization plane in Schwarzschild metric accounting for the effects of light bending and relativistic aberration. We show that the calculation of the observed flux, polarization degree and polarization angle as a function of energy can be performed analytically with high accuracy using approximate light-bending formula, lifting the need for the pre-computed tabular models in fitting routines.