Polarization calibration of the Tandem Etalon Magnetograph of the Solar Magnetic Activity Research Telescope at Hida Observatory

TL;DR

This paper details the polarization calibration process of the Tandem Etalon Magnetograph at Hida Observatory, including response matrix measurement, polarization component analysis, and daily variation tracking to ensure high polarimetric sensitivity.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive end-to-end calibration method for the TEM instrument, accounting for spatial variation and component-induced polarization effects.

Findings

Significant spatial variation in response matrix across the field of view.

Polarization characteristics of the PBS are influenced by stress-induced retardation and diattenuation.

Daily polarization property variations require pixel-by-pixel calibration every 100 minutes.

Abstract

The Tandem Etalon Magnetograph (TEM) is one of the instruments of the Solar Magnetic Activity Research Telescope of Hida Observatory. The TEM is a partial disk (320" x240") filter magnetograph which scans the wavelength around a Fe I line at 6303 angstrom and achieves polarimetric sensitivity of < 5x10^-4 for each wavelength. To obtain the polarimeter response matrix of the instrument, we have carried out end-to-end polarization calibrations of the instrument. We have also measured the polarization characteristics of the polarization beam splitter (PBS), which is a crucial component of the instrument. As a result of end-to-end calibration, we found significant spatial variation in the response matrix across the field of view. From a laboratory test, we found that 1% of the magnitude of a circular diattenuation of the PBS was due to the retardation caused by the stress in the cube and the linear diattenuation of the film. Although the spatial variation across the field of view is more than ten times larger, to achieve the polarimetric sensitivity of < 5x10^-4, this can be well explained by the polarization characteristic of the PBS and corrected by using the response matrix obtained in the end-to-end calibration. In addition, we also obtained the daily variation of the polarization property of the TEM. We found that the crosstalk from Stokes Q to V changes an amount comparable to the tolerance through a day. In the present configuration, we require a pixel-by-pixel calibration every 100 minutes to meet the accuracy requirement.