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Faraday Rotation Measure (RM) Synthesis, as a method for analyzing multi-channel observations of polarized radio emission to investigate galactic magnetic fields structures, requires the definition of complex polarized intensity in the range of the negative lambda square. We introduce a simple method for continuation of the observed complex polarized intensity into this domain using symmetry arguments. The method is suggested in context of magnetic field recognition in galactic disks where the magnetic field is supposed to have a maximum in the equatorial plane. The method is quite simple when applied to a single Faraday-rotating structure on the line of sight. Recognition of several structures on the same line of sight requires a more sophisticated technique. We also introduce a wavelet-based algorithm which allows us to consider a set of isolated structures. The method essentially improves the possibilities for reconstruction of complicated Faraday structures using the capabilities of modern radio telescopes.
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RM Synthesis was recently developed as a new tool for the interpretation of polarized emission data in order to separate the contributions of different sources lying on the same line of sight. Until now the method was mainly applied to discrete sources in Faraday space (Faraday screens). Here we consider how to apply RM Synthesis to reconstruct the Faraday dispersion function, aiming at the further extraction of information concerning the magnetic fields of extended sources, e.g. galaxies. The main attention is given to two related novelties in the method, i.e. the symmetry argument in Faraday space and the wavelet technique. We give a relation between our method and the previous applications of RM Synthesis to point-like sources. We demonstrate that the traditional RM Synthesis for a point-like source indirectly implies a symmetry argument and, in this sense, can be considered as a particular case of the method presented here. Investigating the applications of RM Synthesis to polarization details associated with small-scale magnetic fields, we isolate an option which was not covered by the ideas of the Burn theory, i.e. using quantities averaged over small-scale fluctuations of magnetic field and electron density. We describe the contribution of small-scale fields in terms of Faraday dispersion and beam depolarization. We consider the complex polarization for RM Synthesis without any averaging over small-scale fluctuations of magnetic field and electron density and demonstrate that it allows us to isolate the contribution from small-scale field.
There is evidence that magnetized material along the line of sight to distant quasars is detectable in the polarization properties of the background sources. The polarization properties appear to be correlated with the presence of intervening MgII absorption, which is thought to arise in outflowing material from star forming galaxies. In order to investigate this further, we have obtained high spectral resolution polarization measurements, with the VLA and ATCA, of a set of 49 unresolved quasars for which we have high quality optical spectra. These enable us to produce a Faraday Depth spectrum for each source, using Rotation Measure Synthesis. Our new independent radio data confirms that interveners are strongly associated with depolarization. We characterize the complexity of the Faraday Depth spectrum using a number of parameters and show how these are related, or not, to the depolarization and to the presence of MgII absorption along the line of sight. We argue that complexity and structure in the Faraday Depth distribution likely arise from both intervening material and intrinsically to the background source and attempt to separate these. We find that the strong radio depolarization effects associated with intervening material at redshifts out to $z approx 1$ arise from inhomogeneous Faraday screens producing a dispersion in Rotation Measure across individual sources of around 10~rad/m$^2$. This is likely produced by disordered fields with strengths of at least $3;mu$G.
Rotation measure (RM) synthesis is a widely used polarization processing algorithm for reconstructing polarized structures along the line of sight. Performing RM synthesis on large datasets produced by telescopes like LOFAR can be computationally intensive as the computational cost is proportional to the product of the number of input frequency channels, the number of output Faraday depth values to be evaluated and the number of lines of sight present in the data cube. The required computational cost is likely to get worse due to the planned large area sky surveys with telescopes like the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), and eventually the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The massively parallel General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPGPUs) can be used to execute some of the computationally intensive astronomical image processing algorithms including RM synthesis. In this paper, we present a GPU-accelerated code, called cuFFS or CUDA-accelerated Fast Faraday Synthesis, to perform Faraday rotation measure synthesis. Compared to a fast single-threaded and vectorized CPU implementation, depending on the structure and format of the data cubes, our code achieves an increase in speed of up to two orders of magnitude. During testing, we noticed that the disk I/O when using the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) data format is a major bottleneck and to reduce the time spent on disk I/O, our code supports the faster HDFITS format in addition to the standard FITS format. The code is written in C with GPU-acceleration achieved using Nvidias CUDA parallel computing platform. The code is available at https://github.com/sarrvesh/cuFFS.
We study the magnetic fields in galaxy clusters through Faraday rotation measurements crossing systems in different dynamical states. We confirm that magnetic fields are present in those systems and analyze the difference between relaxed and unrelaxed samples with respect to the dispersion between their inherent Faraday Rotation measurements. We found an increase of this RM dispersion and a higher RM overlapping frequency for unrelaxed clusters. This fact suggests that a large scale physical process is involved in the nature of unrelaxed systems and possible depolarization effects are present in the relaxed ones. We show that dynamically unrelaxed systems can enhance magnetic fields to large coherence lengths. In contrast, the results for relaxed systems suggests that small-scale dynamo can be a dominant mechanism for sustaining magnetic fields, leading to intrinsic depolarization.
Faraday rotation measure (RM) synthesis is an important tool to study and analyze galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields. Since there is a Fourier relation between the Faraday dispersion function and the polarized radio emission, full reconstruction of the dispersion function requires knowledge of the polarized radio emission at both positive and negative square wavelengths $lambda^2$. However, one can only make observations for $lambda^2 > 0$. Furthermore observations are possible only for a limited range of wavelengths. Thus reconstructing the Faraday dispersion function from these limited measurements is ill-conditioned. In this paper, we propose three new reconstruction algorithms for RM synthesis based upon compressive sensing/sampling (CS). These algorithms are designed to be appropriate for Faraday thin sources only, thick sources only, and mixed sources respectively. Both visual and numerical results show that the new RM synthesis methods provide superior reconstructions of both magnitude and phase information than RM-CLEAN
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