No Arabic abstract
We present an investigation into the magnetism of the Magellanic Bridge, carried out through the observation of Faraday rotation towards 167 polarized extragalactic radio sources spanning the continuous frequency range of 1.3 - 3.1 GHz with the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Comparing measured Faraday depth values of sources on and off the Bridge, we find that the two populations are implicitly different. Assuming that this difference in populations is due to a coherent field in the Magellanic Bridge, the observed Faraday depths indicate a median line-of-sight coherent magnetic-field strength of $B_{parallel},simeq,0.3,mu$G directed uniformly away from us. Motivated by the varying magnitude of Faraday depths of sources on the Bridge, we speculate that the coherent field observed in the Bridge is a consequence of the coherent magnetic fields from the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds being pulled into the tidal feature. This is the first observation of a coherent magnetic field spanning the entirety of the Magellanic Bridge and we argue that this is a direct probe of a pan-Magellanic field.
We have measured the Faraday rotation toward a large sample of polarized radio sources behind the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), to determine the structure of this galaxys magnetic field. The magnetic field of the LMC consists of a coherent axisymmetric spiral of field strength ~1 microgauss. Strong fluctuations in the magnetic field are also seen, on small (<0.5 parsecs) and large (~100 parsecs) scales. The significant bursts of recent star formation and supernova activity in the LMC argue against standard dynamo theory, adding to the growing evidence for rapid field amplification in galaxies.
We present new 6 and 20 cm Very Large Array (VLA) observations of polarized continuum emission of roughly 0.5 square degrees of the Galactic center (GC) region. The 6 cm observations detect diffuse linearly-polarized emission throughout the region with a brightness of roughly 1 mJy per 15x10 beam. The Faraday rotation measure (RM) toward this polarized emission has structure on degree size scales and ranges from roughly +330 rad/m2 east of the dynamical center (Sgr A) to -880 rad/m2 west of the dynamical center. This RM structure is also seen toward several nonthermal radio filaments, which implies that they have a similar magnetic field orientation and constrains models for their origin. Modeling shows that the RM and its change with Galactic longitude are best explained by the high electron density and strong magnetic field of the GC region. Considering the emissivity of the GC plasma shows that while the absolute RM values are indirect measures of the GC magnetic field, the RM longitude structure directly traces the magnetic field in the central kiloparsec of the Galaxy. Combining this result with previous work reveals a larger RM structure covering the central ~2 degrees of the Galaxy. This RM structure is similar to that proposed by Novak and coworkers, but is shifted roughly 50 pc west of the dynamical center of the Galaxy. If this RM structure originates in the GC region, it shows that the GC magnetic field is organized on ~300 pc size scales. The pattern is consistent with a predominantly poloidal field geometry, pointing from south to north, that is perturbed by the motion of gas in the Galactic disk.
Traditionally, the strongest magnetic fields on the Sun have been measured in sunspot umbrae. More recently, however, much stronger fields have been measured at the ends of penumbral filaments carrying the Evershed and counter-Evershed flows. Superstrong fields have also been reported within a light bridge separating two umbrae of opposite polarities. We aim to accurately determine the strengths of the strongest fields in a light bridge using an advanced inversion technique and to investigate their detailed structure. We analyze observations from the spectropolarimeter on board the Hinode spacecraft of the active region AR 11967. The thermodynamic and magnetic configurations are obtained by inverting the Stokes profiles using an inversion scheme that allows multiple height nodes. Both the traditional 1D inversion technique and the so-called 2D coupled
We introduce a scheme to coherently suppress second-rank tensor frequency shifts in atomic clocks, relying on the continuous rotation of an external magnetic field during the free atomic state evolution in a Ramsey sequence. The method retrieves the unperturbed frequency within a single interrogation cycle and is readily applicable to various atomic clock systems. For the frequency shift due to the electric quadrupole interaction, we experimentally demonstrate suppression by more than two orders of magnitude for the ${}^2S_{1/2} to {}^2D_{3/2}$ transition of a single trapped ${}^{171}text{Yb}^+$ ion. The scheme provides particular advantages in the case of the ${}^{171}text{Yb}^+$ ${}^2S_{1/2} to {}^2F_{7/2}$ electric octupole (E3) transition. For an improved estimate of the residual quadrupole shift for this transition, we measure the excited state electric quadrupole moments $Theta({}^2D_{3/2}) = 1.95(1)~ea_0^2$ and $Theta({}^2F_{7/2}) = -0.0297(5)~ea_0^2$ with $e$ the elementary charge and $a_0$ the Bohr radius, improving the measurement uncertainties by one order of magnitude.
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.