ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Are we alone? In our quest to find life beyond Earth, we use our own planet to develop and verify new methods and techniques to remotely detect life. Our Life Signature Detection polarimeter (LSDpol), a snapshot full-Stokes spectropolarimeter to be deployed in the field and in space, looks for signals of life on Earth by sensing the linear and circular polarization states of reflected light. Examples of these biosignatures are linear polarization resulting from O2-A band and vegetation, e.g. the Red edge and the Green bump, as well as circular polarization resulting from the homochirality of biotic molecules. LSDpol is optimized for sensing circular polarization. To this end, LSDpol employs a spatial light modulator in the entrance slit of the spectrograph, a liquid-crystal quarter-wave retarder where the fast axis rotates as a function of slit position. The original design of LSDpol implemented a dual-beam spectropolarimeter by combining a quarter-wave plate with a polarization grating. Unfortunately, this design causes significant linear-to-circular cross-talk. In addition, it revealed spurious polarization modulation effects. Here, we present numerical simulations that illustrate how Fresnel diffraction effects can create these spurious modulations. We verified the simulations with accurate polarization state measurements in the lab using 100% linearly and circularly polarized light.
The search for inflationary primordial gravitational waves and the measurement of the optical depth to reionization, both through their imprint on the large angular scale correlations in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), has
Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs) are currently being implemented in experiments designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background on large angular scales because of their capability for providing rapid, front-end po
Liquid crystals allow for the real-time control of the polarization of light. We describe and provide some experimental examples of the types of general polarization transformations, including universal polarization transformations, that can be accom
The weak, turbulent magnetic fields that supposedly permeate most of the solar photosphere are difficult to observe, because the Zeeman effect is virtually blind to them. The Hanle effect, acting on the scattering polarization in suitable lines, can
Massive MIMO, a candidate for 5G technology, promises significant gains in wireless data rates and link reliability by using large numbers of antennas (more than 64) at the base transceiver station (BTS). Extra antennas help by focusing the transmiss