Full-Stokes polychromatic polarimeter design for Arago

Martin Pertenais; Coralie Neiner; Pascal Petit

doi:10.1117/12.2232342

18 July 2016 Full-Stokes polychromatic polarimeter design for Arago

Martin Pertenais, Coralie Neiner, Pascal Petit

Proceedings Volume 9905, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray; 99052Y (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2232342
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

The UVMag consortium will propose the Arago space mission to the ESA call Cosmic Vision M5. This mission aims at characterizing all kind of stars and their environment simultaneously, to better understand the cycle of matter in our galaxy. It carries a single instrument, a spectropolarimeter, acquiring data from 119 to 888 nm and enabling the determination of the magnetic field of stars thanks to the Zeeman effect. One of the key instrumental point of this project is the development of an efficient polarimeter over the large spectral range and in space. We chose to use a polychromatic temporal modulation to achieve a measurement of all four Stokes parameters: I the intensity, Q and U the linear polarization states, and V the circular polarization. The modulator is composed by several birefringent Magnesium Fluoride plates, optimized to achromatize the extraction efficiency of the Stokes parameters from the FUV to the NIR. This polarization modulator is followed by a polarization beam-splitter to analyze the state of the light. After the polarization analysis, the light goes through a high-resolution spectrograph. We present the theoretical optimization and design of the polarimeter and of the whole instrument, as well as the first laboratory results on this concept.

Citation Download Citation

Martin Pertenais, Coralie Neiner, and Pascal Petit "Full-Stokes polychromatic polarimeter design for Arago", Proc. SPIE 9905, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2016: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray, 99052Y (18 July 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2232342

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