Paper
18 July 2016 Full-Stokes polychromatic polarimeter design for Arago
Martin Pertenais, Coralie Neiner, Pascal Petit
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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.
© (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
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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Cited by 3 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Polarization

Polarimetry

Modulators

Ultraviolet radiation

Modulation

Spectrographs

Tolerancing

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