Properties of Polarized Synchrotron Emission from Fluctuation Dynamo Action—II. Effects of Turbulence Driving in the ICM and Beam Smoothing

Abstract

Polarized synchrotron emission from the radio halos of diffuse intracluster medium (ICM) in galaxy clusters are yet to be observed. To investigate the expected polarization in the ICM, we use high resolution (1 kpc) magnetohydrodynamic simulations of fluctuation dynamos, which produces intermittent magnetic field structures, for varying scales of turbulent driving (lf) to generate synthetic observations of the polarized emission. We focus on how the inferred diffuse polarized emission for different lf is affected due to smoothing by a finite telescope resolution. The mean fractional polarization ⟨p⟩ vary as ⟨p⟩∝lf1/2 with ⟨p⟩>20% for lf≳60 kpc, at frequencies ν>4GHz. Faraday depolarization at ν3 GHz leads to deviation from this relation, and in combination with beam depolarization, filamentary polarized structures are completely erased, reducing ⟨p⟩ to below 5% level at ν≲1 GHz. Smoothing on scales up to 30 kpc reduces ⟨p⟩ above 4 GHz by at most a factor of 2 compared to that expected at 1 kpc resolution of the simulations, especially for lf≳100 kpc, while at ν3 GHz, ⟨p⟩ is reduced by a factor of more than 5 for lf≳100 kpc, and by more than 10 for lf≲100 kpc. Our results suggest that observational estimates of, or constrain on, ⟨p⟩ at ν≳4 GHz could be used as an indicator of the turbulent driving scale in the ICM.

Keywords

• intracluster magnetic fields
• polarimetry
• depolarization
• magnetohydrodynamic simulations