A Decade of Linear and Circular Polarimetry with the POLISH2 Polarimeter

Abstract

The POLISH2 optical polarimeter has been in operation at the Lick Observatory 3 m Shane telescope since 2011, and it was commissioned at the Gemini North 8 m in 2016. This instrument primarily targets exoplanets, asteroids, and the Crab Pulsar, but it has also been used for a wide variety of planetary, galactic, and supernova science. POLISH2's photoelastic modulators, employed instead of rotating wave plates or ferroelectric liquid crystal modulators, offer the unprecedented ability to achieve sensitivity and accuracy of order 1 ppm (0.0001%), which are difficult to obtain with conventional polarimeters. Additionally, POLISH2 simultaneously measures the intensity (Stokes I ), linear polarization (Stokes Q and U ), and circular polarization (Stokes V ), which fully describe the polarization state of incident light. We document our laboratory and on-sky calibration methodology and our archival on-sky database, and we demonstrate the conclusive detection of circular polarization of certain objects.

Keywords

• Polarimeters
• Polarimetry
• Starlight polarization
• Calibration
• Astronomical instrumentation
• Astronomy databases