Syllabus

The core theoretical lectures will be taught (mostly) during the first week of the school and will cover two broad topics, "Instrumentation and Observations" and "Polarized Radiative Transfer" (~16 hours total). In the second week we will see the theory of polarized non-LTE radiative transfer and scattering polarization. These main lecture courses will be complemented by shorter lecture series on adjacent topics.

POLARIZED LTE RADIATIVE TRANSFER

David Orozco Suarez (IAA, Spain) will be the lecturer for the theory of radiative transfer (~10 hours). Among other topics, we will see:

  • Absorption and dispersion
  • The radiative transfer equation (RTE): derivation, emission processes and spectral line formation
  • The RTE in the presence of a magnetic field (Zeeman effect, allowed transitions, elements of the propagation matrix, effective Zeeman triplet)
  • Solving the RTE (formal solution, symmetries, evolution operator, simple solutions, Milne-Eddington approximation)
  • Stokes spectrum diagnostics (tomography, contribution functions and response functions)

INSTRUMENTATION AND OBSERVATIONS

This part will be taught by Kevin Reardon (NSO) and it will take ~6 hours.

  • Polarization of light (Jones & Mueller formalisms)
  • Modification of polarization by optical devices (polarizers & retarders)
  • Requirements for polarization measurements (noise, resolution...)
  • Approaches to polarimetry (modulation schemes, dual beam polarimetry...)
  • Spectral discriminators (spectrographs, filtergraphs, fiber optics...)
  • Modern polarimeters (examples)
  • Polarization calibration techniques

NON-LTE RADIATIVE TRANSFER

This part will be taught by Han Uitenbroek (NSO) and it will take ~5 hours.

  • Introduction to non-LTE...

SCATTERING POLARIZATION & THE HANLE EFFECT

This part will be taught by Ivan Milic (Astronomical Observatory, Belgrade) and it will take ~3 hours.

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ADDITIONAL LECTURE TOPICS

There will also be shorter lecture courses (1-3 hours) on complementary topics:

  • Milne-Eddington synthesis and inversions (Han Uitenbroek, NSO, Boulder)
  • Spectral line inversion algorithms (Rebecca Centeno, HAO, Boulder)
  • DKIST  (TBD)
  • Magnetic field disambiguation techniques (Graham Barnes, NWRA)
  • Machine Learning techniques applied to inversion problems (Ivan Milic, Astronomical Observatory, Belgrade)