Statistics – Computation
Scientific paper
Dec 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufm.p11f1628k&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #P11F-1628
Statistics
Computation
[0305] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Aerosols And Particles, [0545] Computational Geophysics / Modeling, [6015] Planetary Sciences: Comets And Small Bodies / Dust, [6045] Planetary Sciences: Comets And Small Bodies / Physics And Chemistry Of Materials
Scientific paper
For a long time, the main polarimetric tool to study dust in the Solar system has been the dependence of polarization on phase (scattering) angle. Surprisingly, a variety of cosmic dusts (interplanetary and cometary dust, dust on the surfaces of asteroids and in debris disks) possesses a very similar phase dependence of polarization with a negative bowl-shaped part at small phase angles and a positive bell-shaped region with maximum polarization around 95-105 deg. Numerous laboratory and theoretical simulations showed that a polarimetric phase curve of this shape is typical for fluffy materials, e.g., porous, aggregated particles. By contrast, the wavelength dependence of polarization is different for different types of dust. In the visual, polarization decreases with wavelength (negative gradient) for asteroids and interplanetary dust, but usually increases with wavelength (positive gradient) for cometary dust. In debris disks both signs of the spectral gradient of polarization have been found. Moreover, it was found that a cometary positive spectral gradient can change to a negative one as observations move to longer (near-infrared) wavelengths (Kelley et al. AJ, 127, 2398, 2004) and some comets(Kiselev et al. JQSRT, 109, 1384, 2008) have negative gradient even in the visible. The diversity of the spectral dependence of polarization therefore gives us hope that it can be used for characterization of the aggregates that represent different types of cosmic dust. To accomplish this, the physics behind the spectral dependence of polarization need to be revealed. Our recent study shows that the spectral dependence of polarization depends on the strength of electromagnetic interaction between the monomers in aggregates. The strength of the interaction mainly depends on how many monomers the electromagnetic wave covers on the light path equal to one wavelength. Since the electromagnetic interaction depolarizes the light, the more particles a single wavelength covers the smaller is the polarization of the scattered light. Thus, at a given monomer size the polarization decreases as wavelength increases resulting in the negative spectral gradient of polarization. However, this tendency occurs only for rather compact aggregates. For porous particles, an increase of wavelength may not increase the number of the covered monomers. In this case, polarization increases with wavelength as a result of decreasing monomer's size parameter. We performed computer modeling of light scattering by aggregates of different porosity using MSTM (multisphere T-matrix) code by D. Mackowski (see http://eng.auburn.edu/users/dmckwski/scatcodes/). The results show that for each porosity a critical wavelength exists at which the spectral gradient of polarization changes from positive to negative. The electromagnetic interaction is also stronger for more transparent materials which in turn affects the value of the critical wavelength. Thus, measurements of polarization over a broad range of wavelength can be a powerful tool to study the porosity and composition of dust in a variety of cosmic environments, especially when detailed phase dependence of polarization cannot be established (e.g. for TNO and other distant objects).
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