Bibcode
Nagendra, K. N.; Anusha, L. S.; Sampoorna, M.
Bibliographical reference
Memorie della Società Astronomica Italiana, v.80, p.678 (2009)
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2009
Citations
4
Refereed citations
4
Description
Polarization of solar lines arises due to illumination of radiating atom
by anisotropic (limb darkened/brightened) radiation. Modelling the
polarized spectra of the Sun and stars requires solution of the line
radiative transfer problem in which the relevant polarizing physical
mechanisms are incorporated. The purpose of this paper is to describe in
what different ways the polarization state of the radiation
`complicates' the numerical methods originally designed for scalar
radiative transfer. We present several interesting situations involving
the solution of polarized line transfer to prove our point. They are (i)
Comparison of the polarized approximate lambda iteration (PALI) methods
with new approaches like Bi-conjugate gradient method that is faster,
(ii) Polarized Hanle scattering line radiative transfer in random
magnetic fields, (iii) Difficulties encountered in incorporating
polarized partial frequency redistribution (PRD) matrices in line
radiative transfer codes, (iv) Technical difficulties encountered in
handling polarized specific intensity vector, some components of which
are sign changing, (v) Proving that scattering polarization is indeed a
boundary layer phenomenon. We provide credible benchmarks in each of the
above studies. We show that any new numerical methods can be tested in
the best possible way, when it is extended to include polarization state
of the radiation field in line scattering.