Aims: We present a polarimetric and spectroscopic study of the persistent ultra-compact X-ray binary 4U 0614+091 aimed at searching for the emission of a relativistic particle jet and at unveiling the orbital period Porb of the system. Methods: We obtained r-band polarimetric observations with the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) equipped with

We investigate the kinematic and magnetic properties of G-band bright points in the moat of a regular sunspot. The analysis is based on vector polarimetric measurements made at the German Vacuum Tower Telescope in visible (630 nm) and infrared (1565 nm) spectral lines, complemented by high-resolution filtergrams in the G-band at 430.6 nm and the

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The Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha SpectroPolarimeter (CLASP) is a sounding rocket experiment designed to measure for the first time the linear polarization of the hydrogen Lyman-{α} line (121.6 nm) and requires a 0.1 % polarization sensitivity, which is unprecedented for a spectropolarimeter in the vacuum UV (VUV) spectral range.

The solar atmosphere is a highly ionized medium which is the playground of magnetic fields. In the deepest layer (the photosphere), magnetic fields disturb the 'normal' fluid motions forcing the plasma to behave incounterintuitive ways; in the outer layers (the chromosphere and the corona) magnetic fields rule, making the plasma levitate or even

The basic idea of optical pumping, for which Alfred Kastler received the 1966 Nobel Prize in physics, is that the absorption and scattering of light that is near-resonant with an optical transition can produce large population imbalances among the magnetic sublevels of atomic ground states as well as in excited states. The degree of this