We present the first circular polarization measurements of circumstellar H2O masers around a sample of late-type stars. These observations are used to obtain the magnetic field strength in the H2O maser region with both an LTE and non-LTE analysis. We find fields from a few hundred milliGauss up to a few Gauss, indicating a solar-type r dependence of the magnetic field on the distance. No linea...

The dynamics of ionized electrons in a plasma can be controlled by synthetic optical fields composed of the fundamental and the second harmonic of femtosecond optical pulses with an arbitrary phase and polarization. We show here that the plasma-emitted half-cycle THz radiation directly reflects the two-dimensional trajectories of the electrons through polarization sensitive THz emission spectro...

Multiple-field-of-view (MFOV) secondary-polarization lidar signals are used to calculate the particle-size density distribution (PSD) at the base of a cloud. At the cloud base, multiple scattering is weak and single backscattering is predominant by many orders of magnitude. Because secondary polarization is a direct measure of multiple scattering, it is therefore advantageous to use secondary p...

Quantum optics entails polarization properties that cannot be fully described by the classical Stokes parameters. In this work, we characterize the polarization of classical as well as quantum fields by means of a probability distribution on the Poincaré sphere. This serves to define the degree of polarization of a field state as the distance between the corresponding polarization distribution ...

We study the response of a spherical colloid under alternating electric fields (AC fields) by mesoscopic simulation method, accounting in full for hydrodynamic and electrostatic interactions. We focus on a special case of uncharged colloids. The main polarization mechanism is the "volume polarization", where ionic currents are deflected by the core of the uncharged colloid. Specifically, we com...

I review the use of polarization data in the study of interstellar magnetic fields. On large scales in the interstellar medium, the polarization of background starlight is a good tracer of the projected plane-of-the-sky magnetic field structure in the neutral gas, and the field there appears to have roughly equal contributions from uniform and nonuniform components. In cases where a localized r...