We study the important, yet widely overlooked, role of gluons for spin transport with a connection to local parity violation in quark gluon plasmas. employ formalism quantum kinetic theory quarks weakly coupled chromodynamics derive source terms polarization. These involve parity-odd correlators dynamically generated color fields near-equilibrium plasmas and give rise locally fluctuating axial ...

Polarized emission observed by Planck HFI at 353 GHz towards a sample of nearby fields is presented, focusing on the statistics of polarization fractions p and angles ψ. The polarization fractions and column densities in these nearby fields are representative of the range of values obtained over the whole sky. We find that: (i) the largest polarization fractions are reached in the most diffuse ...

We introduce the concept of degree of polarization for electromagnetic near fields. The approach is based on the generalized Stokes parameters that appear as expansion coefficients of the 3 x 3 coherence matrix in terms of the Gell-Mann matrices. The formalism is applied to optical near fields of thermally fluctuating half-space sources with particular interest in fields that are strongly polar...

With polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) now detected, and confirmed by several independent experiments, the next goal is to characterise accurately its statistical properties. In these lecture notes we review the physical motivation for pursuing CMB polarization, and the basic statistical properties of the polarization fields. We then discuss some of the key aspects of the an...