Date of Award

Spring 4-3-2014

Author's School

College of Arts & Sciences

Author's Department/Program

Physics

Abstract

In this paper, we for the first time use Stokes parameters to simulate and analyze measurements in the hard x-ray band. Simulations generate photons according to the Klein-Nishina cross section, and are analyzed by summing the Stokes parameters of individual photons to reconstruct the polarization fraction and angle of the signal. We also offer a consideration of a more common method of polarization analysis, that of fitting a sine wave to the distribution of measured azimuthal angles. This fitting method introduces systematic errors dependent on binning and fitting in the azimuthal angle distribution which can be avoided by using the Stokes parameters. In addition to introducing an analysis of the x-ray domain with Stokes parameters, we present a method of Bayesian inversion to generate a posteriori probability distributions given a distribution of measured values. Such a technique addresses the problems of measuring most-probable and mean polarization values greater than the true value at low polarization.

Language

English (en)

Advisor/Committee Chair

Henric Krawczynski

Advisor/Committee Chair's Department

Department of Physics

Second Advisor

Fabian Kislat

Second Advisor's Department

Department of Physics

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