Thesis Topic: Dust polarisation in 3d
Thesis Supervisor: Ralf Siebenmorgen
Abstract
Polarised light is one relative unexplored window to the universe and its study will boost our understanding in the composition and structure of various object types from star formation, proto-planetary disk formation, debris disk to the death of the stars and supernovae, and more general of the diffuse ISM or extra-galactic objects such as starburst galaxies, active galactic nuclei and gamma ray bursts. Recent advances in computer technology enables the use of efficient Monte Carlo (MC) techniques to study the transport of radiation in arbitrary three dimensional geometry (Heymann & Siebenmorgen 2012) of dusty objects as such mentioned before.
The goal of this PhD project is to include in the MC the full treatment of the Stokes vector hence arriving at predictions of the polarisation structure. This is a timely project to support understanding of new data obtained with modern instrumentation projects SPHERE and Xshooter that just arrived at the VLT.