Adiabatic Faraday effect in a two-level Hamiltonian formalism

Understand

The helicity of a photon traversing a magnetized plasma can flip when the B-field along the trajectory slowly reverses.

• Broderick and Blandford have recently shown that this intriguing effect can profoundly change the usual Faraday effect for radio waves.
• We study this phenomenon in a formalism analogous to neutrino flavor oscillations: the evolution is governed by a Schroedinger equation for a two-level system consisting of the two photon helicities.
• Our treatment allows for a transparent physical understanding of this system and its dynamics.