Imprints of magnetic power and helicity spectra on radio polarimetry statistics

Understand

Statistical properties of turbulent magnetic fields in radio-synchrotron sources should imprint on the statistics of polarimetric observables.

• In search of these imprints, we calculate correlation and cross-correlation functions from a set of observables containing the total intensity I, the polarized intensity P and the Faraday depth phi.
• The correlation functions are evaluated for all combinations of observables up to fourth order in the magnetic field B.
• We derive these as far as possible analytically and from first principles only using some basic assumptions such as Gaussian statistics of the underlying magnetic field in the observed region and statistical homogeneity.