Polarized radiation from inhomogeneous shocks

Strongly polarized radiation from AM Herculis binaries is believed to be due to cyclotron emission from hot magnetized plasmas. The flat optically thin spectra and strong IR polarization observed in these binaries cannot be explained by models assuming a homogeneous emission region with a simple geometry. Therefore, the cyclotron emission from infinite plasma cylinders with uniform magnetic fields and temperatures was studied, but with a variety of axially symmetric electron density profiles and it was shown that such inhomogeneous plasmas are able to produce relatively flat spectra which cannot be produced by the homogeneous models. The polarization at low frequencies is shown to be stronger than that due to the homogeneous plasmas and the polarization at high frequencies is weaker. The steady state hydrodynamics was also studied of bremsstrahlung dominated shocks and the cyclotron emission was calculated from them. Three types of accretion rate profiles (uniform, axisymmetric and asymmetric) were considered. The shock-structure is planar for the uniform accretion rate case. The shock due to an axisymmetric accretion rate is a curved surface. For asymmetric accretion, the post-shock region is asymmetric and hence produces asymmetric light curves. All these inhomogeneous shocks produce flat optical/IR spectra and strong IR polarization