For SIRs, CIRs, and Beyond: Polarization Ratio to Feature Location
Curt A. de Koning, Dusan Odstrcil, Sarah Gibson, Craig DeForest, Vic Pizzo, Christopher J. Scott
physics.space-ph, astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.SR
Submitted: 2026-07-25
Comments: 65 pages, 30 figures. A review article submitted to Solar Physics, special edition "The Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) Mission: An Overview"
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: The Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will remotely observe solar wind transients with high signal-to-noise ratio, high-cadence, high-resolution polarized white-light
Terminology
Abstract
The Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission will remotely observe solar wind transients with high signal-to-noise ratio, high-cadence, high-resolution polarized white-light images. Using different polarization states, an important PUNCH data product will be polarization ratio images. In the small-Sun limit, and using two simple line-of-sight density distributions with a finite angular width that can approximate a stream or corotating interaction region (SIR/CIR), we analytically investigate how the polarization ratio will provide three-dimensional location information and what the uncertainty in this estimated location is.