Polarimetry

RoboPol

RoboPol is a photopolarimeter with 13’ x 13’ FOV deployed on the 1.3m telescope at the Skinakas Observatory in Greece. Collaborators include scientists from Caltech, Max-Planck (Bonn), Nicolaus Copernicus University, and IUCAA. Halfwave plates and Wollaston prisms are used to separate photons with orthogonal linear polarizations, and simultaneously produce four images on the CCD detector for each source in the focal plane. The photon counts in each “spot” are used to calculate the Stokes parameters of linear polarization.