The Principal Investigator will organize a community workshop to assess and discuss state-of-the-art science and technology for obtaining polarization measurements and using them to study the Sun and other stars. Sophisticated magnetic field observations are required to improve our scientific understanding of dynamic stars and their atmospheres, and such measurements, in turn, depend upon advanced polarimetric techniques.
"Solar Polarization Workshop 6" will continue a long-standing series of international workshops that bring together experts to discuss how developing topics in theoretical astrophysics, atmospheric modeling, and sensitive instrument technology can help promote our fundamental physical understanding of solar polarization and stellar magnetic fields. This meeting will be convened near the eventual site of the future Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) and will thus help focus community planning on how to optimize this new instrument to advance our understanding of the solar atmosphere and its application to other stars. Students and young researchers who represent the next generation of solar physicists will be supported to attend.
Approximately every 3 years an international community of scientists meets to educate the global community, and to advance the tools that are used to understand how and why the Sun changes in time. Essentially all that we know about the Sun comes from the light we receive and this workshop was devoted to advancing the tools of polarimetry and spectropolarimetry. It is this property of light that carries enormous information about the conditions at the source -- in this case, on the surface of the Sun that created this light. Everything we know about the Sun's magnetism was deduced from careful measurements of the polarization properties of sunlight. This meeting brought together 100 scientists, young researchers, and future researchers from over a dozen different countries. They convened for a week in Hawaii near the future site of the NSF's Advanced Technology Solar Telescope -- an instrument which will become the worlds largest polarization measuring telescope in about 2018. This workshop served to propagate and advance a number of new instruments, theories, and algorithms that will now be more generally applied, tested, and improved for measuring solar magnetism. Important new advances will now allow us to learn about the tangled magnetism that is buried in the surface of the Sun, and that holds clues to why the 11 year solar cycle works. We learned that distant stars polarize light in complicated ways, very similar to how the Sun polarizes light. This new polarizing mechanism should allow us to apply theories of the Sun to other stars with similar, but slightly different, conditions. New techniques for improving the calibration and the efficiency of polarimeters were presented. All of these results will now be expanded and used by a larger community, leading to advances in our understanding of the atmosphere of the Sun and stars.
