A User-Friendly Code to Diagnose Chromospheric Plasmas

Abstract

The physical interpretation of spectropolarimetric observations of lines of neutral helium, such as those of the 10830 A multiplet, represents an excellent opportunity for investigating the magnetism of plasma structures in the solar chromosphere. Here we present a powerful forward modeling and inversion code that permits either to calculate the emergent intensity and polarization for any given magnetic field vector or to infer the dynamical and magnetic properties from the observed Stokes profiles. This diagnostic tool is based on the quantum theory of spectral line polarization, which self-consistently accounts for the Hanle and Zeeman effects in the most general case of the incomplete Paschen-Back effect regime. We also take into account radiative transfer effects. An efficient numerical scheme based on global optimization methods has been applied. Our Stokes inversion code permits a fast and reliable determination of the global minimum.