Orientation Angles of a Pulsar's Polarization Vector

Abstract

A statistical model of the polarization of pulsar radio emission is used to derive the general statistics of a polarization vector's orientation angles. The theoretical distributions are compared with orientation angle histograms computed from single-pulse, polarization observations of PSR B2020+28. The favorable agreement between the theoretical and measured distributions lends support to the underlying assumptions of the statistical model, and demonstrates, like recent work on other pulsars, that the handedness of circular polarization is associated with the radiation's orthogonally polarized modes. Comprehensive directional statistics of the vector's orientation angles are also derived, and are shown to follow the Watson bipolar and Fisher distributions in its limiting forms.