Requirements for Polarimetry

Radiation from pulsars has been shown to be highly polarised. The linear polarisation can at times reach close to $100\%$. Significant amounts of circular polarisation is also seen frequently. The study of these polarisation characteristics is very important for understanding the emission mechanism of pulsars. Hence pulsar studies often require that the telescope support full polarisation observations that finally yield the four Stokes parameters, as a function of time and frequency. Remember that each of these polarisation parameters needs to satisfy all the time and frequency resolution criteria outlined above, leading to a four fold increase in hardware complexity and data flow rate over simple total power observations.