Rotation Measure Distribution of 3C286

I have had a long-standing grievance with my former advisors from graduate school. While I was still active in astrophysics, I wrote numerous papers on my research, sending them back to Brandeis for editing and additional contributions. They, however, never got around to working on them. Consequently, while I did a lot of good work, my publication list is embarrassingly short and few in that field would know the work I did. I know that some of the stuff I found but was never able to publish has been looked into by others.

In going through some old boxes recently, I came across an intact draft of a paper I had been working on and for which I was waiting for input from my colleagues. It's not one of the better papers, but it's not too bad. It describes work I did on a quasar named 3C286. I was one of the early uses of the VLBA to pursue polarization imaging, and to further do multi-frequency observations of a source to measure what is called Faraday rotation. As linearly polarized electromagnetic radiation passes through a magnetized plasma, the plane of polarization rotates as a function of frequency. So observing the polarized emission at different frequencies simultaneously, one can measure this rotation and explore the ambient medium that is otherwise not directly observable. I was one of the first to do such research effectively. This paper is the result of one such study.

I have transcribed the text into HTML and scanned the figures and put the resulting paper on the web. The version I worked from is dated 30 January 1998, so much of the information is long out of date. But at least I will be able to get a little bit of my work out there for others to read. Maybe it will even be useful to someone.

I haven't found any other papers, but there are other images from my usual presentation I would give at conferences. I might scan those sometime and put them up here, along with whatever commentary I can remember from back then.