Astrophysical Spectropolarimetry

The Istituto Ricerche Solari Locarno (IRSOL) has entered a new era with the recent substantial increase in scientific staff made possible through an increase in base funding by the Secretary of State for Education and Research (SERI). Together with the particular instrumentation available at IRSOL, we now meet unique conditions that allow us to endeavor on various research projects of high-precision solar polarimetry that can unlikely be carried out elsewhere.The jewel in our array of instrumental tools remains the Zurich Imaging Polarimeter (ZIMPOL), originally developed at the ETHZ, which allows us to carry out measurements with a polarimetric accuracy of 10^{-5}, a precision yet unachieved by any other solar polarimeter worldwide. However, in order to keep and even improve this leading position, this instrument needs to be constantly maintained and upgraded. With the present proposal, we ask for financial support for a complete redesign of the electronics of ZIMPOL, which will be done within the framework of our collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences (SUPSI) in Manno. With this task, IRSOL also contributes to the Working Program60 (WP60), “Advanced InstrumentationDevelopment”, of the Solarnet project (founded within the framework of the European FP7 Capacities Program) of which IRSOL is member of.We also constantly improve and update the telescopic instrumentation at IRSOL in order to optimize the observations that we regularly carry out with ZIMPOL, both for our internal projects and within the framework of collaborations with colleagues from other institutions. At the same time, we entered a close collaboration with the Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics (KIS) for installing ZIMPOL at the new 1.5 m aperture solar telescope GREGOR in Tenerife, which will allow us to carry out investigations requiring high spectropolarimetric sensitivity combined with high spatial resolution.In collaboration with the Observatory of Geneva, we have two doctoral thesis projects running under the guidance of Prof G. Meynet. MSc. G. Privitera is presently financed within the framework of the ongoing SNF project. MSc. F. Calvo started in November 2013 with a limited one-time funding coming directly from IRSOL.