Polarization as a probe of dusty environments around Type Ia supernovae: radiative transfer models for SN 2012dn

Abstract

Geometry of circumstellar (CS) medium around supernovae (SNe) provides important diagnostics to understand the nature of their progenitors. In this paper, properties of CS dust around SN 2012dn, a super-Chandrasekhar candidate Type Ia supernova (SC-SN), have been studied through detailed three dimensional radiation transfer simulations. With the detected near-infrared excess from SN 2012dn, we show that it has a disk-like dusty CS environment whose mass is roughly consistent with a branch of an accreting white dwarf system (the single degenerate scenario). We show that a similar system should produce polarization signals up to $\sim 8$ \% in the $B$ band, depending on the viewing direction if polarimetric observation is performed. We predict that the maximum polarization is reached around $\sim 60$ days after the $B$-band maximum. We show that the temporal and wavelength dependence of the polarization signals, together with other unique features, can be easily distinguished from the interstellar polarization and intrinsic SN polarization. Indeed, the small polarization degree observed for normal Type Ia SNe (SNe Ia) can constrain a parameter space in the CS dust mass and distribution. We thus encourage multi-band polarimetric observations for SNe Ia, especially for outliers including SC-SNe for which some arguments for the single degenerate scenario exist but the polarization data are very rare so far.