Radio Polarimetry in the Southern Galactic Plane Survey

Abstract

We present radio polarimetric observations of a test region for the Southern Galactic Plane Survey (SGPS), a radio survey in the Galactic plane in HI and polarized continuum at 1.4 GHz with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) and the Parkes 64m dish. Ubiquitous structure in linearly polarized intensity is often uncorrelated with structure in total intensity, indicating Faraday rotation and depolarization. The one-dimensional second order structure function of rotation measure for different position angles of the distance lag shows a very shallow slope of the structure function on small scales and an anisotropy in the slope on large scales. The anisotropy on large scales is indicative of a gradient or large filament across the field. The shallow slope can be explained by contributions of two separated Faraday screens. Assuming that the two Faraday screens are the local and Carina spiral arms, the structure function suggests an outer scale of structure in the local arm of about 2 pc. This scale is similar to the typical scale of a Stroemgren sphere of a B1-2 star. Therefore, we suggest that HII regions possibly dominate the scale of structure in spiral arms.