The depolarisation properties of powerful extragalactic radio sources as a function of cosmic epoch

Abstract

We use the observed polarisation properties of a sample of 26 powerful radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars to constrain the conditions in the Faraday screens local to the sources. We adopt the cosmological redshift, low-frequency radio luminosity and physical size of the large-scale radio structures as our `fundamental' parameters. We find no correlation of the radio spectral index with any of the fundamental parameters. The observed rotation measure is also independent of these parameters. The difference between the rotation measures of the two lobes of an individual source as well as the dispersion of the rotation measure show significant correlations with the source redshift, but not with the radio luminosity or source size. Thus the small-scale structure observed in the rotation measure is caused by a Faraday screen local to the sources. The observed asymmetries between the lobes of our sources show no significant trends with each other or other source properties. Finally, we show that the commonly used model for the depolarisation of synchrotron radio emission by foreground Faraday screens is inconsistent with our observations. We apply alternative models to our data and show that they require a strong increase of the dispersion of the rotation measure inside the Faraday screens with cosmological redshift. Correcting our observations with these models for redshift effects, we find a strong correlation of the depolarisation measure with redshift and a significantly weaker correlation with radio luminosity. All our results are consistent with a decrease in the order of the magnetic field structure of the Faraday screen local to the sources for increasing cosmological redshift. (abridged)