On the statistical behaviour of the position angle of linear polarization
J. Naghizadeh-Khouei, David C. Clarke · 1993
When dealing with measurements of the position angle, θ, of linear polarization, p, it is common practice to use one of the alternative error formulae of Serkowski for expressing the one sigma value, σ θ , according to whether the signal-to-noise ratio of the polarization measure, p/σ, is zero or >> zero. In this paper, the applicability of these formulae has been considered by exploring the statistical behaviour of θ using both numerical integrations and data simulations. For p/σ > 6, it is shown that the distribution of θ is essentially Gaussian and that standard formulae can be applied. Below this critical value, the non-normality of the statistics provides a situation for which error estimation is complex and can't be considered in terms of the simple Serkowski formulae