The Hanle Effect as a Diagnostic of Magnetic Fields in Stellar Envelopes. IV. Application to Polarized P Cygni Wind Lines

Abstract

The Hanle effect has been proposed as a new diagnostic of circumstellar magnetic fields for early-type stars, for which it is sensitive to field strengths in the 1‐300 G range. In this paper we compute the polarized P Cygni line profiles that result from the Hanle effect. For modeling the polarization, we employ a variant of the ‘‘last scattering approximation.’’ For cases in which the Sobolev optical depths are greater than unity, the emergent line intensity is assumed to be unpolarized, while for smaller optical depths, the Stokes source functions for the Hanle effect with optically thin line scattering are used. For a typical P Cygni line, the polarized emission forms in the outer wind, because the Sobolev optical depth is large at the inner wind. For low surface field strengths, weak P Cygni lines are needed to measure the circumstellar field. For high values of the surface fields, both the Zeeman and Hanle diagnostics can be used, with the Zeeman effect probing the photospheric magnetic fields and the Hanle effect measuring the magnetic field in the wind flow. Polarized line profiles are calculated for a selfconsistent structure of the flow and the magnetic geometry based on the WCFields model, which is applicable to slowly rotating stellar winds with magnetic fields drawn out by the gas flow. For surface fields of a few hundred gauss, we find that the Hanle effect can produce line polarizations in the range of a few tenths of a percent up to about 2%.