Challenges in constraining dust properties from starlight polarization

Abstract: Dust polarization, which comes from the alignment of aspherical grains to magnetic fields, has been widely employed to study the interstellar medium (ISM) dust properties. The wavelength dependence of the degree of optical polarization, known as the Serkowski relation, was a key observational discovery that advanced grain modeling and alignment theories. However, it was recently shown that line-of-sight (LOS) variations in the structure of the ISM or the magnetic field morphology contaminate the constraints extracted from fits to the Serkowski relation. These cases can be identified by the wavelength-dependent variability in the polarization angles. We aim to investigate the extent to which we can constrain the intrinsic dust properties and alignment efficiency from dust polarization data, by accounting for LOS variations of the magnetic field morphology. We employed archival data to fit the Serkowski relation and constrain its free parameter. We explored potential imprints of LOS variations of the magnetic field morphology in these constraints. We found that these LOS integration effects contaminate the majority of the existing dataset, thus biasing the obtained Serkowski parameters by approximately 10%. The constancy of the polarization angles with wavelength does not necessarily guarantee the absence of 3D averaging effects. We examined the efficiency of dust grains in polarizing starlight, as probed by the ratio of the degree of polarization to dust reddening, E(B-V). We found that all measurements respect the limit established by polarized dust emission data. A suppression in polarization efficiencies occurs at E(B-V) close to 0.5 mag, which we attribute to projection effects and may be unrelated to the intrinsic alignment of dust grains.