Thomson Scattering in the Solar Corona

Bernd Inhester

Published 2015-12-02Version 1

The fundaments of the application of Thomson scattering to the analysis of coronagraph images has been laid decades ago. Even though the basic formulation is undebated, a discussion has grown in recent years about the spatial distribution of Thomson scatter sensitivity in space. These notes are an attempt to clarify the understanding about this topic. We reformulate the classical calculations in a more transparent way using modern SI-compatible quantities and extend the scattering calculations to the case of relativistic electrons. Many mathematical and some basic physical ingredients are made explicit in several chapters of the appendix.