An investigation of polarisation properties of Thomson scattering in relativistic plasma

Thomson scattering is employed to measure the temperature of plasma. Traditional methodology involves measurement of the spectrum of scattered radiation from a pulsed laser in a small scattering volume. New theoretical investigations involving the use of Mueller matrices suggest an approach of determination of the temperature using the polarisation properties of the scattered radiation in the region where relativistic effects are significant. These methods are investigated here numerically, with the intention of proposing an application at the W7-X stellarator.