Prospects for the Detection of the Sgr A* Photon Ring with next-generation Event Horizon Telescope Polarimetry

Abstract

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has imaged two supermassive black holes, Messier 87* (M87*) and Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), using very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI). The theoretical analyses of each source suggest magnetically arrested disk (MAD) accretion viewed at modest inclination. These MADs exhibit rotationally symmetric polarization of synchrotron emission caused by symmetries of their ordered magnetic fields. We leverage these symmetries to study the detectability of the black hole photon ring, which imposes known antisymmetries in polarization. In this letter, we propose a novel observational strategy based on coherent baseline-averaging of polarization ratios in a rotating basis to detect the photon ring with 345 GHz VLBI from the Earth's surface. Using synthetic observations from a likely future EHT, we find a reversal in polarimetric phases on long baselines that reveals the presence of the Sgr\,A* photon ring in a MAD system at 345 GHz, a critical frequency for lengthening baselines and overcoming interstellar scattering. We use our synthetic data and analysis pipeline to estimate requirements for the EHT using a new metric: ${\rm SNR}_{\rm PR}$, the signal-to-noise ratio of this polarimetric reversal signal. We identify long, coherent integrations using frequency phase transfer as a critical enabling technique for the detection of the photon ring, and predict a ${\rm SNR}_{\rm PR} \sim 2-3$ detection using proposed ngEHT parameters and currently-favored models for the Sgr A* accretion flow. We find that higher sensitivity, rather than denser Fourier sampling, is the most critical requirement for polarimetric detection of the photon ring.