Descriptions of the polarization states of vector processes - Applications to ULF magnetic fields

In recent years a wide variety of methods has been used to describe the polarization characteristics of ULF (.001 to 1 Hz) magnetic fields. This paper gives a detailed outline of some of the descriptions derived from the spectral matrices of n-variate stochastic processes. The matrices are expanded in three different, standard sets of matrices in order to add some simplification to the interpretation of the polarizations. One set is composed of n-squared trace-orthogonal, hermitean matrices and leads directly to a generalization of the Stokes parameters and the degree of polarization for n-variate processes. The second set is developed from the dyad expansion, which in particular cases is analogous to the spectral decomposition of the matrix. The third set is composed of n commuting idempotent matrices and proves to be the most useful set when the stochastic process is not strictly polarized.