THE DRAO PLANCK DEEP FIELDS: THE POLARIZATION PROPERTIES OF RADIO GALAXIES AT 1.4 GHz

We present results of deep polarization imaging at 1.4 GHz with the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory as part of the DRAO Planck Deep Fields project. This deep extragalactic field covers 15.16 deg(2) centered at alpha(2000) = 16(h)14(m) and delta(2000) = 54 degrees 56', has an angular resolution of 42 '' x 62 '' at the field center, and reaches a sensitivity of 55 mu Jy beam(-1) in Stokes I and 45 mu Jy beam-1 in Stokes Q and U. We detect 958 radio sources in Stokes I of which 136 are detected in polarization. We present the Euclidean-normalized polarized differential source counts down to 400 mu Jy. These counts indicate that sources have a higher degree of fractional polarization at fainter Stokes I flux density levels than for brighter sources, confirming an earlier result. We find that the majority of our polarized sources are steep-spectrum objects with a mean spectral index of -0.77, and there is no correlation between fractional polarization and spectral index. We also matched deep field sources to counterparts in the Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty Centimeters catalog. Of the polarized sources, 77% show structure at the arcsecond scale whereas only 38% of the sources with no detectable polarization show such structure. The median fractional polarization for resolved sources is 6.8%, while it is 4.4% for compact objects. The polarized radio sources in our deep field are predominantly those sources which are resolved and show the highest degrees of fractional polarization, indicating that the lobe dominated structure may be the source of the highly polarized sources. These resolved radio galaxies dominate the polarized source counts at P-0 =root Q(2)+U-2 < 3 mJy.