  NICSPol is a near infrared imaging polarimeter developed for the Near
Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (NICS), one of the back end instruments of the
1.2 m Cassegrain telescope at the Mount Abu Infrared Observatory (MIRO), India.
The polarimeter consists of a rotating wire grid polarizer which is mounted
between the telescope optics and NICS. The polarimetric observations are
carried out by rotating the polarizer using a motorized mechanism to determine
the Stokes parameters, which are then converted into the polarization fraction
and polarization angle. Here we report the details of the instrument and the
results of observations of IR polarimetric standards. A set of polarized and
unpolarized standards were observed using NICSPol over J, H and Ks bands
covering 0.8 to 2.5 micro m. The observations of polarized standards using
NICSPol show that, NICSPol can constrain polarization within ~1% for sources
brighter than ~16 magnitude in JHKs bands. NICSPol is a general purpose
instrument which could be used to study variety of astrophysical sources such
as AGNs, Pulsars, XRBs, Supernovae, star forming regions etc. With few NIR
polarimeters available world-wide so far, NICSPol would be the first imaging
NIR polarimeter in India.
