  Polarized emission carries captivating information and can help understand
various elementary processes involving collisions within the plasma as well as
in radiative transitions. In this work, we investigate the spatio-temporal
dependence of the emission anisotropy of a nanosecond laser produced aluminium
plasma at 100 mbar background pressure. We observe that the anisotropy of the
emission spectra exhibits interesting spatio-temporal characteristics which in
turn depend on the charge state of the emitting species. The degree of
polarization (DOP) is found to reverse its sign along the plume propagation
direction. Observed behaviour in DOP appears to be due to the contribution from
various involved atomic processes. However, closer to the sample the
contribution from the self-generated magnetic field predominantly affect the
polarization. On the other hand, the effect of the self generated magnetic
field on the observed polarized emission is insignificant as the plume
propagates away from the sample. This is of particular interest in polarization
resolved laser induced breakdown spectroscopy as spatio-temporal profile of the
degree of polarization has to be properly taken into account prior to the
spectral analysis.
