Observability of Forming Planets and their Circumplanetary Disks III. -- Polarized Scattered Light

There are growing amount of very high-resolution polarized scattered light images of circumstellar disks. Naturally, the question arises whether the circumplanetary disk forming around nascent planets can be detected with the same technique. Here we created scattered light mock observations at 1.2 and 1.6 microns for instruments like SPHERE and GPI, for various planetary masses and disk inclinations. We found that the detection of a circumplanetary disk is significantly favored if the planet is massive ($\geq 5 \rm{M_{Jup}}$) and the system is nearly face-on ($\leq 30^\circ$). Its detection is hindered by the neighboring circumstellar disk that also provides a strong polarized flux. However, the comparison between the $PI$ and the $Q_\phi$ maps, as well as the contrasts between the J and H bands are viable tools to pinpoint the presence of the circumplanetary disk within the circumstellar disk, as the two disks are behaving differently on those images.