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Clumping in the winds of massive stars may significantly reduce empiricalmass-loss rates, and which in turn may have a large impact on our understandingof massive star evolution. Here, we investigate wind-clumping through thelinear polarization induced by light scattering off the clumps. Through the useof an analytic wind clumping model, we predict the time evolution of the linearpolarimetry over a large parameter space. We concentrate on the Luminous BlueVariables, which display the greatest amount of polarimetric variability andfor which we recently conducted a spectropolarimetric survey. Our model resultsindicate that the observed level of polarimetric variability can be reproducedfor two regimes of parameter space: one of a small number of massive,optically-thick clumps; and one of a very large number of low-mass clumps.Although a systematic time-resolved monitoring campaign is required todistinguish between the two scenarios, we currently favour the latter, giventhe short timescale of the observed polarization variability. As thepolarization is predicted to scale linearly with mass-loss rate, we anticipatethat all hot stars with very large mass-loss rates should display polarimetricvariability. This is consistent with recent findings that intrinsicpolarization is more common in stars with strong H$\alpha$ emission.

Modelling the clumping-induced polarimetric variability of hot star winds