1995A&A...296..164H

The discovery of RE2107-05 (Hakala et al. 1993MNRAS.263...61H; Schwope et al. 1993A&A...271L..25S), the brightest of the four known eclipsing AM Her systems revealed that a significant proportion of the optical emission from AM Her systems originates within the accretion stream. This is clearly demonstrated by the asymmetric eclipse profiles obtained by Hakala et al. (1993MNRAS.263...61H). I present a new method for deriving the accretion stream brightness distribution from the eclipse profile photometry of AM Her systems using a maximum entropy method (MEM) and a Genetic Algorithm for optimisation. This technique is applied to the U band eclipse profile of RE2107-05. The qualitative results indicate, that the stream emission rises quadratically towards the white dwarf and there is a separate "hot spot" within the stream possibly due to the threading to the WD magnetosphere.