Correcting systematic polarization effects in Keck LRISp spectropolarimetry to <0.05%

TL;DR

This paper presents methods to correct instrumental polarization artifacts in Keck LRISp spectropolarimetry, enabling high-sensitivity measurements of stellar magnetic fields with sensitivities better than 0.05%.

Contribution

It introduces techniques to mitigate instrumental errors like flexure, fringes, and cosmic rays, improving the calibration stability and sensitivity of LRISp spectropolarimetric data.

Findings

Instrument flexure and fringes cause 0.5% artificial signals.

Spectropolarimetric signals of 0.2% are detectable.

Calibration stability and sensitivity are improved to <0.05%.

Abstract

Spectropolarimetric measurements at moderate spectral resolutions are effective tracers of stellar magnetic fields and circumstellar environments when signal to noise ratios (SNRs) above 2000 can be achieved. The LRISp spectropolarimeter is capable of achieving these SNRs on faint targets with the 10m aperture of the Keck telescope, provided several instrumental artifacts can be suppressed. We describe here several methods to overcome instrumental error sources that are required to achieve these high SNRs on LRISp. We explore high SNR techniques such as defocusing and slit-stepping during integration with high spectral and spatial oversampling. We find that the instrument flexure and interference fringes introduced by the achromatic retarders create artificial signals at 0.5\% levels in the red channel which mimic real stellar signals and limit the sensitivity and calibration stability of LRISp. Careful spectral extraction and data filtering algorithms can remove these error sources. For faint targets and long exposures, cosmic ray hits are frequent and present a major limitation to the upgraded deep depletion red-channel CCD. These must be corrected to the same high SNR levels, requiring careful spectral extraction using iterative filtering algorithms. We demonstrate here characterization of these sources of instrumental polarization artifacts and present several methods used to successfully overcome these limitations. We have measured the linear to circular cross-talk and find it to be roughly 5\%, consistent with the known instrument limitations. We show spectropolarimetric signals on brown dwarfs are clearly detectable at 0.2\% amplitudes with sensitivities better than 0.05\% at full spectral sampling in atomic and molecular bands. Future LRISp users can perform high sensitivity observations with high quality calibration when following the described algorithms.