Fringing analysis and forward modeling of Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) spectra

TL;DR

This paper addresses fringing noise in KPIC spectra by identifying its sources, modeling it with Fabry-Perot cavity physics, and implementing hardware modifications, significantly reducing systematic errors for exoplanet characterization.

Contribution

It introduces a physically informed fringing model and hardware solutions to mitigate systematic noise in high-resolution exoplanet spectra.

Findings

Fringing can dominate residuals up to 10% of the continuum.

Modeling fringing reduces residuals by a factor of 2.

Wedge optics eliminate two fringing sources, reducing residuals by a factor of 10.

Abstract

The Keck Planet Imager and Characterizer (KPIC) combines high contrast imaging with high resolution spectroscopy (R~35,000 in K band) to study directly imaged exoplanets and brown dwarfs in unprecedented detail. KPIC aims to spectrally characterize substellar companions through measurements of planetary radial velocities, spins, and atmospheric composition. Currently, the dominant source of systematic noise for KPIC is fringing, or oscillations in the spectrum as a function of wavelength. The fringing signal can dominate residuals by up to 10% of the continuum for high S/N exposures, preventing accurate wavelength calibration, retrieval of atmospheric parameters, and detection of planets with flux ratios less than 1% of the host star. To combat contamination from fringing, we first identify its three unique sources and adopt a physically informed model of Fabry-Perot cavities to apply to post-processed data. We find this strategy can effectively model the fringing in observations of A0V/F0V stars, reducing the residual systematics caused by fringing by a factor of 2. Next, we wedge two of the transmissive optics internal to KPIC to eliminate two sources of fringing and confirm the third source as the entrance window to the spectrograph. Finally, we apply our previous model of the Fabry-Perot cavity to new data taken with the wedged optics to reduce the amplitude of the residuals by a factor of 10.