The Impact of Fiber Cross Contamination on Radial Velocity Precision

TL;DR

This study investigates how fiber cross contamination affects the radial velocity precision in high-resolution spectrographs, emphasizing the importance of design and data processing to minimize errors for detecting Earth-like planets.

Contribution

The paper provides a simulation-based analysis of fiber cross contamination effects in PRV spectrographs, highlighting their impact and offering design recommendations to mitigate errors.

Findings

Cal-sci contamination is negligible (<0.0001%) in the CHORUS design.

Sci-sci contamination can cause up to 10 cm/s RV error in worst-case scenarios.

Proper design and spectral extraction are crucial for minimizing contamination effects.

Abstract

High-resolution spectrographs with precise radial velocity (PRV) capabilities require careful considerations in instrumental design and data processing in order to reach the 10 cm/s-level precision, which is needed for detecting Earth-like planets. In this work, we investigate the impact of fiber cross contamination on the RV precision via simulations, as modern PRV spectrographs often have multiple fiber traces on their spectral images. We simulated extracted 1-D spectra under the preliminary design of CHORUS, short for the Canary Hybrid Optical high-Resolution Ultra-stable Spectrograph, a dual-arm PRV spectrograph under construction for the Gran Telescopio de Canarias. We considered two types of fiber cross contaminations: contamination from calibration traces to neighboring science traces (or cal-sci contamination) and between science traces (or sci-sci contamination). We present results in four different scenarios: photon noise only, cal-sci contamination only, sci-sci contamination only, and all effects combined. For the preliminary design of CHORUS, we estimated that the cal-sci contamination fraction is smaller than 0.0001% in flux across the whole CCD for either arm, resulting in a negligible impact on the RV precision. Assuming worst-case scenarios, we estimated the sci-sci contamination to be up to 0.1% in some traces, corresponding to an additional RV error of up to 10 cm/s. We demonstrate the importance of considering fiber-trace spacing and cross contamination in PRV spectrographs, and we recommend careful design, operation, and spectral extraction algorithms to minimize and mitigate cross contamination to achieve the best possible instrumental RV precision.