A passive cost-effective solution for the high accuracy wavelength calibration of radial velocity spectrographs

摘要

Today, the RV technique has pushed the planet detection limits down to super-earths but the reach the precisionrequired to detect earth-like planets it is necessary to reach a precision around 1cm ssup-1/sup. While a significant part ofthe error budget is the incompressible photon noise, another part is the noise in the wavelength calibration of thespectrograph. In the past 3 years the Observatory of Geneva has designed, built and tested an commissioned 2wavelength calibrator systems based on a Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer with great success. The calibratorsystem demonstrated 10 cm ssup-1/sup stability over one night and 1 m ssup-1/sup over 60 days. By improving the system injectingthe calibration light into the calibration fiber of the spectrograph we are aiming at 1 m ssup-1/sup repeatability over thelong term. This technique is now being extended to cover the near infrared to the K band in the frame of theSPIROU project.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.