Precision near-infrared radial velocity instrumentation I: absorption gas cells
Abstract
We have built and commissioned gas absorption cells for precision spectroscopic radial velocity measurements in the near-infrared in the H and K bands. We describe the construction and installation of three such cells filled with 13CH4, 12CH3D, and 14NH3 for the CSHELL spectrograph at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF). We have obtained their high-resolution laboratory Fourier Transform spectra, which can have other practical uses. We summarize the practical details involved in the construction of the three cells, and the thermal and mechanical control. In all cases, the construction of the cells is very affordable. We are carrying out a pilot survey with the 13CH4 methane gas cell on the CSHELL spectrograph at the IRTF to detect exoplanets around low mass and young stars. We discuss the current status of our survey, with the aim of photon-noise limited radial velocity precision. For adequately bright targets, we are able to probe a noise floor of 7 m/s with the gas cell with CSHELL at cassegrain focus. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of using a gas cell on the next generation of near-infrared spectrographs such as iSHELL on IRTF, iGRINS, and an upgraded NIRSPEC at Keck.
Additional Information
© 2013 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Peter Plavchan would like acknowledge Wes Traub and Stephen Unwin for seed funding provided by the JPL Center for Exoplanet Science and NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, as well as JPL Research and Technology Development grant in FY13. G. Anglada-Escudé would like to acknowledge the Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the support provided by the NASA Astrobiology Institute grant NNA09DA81A. Part of the research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and California Institute of Technology was performed under contracts with National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The stellar synthetic spectra were graciously provided by Peter Hauschildt (U. of Hamburg) and the PHOENIX group. We also thank Keeyoon Sung, Linda Brown and Pin Chen from JPL's Laboratory Studies and Astrobiology Group for their advice and support using the FTIR spectrometer. We would like to thank Paul Butler (Carnegie Institution of Washington) and Gilian Nave (NIST) for their advice in gas optimization parameters and molecular spectroscopy in general. We would like to thank Steve Osterman (U. of Colorado) for their valuable discussions. We also thank John Rayner, Morgan Bonnet, George Koenig, Kars Bergknut and Alan Tokunaga from IfA/Hawaii for their support during the CSHELL/IRTF cell design review, integration and commissioning. We thank Rick Gerhart (Caltech), Scot Howell (Mindrum Precision) and Thurston Levy (Glass Instruments, Inc.) for their work in helping construct and fill the gas cells, and Joeff Zolkower (Caltech) for mechanical engineering advise.Attached Files
Published - Plavchan_2013p88641J.pdf
Submitted - 1309.2992v1.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 41544
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20130930-090405343
- NASA
- JPL Research and Technology Development Fund
- Carnegie Trust
- NNA09DA81A
- NASA
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Created
-
2013-09-30Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)
- Series Name
- Proceedings of SPIE
- Series Volume or Issue Number
- 8864