Comparing telluric removal methods in their capability to recover injected exoplanet atmosphere signals with high resolution emission spectroscopy

For ground-based high-resolution spectroscopic exoplanet atmosphere studies, removing the contamination from telluric and stellar lines is a crucial step in the analysis process. Despite that, there is no consensus in the literature on the most appropriate way to carry this out. Typically, tellurics are either directly modelled to a percent-level precision, or blindly detrended via Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithms, the latter particularly common at infrared wavelengths. Here, we compare three different detrending methods, PCA, Molecfit and our own fitting algorithm Astroclimes, measuring their performance in the context of removing telluric and stellar lines to detect exoplanetary atmospheric signals. We specifically look for H2O detections, which are particularly affected by residual, time-correlated variability of the telluric spectrum. We use near-infrared CARMENES observations of the day-side of tau Bootis b to carry out injection and recovery tests. We find that while PCA can sometimes achieve higher SNR, it comes at the expense of stronger signal degradation. All methods struggle more for injected signals with lower orbital velocities, not just affecting the signal's magnitude but its location in velocity space as well. This behaviour is more prominent for PCA than for Astroclimes and Molecfit. These results highlight the importance of understanding the effects of different detrending methods on exoplanetary signals, which can lead to biases when characterising real detections. Finally, we report that our attempts to detect a previously claimed water signal from tau Bootis b all resulted in non-detections.