Investigating the differential limb coupling effect for diffraction-limited spectrographs with PARVI
Andrea S. J. Lin, Ashley D. Baker, Samuel Halverson, Nemanja Jovanovic, Dimitri Mawet, Rebecca Oppenheimer, Garreth Ruane, Gautam Vasisht
astro-ph.IM, astro-ph.EP
Submitted: 2026-08-07
Updated: 2026-08-11
Comments: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2026, paper number 14149-456, submitted to Proc. SPIE
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: A promising new architecture for extreme-precision radial velocity (EPRV) spectrographs, hunting for small-amplitude stellar Doppler shifts induced by orbiting planets, is to build
Terminology
Abstract
A promising new architecture for extreme-precision radial velocity (EPRV) spectrographs, hunting for small-amplitude stellar Doppler shifts induced by orbiting planets, is to build diffraction-limited instruments by using single-mode fibers fed by an adaptive optics system. However, the target stars are partially resolved when observing at the diffraction limit, and the resulting RVs are expected to be affected by differential limb coupling (DLC), an effect where the red- and blue-shifted sides of the stellar disk are coupled unequally into the spectrograph, producing an RV error term on the order of m/s for nearby EPRV target stars for the upcoming HISPEC spectrograph for Keck II. We present our efforts to directly measure the RV shifts resulting from DLC for the first time, using the diffraction-limited spectrograph PARVI, in order to verify the expected behavior of DLC and subsequently develop mitigation strategies for HISPEC and other future instruments. We outline an observing strategy designed to produce DLC-induced RV shifts of hundreds of m/s, and describe the execution of this experiment with PARVI. We use these data to characterize the PARVI tip-tilt guide camera and its performance, and have begun analysis of the derived RVs, though this investigation has proven complicated since the RVs are deeply entangled with other instrumental and algorithmic effects.
Sources
- Extreme Precision Radial Velocity Working Group Final Report
- NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) Mission Star List for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (2023)
Related papers
- A signal dedispersion algorithm for imaging-based transient searches
- AVICA: A fully automated CASA pipeline for large volume VLBI data calibration
- Spectral Map Making with SPHEREx
- Long-Integration Magnetar Burst Observatory (LIMBO): Instrument Summary and Early FRB Rate Constraints
- Towards independent event horizon imaging of the supermassive black holes in M87 and the Milky Way
- A PINK update: Improvements to the CELEBI fast radio burst data reduction and analysis pipeline