The HARPS-TERRA project I. Description of the algorithms, performance and new measurements on a few remarkable stars observed by HARPS

Abstract: Doppler spectroscopy has uncovered or confirmed all the known planets orbiting nearby stars. Two main techniques are used to obtain precision Doppler measurements at optical wavelengths. The first approach is the gas cell method, which consists on the least-squares matching of the spectrum of Iodine imprinted on the spectrum of the star. The second method relies on the construction of a stabilized spectrograph externally calibrated in wavelength. The most precise stabilized spectrometer in operation is HARPS, operated by ESO in La Silla Observatory/Chile. The Doppler measurements obtained with HARPS are typically obtained using the Cross-Correlation Function technique (CCF). It consists of multiplying the stellar spectrum with a weighted binary mask and finding the minimum of such product as a function of the Doppler shift. It is known that CCF is suboptimal in exploiting the Doppler information in the stellar spectrum. Here, we describe an algorithm to obtain precision RV measurements using least-squares matching of each observed spectrum to a high signal-to-noise ratio template derived from the same observations. Such algorithm is implemented in our software called HARPS-TERRA (Template Enhanced Radial velocity Re-analysis Application). New radial velocity measurements on a representative sample of stars observed by HARPS is used to illustrate the benefits of the proposed method. We show that, compared to CCF, template matching provides a significant improvement in accuracy, specially when applied to M dwarfs.