Spectroscopic study of RGs in the Kepler field

Based on the high-dispersion spectra of selected such 55 red giants in the Kepler field with precisely known seismic parameters (among which parallaxes are available for nine stars), we checked the accuracy of the determination method of stellar parameters previously applied to many red giants by Takeda et al. (2008PASJ...60..781T), since it may be possible to discriminate their complex evolutionary status by using the surface gravity versus mass diagram.

We confirmed that our spectroscopic gravity and the seismic gravity satisfactorily agree with each other (to within ~0.1 dex) without any systematic difference. However, the mass values of He-burning red clump giants derived from stellar evolutionary tracks (~2-3 M_{sun}_) were found to be markedly larger by ~50 percent compared to the seismic values (~1-2 M_{sun}_) though such discrepancy is not seen for normal giants in the H-burning phase, which reflects the difficulty of mass determination from intricately overlapping tracks on the luminosity versus effective temperature diagram.