Abundances of 17000 M dwarfs in SDSS-V

Recent modifications to spectral synthesis pipelines have enabled more accurate modeling of M dwarf atmospheres, but these methods are too slow for characterizing more than a handful of stars at a time. Data-driven methods such as The Cannon are viable alternatives, and can harness the information content of many M dwarfs from large spectroscopic surveys.

Here, we train The Cannon on M dwarfs with FGK binary companions from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V/Milky Way Mapper (SDSS-V/MWM), with spectra from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment. The FGK-M pairs are assumed to be chemically homogeneous and span -0.56<[Fe/H]<0.31dex. The resulting model is capable of inferring M dwarf Teff and elemental abundances for Fe, Mg, Al, Si, C, N, O, Ca, Ti, Cr, and Ni with median uncertainties of 13 K and 0.018-0.029 dex, respectively.