Metallicities and abundances of evolved stars

Whether these trends are related to the presence of planets or not is strongly debated. At the same time, tentative evidence that the properties of evolved stars with planets may be different from what we know for main-sequence hosts has been recently reported.

We aim to test whether evolved stars with planets show any chemical peculiarity that could be related to the planet formation process. We determine in a consistent way the metallicity and individual abundances of a large sample of evolved (subgiants and red giants) and main-sequence stars with and without known planetary companions, and discuss their metallicity distribution and trends. Our methodology is based on the analysis of high-resolution echelle spectra (R ~ 57000) from 2-3 m class telescopes.