Identify dominant emission components driving disk-accretor Doppler shifts

Ascertain which accretion-disk components (e.g., disk, bright spot, and stream) dominate the observed emission-line Doppler shifts in AM Canum Venaticorum systems that host accretion disks, to enable reliable radial-velocity inference of component masses and orbital parameters.

Background

For the newly discovered systems, the optical spectra are dominated by double-peaked emission lines from an accretion disk. The authors discuss the challenges of using emission-line radial velocities to derive system parameters when disks are present.

They emphasize that disk dynamics and bright-spot contributions can contaminate the measured velocities, and that the relative contributions from different components of the disk to the observed line profiles are not clearly understood, limiting robust parameter estimation.