Quantify end-of-life charge-transfer-inefficiency systematics

Quantify the end-of-life charge-transfer-inefficiency correction and establish its magnitude-dependent impact on the PLATO transit-detection completeness and false-alarm rate for faint M-dwarf targets.

Background

The study models residual PLATO systematics using a pre-launch template whose official tables do not extend to the faint magnitudes of the simulated M-dwarf campaign. The authors note that charge-transfer inefficiency is expected to worsen for faint stars, potentially altering the systematics penalty inferred from the simulations.

Because the end-of-life charge-transfer-inefficiency correction has not been quantified, the reported systematics penalty is not a reliable per-star prediction across the full magnitude range of the PLATO M-dwarf sample. Establishing this correction is necessary to determine how instrumental residuals affect detection performance at the faint end.

References

Its systematics are the residuals left after the planned mission corrections (drift correction and microscan assumed applied; the end-of-life charge-transfer-inefficiency correction not yet quantified), treated here as independent between cameras, whereas the dominant common-mode terms such as pointing jitter are correlated within a camera group \citep{Jannsen2024}, so the real multicamera averaging is less favourable.

— Habitable-zone Earths at the detection frontier: Measured completeness and false-alarm rate of a transit pipeline for the PLATO M-dwarf sample  (2609.04887 - Tschudi, 4 Sep 2026) in Section 4, Limitations