Experiments in binary evolution

Abstract: The majority of stars more massive than the Sun is found in binary or multiple star systems and many of them will interact during their evolution. Specific interactions, where progenitors and post-mass transfer (MT) systems are clearly linked, can provide yet missing observational constraints. Volume-complete samples of progenitor and post-MT systems are well suited to study those processes. To compile them, we need to determine the parameters of thousands of binary systems with periods spanning several orders of magnitude. The bottleneck are the orbital parameters, because accurate determinations require a good coverage of the orbital phases. The next generation of time-resolved spectroscopic surveys should be optimized to follow-up and solve whole populations of binary systems in an efficient way. To achieve this, a scheduler predicting the best times of the next observation for any given target in real time should be combined with a flexibly schedulable multi-object spectrograph or ideally a network of independent telescopes.