Abundance signature of M dwarf stars

Most of our current knowledge on planet formation is still based on the analysis of main-sequence, solar-type stars. Conversely, detailed chemical studies of large samples of M-dwarf planet hosts are still missing. We aim to test whether the correlations between the metallicity, individual chemical abundances, and mass of the star and the presence of different type of planets found for FGK stars still holds for the less massive M dwarf stars. Methods to determine in a consistent way stellar abundances of M dwarfs from high-resolution optical spectra are still missing. The present work is a first attempt to fill this gap. We analyse in a coherent and homogeneous way a large sample of M dwarf…