2018AJ....155...93C

The SPIRou near-infrared spectropolarimeter is destined to begin science operations at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in mid-2018. One of the instrument's primary science goals is to discover the closest exoplanets to the solar system by conducting a three- to five-year long radial velocity survey of nearby M dwarfs at an expected precision of ∼1 m s^–1, the SPIRou Legacy Survey-Planet Search (SLS-PS). In this study, we conduct a detailed Monte Carlo simulation of the SLS-PS using our current understanding of the occurrence rate of M dwarf planetary systems and physical models of stellar activity. From simultaneous modeling of planetary signals and activity, we predict the population of planets to be detected in the SLS-PS. With our fiducial survey strategy and expected instrument performance over a nominal survey length of ∼3 years, we expect SPIRou to detect 85.3_–12.4^+29.3 planets including 20.0_–7.2^+16.8 habitable-zone planets and 8.1_–3.2^+7.6 Earth-like planets from a sample of 100 M1-M8.5 dwarfs out to 11 pc. By studying mid-to-late M dwarfs previously inaccessible to existing optical velocimeters, SPIRou will put meaningful constraints on the occurrence rate of planets around those stars including the value of η_⊕ at an expected level of precision of 45 % . We also predict that a subset of 46.7_–6.0^+16.0 planets may be accessible with dedicated high-contrast imagers on the next generation of extremely large telescopes including 4.9_–2.0^+4.7 potentially imagable Earth-like planets. Lastly, we compare the results of our fiducial survey strategy to other foreseeable survey versions to quantify which strategy is optimized to reach the SLS-PS science goals. The results of our simulations are made available to the community on GitHub (https://github.com/r-cloutier/SLSPS_Simulations).