2014ApJ...797...29L

Star rotation offers us a large horizon for the study of many important physical issues pertaining to stellar evolution. Currently, four methods are widely used to infer rotation velocities, namely those related to line width calibrations, on the fitting of synthetic spectra, interferometry, and on Fourier transforms (FTs) of line profiles. Almost all of the estimations of stellar projected rotation velocities using the Fourier method in the literature have been addressed with the use of linear limb-darkening (LD) approximations during the evaluation of rotation profiles and their cosine FTs, which in certain cases, lead to discrepant velocity estimates. In this work, we introduce new mathematical expressions of rotation profiles and their Fourier cosine transforms assuming three nonlinear LD laws–quadratic, square-root, and logarithmic–and study their applications with and without gravity-darkening (GD) and geometrical flattening (GF) effects. Through an analysis of He I models in the visible range accounting for both limb and GD, we find out that, for classical models without rotationally driven effects, all the Vsin i values are too close to each other. On the other hand, taking into account GD and GF, the Vsin i obtained with the linear law result in Vsin i values that are systematically smaller than those obtained with the other laws. As a rule of thumb, we apply these expressions to the FT method to evaluate the projected rotation velocity of the emission B-type star Achernar (α Eri).