2015ApJ...800..137H

We present a comprehensive survey of diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) in 0.91-1.32 µm with the newly developed near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph WINERED mounted on the Araki 1.3 m telescope in Japan. We obtained high-resolution (R = 28, 300) spectra of 25 early-type stars with color excesses of 0.07 < E(B - V) < 3.4. In addition to the 4 DIBs previously detected in this wavelength range, we identified 15 new DIBs, 7 of which were reported as DIB "candidates" by Cox. We analyze the correlations among NIR DIBs, strong optical DIBs, and the reddening of the stars. Consequently, we found that all NIR DIBs show weaker correlations with the reddening rather than the optical DIBs, suggesting that the equivalent widths of NIR DIBs depend on some physical conditions of the interstellar clouds, such as UV flux. Three NIR DIBs, λλ10780, 10792, and 11797, are found to be classifiable as a "family," in which the DIBs are well correlated with each other, suggesting that the carriers of these DIBs are connected with some chemical reactions and/or have similar physical properties such as ionization potential. We also found that the three strongest NIR DIBs, λλ10780, 11797, and 13175 are well correlated with the optical DIB λ5780.5, whose carrier is proposed to be a cation molecule with high ionization potential, indicating that the carriers of the NIR DIBs could be cation molecules.