The near-infrared Ca ii triplet as a metallicity indicator - II. Extension to extremely metal-poor metallicity regimes

We extend our previous calibration of the infrared Ca ii triplet (CaT) as a metallicity indicator to the metal-poor regime by including observations of 55 field stars with [Fe/H] down to -4.0 dex. While we previously solved the saturation at high metallicity using a combination of a Lorentzian and a Gaussian to reproduce the line profiles, in this paper we address the non-linearity at low metallicity following the suggestion of Starkenburg et al. of adding two non-linear terms to the relation among the [Fe/H], luminosity and strength of the calcium triplet lines. Our calibration thus extends from -4.0 to +0.5 in metallicity and is presented using four different luminosity indicators: V - V-HB, M-V, M-I and M-K. The calibration obtained in this paper results in a tight correlation between [Fe/H] abundances measured from high-resolution spectra and [Fe/H] values derived from the CaT, over the whole metallicity range covered.