Abstract

The Gaia benchmark stars (GBS) are very bright stars of dierent late spectral types, luminosities and metallicities. They are well-known in the Galactic archaeology community because they are widely used to calibrate and validate the automatic pipelines delivering parameters of ongoing and future spectroscopic surveys. The sample provides us with consistent fundamental parameters as well as a library of high-resolution and high signal-to-noise spectra. Since the SSL community can thus study details of high-resolution spectroscopy and compare results between dierent survey pipelines, the GBS is therefore very central to that community. We discuss some results arising from using the GBS as the main data source for spectral analyses.