Comments on the Voigt function implementation in the Astropy and SpectraPlot.com packages
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
2019-01-25 v1 Computational Physics
Abstract
The Voigt profile is important for spectroscopy, astrophysics, and many other fields of physics, but is notoriously difficult to compute. McLean et al. [J. Electron Spectrosc. & Relat. Phenom., 1994] have proposed an approximation using a sum of Lorentzians. Our assessment indicates that this algorithm has significant errors for small arguments. After a brief survey of the requirements for spectroscopy we give a short list of both efficient and accurate codes and recommend implementations based on rational approximations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1806.10338,
title = {Comments on the Voigt function implementation in the Astropy and SpectraPlot.com packages},
author = {Franz Schreier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.10338},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
5 pages, 2 figures