Payne4GAIN: NLTE Corrections for Red Giants in Milky Way Mapper using H-Band Neural Network Emulators
Abstract
The majority of spectroscopic surveys assume local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) during the modeling of stellar spectra. This assumption begins to break down for luminous stars, like the red giants targeted by SDSS-V's Milky Way Mapper Survey in its Galactic Genesis program. In this work, we present non-LTE (NLTE) abundances for 360,000 red giant stars in Milky Way Mapper DR19, from infrared APOGEE spectra. We generate NLTE spectra using precomputed departure coefficient grids for Na, Mg, Si, Al, Ca, Ti, Mn, and Ni. To fit APOGEE spectra at scale, we train neural network emulators (NNEs) to synthesize LTE and NLTE H-band spectra. After verifying that the NNEs are accurate, we fit the APOGEE spectra with ASPCAP results that fall within the same parameter range as the training data. We find strong NLTE effects on the order of 0.1\,dex for Al, Mn, and Ti, and smaller effects for Si and Ni. We provide a catalog of the results of our LTE and NLTE fits, as well as NLTE-corrected ASPCAP abundances using a polynomial fit correction.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.22499,
title = {Payne4GAIN: NLTE Corrections for Red Giants in Milky Way Mapper using H-Band Neural Network Emulators},
author = {Pierre Thibodeaux and Alexander P. Ji and Nicholas Storm and Maria Bergemann and Rana Ezzeddine and Yuan-sen Ting and Andrew R. Casey and Emily Griffith and José Fernández-Trincado and Guilherme Limberg and Szabolcs Mészáros and Amaya Sinha and Danny Horta and Andrew K. Saydjari and Joel Brownstein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.22499},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
20 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables. To be submitted to Open Journal of Astrophysics