FastSpec: Fast and versatile stellar spectrum synthesis code

Abstract

Modelling data from modern spectroscopic surveys and time-resolved spectropolarimetric observations requires stellar synthetic spectra to be computed rapidly over wide wavelength ranges from line lists that increasingly reach hundreds of millions of transitions. Spectropolarimetric analyses of magnetically active stars additionally demand a solution of the polarised radiative transfer problem. We present FastSpec, a new LTE spectrum synthesis code designed around two goals: increased raw computational speed and broad astrophysical applicability, including the calculation of the full Stokes vector in the presence of a magnetic field. FastSpec computes emergent intensity and flux spectra from plane-parallel and spherical model atmospheres. Chemical and ionisation equilibrium is obtained from the updated SME equation-of-state package, continuum opacities follow the ATLAS family of routines, hydrogen bound-bound and bound-free absorption uses the occupation-probability formalism, and line absorption is evaluated with fast table-based Voigt and Faraday-Voigt profile algorithms. The transfer equation is integrated with DELO-Bezier formal solvers in both scalar and Stokes-vector form. Speed is achieved through aggressive OpenMP parallelisation, adaptive per-line wavelength windowing, and a memory-capped block-processing scheme that lets arbitrarily large line lists be handled within a user-defined RAM budget. The code synthesises spectra thousands of Å wide from line lists of $10^8$ molecular and atomic transitions in under a minute on a modern multi-core laptop while reproducing benchmark calculations from established codes. FastSpec combines the physical completeness of classical model atmosphere and spectrum synthesis codes with the speed required by large surveys and the polarised transfer needed for stellar magnetism studies into a single portable package.