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arXiv · 2604.24838

spectroxide: A code package for computing cosmic microwave background spectral distortions

Ethan Baker·Hongwan Liu·Siddharth Mishra-Sharma
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Abstract

We present spectroxide, a code package for computing cosmic microwave background spectral distortions in which all ${\sim}14{,}500$ lines of Rust code, Python interface, and ${\sim}400$ automated tests were written by an AI assistant (Claude Code) under human physicist supervision. The solver evolves the photon Boltzmann equation under Compton scattering, double Compton emission, and Bremsstrahlung from $z \sim 5 \times 10^6$ to the present, computing spectral distortions from arbitrary heat and photon injection within this redshift range. No fully open-source code of this kind is publicly available; we validate against analytic limits, published spectra, and publicly available precomputed Green's function tables. We document the development as a case study in AI-assisted scientific computing, highlighting how domain expertise caught physics bugs (incorrect dimensional prefactors, near-cancellation errors) that evaded the full automated test suite, and provide recommendations for best practices in human--AI collaborative development of scientific software. We make spectroxide publicly available on GitHub.

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Ethan Baker, Hongwan Liu, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma. 2026-04-27. spectroxide: A code package for computing cosmic microwave background spectral distortions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24838

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