SolRaT: polarized spectral line modeling with multi-term and multi-level atoms

Abstract

The interpretation of polarized spectral lines requires models that combine statistical equilibrium with polarized radiative transfer accounting for atomic polarization, the Hanle effect, and Zeeman and Paschen-Back splitting. The aim is to provide an open-source Python implementation of the irreducible spherical tensor formalism of Landi Degl`Innocenti and Landolfi (2004), hereafter LL04, for forward synthesis of Stokes profiles with interchangeable atomic descriptions. SolRaT solves the statistical equilibrium and polarized transfer problem for interchangeable multi-term and multi-level atomic descriptions. The multi-term model retains coherences between fine-structure levels of the same term and treats the magnetic Hamiltonian by exact diagonalization, allowing the magnetic splitting to be followed from the linear Zeeman regime to the incomplete and complete Paschen-Back regimes. The widely used multi-level model in turn assumes only the linear Zeeman regime, resulting in a simpler and more developed formalism. The implementation is checked against analytic results from LL04, the Unno-Rachkovsky solution for local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) Zeeman transfer, the Hazel2 He I D3 synthesis, and published self-consistent non-LTE scattering benchmarks. The examples show how the intra-term magnetic mixing produces departures from a linear Zeeman multi-level description, and how a J-constrained multi-term approach can be used to isolate this effect on a chosen fine-structure component. Synthesizing the same spectral line with interchangeable multi-term and multi-level descriptions under identical conditions isolates the signatures of intra-term magnetic mixing and inter-J coherences from the linear Zeeman response. Such controlled comparisons are central to developing scattering polarization diagnostics applicable across multiple atomic descriptions.