Learning to See Sharper: A Physics-Informed Artificial Intelligence Framework for Super-Resolving Galaxy Spectra
The information recoverable from galaxy spectra depends fundamentally on spectral resolution, yet assembling large samples at high resolution remains observationally expensive. We present a deep-learning framework for spectral super-resolution that enhances low-resolution galaxy spectra by a factor of $\sim$10 in resolving power ($R\sim100$ to $R\sim1000$). The model is trained on 2,858 paired JWST/NIRSpec observations from the JADES program, where low-resolution prism spectra are matched with medium-resolution grating spectra (G140M, G235M, G395M) combined into a unified reference covering $1.0-5.3μ\mathrm{m}$. Our three-stage architecture performs an initial super-resolution, infers the redshift from the coarse reconstruction, and then applies a physics-informed residual refinement that uses attention across emission-line tokens to learn inter-line relationships and predict parametric line profiles, alongside a convolutional branch for continuum corrections. Evaluated on a 20% held-out sample, the model achieves noise-limited residuals over most of the spectral range and improves the signal-to-noise ratio of key diagnostic lines including [OII], H$β$, [OIII], and H$α$. The super-resolved spectra separate features that are entirely unresolved at prism resolution, such as the [OIII] $λ\lambda4959,5007$ doublet and H$β$, in exchange for a modest retrieval of line fluxes. As a proof of concept using JWST data, this approach is readily extensible to the low-resolution grism spectroscopy that will be delivered by Euclid and the Roman Space Telescope, potentially enabling population-level diagnostics across millions of galaxy spectra that would otherwise be inaccessible at low-resolution.