Empirical determination of atomic line parameters of the 1.5 $\mu$m spectral region

TL;DR

This paper derives accurate atomic parameters for 15 spectral lines in the 1.56 μm infrared range, enhancing solar atmospheric modeling and magnetic field studies by expanding usable spectral lines.

Contribution

It introduces a method to empirically determine atomic line parameters for multiple spectral lines in the infrared, improving analysis of solar spectropolarimetric data.

Findings

Atomic parameters for 15 spectral lines were accurately determined.

Including more spectral lines reduces ambiguities in solar atmospheric parameters.

Infrared lines are effective tracers of solar magnetic fields.

Abstract

Both the quality and amount of astrophysical data are steadily increasing over time owing to the improvement of telescopes and their instruments. This requires corresponding evolution of the techniques used for obtaining and analyzing the resulting data. The infrared spectral range at 1.56 $\mu$m usually observed by the GRegor Infrared Spectrograph (GRIS) at the GREGOR solar telescope has a width of around 30 $\AA$ and includes at least 15 spectral lines. Normally, only a handful of spectral lines (five at most) are used in studies using GRIS because of the lack of atomic parameters for the others. Including more spectral lines may alleviate some of the known ambiguities between solar atmospheric parameters. We used inversion techniques to infer both solar atmospheric models and the atomic parameters of spectral lines which, under the local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) approximation, reproduce spectropolarimetric observations. We present accurate atomic parameters for 15 spectral lines within the spectral range from 15644 $\AA$ to 15674 $\AA$. This spectral range is commonly used in solar studies because it enables the study of the low photosphere. Moreover, the infrared spectral lines are better tracers of the magnetic fields than the optical ones.