Towards an automatic approach to modelling the circumgalactic medium: new tools for mock making and fitting of metal profiles in large surveys

TL;DR

This paper introduces two new automated tools, NMF-Profile Maker and MC-ALF, for modeling and fitting metal absorption lines in the circumgalactic medium, aiding large survey analyses.

Contribution

The paper presents novel, publicly available tools that automate the generation and fitting of metal absorption profiles, improving analysis efficiency in large spectroscopic surveys.

Findings

NMF-Profile Maker generates realistic metal absorption profile libraries.

MC-ALF automatically decomposes metal lines into Voigt components.

Tools are designed for large survey data analysis.

Abstract

We present two new tools for studying and modelling metal absorption lines in the circumgalactic medium. The first tool, dubbed ``NMF Profile Maker'' (NMF$-$PM), uses a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method and provides a robust means to generate large libraries of realistic metal absorption profiles. The method is trained and tested on 650 unsaturated metal absorbers in the redshift interval $z=0.9-4.2$ with column densities between $11.2 \le \log{(\mathrm{N/cm^{-2}})} \le 16.3$, obtained from high-resolution ($R> 4000$) and high signal-to-noise ratio ($S/N \ge 10$) quasar spectroscopy. To avoid spurious features, we train on infinite $S/N$ Voigt models of the observed line profiles derived using the code ``Monte-Carlo Absorption Line Fitter'' (MC$-$ALF), a novel automatic Bayesian fitting code that is the second tool we present in this work. MC$-$ALF is a Monte Carlo code based on nested sampling that, without the need for any prior guess or human intervention, can decompose metal lines into individual Voigt components. Both MC$-$ALF and NMF$-$PM are made publicly available to allow the community to produce large libraries of synthetic metal profiles and to reconstruct Voigt models of absorption lines in an automatic fashion. Both tools contribute to the scientific effort of simulating and analysing metal absorbers in very large spectroscopic surveys of quasars like the ongoing Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the 4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST), and the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) surveys.