Calculation of emission and absorption spectra of LTE plasma by the STA method

Recent improvements in the Super Transition Array (STA) method for calculating Bound-Bound (BB) and Bound-Free (BF) emission and absorption spectra for LTE plasma are described and illustrated. The method accounts for all possible BB and BF radiative transitions in the plasma. Full detailed first order quantum relativistic treatment is used for calculating transition energies and probabilities. The enormous number of configurations are divided into sets of superconfigurations comprised of a collection of energetically grouped configurations to a specific one-electron transition is then represented by a Gaussian whose moments (total intensity, average energy and variance) are calculated accurately using a technique that bypasses the necessity of direct summation over all the levels involved. The calculation of these moments involves the populations of the configurations given by their statistical weights and the Boltzmann factor. For each configuration within the superconfiguration the authors use zeroeth order energies in the Boltzmann factor corrected by a superconfiguration averaged first order term. The structure of the spectrum is increasingly revealed by splitting each STA into a number of smaller STAs. When the spectrum converges it describes the detailed UTA structure, where each configuration-to-configuration array is represented by a separate Gaussian with first order energy in the Boltzmann factor. Convergence is reached with only a few thousand STAs, at most, which makes the calculations practical. It should be pointed out that in this treatment the STA moments are obtained by summing over all level-to-level transitions, rather than configuration-to-configuration average transitions. The authors also take into account orbital relaxation by calculating orbitals and energies for each superconfiguration in its own, optimized potential