Comments on the Voigt function implementation in the Astropy and SpectraPlot.com packages
Abstract
The Voigt profile is important for spectroscopy, astrophysics, and many other fields of physics, but is notoriously difficult to compute. McLean et al. [J. Electron Spectrosc. & Relat. Phenom., 1994] have proposed an approximation using a sum of Lorentzians. Our assessment indicates that this algorithm has significant errors for small arguments. After a brief survey of the requirements for spectroscopy we give a short list of both efficient and accurate codes and recommend implementations based on rational approximations.
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