astro-ph.COApr 27, 2026

spectroxide: A code package for computing cosmic microwave background spectral distortions

Authors: Ethan BakerHongwan LiuSiddharth Mishra-Sharma

Organizations: Physics Department, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA · Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA

Abstract

We present spectroxide, a code package for computing cosmic microwave background spectral distortions in which all 14,500{\sim}14{,}500 lines of Rust code, Python interface, and 400{\sim}400 automated tests were written by an AI assistant (Claude Code) under human physicist supervision. The solver evolves the photon Boltzmann equation under Compton scattering, double Compton emission, and Bremsstrahlung from z5×106z \sim 5 \times 10^6 to the present, computing spectral distortions from arbitrary heat and photon injection within this redshift range. No fully open-source code of this kind is publicly available; we validate against analytic limits, published spectra, and publicly available precomputed Green's function tables. We document the development as a case study in AI-assisted scientific computing, highlighting how domain expertise caught physics bugs (incorrect dimensional prefactors, near-cancellation errors) that evaded the full automated test suite, and provide recommendations for best practices in human--AI collaborative development of scientific software. We make spectroxide publicly available on GitHub.

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