IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EFFICIENT ANALYTICAL APPROXIMATION TO THE VOIGT FUNCTION FOR PHOTOEMISSION LINESHAPE ANALYSIS

The Voigt function is used extensively in lineshape analysis of core-level photoemission spectra from non-metallic solids. It is often generated by numerically convulting a Lorentzian spectral function with a Gaussian function which models the thermal and instrumental broadening. The convolution process is time consuming and the analysis of corelevel photoemission data is usually the domain of high performance workstations or mainframe computers. However, a high accuracy analytical approximation has been found for the Voigt function and an implementation of this approximation is presented in this paper. It is demonstrated that the approximation brings lineshape analysis within the domain of the desktop computer.