Testing Stellar Population Fitting Ingredients with Globular Clusters I: Stellar Libraries

The integrated spectra of stellar systems contain a wealth of information, and its analysis can reveal fundamental parameters such as metallicity, age, and star formation history. Widely used methods to analyse these spectra are based on comparing the galaxy spectra to stellar population (SP) models. Despite being a powerful tool, SP models contain many ingredients, each with their assumptions and uncertainties. Among the several possible sources of uncertainties, it is not straightforward to identify which ingredient dominates the errors in the models. In this work we propose a study of one of the SP model ingredients - the spectral stellar libraries - independently of the other ingredients. To that aim, we will use the integrated spectra of globular clusters which have colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) available. From these CMDs it is possible to model the integrated spectra of these objects without having to adopt - or make assumptions - on the other two main ingredients of SP models, evolutionary tracks or an IMF. Here we tested four widely used stellar libraries. We found that the libraries are able to reproduce the integrated spectra of 18 of the 30 cluster spectra inside a mean flux uncertainty of 5 per cent. For the larger wavelength range tested, a theoretical library outperforms the empirical ones in the comparison. Without the blue part of the spectra, empirical libraries fare better than the theoretical, in particular when individual features are concerned. However, the results are promising for theoretical libraries, which are equally efficient to reproduce the whole spectrum.