YONSEI EVOLUTIONARY POPULATION SYNTHESIS (YEPS) MODEL. I. SPECTROSCOPIC EVOLUTION OF SIMPLE STELLAR POPULATIONS

We present a series of papers on the 2012 version of the Yonsei Evolutionary Population Synthesis (YEPS) model, which was constructed based on over 20 years of research. This first paper delineates the spectroscopic aspect of integrated light from stellar populations older than 1 Gyr. The standard YEPS is based on the most up-to-date Yonsei-Yale stellar evolutionary tracks and BaSel 3.1 flux libraries, and provides absorption line indices of the Lick/IDS system and high-order Balmer lines for simple stellar populations as functions of stellar parameters, such as metallicity, age, and alpha-element mixture. Special care has been taken to incorporate a systematic contribution from horizontal-branch (HB) stars, which alters the temperature-sensitive Balmer lines significantly, resulting in up to a 5 Gyr difference in the age estimation of old, metal-poor stellar populations. We also find that HBs exert an appreciable effect not only on the Balmer lines but also on the metallicity-sensitive lines, including the magnesium index. This is critical in explaining the intriguing bimodality found in index distributions of globular clusters in massive galaxies and to accurately derive spectroscopic metallicities from various indices. A full set of the spectroscopic and photometric YEPS model data of the entire parameter space is currently downloadable at http://web.yonsei.ac.kr/cosmic/data/YEPS.htm.