CGS: Collisionless Galactic Simulator

CGS (Collisionless Galactic Simulator) uses Fourier techniques to solve the Poisson equation, relating the mean potential of a system to the mass density. The angular dependence of the force is treated exactly in terms of the single-particle Legendre polynomials, which preserves accuracy and avoids systematic errors. The density is assigned to a radial grid by means of a cloud-in-cell scheme with a linear kernel, i.e., a particle contributes to the density of the two closest cells with a weight depending linearly on the distance from the center of the cell considered. The same kernel is then used to assign the force from the grid to the particle. The time step is chosen adaptively in such a way that particles are not allowed to cross more than one radial cell during one step. CGS is based on van Albada's code (1982) and is distributed in the NEMO (ascl:1010.051) Stellar Dynamics Toolbox.