NRPyCritCol & SFcollapse1D: an open-source, user-friendly toolkit to study critical phenomena

TL;DR

This paper introduces NRPyCritCol and SFcollapse1D, open-source tools that facilitate the study of gravitational collapse and critical phenomena in scalar fields, optimized for user-friendliness and accessible hardware.

Contribution

The paper presents two new codes, one in C/C++ and one in Python, designed for efficient and user-friendly simulation of scalar field collapse in spherical symmetry.

Findings

Successful simulation of critical phenomena using consumer-grade hardware

Demonstration of the toolkit's effectiveness in studying gravitational collapse

Open-source availability promotes wider research in critical phenomena

Abstract

We present a new open-source, user-friendly toolkit of two codes$-$SFcollapse1D and NRPyCritCol$-$to study critical phenomena in the context of gravitational collapse. SFcollapse1D is a C/C++ tool designed to solve the problem of gravitational collapse of massless, spherically symmetric scalar fields with the ADM formalism in spherical-like coordinates. NRPyCritColis a collection of Python modules that leverage the NRPy+ infrastructure to generate a highly optimized C-code for evolving massless scalar fields within a covariant BSSN formalism. The toolkit was developed with user-friendliness and code efficiency in mind, enabling the exploration of critical phenomena with consumer-grade computers. We present a study of critical phenomena from the collapse of massless scalar fields in spherical symmetry, using only these two codes and a laptop computer.