SPHerical: A Python Package For Exploring Alternative Dark Matter Models

Cold dark matter (CDM) cosmological N-body simulations have proved to be powerful tools for studying the evolution and structure of the universe. These simulations, however, predict certain small-scale structure that disagrees with observation. They are also computationally expensive. Thus, the majority of efforts have focused upon the vanilla CDM model. There are, however, a variety of DM models beyond CDM, such as self-interacting dark matter (SIDM), which has shown promise in resolving some of the aforementioned small-scale structure problems. Our new Python package, SPHerical, which we present in this paper, aims to allow for further exploration of SIDM and other alternative DM models. The package is used to simulate the evolution of isolated spherically symmetric DM halos using a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework and gravothermal fluid model. In this paper, we limit our scope to SIDM and compare SPHerical's results with those of similar simulations.