PINpointing Orbit Crossing Collapsed HIerarchical Objects

PINOCCHIO is a fast code to generate catalogues of cosmological dark matter halos with known mass, position, velocity and merger history.

It is able to reproduce, with very good accuracy, the hierarchical formation of dark matter halos from a realization of an initial (linear) density perturbation field, given on a 3D grid.

Its setup is similar to that of a conventional N-body simulation, but it is based on the powerful Lagrangian Perturbation Theory. It runs in just a small fraction of the computing time taken by an equivalent N-body simulation, producing promptly the merging histories of all halos in the catalog.

PINOCCHIO is distributed under a gnu-gpl v2 license.

The code is available on github.

Stable version: v5.1.

Papers (to be updated):

• The PINOCCHIO algorithm: pinpointing orbit-crossing collapsed hierarchical objects in a linear density field, Pierluigi Monaco, Tom Theuns & Giuliano Taffoni, 2002, MNRAS, 331, 587
• Predicting the Number, Spatial Distribution and Merging History of Dark Matter Haloes, Pierluigi Monaco, Tom Theuns, Giuliano Taffoni, Fabio Governato, Tom Quinn & Joachim Stadel, 2002, ApJ, 564, 8
• PINOCCHIO and the Hierarchical Build-Up of Dark-Matter Haloes, Giuliano Taffoni, Pierluigi Monaco & Tom Theuns, 2002, MNRAS, 333, 623
• An accurate tool for the fast generation of dark matter halo catalogs, Pierluigi Monaco, Emiliano Sefusatti, Stefano Borgani, Martin Crocce, Pablo Fosalba, Ravi Sheth & Tom Theuns, 2013, MNRAS, 433, 2389
• Improving the prediction of dark matter halo clustering with higher orders of Lagrangian Perturbation Theory, E. Munari, P. Monaco, E. Sefusatti, E. Castorina, F.G. Mohammad, S. Anselmi & S. Borgani, 2017, MNRAS, 465, 4658
• Simulating cosmologies beyond LambdaCDM with Pinocchio, L.A. Rizzo, F. Villaescusa-Navarro, P. Monaco, E. Munari, S. Borgani, E. Castorina & E. Sefusatti, 2017, JCAP, 01 008
• Fast numerical method to generate halo catalogues in modified gravity (part I): second-order Lagrangian perturbation theory, C. Moretti, S. Mozzon, P. Monaco, E. Munari, M. Baldi, M. 2020, MNRAS, 493, 1153
• Euclid Preparation. Simulating thousands of Euclid spectroscopic skies, Euclid Consortium: P. Monaco, G. Parimbelli, Y. Elkhashab et al., in preparation.

Review papers:

• The cosmological mass function, P.Monaco, 1998, Fundamentals of Cosmic Physics, 19, 157.
• Approximate methods for the generation of dark matter halo catalogs in the age of precision cosmology, P.Monaco, 2016, Galaxies, N. 4, 53, special issue: "Dark Matter: Large versus Small Scale Structures", ed. J. Gaite & A. Diaferio. (Link to the journal)