# shark¶

shark is a new, flexible semi-analytic model of galaxy formation.

Thanks to its flexibility, shark allows for easy exploration of different physical processes. Shark has been implemented with several models for gas cooling, active galactic nuclei, stellar and photo-ionization feedback, and star formation (SF). The software can determine the stellar mass function and stellar–halo mass relation at z=0–4; cosmic evolution of the star formation rate density, stellar mass, atomic and molecular hydrogen; local gas scaling relations; and structural galaxy properties. It performs particularly well for the mass–size relation for discs/bulges, the gas–stellar mass and stellar mass–metallicity relations.

shark is written in C++11 and has been parallelized with OpenMP. It currently compiles with all major compilers (gcc, clang, MSVC), but any C++11-enabled compiler should work. It comes with a set of standard plotting scripts, HPC-related utilities to ease its usage across as many platforms as possible, and optimization routines for easy parameter exploration.

## Citing¶

If you are using shark for your projects, please cite the following paper, which is the first one describing shark in full:

@article{doi:10.1093/mnras/sty2440,
author = {Lagos, Claudia del P and Tobar, Rodrigo J and Robotham, Aaron S G and Obreschkow, Danail and Mitchell, Peter D and Power, Chris and Elahi, Pascal J},
title = {Shark: introducing an open source, free, and flexible semi-analytic model of galaxy formation},
journal = {Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
volume = {481},
number = {3},
pages = {3573-3603},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1093/mnras/sty2440},
URL = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty2440},
eprint = {/oup/backfile/content_public/journal/mnras/481/3/10.1093_mnras_sty2440/1/sty2440.pdf}
}


An online entry can also be found at NASA’s ADS service.