The Phantom Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics code
Phantom is a 3D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics code for astrophysics. It was written and developed by Daniel Price with contributions from many others (see AUTHORS). It is designed to be a fast, 3D SPH code for production runs. It is not a code for testing algorithms. Key features include:
- Compressible hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics
- Advanced shock capturing using state-of-the-art methods
- Sink particles with 4th order symplectic integration of gravitational dynamics
- Self-gravity using a momentum-conserving fast multipole method and adaptive gravitational force softening
- Multi-species dust-gas mixtures (dust-as-mixture or dust-as-particles)
- Dust growth and porosity evolution
- General relativistic hydrodynamics in Kerr, Schwarzschild and Minkowski metrics
- Radiation hydrodynamics using either implicit flux-limited diffusion or live-coupled Monte Carlo Radiative transfer
- Adaptive particle refinement
- Wind injection, dust nucleation and radiative acceleration
- Automated mapping of 1D stellar evolution models into 3D stars using Relax-O-Matic^TM
- N-body regularisation for fast simulation of star clusters
- Easy and flexible setup of binary, triple and multiple stars with discs and planets in arbitrary configurations
- Direct coupling with Monte Carlo radiative transfer for easy comparison with observations
- Project homepage: http://phantomsph.github.io/
- Code repository: https://github.com/danieljprice/phantom/
- Documentation: https://phantomsph.readthedocs.org/
- Code paper: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018PASA...35...31P
The Phantom source code is structured as follows:
build/Makefile |
main Makefile for compiling Phantom and all utilities |
src/main |
source for main code |
src/setup |
source for Phantomsetup utility |
src/tests |
source for unit tests and the Phantom testsuite |
src/utils |
source for optional utilities and analysis |
If you need help, please try the following, in order:
- Check the documentation.
- If you encounter a bug, file an issue
- If you want to request a feature, start a discussion
- If you need help on how to use phantom, start a discussion
We welcome general discussion about Phantom, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics, and astrophysics at the Phantom Slack. However, please use the github issues for support requests. Please note this is a community-supported code and that we rely on user contributions and community engagement to deal with issues raised on github.
We welcome contributions, including (but not limited to):
- Starring or forking the repository to let us know you are using the code.
- Providing help to other users on github discussions or on the Slack channel.
- Code, via pull request. Please read developer section of user guide for guidelines. Our wish list is the issue tracker.
- Documentation, also by pull request. Docs can be edited in the docs/ directory of the main code.
- Suggestions for features or bug reports, via the issue tracker. Please file bugs via github rather than by email.
Please cite Price et al. (2018) when using Phantom. Wherever possible, please try to also cite original references for the algorithms you are using. A partial list can be found in docs/phantom.bib file, or by reading the relevant sections of the paper.
For CHANGES see the release notes: https://phantomsph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/releasenotes.html. See LICENSE file for usage and distribution conditions.
Copyright (c) 2007-2025 Daniel Price and contributors (see AUTHORS file).
