COLOSSUS: A python toolkit for cosmology, large-scale structure, and dark matter halos

Abstract

This paper introduces Colossus, a public, open-source python package for calculations related to cosmology, the large-scale structure of matter in the universe, and the properties of dark matter halos. The code is designed to be fast and easy to use, with a coherent, well-documented user interface. The cosmology module implements FLRW cosmologies including curvature, relativistic species, and different dark energy equations of state, and provides fast computations of the linear matter power spectrum, variance, and correlation function. The large-scale structure module is concerned with the properties of peaks in Gaussian random fields and halos in a statistical sense, including their peak height, peak curvature, halo bias, and mass function. The halo module deals with spherical overdensity radii and masses, density profiles, concentration, and the splashback radius. To facilitate the rapid exploration of these quantities, Colossus implements about 40 different fitting functions from the literature. I discuss the core routines in detail, with a particular emphasis on their accuracy. Colossus is available at bitbucket.org/bdiemer/colossus.