GALACTICUS: A semi-analytic model of galaxy formation

We describe a new, free and open source semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, GALACTICUS. The GALACTICUS model was designed to be highly modular to facilitate expansion and the exploration of alternative descriptions of key physical ingredients. We detail the GALACTICUS engine for evolving galaxies through a merging hierarchy of dark matter halos and give details of the specific implementations of physics currently available in GALACTICUS. Finally, we show results from an example model that is in reasonably good agreement with several observational datasets. We use this model to explore numerical convergence and to demonstrate the types of information which can be extracted from GALACTICUS. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.