The Cluster Monte Carlo Code, CMC

Welcome to the documentation for CMC, an N-body code for collisional stellar dynamics based on the original method of Hénon (1971). CMC has been under development for more than 20 years, starting with Joshi et al. (2000, 2001), Fregeau et al. (2003). It has been upgraded to include all the relevant physics for modeling dense spherical star clusters, such as strong dynamical encounters (Fregeau & Rasio 2007), single and binary stellar evoltuion (Chatterjee et al. 2010), central massive black holes (Umbreit et al. 2012), three-body binary formation (Morscher et al., 2014), relativistic dynamics (Rodriguez et al. 2018) and more. CMC is parallelized using the Message Passing Interface (MPI), allowing it to run on workstations and distributed-memory high-performance computing clusters (Pattabiraman et al. 2013). It has been shown to produce similar results to state-of-the-art direct N-body simulations (Rodriguez et al. 2016).

The public version of CMC is pinned to the COSMIC package for binary population synthesis (Breivik et al. 2019), which itself was originally based on the version of BSE (Hurley et al. 2002) that was developed in CMC over many years (Chatterjee et al. 2010, Rodriguez et al. 2016, and 2018). Both projects have advanced significantly since then, but are pinned at the repository level: COSMIC is currently a submodule within CMC, ensuring that any cluster simulations or binary populations are integrated with the same physics.