SMILE

SMILE — a software package for orbital analysis and Schwarzschild modelling of triaxial stellar systems.

Its main features include:

Orbit integration in various 2d and 3d potentials (including N-body and basis-set representations of an arbitrary potential);
Methods for analysis of orbital class, fundamental frequencies, regular or chaotic nature of an orbit, computation of Lyapunov exponents;
Poincaré sections (in 2d) and frequency maps (in 3d) for analyzing orbital structure of potential;
Construction of self-consistent Schwarzschild models;
Convenient visualization and integrated GUI environment, and a console scriptable version.

The program is written in C++ using Qt library, so it is portable to different platforms including MS Windows, Linux and Mac. Source code and compiled versions are available on the Download page. A few screenshots (from a very old version 1.0) are presented.

A more detailed description may be found in the code paper and readme file. There is also a poster about SMILE.

Current version is 2.5 (1 February 2015); main features: new potential expansion for discs, rotating reference frame, multicomponent models, wider choice of orbit integrators (see Vasiliev&Athanassoula 2015).

Previous version 2.0 (1 August 2013); main features: more modularity, another general-purpose potential approximation (Spline), new variants of Schwarzschild modelling; additional programs such as the generation of a spherical isotropic N-body snapshot for any given density profile (similar to HALOGEN, spherIC but more general).

2017 update: the core functionality of SMILE is now included as part of Agama library for galaxy modelling, but the Qt-based graphical interface is not (yet?) ported. This new version, called Forstand, is suitable for both "theoretical" (construction of models with the given density profile and only basic kinematics constraints) and "observational" (fitting models to line-of-sight kinematic data) applications, and is described in Vasiliev&Valluri 2020