SIROCCO - Simulating Ionization and Radiation in Outflows Created by Compact Objects

SIROCCO is a Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code designed to simulate the spectrum of biconical (or spherical) winds in disk systems. It was formerly known as Python, and originally written by Long and Knigge (2002) and was intended for simulating the spectra of winds in cataclysmic variables. Since then, it has also been used to simulate the spectra of systems ranging from young stellar objects to AGN. SIROCCO is named after the Sirocco wind, and also stands for Simulating Ionization and Radiation in Outflows Created by Compact Objects. sirocco-1.0, the version of the code in January 2025, is described by Matthews, Long et al.

The program is written in C and can be compiled on systems runining various flavors of linux, including macOS and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The code is is available on GitHub. Issues regarding the code and suggestions for improvement should be reported there. We actively encourage others to make use of the code for their own science. If anyone has questions about whether the code might be useful for a project, we encourage you to contact one of the authors of the code.

You can join the users mailing list through our Sirocco Users Google Group.

Documentation & Publications

Various documentation exists:

• A Quick Guide describing how to install and run SIROCCO (in a fairly mechanistic fashion).

• More detailed documentation on this site and in the docs/sphinx/ folder of the repository.

• A code release paper, published in MNRAS in January 2025.

• Various PhD theses that describe the code in more detail:

  • Higginbottom, N (2014): Modelling accretion disk winds in quasars,

  • Matthews, J. (2016): Disc Winds Matter: Modelling Accretion And Outflow On All Scales,

  • Mangham, S. (2019): The reverberation signatures of accretion disk winds in active galactic nuclei,

  • Parkinson, E. (2022): Shining lights, even in death: modelling the optical and ultraviolet emission from tidal disruption events .

For more information on how this page was generated and how to create documentation for SIROCCO, look at the page for documentation on the documentation.

This ADS library contains a list of publications using SIROCCO to date.

Authors

The authors of the SIROCCO code and their institutions are:

Knox Long

Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA Eureka Scientific, Inc., 2452 Delmer St., Suite 100, Oakland, CA 94602-3017, USA

James Matthews

Department of Physics, Astrophysics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford, OX1 3RH, UK

Christian Knigge

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

Stuart Sim

School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast, University Road, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK

Nick Higginbottom

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

Sam Mangham

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

Edward Parkinson

Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

Mandy Hewitt

School of Mathematics and Physics, Queen’s University Belfast, University Road, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK

Nicolas Scepi

Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, 38000 Grenoble, France

Austen Wallis

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

Amin Mosallanezhad

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

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