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.Comment: 35 pages, submitted to New Astronom
