The MICE Grand Challenge Lightcone Simulation II: Halo and Galaxy catalogues

Abstract

This is the second in a series of three papers in which we present an end-to-end simulation from the MICE collaboration, the MICE Grand Challenge (MICE-GC) run. The N-body contains about 70 billion dark-matter particles in a $(3h^{-1}\mathrm{Gpc}{)}^3$ comoving volume spanning 5 orders of magnitude in dynamical range. Here we introduce the halo and galaxy catalogues built upon it, both in a wide ($5000{\mathrm{deg}}^2$) and deep ($z<1.4$) light-cone and in several comoving snapshots. Halos were resolved down to few $10^{11}{h}^{-1}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$. This allowed us to model galaxies down to absolute magnitude M${}_r<-18.9$. We used a new hybrid Halo Occupation Distribution and Abundance Matching technique for galaxy assignment. The catalogue includes the Spectral Energy Distributions of all galaxies. We describe a variety of halo and galaxy clustering applications. We discuss how mass resolution effects can bias the large scale $2$-pt clustering amplitude of poorly resolved halos at the $\lesssim 5\%$ level, and their $3$-pt correlation function. We find a characteristic scale dependent bias of $\lesssim 6\%$ across the BAO feature for halos well above $M_{\star }\sim 10^{12}{h}^{-1}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$ and for LRG like galaxies. For halos well below $M_{\star }$ the scale dependence at $100\mathrm{Mpc}{h}^{-1}$ is $\lesssim 2\%$. Lastly we discuss the validity of the large-scale Kaiser limit across redshift and departures from it towards nonlinear scales. We make the current version of the light-cone halo and galaxy catalogue (MICECATv1.0) publicly available through a dedicated web portal, http://cosmohub.pic.es, to help develop and exploit the new generation of astronomical surveys.

Version published in MNRAS. 20 pages, 21 figures. MICE-GC halo and galaxy wide area (5000 sq deg) and deep (z<1.4) light-cone catalogue publicly available at http://cosmohub.pic.es