Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Galaxy mock catalogs for BAO analysis

Abstract

The calibration and validation of scientific analysis in simulations is a fundamental tool to ensure unbiased and robust results in observational cosmology. In particular, mock galaxy catalogs are a crucial resource to achieve these goals in the measurement of baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) in the clustering of galaxies. Here we present a set of 1952 galaxy mock catalogs designed to mimic the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 BAO sample over its full photometric redshift range $0.6<z_{\mathrm{photo}}<1.1$. The mocks are based upon 488 ICE-COLA fast $N$-body simulations of full-sky light cones and were created by populating halos with galaxies, using a hybrid halo occupation distribution - halo abundance matching model. This model has ten free parameters, which were determined, for the first time, using an automatic likelihood minimization procedure. We also introduced a novel technique to assign photometric redshift for simulated galaxies, following a two-dimensional probability distribution with VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS) data. The calibration was designed to match the observed abundance of galaxies as a function of photometric redshift, the distribution of photometric redshift errors, and the clustering amplitude on scales smaller than those used for BAO measurements. An exhaustive analysis was done to ensure that the mocks reproduce the input properties. Finally, mocks were tested by comparing the angular correlation function $w(\theta )$, angular power spectrum $C_{\ell }$, and projected clustering ${\xi }_p(r_{\perp })$ to theoretical predictions and data. The impact of volume replication in the estimate of the covariance is also investigated. The success in accurately reproducing the photometric redshift uncertainties and the galaxy clustering as a function of redshift render this mock creation pipeline as a benchmark for future analyses of photometric galaxy surveys.

arXiv comment15 pages, 15 figures, Published on A&A

References in corpus (51)

• The Structure of Cold Dark Matter Halos
• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Interpretation
• The 6dF Galaxy Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the Local Hubble Constant
• Halo Models of Large Scale Structure
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological Implications from two Decades of Spectroscopic Surveys at the Apache Point observatory
• Analytic model for galaxy and dark matter clustering
• The Dark Energy Camera
• The Dark Side of the Halo Occupation Distribution
• Measuring the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation scale using the SDSS and 2dFGRS
• Modeling Luminosity-Dependent Galaxy Clustering Through Cosmic Time
• MASTER of the CMB Anisotropy Power Spectrum: A Fast Method for Statistical Analysis of Large and Complex CMB Data Sets
• The Nature of Galaxy Bias and Clustering
• Spatial correlation function and pairwise velocity dispersion of galaxies: CDM models versus the Las Campanas Survey
• A unified pseudo-$C_{\ell }$ framework
• The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). An unprecedented view of galaxies and large-scale structure at 0.5<z<1.2
• Solving Large Scale Structure in Ten Easy Steps with COLA
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: mock galaxy catalogues for the BOSS Final Data Release
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: a large sample of mock galaxy catalogues
• CosmoLike - Cosmological Likelihood Analyses for Photometric Galaxy Surveys
• The Dark Energy Survey Image Processing Pipeline
• The MICE Grand Challenge Lightcone Simulation I: Dark matter clustering
• Equivalence Principle and the Baryon Acoustic Peak
• Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Photometric Data Set for Cosmology
• EZmocks: extending the Zel'dovich approximation to generate mock galaxy catalogues with accurate clustering statistics
• The MICE Grand Challenge Lightcone Simulation III: Galaxy lensing mocks from all-sky lensing maps
• PTHalos: A fast method for generating mock galaxy distributions
• Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Measurement of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation scale in the distribution of galaxies to redshift 1
• The MICE Grand Challenge Lightcone Simulation II: Halo and Galaxy catalogues
• An algorithm to build mock galaxy catalogues using MICE simulations
• Peculiar velocities of galaxies and clusters
• Perturbation theory, effective field theory, and oscillations in the power spectrum
• DNF - Galaxy photometric redshift by Directional Neighbourhood Fitting
• The completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: 1000 multi-tracer mock catalogues with redshift evolution and systematics for galaxies and quasars of the final data release
• CMB lensing tomography with the DES Science Verification galaxies
• Euclid preparation: X. The Euclid photometric-redshift challenge
• ICE-COLA: Towards fast and accurate synthetic galaxy catalogues optimizing a quasi $N$-body method
• 2D-FFTLog: Efficient computation of real space covariance matrices for galaxy clustering and weak lensing
• Comparing approximate methods for mock catalogues and covariance matrices I: correlation function
• nIFTy Cosmology: Galaxy/halo mock catalogue comparison project on clustering statistics
• Fast and accurate mock catalogue generation for low-mass galaxies
• Tomographic galaxy clustering with the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first year public data release
• HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
• CUTE solutions for two-point correlation functions from large cosmological datasets
• Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: galaxy mock catalogues for BAO
• Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Galaxy Sample for BAO Measurement
• Stochastic bias of colour-selected BAO tracers by joint clustering-weak lensing analysis
• Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Measurement of the Galaxy Angular Power Spectrum
• BAO from angular clustering: optimization and mitigation of theoretical systematics
• Optimized Clustering Estimators for BAO Measurements Accounting for Significant Redshift Uncertainty
• ICE-COLA: fast simulations for weak lensing observables
• Cosmological Model Parameter Dependence of the Matter Power Spectrum Covariance from the DEUS-PUR $Cosmo$ Simulations