Efficient construction of mock catalogs for baryon acoustic oscillation surveys
- Department of Physics, Yale University, 260 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511 (United States)
- High Energy Physics and Mathematics and Computer Science Divisions, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Lemont, IL 60439 (United States)
Precision measurements of the large scale structure of the Universe require large numbers of high fidelity mock catalogs to accurately assess, and account for, the presence of systematic effects. We introduce and test a scheme for generating mock catalogs rapidly using suitably derated N-body simulations. Our aim is to reproduce the large scale structure and the gross properties of dark matter halos with high accuracy, while sacrificing the details of the halo's internal structure. By adjusting global and local time-steps in an N-body code, we demonstrate that we recover halo masses to better than 0.5% and the power spectrum to better than 1% both in real and redshift space for k =1 h Mpc{sup −1}, while requiring a factor of 4 less CPU time. We also calibrate the redshift spacing of outputs required to generate simulated light cones. We find that outputs separated by Δ z =0.05 allow us to interpolate particle positions and velocities to reproduce the real and redshift space power spectra to better than 1% (out to k =1 h Mpc{sup −1}). We apply these ideas to generate a suite of simulations spanning a range of cosmologies, motivated by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) but broadly applicable to future large scale structure surveys including eBOSS and DESI. As an initial demonstration of the utility of such simulations, we calibrate the shift in the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak position as a function of galaxy bias with higher precision than has been possible so far. This paper also serves to document the simulations, which we make publicly available.
- OSTI ID:
- 22667550
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 05; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1475-7516
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
The Gaussian streaming model and convolution Lagrangian effective field theory
|
journal | December 2016 |
| The Gaussian streaming model and Lagrangian effective field theory | text | January 2016 |
| Non-linear Structure Formation for Dark Energy Models with a Steep Equation of State | text | January 2019 |
Similar Records
The completed SDSS-IV extended baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey: pairwise-inverse probability and angular correction for fibre collisions in clustering measurements
Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Galaxy mock catalogs for BAO analysis