Efficient construction of mock catalogs for baryon acoustic oscillation surveys
- Yale Univ., New Haven, CT (United States). Dept. of Physics
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). High Energy Physics and Mathematics & Computer Science Divisions
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). High Energy Physics and Mathematics & Computer Science Divisions; Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States). Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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=1hMpc-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=1hMpc-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.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0008080; AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1542149
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Vol. 2016, Issue 05; ISSN 1475-7516
- Publisher:
- Institute of Physics (IOP)Copyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Web of Science
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