nIFTy Cosmology: Galaxy/halo mock catalogue comparison project on clustering statistics

CHUANG, CHIA-HSUN; ZHAO, CHENG; PRADA, FRANCISCO; MUNARI, EMILIANO; AVILA, SANTIAGO; IZARD, ALBERT; KITAURA, FRANCISCO-SHU; MANERA, MARC; MONACO, PIERLUIGI; MURRAY, STEVEN; KNEBE, ALEXANDER; SCOCCOLA, CLAUDIA G.; YEPES, GUSTAVO; GARCIA-BELLIDO, JUAN; MARIN, FELIPE A.; MULLER, VOLKER; SKIBBA, RAMIN; CROCCE, MARTIN; FOSALBA, PABLO; GOTTLOBER, STEFAN; KLYPIN, ANATOLY A.; POWER, CHRIS; TAO, CHARLING; TURCHANINOV, VICTOR

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY

WILEY-BLACKWELL PUBLISHING, INC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2015 vol. 452 p. 686 - 700

0035-8711

We present a comparison of major methodologies of fast generating mockhalo or galaxy catalogues. The comparison is done for two-point and thethree-point clustering statistics. The reference catalogues are drawnfrom the BigMultiDark N-body simulation. Both friend-of-friends(including distinct halos only) and spherical overdensity (includingdistinct halos and subhalos) catalogs have been used with the typicalnumber density of a large-volume galaxy surveys. We demonstrate that aproper biasing model is essential for reproducing the power spectrum atquasilinear and even smaller scales. With respect to various clusteringstatistics a methodology based on perturbation theory and a realisticbiasing model leads to very good agreement with N-body simulations.However, for the quadrupole of the correlation function or the powerspectrum, only the method based on semi-N-body simulation could reachhigh accuracy (1% level) at small scales, i.e., r<25 Mpc/h ork>0.15 h/Mpc. Full N-body solutions will remain indispensable toproduce reference catalogues. Nevertheless, we have demonstrated thatthe far more efficient approximate solvers can reach a few percentaccuracy in terms of clustering statistics at the scales interesting forthe large-scale structure analysis after calibration with a fewreference N-body calculations. This makes them useful for massiveproduction aimed at covariance studies, to scan large parameter spaces,and to estimate uncertainties in data analysis techniques, such asbaryon acoustic oscillation reconstruction, redshift distortionmeasurements, etc.