The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: mock galaxy catalogues for the BOSS Final Data Release

TL;DR

This paper presents the creation of large, high-fidelity mock galaxy catalogues for the SDSS-III BOSS survey, enabling precise analysis of galaxy clustering, baryon acoustic oscillations, and redshift space distortions.

Contribution

The authors developed a comprehensive pipeline to generate extensive mock galaxy catalogues that accurately reproduce observed clustering statistics and survey characteristics.

Findings

Mock catalogues match observed power spectra within 1 sigma up to k=0.3 h/Mpc.

Reproduces two-point correlation functions down to a few Mpc scales.

Simulates the largest volume to date for galaxy clustering studies.

Abstract

We reproduce the galaxy clustering catalogue from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Final Data Release (BOSS DR11&DR12) with high fidelity on all relevant scales in order to allow a robust analysis of baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift space distortions. We have generated (6,000) 12,288 MultiDark PATCHY BOSS (DR11) DR12 light-cones corresponding to an effective volume of $\sim192,000\,[h^{-1}\,{\rm Gpc}]^3$ (the largest ever simulated volume), including cosmic evolution in the redshift range from 0.15 to 0.75. The mocks have been calibrated using a reference galaxy catalogue based on the halo abundance matching modelling of the BOSS DR11&DR12 galaxy clustering data and on the data themselves. The production follows three steps. First, we apply the PATCHY code to generate a dark matter field and an object distribution including nonlinear stochastic galaxy bias. Secondly, we run the halo/stellar distribution reconstruction HADRON code to assign masses to the various objects. This step uses the mass distribution as a function of local density and non-local indicators (i.e., tidal field tensor eigenvalues and relative halo exclusion separation for massive objects) from the reference simulation applied to the corresponding PATCHY dark matter and galaxy distribution. Finally, we apply the SUGAR code to build the light cones. The resulting MultiDark PATCHY mock light cones reproduce the number density, selection function, survey geometry, and in general within 1 $\sigma$, for arbitrary stellar mass bins, the power spectrum up to $k=0.3\,h\,{\rm Mpc}^{-1}$, the two-point correlation functions down to a few Mpc scales, and the three-point statistics of the BOSS DR11&DR12 galaxy samples.