The Quijote simulations

TL;DR

The Quijote simulations are an extensive set of over 44,000 N-body cosmological simulations designed to analyze the universe's structure and support machine learning, providing a vast dataset of simulations, catalogs, and statistical measures.

Contribution

This work introduces a large-scale, diverse simulation dataset for cosmology, enabling detailed analysis and machine learning applications in understanding cosmic structure formation.

Findings

Quantified information content of cosmological observables

Provided extensive datasets for training machine learning models

Demonstrated applications of simulations in cosmological analysis

Abstract

The Quijote simulations are a set of 44,100 full N-body simulations spanning more than 7,000 cosmological models in the $\{\Omega_{\rm m}, \Omega_{\rm b}, h, n_s, \sigma_8, M_\nu, w \}$ hyperplane. At a single redshift the simulations contain more than 8.5 trillions of particles over a combined volume of 44,100 $(h^{-1}{\rm Gpc})^3$; each simulation follow the evolution of $256^3$, $512^3$ or $1024^3$ particles in a box of $1~h^{-1}{\rm Gpc}$ length. Billions of dark matter halos and cosmic voids have been identified in the simulations, whose runs required more than 35 million core hours. The Quijote simulations have been designed for two main purposes: 1) to quantify the information content on cosmological observables, and 2) to provide enough data to train machine learning algorithms. In this paper we describe the simulations and show a few of their applications. We also release the Petabyte of data generated, comprising hundreds of thousands of simulation snapshots at multiple redshifts, halo and void catalogs, together with millions of summary statistics such as power spectra, bispectra, correlation functions, marked power spectra, and estimated probability density functions.