The halo light cone catalogues of \Abacus{AbacusSummit}

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to generate realistic halo light cone catalogues from exttt{AbacusSummit} simulations, enabling improved mock galaxy and weak lensing studies with validated accuracy and broad applicability.

Contribution

We introduce a novel algorithm for creating halo light cone catalogues from exttt{AbacusSummit} simulations, facilitating realistic sky-mapped galaxy and lensing analyses.

Findings

Auto-correlation multipoles match full-box predictions.

CMB convergence maps agree with theoretical power spectra at subpercent level.

Catalogues are available for multiple simulation resolutions.

Abstract

We describe a method for generating halo catalogues on the light cone using the \Abacus{AbacusSummit} suite of $N$-body simulations. The main application of these catalogues is the construction of realistic mock galaxy catalogues and weak lensing maps on the sky. Our algorithm associates the haloes from a set of coarsely-spaced snapshots with their positions at the time of light-cone crossing by matching halo particles to on-the-fly light cone particles. It then records the halo and particle information into an easily accessible product, which we call the \Abacus{AbacusSummit} halo light cone catalogues. Our recommended use of this product is in the halo mass regime of $M_{\rm halo} > 2.1 \times 10^{11} \ M_\odot/h$ for the \texttt{base} resolution simulations, i.e. haloes containing at least 100 particles, where the interpolated halo properties are most reliable. To test the validity of the obtained catalogues, we perform various visual inspections and consistency checks. In particular, we construct galaxy mock catalogues of emission-line galaxies (ELGs) at $z \sim 1$ by adopting a modified version of the \Abacus{AbacusHOD} script, which builds on the standard halo occupation distribution (HOD) method by including various extensions. We find that the multipoles of the auto-correlation function are consistent with the predictions from the full-box snapshot, implicitly validating our algorithm. In addition, we compute and output CMB convergence maps and find that the auto- and cross-power spectrum agrees with the theoretical prediction at the subpercent level. Halo light cone catalogues for 25 \texttt{base} and 2 \texttt{huge} simulations at the fiducial cosmology is available at DOI:\href{https://www.doi.org/10.13139/OLCF/1825069}{10.13139/OLCF/1825069}