Mock Observatory: two thousand lightcone mock catalogues of luminous red galaxies from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey for the cosmological large-scale analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents the creation of 2,000 realistic lightcone mock catalogs of luminous red galaxies from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey, enabling accurate covariance estimation and BAO analysis for cosmological studies.

Contribution

The authors develop a comprehensive method to generate large sets of mock LRG catalogs that match observations, including halo occupation, stellar mass assignment, and photometric redshift modeling.

Findings

Mock catalogs reproduce observed clustering statistics.

BAO signatures are clearly detected in the mocks.

Mock catalogs are suitable for covariance estimation and cosmological analysis.

Abstract

Estimating a reliable covariance matrix for correlation functions of galaxies is a crucial task to obtain accurate cosmological constraints from galaxy surveys. We generate 2,000 independent lightcone mock luminous red galaxy (LRGs) catalogues at $0.3 \leq z \leq 1.25$, designed to cover CAMIRA LRGs observed by the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Programme (HSC SSP). We first produce full-sky lightcone halo catalogues using a COmoving Lagrangian Acceleration (COLA) technique, and then trim them to match the footprints of the HSC SSP S20A Wide layers. The mock LRGs are subsequently populated onto the trimmed halo catalogues according to the halo occupation distribution model constrained by the observed CAMIRA LRGs. The stellar mass ($M_{\star}$) is assigned to each LRG by the subhalo abundance-matching technique using the observed stellar-mass functions of CAMIRA LRGs. We evaluate photometric redshifts (photo-$z$) of mock LRGs by incorporating the photo-$z$ scatter, which is derived from the observed $M_{\star}$--photo-$z$-scatter relations of the CAMIRA LRGs. We validate the constructed full-sky halo and lightcone LRG mock catalogues by comparing their angular clustering statistics (i.e., power spectra and correlation functions) with those measured from the halo catalogues of full $N$-body simulations and the CAMIRA LRG catalogues from the HSC SSP, respectively. We detect clear signatures of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) from our mock LRGs, whose angular scales are well consistent with theoretical predictions. These results demonstrate that our mock LRGs can be used to evaluate covariance matrices at large scales and provide predictions for the BAO detectability and cosmological constraints.