Buzzard to Cardinal: Improved Mock Catalogs for Large Galaxy Surveys

Kavli Affiliate: Eli Rykoff

| First 5 Authors: Chun-Hao To, Joseph DeRose, Risa H. Wechsler, Eli Rykoff, Hao-Yi Wu

| Summary:

We present the Cardinal mock galaxy catalogs, a new version of the Buzzard
simulation that has been updated to support ongoing and future cosmological
surveys, including DES, DESI, and LSST. These catalogs are based on a
one-quarter sky simulation populated with galaxies out to a redshift of
$z=2.35$ to a depth of $m_{rm{r}}=27$. Compared to the Buzzard mocks, the
Cardinal mocks include an updated subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) model that
considers orphan galaxies and includes mass-dependent scatter between galaxy
luminosity and halo properties. This model can simultaneously fit galaxy
clustering and group–galaxy cross-correlations measured in three different
luminosity threshold samples. The Cardinal mocks also feature a new color
assignment model that can simultaneously fit color-dependent galaxy clustering
in three different luminosity bins. We have developed an algorithm that uses
photometric data to improve the color assignment model further and have also
developed a novel method to improve small-scale lensing below the ray-tracing
resolution. These improvements enable the Cardinal mocks to accurately
reproduce the abundance of galaxy clusters and the properties of lens galaxies
in the Dark Energy Survey data. As such, these simulations will be a valuable
tool for future cosmological analyses based on large sky surveys. The cardinal
mock will be released upon publication at https://chunhaoto.com/cardinalsim.

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