HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues

© 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We present a simple method of generating approximate synthetic halo catalogues: HALOGEN. This method uses a combination of second-order Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (2LPT) in order to generate the...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Avila, S., Murray, Steven, Knebe, A., Power, C., Robotham, A., Garcia-Bellido, J.
Format: Journal Article
Published: Oxford University Press 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/55842
_version_ 1848759721817800704
author Avila, S.
Murray, Steven
Knebe, A.
Power, C.
Robotham, A.
Garcia-Bellido, J.
author_facet Avila, S.
Murray, Steven
Knebe, A.
Power, C.
Robotham, A.
Garcia-Bellido, J.
author_sort Avila, S.
building Curtin Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description © 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We present a simple method of generating approximate synthetic halo catalogues: HALOGEN. This method uses a combination of second-order Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (2LPT) in order to generate the large-scale matter distribution, analytical mass functions to generate halo masses, and a single-parameter stochastic model for halo bias to position haloes. HALOGEN represents a simplification of similar recently published methods. Our method is constrained to recover the two-point function at intermediate (10 h &lt; sup &gt; -1 &lt; /sup &gt; Mpc &lt; r &lt; 50 h &lt; sup &gt; -1 &lt; /sup &gt; Mpc) scales, which we show is successful to within 2 per cent. Larger scales (~100 h &lt; sup &gt; -1 &lt; /sup &gt; Mpc) are reproduced to within 15 per cent. We compare several other statistics (e.g. power spectrum, point distribution function, redshift space distortions) with results from N-body simulations to determine the validity of our method for different purposes. One of the benefits of HALOGEN is its flexibility, and we demonstrate this by showing how it can be adapted to varying cosmologies and simulation specifications. A driving motivation for the development of such approximate schemes is the need to compute covariance matrices and study the systematic errors for large galaxy surveys, which requires thousands of simulated realizations. We discuss the applicability of our method in this context, and conclude that it is well suited tomass production of appropriate halo catalogues. The code is publicly available at <a href="https://github.com/savila/halogen">https://github.com/savila/halogen</a>.
first_indexed 2025-11-14T10:04:23Z
format Journal Article
id curtin-20.500.11937-55842
institution Curtin University Malaysia
institution_category Local University
last_indexed 2025-11-14T10:04:23Z
publishDate 2015
publisher Oxford University Press
recordtype eprints
repository_type Digital Repository
spelling curtin-20.500.11937-558422018-03-29T09:09:01Z HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues Avila, S. Murray, Steven Knebe, A. Power, C. Robotham, A. Garcia-Bellido, J. © 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. We present a simple method of generating approximate synthetic halo catalogues: HALOGEN. This method uses a combination of second-order Lagrangian Perturbation Theory (2LPT) in order to generate the large-scale matter distribution, analytical mass functions to generate halo masses, and a single-parameter stochastic model for halo bias to position haloes. HALOGEN represents a simplification of similar recently published methods. Our method is constrained to recover the two-point function at intermediate (10 h &lt; sup &gt; -1 &lt; /sup &gt; Mpc &lt; r &lt; 50 h &lt; sup &gt; -1 &lt; /sup &gt; Mpc) scales, which we show is successful to within 2 per cent. Larger scales (~100 h &lt; sup &gt; -1 &lt; /sup &gt; Mpc) are reproduced to within 15 per cent. We compare several other statistics (e.g. power spectrum, point distribution function, redshift space distortions) with results from N-body simulations to determine the validity of our method for different purposes. One of the benefits of HALOGEN is its flexibility, and we demonstrate this by showing how it can be adapted to varying cosmologies and simulation specifications. A driving motivation for the development of such approximate schemes is the need to compute covariance matrices and study the systematic errors for large galaxy surveys, which requires thousands of simulated realizations. We discuss the applicability of our method in this context, and conclude that it is well suited tomass production of appropriate halo catalogues. The code is publicly available at <a href="https://github.com/savila/halogen">https://github.com/savila/halogen</a>. 2015 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/55842 10.1093/mnras/stv711 Oxford University Press restricted
spellingShingle Avila, S.
Murray, Steven
Knebe, A.
Power, C.
Robotham, A.
Garcia-Bellido, J.
HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
title HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
title_full HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
title_fullStr HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
title_full_unstemmed HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
title_short HALOGEN: A tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
title_sort halogen: a tool for fast generation of mock halo catalogues
url http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/55842