We present a new N-body simulation from the Marenostrum Institut de Ciències de l'Espai (MICE) collaboration, the MICE Grand Challenge (MICE-GC), containing about 70 billion dark matter particles in ...a (3 Gpc h
−1)3 comoving volume. Given its large volume and fine spatial resolution, spanning over five orders of magnitude in dynamic range, it allows an accurate modelling of the growth of structure in the universe from the linear through the highly non-linear regime of gravitational clustering. We validate the dark matter simulation outputs using 3D and 2D clustering statistics, and discuss mass-resolution effects in the non-linear regime by comparing to previous simulations and the latest numerical fits. We show that the MICE-GC run allows for a measurement of the BAO feature with per cent level accuracy and compare it to state-of-the-art theoretical models. We also use sub-arcmin resolution pixelized 2D maps of the dark matter counts in the lightcone to make tomographic analyses in real and redshift space. Our analysis shows the simulation reproduces the Kaiser effect on large scales, whereas we find a significant suppression of power on non-linear scales relative to the real space clustering. We complete our validation by presenting an analysis of the three-point correlation function in this and previous MICE simulations, finding further evidence for mass-resolution effects. This is the first of a series of three papers in which we present the MICE-GC simulation, along with a wide and deep mock galaxy catalogue built from it. This mock is made publicly available through a dedicated web portal, http://cosmohub.pic.es.
In Paper I of this series, we presented a new N-body light-cone simulation from the MICE Collaboration, the MICE Grand Challenge (MICE-GC), containing about 70 billion dark-matter particles in a (3 h
...−1 Gpc)3 comoving volume, from which we built halo and galaxy catalogues using a Halo Occupation Distribution and Halo Abundance Matching technique, as presented in the companion Paper II. Given its large volume and fine mass resolution, the MICE-GC simulation also allows an accurate modelling of the lensing observables from upcoming wide and deep galaxy surveys. In the last paper of this series (Paper III), we describe the construction of all-sky lensing maps, following the ‘Onion Universe’ approach, and discuss their properties in the light-cone up to z = 1.4 with sub-arcminute spatial resolution. By comparing the convergence power spectrum in the MICE-GC to lower mass-resolution (i.e. particle mass ∼1011 h
−1 M⊙) simulations, we find that resolution effects are at the 5 per cent level for multipoles ℓ ∼ 103 and 20 per cent for ℓ ∼ 104. Resolution effects have a much lower impact on our simulation, as shown by comparing the MICE-GC to recent numerical fits by Takahashi. We use the all-sky lensing maps to model galaxy lensing properties, such as the convergence, shear, and lensed magnitudes and positions, and validate them thoroughly using galaxy shear auto and cross-correlations in harmonic and configuration space. Our results show that the galaxy lensing mocks here presented can be used to accurately model lensing observables down to arcminute scales. Accompanying this series of papers, we make a first public data release of the MICE-GC galaxy mock, the MICECAT v1.0, through a dedicated web-portal for the MICE simulations, http://cosmohub.pic.es, to help developing and exploiting the new generation of astronomical surveys.
We present a test of different error estimators for two-point clustering statistics, appropriate for present and future large galaxy redshift surveys. Using an ensemble of very large dark matter ΛCDM ...N-body simulations, we compare internal error estimators (jackknife and bootstrap) to external ones (Monte Carlo realizations). For three-dimensional clustering statistics, we find that none of the internal error methods investigated is able to reproduce either accurately or robustly the errors of external estimators on 1 to 25 h−1 Mpc scales. The standard bootstrap overestimates the variance of ξ(s) by ∼40 per cent on all scales probed, but recovers, in a robust fashion, the principal eigenvectors of the underlying covariance matrix. The jackknife returns the correct variance on large scales, but significantly overestimates it on smaller scales. This scale dependence in the jackknife affects the recovered eigenvectors, which tend to disagree on small scales with the external estimates. Our results have important implications for fitting models to galaxy clustering measurements. For example, in a two-parameter fit to the projected correlation function, we find that the standard bootstrap systematically overestimates the 95 per cent confidence interval, while the jackknife method remains biased, but to a lesser extent. Ignoring the systematic bias, the scatter between realizations, for Gaussian statistics, implies that a 2σ confidence interval, as inferred from an internal estimator, corresponds in practice to anything from 1σ to 3σ. By oversampling the subvolumes, we find that it is possible, at least for the cases we consider, to obtain robust bootstrap variances and confidence intervals that agree with external error estimates. Our results are applicable to two-point statistics, like ξ(s) and wp(rp), measured in large redshift surveys, and show that the interpretation of clustering measurements with internally estimated errors should be treated with caution.
We study the linear and non-linear bias parameters which determine the mapping between the distributions of galaxies and the full matter density fields, comparing different measurements and ...predictions. Associating galaxies with dark matter haloes in the Marenostrum Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (MICE) Grand Challenge N-body simulation, we directly measure the bias parameters by comparing the smoothed density fluctuations of haloes and matter in the same region at different positions as a function of smoothing scale. Alternatively, we measure the bias parameters by matching the probability distributions of halo and matter density fluctuations, which can be applied to observations. These direct bias measurements are compared to corresponding measurements from two-point and different third-order correlations, as well as predictions from the peak-background model, which we presented in previous papers using the same data. We find an overall variation of the linear bias measurements and predictions of ~5 per cent with respect to results from two-point correlations for different halo samples with masses between ~10... and 10... h... M... at the redshifts z = 0.0 and 0.5. Variations between the second- and third-order bias parameters from the different methods show larger variations, but with consistent trends in mass and redshift. The various bias measurements reveal a tight relation between the linear and the quadratic bias parameters, which is consistent with results from the literature based on simulations with different cosmologies. Such a universal relation might improve constraints on cosmological models, derived from second-order clustering statistics at small scales or higher order clustering statistics. (ProQuest: ... denotes formulae/symbols omitted.)
This is the second in a series of three papers in which we present an end-to-end simulation from the MICE collaboration, the MICE Grand Challenge (MICE-GC) run. The N-body contains about 70 billion ...dark-matter particles in a (3 h
−1 Gpc)3 comoving volume spanning five orders of magnitude in dynamical range. Here, we introduce the halo and galaxy catalogues built upon it, both in a wide (5000 deg2) and deep (z < 1.4) lightcone and in several comoving snapshots. Haloes were resolved down to few 1011 h
−1 M⊙. This allowed us to model galaxies down to absolute magnitude M
r
< −18.9. We used a new hybrid halo occupation distribution and abundance matching technique for galaxy assignment. The catalogue includes the spectral energy distributions of all galaxies. We describe a variety of halo and galaxy clustering applications. We discuss how mass resolution effects can bias the large-scale two-pt clustering amplitude of poorly resolved haloes at the ≲5 per cent level, and their three-pt correlation function. We find a characteristic scale-dependent bias of ≲6 per cent across the BAO feature for haloes well above M
⋆ ∼ 1012 h
−1 M⊙ and for luminous red galaxy like galaxies. For haloes well below M
⋆ the scale dependence at 100 h
−1 Mpc is ≲2 per cent. Lastly, we discuss the validity of the large-scale Kaiser limit across redshift and departures from it towards non-linear scales. We make the current version of the lightcone halo and galaxy catalogue (MICECATv1.0) publicly available through a dedicated web portal to help develop and exploit the new generation of astronomical surveys.
We present a method to build mock galaxy catalogues starting from a halo catalogue that uses halo occupation distribution (HOD) recipes as well as the subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) technique. ...Combining both prescriptions we are able to push the absolute magnitude of the resulting catalogue to fainter luminosities than using just the SHAM technique and can interpret our results in terms of the HOD modelling. We optimize the method by populating with galaxies friends-of-friends dark matter haloes extracted from the Marenostrum Institut de Ciències de l'Espai dark matter simulations and comparing them to observational constraints. Our resulting mock galaxy catalogues manage to reproduce the observed local galaxy luminosity function and the colour–magnitude distribution as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They also reproduce the observed galaxy clustering properties as a function of luminosity and colour. In order to achieve that, the algorithm also includes scatter in the halo mass–galaxy luminosity relation derived from direct SHAM and a modified Navarro–Frenk–White mass density profile to place satellite galaxies in their host dark matter haloes. Improving on general usage of the HOD that fits the clustering for given magnitude limited samples, our catalogues are constructed to fit observations at all luminosities considered and therefore for any luminosity subsample. Overall, our algorithm is an economic procedure of obtaining galaxy mock catalogues down to faint magnitudes that are necessary to understand and interpret galaxy surveys.
Measurements of the linear growth factor D at different redshifts z are key to distinguish among cosmological models. One can estimate the derivative dD(z)/dln (1 + z) from redshift space ...measurements of the 3D anisotropic galaxy two-point correlation ξ(z), but the degeneracy of its transverse (or projected) component with galaxy bias b, i.e. ξ⊥(z) ∝ D
2(z)b
2(z), introduces large errors in the growth measurement. Here, we present a comparison between two methods which breaks this degeneracy by combining second- and third-order statistics. One uses the shape of the reduced three-point correlation and the other a combination of third-order one- and two-point cumulants. These methods use the fact that, for Gaussian initial conditions and scales larger than 20 h
−1 Mpc, the reduced third-order matter correlations are independent of redshift (and therefore of the growth factor), while the third-order galaxy correlations depend on b. We use matter and halo catalogues from the MICE-GC simulation to test how well we can recover b(z) and therefore D(z) with these methods in 3D real space. We also present a new approach, which enables us to measure D directly from the redshift evolution of the second- and third-order galaxy correlations without the need of modelling matter correlations. For haloes with masses lower than 1014
h
−1 M⊙, we find 10 per cent deviations between the different estimates of D, which are comparable to current observational errors. At higher masses, we find larger differences that can probably be attributed to the breakdown of the bias model and non-Poissonian shot noise.
There is currently no consistent approach to modelling galaxy bias evolution in cosmological inference. This lack of a common standard makes the rigorous comparison or combination of probes ...difficult. We show that the choice of biasing model has a significant impact on cosmological parameter constraints for a survey such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES), considering the two-point correlations of galaxies in five tomographic redshift bins. We find that modelling galaxy bias with a free biasing parameter per redshift bin gives a Figure of Merit (FoM) for dark energy equation of state parameters w
0, w
a
smaller by a factor of 10 than if a constant bias is assumed. An incorrect bias model will also cause a shift in measured values of cosmological parameters. Motivated by these points and focusing on the redshift evolution of linear bias, we propose the use of a generalized galaxy bias which encompasses a range of bias models from theory, observations and simulations, b(z) = c + (b
0 − c)/D(z)α, where parameters c, b
0 and α depend on galaxy properties such as halo mass. For a DES-like galaxy survey, we find that this model gives an unbiased estimate of w
0, w
a
with the same number or fewer nuisance parameters and a higher FoM than a simple b(z) model allowed to vary in z-bins. We show how the parameters of this model are correlated with cosmological parameters. We fit a range of bias models to two recent data sets, and conclude that this generalized parametrization is a sensible benchmark expression of galaxy bias on large scales.
A new determination of the sound horizon scale in angular coordinates is presented. It makes use of ∼0.6 × 106 luminous red galaxies, selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data, with ...photometric redshifts. The analysis covers a redshift interval that goes from z= 0.5 to 0.6. We find evidence of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) signal at the ∼2.3σ confidence level, with a value of θBAO(z= 0.55) = (3°.90 ± 0°.38), including systematic errors. To our understanding, this is the first direct measurement of the angular BAO scale in the galaxy distribution and it is in agreement with previous BAO measurements. We also show how radial determinations of the BAO scale can break the degeneracy in the measurement of cosmological parameters when they are combined with BAO angular measurements. The result is also in good agreement with the 7-year Wilkinson Microscopy Anisotropy Probe (WMAP7) best-fitting cosmology. We obtain a value of w
0=−1.03 ± 0.16 for the equation of state parameter of the dark energy, or ΩM= 0.26 ± 0.04 for the matter density, when the other parameters are fixed. We have also tested the sensitivity of current BAO measurements to a time-varying dark energy equation of state, finding w
a
= 0.06 ± 0.22 if we fix all the other parameters to the WMAP7 best-fitting cosmology.
The Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) survey at the William Herschel Telescope will use a new optical camera (PAUCam) with a large set of narrow-band filters to perform a photometric galaxy ...survey with a quasi-spectroscopic redshift precision of σ(z)/(1 + z) ∼ 0.0035 and map the large-scale structure of the universe in three dimensions up to i
AB < 22.5–23.0. In this paper, we present a detailed photo-z performance study using photometric simulations for 40 equally spaced 12.5-nm-wide (full width at half-maximum) filters with an ∼25 per cent overlap and spanning the wavelength range from 450 to 850 nm, together with a ugrizY broad-band filter system. We then present the migration matrix r
ij
, containing the probability that a galaxy in a true redshift bin j is measured in a photo-z bin i, and study its effect on the determination of galaxy auto- and cross-correlations. Finally, we also study the impact on the photo-z performance of small variations of the filter set in terms of width, wavelength coverage, etc., and find a broad region where slightly modified filter sets provide similar results, with the original set being close to optimal.
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