Connecting massive galaxies to dark matter halos in BOSS - I. Is galaxy color a stochastic process in high-mass halos?

Understand

We use subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) to model the stellar mass function (SMF) and clustering of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) "CMASS" sample at $z\sim0.5$.

• We introduce a novel method which accounts for the stellar mass incompleteness of CMASS as a function of redshift, and produce CMASS mock catalogs which include selection effects, reproduce the overall SMF, the projected two-point correlation function $w_{\rm p}$, the CMASS $dn/dz$, and are made publicly available.
• We study the effects of assembly bias above collapse mass in the context of "age matching" and show that these effects are markedly different compared to the ones explored by Hearin et al.
• (2013) at lower stellar masses.