Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Galaxy mock catalogs for BAO analysis

Understand

The calibration and validation of scientific analysis in simulations is a fundamental tool to ensure unbiased and robust results in observational cosmology.

• In particular, mock galaxy catalogs are a crucial resource to achieve these goals in the measurement of baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) in the clustering of galaxies.
• Here we present a set of 1952 galaxy mock catalogs designed to mimic the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 BAO sample over its full photometric redshift range $0.6<z_{\rm photo}<1.1$.
• The mocks are based upon 488 ICE-COLA fast $N$-body simulations of full-sky light cones and were created by populating halos with galaxies, using a hybrid halo occupation distribution - halo abundance matching model.