The Molino Suite of Galaxy Mock Catalogs

Abstract

The Molino suite contains 75,000 galaxy mock catalogs designed to quantify the information content of any cosmological observable for a redshift-space galaxy sample. They are constructed from the Quijote N-body simulations (Villaescusa-Navarro et al. 2020) using the standard Zheng et al. (2007) Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) model. The fiducial HOD parameters are based on the SDSS high luminosity samples. The suite contains 15,000 mocks at the fiducial cosmology and HOD parameters for covariance matrix estimation. It also includes (500 N-body realizations) x (5 HOD realizations)=2,500 mocks at 24 other parameter values to estimate the derivative of the observable with respect to six cosmological parameters (Omega_m, Omega_b, h, n_s, sigma_8, and M_nu) and five HOD parameters (logMmin, sigma_logM, log M_0, alpha, and log M_1). Using the covariance matrix and derivatives calculated from Molino, one can derive Fisher matrix forecasts on the cosmological parameters marginalized over HOD parameters.