English

DESI DR2 reference mocks: clustering results from Uchuu-BGS and LRG

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-03-09 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

The aim of this work is to construct mock galaxy catalogues that accurately reproduce the redshift evolution of galaxy number density, clustering statistics, and baryonic properties, such as stellar mass for luminous red galaxies (LRGs) and absolute magnitude in the rr-band for the bright galaxy sample (BGS), based on the first three years of observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). To achieve this, we applied the subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) technique to the Uchuu NN-body simulation, which follows the evolution of 2.1 trillion particles within a volume of 8h3Gpc38\,h^{-3}\,\mathrm{Gpc}^{3}, assuming a Planck base-Λ\LambdaCDM cosmology. Using SHAM, we populated Uchuu subhalos with LRGs and BGS-BRIGHT (r<19.5r<19.5) galaxies up to redshift z=1.1z=1.1, assigning stellar masses to LRGs and luminosities to BGS galaxies (up to Mr20M_{\rm r}\leq 20). Furthermore, we analyzed the clustering dependence on stellar mass and luminosity for each tracer. Our results show that the Uchuu BGS-BRIGHT and LRG mocks accurately reproduce the observed redshift evolution of clustering, with better than 5\% agreement for separations of 1<r<20h1Mpc1<r<20\,h^{-1}\,\mathrm{Mpc} and below 10\% for 0.1<r<1h1Mpc0.1<r<1\,h^{-1}\,\mathrm{Mpc}. For the Uchuu-LRG mock, we successfully captured the stellar mass dependence of clustering, while for the Uchuu-BGS mock, we replicated the clustering for various volume-limited subsamples. We also find good agreement between the data and mocks in the dependence of large-scale bias on luminosity for BGS-BRIGHT galaxies and on stellar mass for LRGs. Altogether, these results equip DESI with robust tools for generating high-fidelity lightcones for the remainder of the survey, thereby enhancing our understanding of the galaxy--halo connection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.01593,
  title  = {DESI DR2 reference mocks: clustering results from Uchuu-BGS and LRG},
  author = {E. Fernández-García and F. Prada and A. Smith and J. DeRose and A. J. Ross and S. Bailey and M. S. Wang and Z. Ding and C. Guandalin and C. Lamman and R. Vaisakh and R. Kehoe and J. Lasker and T. Ishiyama and S. M. Moore and S. Cole and M. Siudek and A. Amalbert and A. Salcedo and A. Hearin and B. Joachimi and A. Rocher and S. Saito and A. Krolewski and Z. Slepian and Q. Li and K. S. Dawson and E. Jullo and J. Aguilar and S. Ahlen and D. Bianchi and D. Brooks and T. Claybaugh and A. de la Macorra and P. Doel and S. Ferraro and A. Font-Ribera and J. E. Forero-Romero and S. Gontcho A Gontcho and G. Gutierrez and K. Honscheid and M. Ishak and R. Joyce and S. Juneau and D. Kirkby and T. Kisner and A. Kremin and O. Lahav and A. Lambert and M. Landriau and M. E. Levi and M. Manera and R. Miquel and J. Moustakas and S. Nadathur and W. J. Percival and I. Pérez-Ràfols and G. Rossi and E. Sanchez and D. Schlegel and H. Seo and J. Silber and D. Sprayberry and G. Tarlé and B. A. Weaver and P. Zarrouk and R. Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.01593},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

31 pages, 14 figures