Validating Synthetic Galaxy Catalogs for Dark Energy Science in the LSST Era
Abstract
Large simulation efforts are required to provide synthetic galaxy catalogs for ongoing and upcoming cosmology surveys. These extragalactic catalogs are being used for many diverse purposes covering a wide range of scientific topics. In order to be useful, they must offer realistically complex information about the galaxies they contain. Hence, it is critical to implement a rigorous validation procedure that ensures that the simulated galaxy properties faithfully capture observations and delivers an assessment of the level of realism attained by the catalog. We present here a suite of validation tests that have been developed by the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). We discuss how the inclusion of each test is driven by the scientific targets for static ground-based dark energy science and by the availability of suitable validation data. The validation criteria that are used to assess the performance of a catalog are flexible and depend on the science goals. We illustrate the utility of this suite by showing examples for the validation of cosmoDC2, the extragalactic catalog recently released for the LSST DESC second Data Challenge.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.03769,
title = {Validating Synthetic Galaxy Catalogs for Dark Energy Science in the LSST Era},
author = {Eve Kovacs and Yao-Yuan Mao and Michel Aguena and Anita Bahmanyar and Adam Broussard and James Butler and Duncan Campbell and Chihway Chang and Shenming Fu and Katrin Heitmann and Danila Korytov and François Lanusse and Patricia Larsen and Rachel Mandelbaum and Christopher B. Morrison and Constantin Payerne and Marina Ricci and Eli Rykoff and F. Javier Sánchez and Ignacio Sevilla-Noarbe and Melanie Simet and Chun-Hao To and Vinu Vikraman and Rongpu Zhou and Camille Avestruz and Christophe Benoist and Andrew J. Benson and Lindsey Bleem and Aleksandra Ćiprianović and Céline Combet and Eric Gawiser and Shiyuan He and Remy Joseph and Jeffrey A. Newman and Judit Prat and Samuel Schmidt and Anže Slosar and Joe Zuntz and The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.03769},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
46 pages, 33 figures