The modified gravity light-cone simulation project - I. Statistics of matter and halo distributions

We introduce a set of four very high resolution cosmological simulations exploring f(R) gravity, with 2048(3) particles in 768 and 1536 h(-1) Mpc simulation boxes, for vertical bar(f) over bar (R0)vertical bar = 10(-5) and Lambda cold dark matter (Lambda CDM), making the set the largest simulations of f(R) gravity to date. To mimic real observations, the simulations include a continuous 2D- and 3D-light-cone output dedicated to study lensing and clustering statistics. We present a detailed analysis and resolution study for the matter power spectrum in f(R) gravity over a wide range of scales. We also analyse the angular matter power spectrum and lensing convergence on the light-cone. In addition, we investigate the impact of modified gravity on the halo mass function, matter, and halo autocorrelation functions, linear halo bias, and the concentration-mass relation. The impact of f(R) gravity is generally larger on smaller scales and smaller redshift. Comparing our simulations to state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations, we confirm a degeneracy between f(R) gravity and baryonic feedback in the matter power spectrum on small scales, but also find that scales around k = 1 h Mpc(-1) are promising to distinguish both effects. The lensing convergence power spectrum is increased in f(R) gravity. Numerical fits are in good agreement with our simulations for both standard and modified gravity, but tend to overestimate their relative difference on non-linear scales. The halo bias is lower in f(R) gravity, whereas halo concentrations are increased for unscreened haloes.