COSMIC EMULATION: FAST PREDICTIONS FOR THE GALAXY POWER SPECTRUM

The halo occupation distribution (HOD) approach has proven to be an effective method for modeling galaxy clustering and bias. In this approach, galaxies of a given type are probabilistically assigned to individual halos in N-body simulations. In this paper, we present a fast emulator for predicting the fully nonlinear galaxy-galaxy auto and galaxy-dark matter cross power spectrum and correlation function over a range of freely specifiable HOD modeling parameters. The emulator is constructed using results from 100 HOD models run on a large Lambda CDM N-body simulation, with Gaussian Process interpolation applied to a PCA-based representation of the galaxy power spectrum. The total error is currently similar to 1% in the auto correlations and similar to 2% in the cross correlations from z = 1 to z = 0, over the considered parameter range. We use the emulator to investigate the accuracy of various analytic prescriptions for the galaxy power spectrum, parametric dependencies in the HOD model, and the behavior of galaxy bias as a function of HOD parameters. Additionally, we obtain fully nonlinear predictions for tangential shear correlations induced by galaxy-galaxy lensing from our galaxy-dark matter cross power spectrum emulator. All emulation products are publicly available at http://www.hep.anl.gov/cosmology/CosmicEmu/emu.html.