Reconstructing the distribution of haloes and mock galaxies below the resolution limit in cosmological simulations

Abstract

We present a method for populating dark matter simulations with haloes of mass below the resolution limit. It is based on stochastically sampling a field derived from the density field of the halo catalogue, using constraints from the conditional halo mass function n(m|{\delta}). We test the accuracy of the method and show its application in the context of building mock galaxy samples. We find that this technique allows precise reproduction of the two-point statistics of galaxies in mock samples constructed with this method. Our results demonstrate that the full information content of a simulation can be communicated efficiently using only a catalogue of the more massive haloes.