The BACCO Simulation Project: Exploiting the full power of large-scale structure for cosmology
Abstract
We present the BACCO project, a simulation framework specially designed to provide highly-accurate predictions for the distribution of mass, galaxies, and gas as a function of cosmological parameters. In this paper, we describe our main suite of simulations (L 2 Gpc and 43203 particles) and present various validation tests. Using a cosmology-rescaling technique, we predict the nonlinear mass power spectrum over the redshift range 0<z<1.5 and over scales 10-2 < k/(h Mpc-1 ) < 5 for 800 points in an 8-dimensional cosmological parameter space. For an efficient interpolation of the results, we build an emulator and compare its predictions against several widely-used methods. Over the whole range of scales considered, we expect our predictions to be accurate at the 2\% level for parameters in the minimal CDM model and to 3\% when extended to dynamical dark energy and massive neutrinos. We make our emulator publicly available under http://www.dipc.org/bacco