Paper detail

Extending the halo mass resolution of $N$-body simulations

We present a scheme to extend the halo mass resolution of N-body simulations of the hierarchical clustering of dark matter. The method uses the density field of the simulation to predict the number of sub-resolution dark matter haloes expected in different regions. The technique requires as input the abundance of haloes of a given mass and their average clustering, as expressed through the linear and higher order bias factors. These quantities can be computed analytically or, more accurately, derived from a higher resolution simulation as done here. Our method can recover the abundance and clustering in real- and redshift-space of haloes with mass below $\sim 7.5 \times 10^{13}h^{-1}M_{\odot}$ at $z=0$ to better than 10%. We demonstrate the technique by applying it to an ensemble of 50 low resolution, large-volume $N$-body simulations to compute the correlation function and covariance matrix of luminous red galaxies (LRGs). The limited resolution of the original simulations results in them resolving just two thirds of the LRG population. We extend the resolution of the simulations by a factor of 30 in halo mass in order to recover all LRGs. With existing simulations it is possible to generate a halo catalogue equivalent to that which would be obtained from a $N$-body simulation using more than 20 trillion particles; a direct simulation of this size is likely to remain unachievable for many years. Using our method it is now feasible to build the large numbers of high-resolution large volume mock galaxy catalogues required to compute the covariance matrices necessary to analyse upcoming galaxy surveys designed to probe dark energy.