Connecting massive galaxies to dark matter halos in BOSS - I. Is galaxy
  color a stochastic process in high-mass halos?
  We use subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) to model the stellar mass function
(SMF) and clustering of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS)
"CMASS" sample at $z\sim0.5$. We introduce a novel method which accounts for
the stellar mass incompleteness of CMASS as a function of redshift, and produce
CMASS mock catalogs which include selection effects, reproduce the overall SMF,
the projected two-point correlation function $w_{\rm p}$, the CMASS $dn/dz$,
and are made publicly available. We study the effects of assembly bias above
collapse mass in the context of "age matching" and show that these effects are
markedly different compared to the ones explored by Hearin et al. (2013) at
lower stellar masses. We construct two models, one in which galaxy color is
stochastic ("AbM" model) as well as a model which contains assembly bias
effects ("AgM" model). By confronting the redshift dependent clustering of
CMASS with the predictions from our model, we argue that that galaxy colors are
not a stochastic process in high-mass halos. Our results suggest that the
colors of galaxies in high-mass halos are determined by other halo properties
besides halo peak velocity and that assembly bias effects play an important
role in determining the clustering properties of this sample.
