Efficient Construction of Mock Catalogs for Baryon Acoustic Oscillation
  Surveys
  Precision measurements of the large scale structure of the Universe require
large numbers of high fidelity mock catalogs to accurately assess, and account
for, the presence of systematic effects. We introduce and test a scheme for
generating mock catalogs rapidly using suitably derated N-body simulations. Our
aim is to reproduce the large scale structure and the gross properties of dark
matter halos with high accuracy, while sacrificing the details of the internal
structure of the halos. By adjusting global and local time-steps in an N-body
code, we demonstrate that we recover halo masses to better than 0.5% and the
power spectrum to better than 1% both in real and redshift space for k =
1h/Mpc, while requiring a factor of 4 less CPU time. We also calibrate the
redshift spacing of outputs required to generate simulated light cones. We find
that outputs separated by every z = 0.05 allow us to interpolate particle
positions and velocities to reproduce the real and redshift space power spectra
to better than 1% (out to k = 1h/Mpc). We apply these ideas to generate a suite
of simulations spanning a range of cosmologies, motivated by the Baryon
Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) but broadly applicable to future large
scale structure surveys including eBOSS and DESI. As an initial demonstration
of the utility of such simulations, we calibrate the shift in the baryonic
acoustic oscillation peak position as a function of galaxy bias with higher
precision than has been possible so far. This paper also serves to document the
simulations, which we make publicly available.
