The MICE Grand Challenge Lightcone Simulation II: Halo and Galaxy
  catalogues
  This is the second in a series of three papers in which we present an
end-to-end simulation from the MICE collaboration, the MICE Grand Challenge
(MICE-GC) run. The N-body contains about 70 billion dark-matter particles in a
$(3 \, h^{-1} \, {\rm Gpc})^3$ comoving volume spanning 5 orders of magnitude
in dynamical range. Here we introduce the halo and galaxy catalogues built upon
it, both in a wide ($5000 \,{\rm deg}^2$) and deep ($z<1.4$) light-cone and in
several comoving snapshots. Halos were resolved down to few $10^{11}
\,h^{-1}\,{\rm M_{\odot}}$. This allowed us to model galaxies down to absolute
magnitude M$_r<-18.9$. We used a new hybrid Halo Occupation Distribution and
Abundance Matching technique for galaxy assignment. The catalogue includes the
Spectral Energy Distributions of all galaxies. We describe a variety of halo
and galaxy clustering applications. We discuss how mass resolution effects can
bias the large scale $2$-pt clustering amplitude of poorly resolved halos at
the $\lesssim 5\%$ level, and their $3$-pt correlation function. We find a
characteristic scale dependent bias of $\lesssim 6\%$ across the BAO feature
for halos well above $M_{\star}\sim 10^{12}\,h^{-1}\,{\rm M_{\odot}}$ and for
LRG like galaxies. For halos well below $M_{\star}$ the scale dependence at
$100\,{\rm Mpc} h^{-1}$ is $\lesssim 2\%$. Lastly we discuss the validity of
the large-scale Kaiser limit across redshift and departures from it towards
nonlinear scales. We make the current version of the light-cone halo and galaxy
catalogue (MICECATv1.0) publicly available through a dedicated web portal,
http://cosmohub.pic.es, to help develop and exploit the new generation of
astronomical surveys.
