Mock Lightcones and Theory Friendly Catalogs for the CANDELS Survey
  We present mock catalogs created to support the interpretation of the CANDELS
survey. We extract halos along past lightcones from the Bolshoi Planck
dissipationless N-body simulations and populate these halos with galaxies using
two different independently developed semi-analytic models of galaxy formation
and the empirical model UniverseMachine. Our mock catalogs have geometries that
encompass the footprints of observations associated with the five CANDELS
fields. In order to allow field-to-field variance to be explored, we have
created eight realizations of each field. In this paper, we present comparisons
with observable global galaxy properties, including counts in observed frame
bands, luminosity functions, color-magnitude distributions and color-color
distributions. We additionally present comparisons with physical galaxy
parameters derived from SED fitting for the CANDELS observations, such as
stellar masses and star formation rates. We find relatively good agreement
between the model predictions and CANDELS observations for luminosity and
stellar mass functions. We find poorer agreement for colors and star formation
rate distributions. All of the mock lightcones as well as curated "theory
friendly" versions of the observational CANDELS catalogs are made available
through a web-based data hub.
