Improved Mock Galaxy Catalogs for the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey from
  Subhalo Abundance and Environment Matching
  We develop empirical methods for modeling the galaxy population and
populating cosmological N-body simulations with mock galaxies according to the
observed properties of galaxies in survey data. We use these techniques to
produce a new set of mock catalogs for the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey based
on the output of the high-resolution Bolshoi simulation, as well as two other
simulations with different cosmological parameters, all of which we release for
public use. The mock-catalog creation technique uses subhalo abundance matching
to assign galaxy luminosities to simulated dark-matter halos. It then adds
color information to the resulting mock galaxies in a manner that depends on
the local galaxy density, in order to reproduce the measured color-environment
relation in the data. In the course of constructing the catalogs, we test
various models for including scatter in the relation between halo mass and
galaxy luminosity, within the abundance-matching framework. We find that there
is no constant-scatter model that can simultaneously reproduce both the
luminosity function and the autocorrelation function of DEEP2. This result has
implications for galaxy-formation theory, and it restricts the range of
contexts in which the mocks can be usefully applied. Nevertheless, careful
comparisons show that our new mocks accurately reproduce a wide range of the
other properties of the DEEP2 catalog, suggesting that they can be used to gain
a detailed understanding of various selection effects in DEEP2.
