A semi-analytical perspective on massive galaxies at $z\sim0.55$
  The most massive and luminous galaxies in the Universe serve as powerful
probes to study the formation of structure, the assembly of mass, and
cosmology. However, their detailed formation and evolution is still barely
understood. Here we extract a sample of massive mock galaxies from the
semi-analytical model of galaxy formation (SAM) GALACTICUS from the
MultiDark-Galaxies, by replicating the CMASS photometric selection from the
SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). The comparison of the
GALACTICUS CMASS-mock with BOSS-CMASS data allows us to explore different
aspects of the massive galaxy population at $0.5<z<0.6$, including the
galaxy-halo connection and the galaxy clustering. We find good agreement
between our modelled galaxies and observations regarding the galaxy-halo
connection, but our CMASS-mock over-estimates the clustering amplitude of the
2-point correlation function, due to a smaller number density compared to BOSS,
a lack of blue objects, and a small intrinsic scatter in stellar mass at fixed
halo mass of $<0.1$ dex. To alleviate this problem, we construct an alternative
mock catalogue mimicking the CMASS colour-magnitude distribution by randomly
down-sampling the SAM catalogue. This CMASS-mock reproduces the clustering of
CMASS galaxies within 1$\sigma$ and shows some environmental dependency of star
formation properties that could be connected to the quenching of star formation
and the assembly bias.
