Alex Merson

The focus of my PhD was the construction of lightcone mock catalogues; catalogues of synthetic galaxies used widely for calibration of statistical estimators and for making predictions for large scale galaxy surveys.

Lightcone catalogues for various galaxy surveys can be downloaded by using the drop box on the sidebar.

catalogue construction

In Merson et al. (2013), we construct lightcone catalogues by using a semi-analytical galaxy formation model to populate the dark matter halo merger trees of a cosmological simulation. The simulation used is the Millennium Simulation and the semi-analytic model used is the GALFORM model. The catalogues are known as lightcone catalogues because galaxies are placed in the catalogue at the epoch at which they first enter the past lightcone of the observer. The position and velocity of each galaxy is determined by interpolation between the snapshot outputs of the simulation. By constructing the catalogues in this way, we are able to incorporate the evolution of the galaxy population with cosmic time and make predictions for the galaxy population out to high redshifts. Additonally, with GALFORM we are able to make extensive multi-wavelength predictions for the galaxies in the catalogue, ranging from the their X-ray properties right through to their radio emission.