Cosmic Emulation: Fast Predictions for the Galaxy Power Spectrum

The halo occupation distribution (HOD) approach has proven to be an effective method for modeling galaxy clustering and bias. In this approach, galaxies of a given type are probabilistically assigned to individual halos in N-body simulations. In this paper, we present a fast emulator for predicting the fully nonlinear galaxy power spectrum over a range of freely specifiable HOD modeling parameters. The emulator is constructed using results from 100 HOD models run on a large LCDM N-body simulation, with Gaussian Process interpolation applied to a PCA-based representation of the galaxy power spectrum. The total error is currently ~3% (~2% in the simulation and ~1% in the emulation process) from z=1 to z=0, over the considered parameter range. We use the emulator to investigate parametric dependencies in the HOD model, as well as the behavior of galaxy bias as a function of HOD parameters. The emulator is publicly available at http://www.hep.anl.gov/cosmology/CosmicEmu/emu.html.