Overview

Our knowledge of large scale stucture in the Universe is going to change dramatically as a result of the new generation of galaxy redshift surveys that are now underway. The Anglo-Australian 2dF galaxy redshift survey will measure redshifts for 250,000 galaxy selected from the APM galaxy survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will include a redshift sample of nearly one million galaxies. As these surveys will be more than an order magnitude larger than any existing survey they will allow both much more precise estimates to be made of the standard statistics that are used to quantify large scale structure (e.g. the galaxy correlation function and power spectrum) and a first opportunity to quantify more subtle properties of the galaxy distribution. To achieve this goal will require the development of faster algorithms capable of dealing with the very large numbers of galaxies involved and the development of new statistics. To facilitate both of these tasks before the surveys are complete will require synthetic data sets on which the techniques can be developed and tested.

Here we present an extensive set of mock 2dF and SDSS galaxy catalogues. These galaxy redshift catalogues have been constructed from a series of large high-resolution cosmological N-body simulations. The N-body simulations span a wide range of cosmological models, with varying values of the density parameter Omega_0, the cosmological constant Lambda_0 and varying choices of the shape and amplitude of the mass fluctuation power spectrum. For some models several different catalogues have been produced each employing a different biasing algorithm to relate the galaxy distribution to the underlying mass distribution. All the mock galaxy catalogues have selection functions that mimic those of the real surveys.