Semi-analytic forecasts for JWST – VI. Simulated light-cones and galaxy clustering predictions

Abstract

ABSTRACT In anticipation of the new era of high-redshift exploration marked by the commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), we present two sets of galaxy catalogues that are designed to aid the planning and interpretation of observing programs. We provide a set of 40 wide-field light-cones with footprints spanning approximately ∼1000 arcmin2 containing galaxies up to z = 10, and a new set of eight ultradeep light-cones with 132 arcmin2 footprints, containing galaxies up to z ∼ 12 down to the magnitudes expected to be reached in the deepest JWST surveys. These mock light-cones are extracted from dissipationless N-body simulations and populated with galaxies using the well-established, computationally efficient Santa Cruz semi-analytic model for galaxy formation. We provide a wide range of predicted physical properties, and simulated photometry from Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and many other instruments. We explore the predicted counts and luminosity functions and angular two-point correlation functions for galaxies in these simulated light-cones. We also explore the predicted field-to-field variance using multiple light-cone realizations. We find that these light-cones reproduce the available measurements of observed clustering from 0.2 ≲ z ≲ 7.5 very well. We provide predictions for galaxy clustering at high redshift that may be obtained from future JWST observations. All of the light-cones presented here are made available through a web-based interactive data release portal.