Mock galaxy catalogues and their application to future galaxy surveys

We present a method for constructing end-to-end mock galaxy catalogues using a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation, applied to the halo merger trees extracted from a cosmological N-body simulation. These mocks are lightcone catalogues, which incorporate the evolution of galaxy properties with cosmic time. Interpolation is used to determine the epoch at which a galaxy will appear in the past lightcone of the observer. We discuss several applications of mock catalogues. Firstly, we consider the effectiveness of the BzK colour selection technique. The mock catalogue predictions are in reasonable agreement with the observed number counts of BzK galaxies. We predict that over 75 per cent of the model galaxies with K≤23, and redshift 1.4<z