Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: galaxy mock catalogues for BAO

Mock catalogues are a crucial tool in the analysis of galaxy surveys data, both for the accurate computation of covariance matrices, and for the optimization of analysis methodology and validation of data sets. In this paper, we present a set of 1800 galaxy mock catalogues designed to match the Dark Energy Survey Year-1 BAO sample (Crocce et al. 2017) in abundance, observational volume, redshift distribution and uncertainty, and redshift-dependent clustering. The simulated samples were built upon HALOGEN (Avila et al. 2015) halo catalogues, based on a 2LPT density field with an empirical halo bias. For each of them, a light-cone is constructed by the superposition of snapshots in the redshift range 0.45 ph ) that matches the data at the 1σ level in the range 0.6 ph