On the origin of the evolution of the halo occupation distribution

Abstract: We use the TNG300 magneto-hydrodynamic simulation and mock catalogues built using subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) to study the origin of the redshift evolution of the halo occupation distribution (HOD). We analyse stellar-mass selected galaxy samples with fixed number densities, spanning the redshift range $0 \le z \le 3$. We measure their halo occupation functions and fit the HOD parameters to study their evolution over cosmic time. The TNG300 galaxy population strongly depends on the baryonic physics implemented in the simulation. In contrast, the galaxy population predicted by a basic SHAM model without scatter is a direct result of the cosmology of the dark matter simulation. We find that the HOD evolution is similar for both models and is consistent with a previous study of the HOD evolution in semi-analytical models. Specifically, this is the case for the ratio between the characteristic halo masses for hosting central and satellite galaxies. The only HOD parameter whose evolution varies across models is $\sigma_{\rm logM}$, which contains information about the stellar mass-halo mass relation of the galaxies and does not strongly impact galaxy clustering. We also demonstrate that the dependence on the specific values of the cosmological parameters is small. We conclude that the cosmology of the galaxy sample, i.e. the cosmological hierarchical growth of structure, and not the baryonic physics prescriptions, governs the evolution of the HOD for stellar mass-selected samples. These results have important implications for populating simulated lightcones with galaxies and can facilitate the interpretation of clustering data at different redshifts.