Reproduce DES-SN5YR event and contamination rates from first principles in simulations

Develop first-principles simulation modeling within the SNANA framework and Buzzard-based host galaxy library that reproduces, without manual scaling, both the observed total number of supernovae and the core-collapse contamination rate seen in the DES-SN5YR photometrically classified sample used in this analysis.

Background

For validation, the study compares simulated catalogs to DES-SN5YR data across light-curve and host-galaxy properties. To match the data, the authors had to manually scale down the simulated total number of supernovae and the core-collapse contamination rate.

They explicitly state that they could not reproduce these values from first principles alone, indicating an unresolved modeling gap in the current simulation inputs or assumptions.

References

We manually scale down the simulated total number of SNe, as well as the rate of core-collapse contamination, to better match the data, as we are unable to replicate the same values from first principles alone.

— Evaluating Cosmological Biases using Photometric Redshifts for Type Ia Supernova Cosmology with the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program  (2407.16744 - Chen et al., 2024) in Section 4.4 (Data and Simulation Comparison)