A new free software package for painting galaxies into dark matter haloes

During the years, several improvements in the study of the physical galaxy properties, such as stellar mass, star formation rate, have been achieved. Nowadays, statistical measurements of galaxy are performed using, for example, the stellar mass function (SMF) and the two-point correlation function (2PCF), at different redshift. Galaxies are indeed biased tracers of underlying matter density field and the 2PCF allows to study the spatial distribution of galaxies and the large scale structure of the Universe, which properties depend on the cosmological model. On the other hand, with the SMF we can infer information about the evolution of galaxies and about their formation channels. Despite all the observational studies that have been conducted, a full and exhaustive theory for the galaxy formation and evolution is far from be reached, due to the multitude of different and competitive processes involved. A common practice to face this issue is to compare observed galaxy properties with the ones obtained for simulated galaxy samples. Many efforts have been done to create even more detailed and larger galaxy catalogues, but the requirement of high computational power or, alternatively, the employment of empirical approximations, makes the realisation of accurate simulations a difficult task to achieve. In this Thesis work we present a new \textit{free software} based on the Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) technique to generate galaxy catalogues populating whatever Dark Matter (DM) haloes catalogue.