Accurate Modeling of the Projected Galaxy Clustering in Photometric Surveys. I. Tests with Mock Catalogs

We develop a novel method to explore the galaxy-halo connection using the galaxy imaging surveys by modeling the projected two-point correlation function measured from the galaxies with reasonable photometric redshift measurements. By assuming a Gaussian form of the photometric redshift errors, we are able to simultaneously constrain the halo occupation distribution (HOD) models and the effective photometric redshift uncertainties. Tests with mock galaxy catalogs demonstrate that this method can successfully recover (within similar to 1 sigma) the intrinsic large-scale galaxy bias, as well as the HOD models and the effective photometric redshift uncertainty. This method also works well even for galaxy samples with 10% catastrophic photometric redshift errors.