Panoramic Survey of Lyman \alpha\ Emitters at z=3.1

TL;DR

This paper reports a large survey of Lyα emitters at z=3.1, identifying a significant protocluster in the SSA22 field, and analyzing its density compared to cosmological models.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive survey of Lyα emitters over a large area, confirming the presence of a rare, significant protocluster at z=3.09 with detailed density analysis.

Findings

Detected 2161 Lyα emitters above the flux threshold.

Identified the SSA22 region as a robust protocluster.

Found the protocluster's overdensity exceeds expected fluctuations.

Abstract

We present the results of the extensive narrow-band survey of Ly\alpha\ emission-line objects at z=3.1 in the 1.38 deg^2 area surrounding the high density region of star-forming galaxies at z=3.09 in the SSA22 field, as well as in the 1.04 deg^2 area of the three separated general blank fields. In total of 2161 Ly\alpha\ emitters, 1394 in the SSA22 fields and 767 in the general fields, respectively, are detected to the narrow-band AB magnitude limit of 25.73, which corresponds to the line flux of 1.8 x 10^{-17} erg s^{-1} cm^{-2} or luminosity of 1.5 x 10^{42} erg s^{-1} at z=3.1, above the observed equivalent width threshold, 190\AA . The average surface number density of the emitters at z=3.1 in the whole general fields above the thresholds is 0.20+-0.01 arcmin^{-2}. The SSA22 high-density region at z=3.09 whose peak local density is 6 times the average is found to be the most prominent outstanding structure in the whole surveyed area and is firmly identified as a robust `protocluster' with the enough large sample. We also compared the overdensity of the 100 arcmin^2 and 700 arcmin^2 areas which contain the protocluster with the expected fluctuation of the dark matter as well as those of the model galaxies in cosmological simulations. We found that the peak height values of the overdensity correspond to be 8-10 times and 3-4 times of the expected standard deviations of the counts of Ly\alpha emitters at z=3.1 in the corresponding volume, respectively. We conclude that the structure at z=3.09 in the SSA22 field is a very significant and rare density peak up to the scale of 60 Mpc.