A Study of Selection Methods for H alpha Emitting Galaxies at z~1.3 for the Subaru/FMOS Galaxy Redshift Survey for Cosmology (FastSound)

TL;DR

This study evaluates various target selection methods for identifying H alpha emitting galaxies at z~1.3, optimizing for future cosmological redshift surveys by analyzing detection success rates and limiting factors.

Contribution

It compares color-color and photometric redshift selection methods, assessing their efficiency and limitations for selecting high-redshift emission galaxies.

Findings

Photometric redshift selection yields higher success rates than color-based methods.

Adding near-infrared data does not significantly improve selection efficiency.

Photometric redshift and flux estimation inaccuracies limit detection success.

Abstract

The efficient selection of high-redshift emission galaxies is important for future large galaxy redshift surveys for cosmology. Here we describe the target selection methods for the FastSound project, a redshift survey for H alpha emitting galaxies at z=1.2-1.5 using Subaru/FMOS to measure the linear growth rate f\sigma 8 via Redshift Space Distortion (RSD) and constrain the theory of gravity. To select ~400 target galaxies in the 0.2 deg^2 FMOS field-of-view from photometric data of CFHTLS-Wide (u*g'r'i'z'), we test several different methods based on color-color diagrams or photometric redshift estimates from spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting. We also test the improvement in selection efficiency that can be achieved by adding near-infrared data from the UKIDSS DXS (J). The success rates of H alpha detection with FMOS averaged over two observed fields using these methods are 11.3% (color-color, optical), 13.6% (color-color, optical+NIR), 17.3% (photo-z, optical), and 15.1% (photo-z, optical+NIR). Selection from photometric redshifts tends to give a better efficiency than color-based methods, although there is no significant improvement by adding J band data within the statistical scatter. We also investigate the main limiting factors for the success rate, by using the sample of the HiZELS H alpha emitters that were selected by narrow-band imaging. Although the number density of total H alpha emitters having higher H alpha fluxes than the FMOS sensitivity is comparable with the FMOS fiber density, the limited accuracy of photometric redshift and H alpha flux estimations have comparable effects on the success rate of <~20% obtained from SED fitting.