Outside the Lyman-break box: detecting Lyman continuum emitters at 3.5 < z < 5.1 with CLAUDS

June 2020 • 2020MNRAS.494.4986M

Authors • Meštrić, U. • Ryan-Weber, E. V. • Cooke, J. • Bassett, R. • Sawicki, M. • Faisst, A. L. • Kakiichi, K. • Inoue, A. K. • Rafelski, M. • Prichard, L. J. • Arnouts, S. • Moutard, T. • Coupon, J. • Golob, A. • Gwyn, S.

Abstract • Identifying non-contaminated sample of high-redshift galaxies with escaping Lyman continuum (LyC) flux is important for understanding the sources and evolution of cosmic reionization. We present CLAUDS (CFHT Large Area u-band deep survey) u-band photometry of the COSMOS field to probe LyC radiation from spectroscopically confirmed galaxies at $z$ ≥ 3.5 and outside the standard Lyman-break galaxy colour-selection expectations. Complementary to the CLAUDS data, we use Subaru multifilter photometry, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) multifilter imaging, and the spectroscopic surveys D10K, VUDS, and 3D-HST. We present a sample of Lyman continuum galaxy (LCG) candidates in the redshift range 3.5 ≲ $z$ ≲ 5.1. Here, we introduce 5 LCG candidates, where two are flagged quality 1 and three quality 2. The estimated $f_{\rm esc}^{\rm abs}$ for quality 1 candidates are in the range $\sim 5 - 73{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ and $\sim 30 - 93{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ . These estimates are based on our derived parameters from individual galaxies as inputs to a range of BPASS models as well as mean intergalactic medium (IGM) and maximal intergalactic and circumgalactic media (IGM+CGM) transmission. We conclude that our search for LCGs is most likely biased to lines of sight with low H I densities or free from Lyman limit systems. Our two best LCG candidates have EW (Lyα) ≤ 50 Å and we find no correlation or anticorrelation between EW (Lyα), $f_{\rm esc}^{\rm abs}$ , and R_obs, the ratio of ionizing to non-ionizing observed flux in the measured passbands. Stacking candidates without solid LyC detections (S/N < 3) results in an estimated $f_{\rm esc}^{\rm abs}$ from galaxies not greater than $1{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ .

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• SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbo.pl?bibcode=2020MNRAS.494.4986M
• PDF http://academic.oup.com/mnras/pdf-lookup/doi/10.1093/mnras/staa920
• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00158
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• ELECTR https://doi.org/10.1093%2Fmnras%2Fstaa920