English

Lyman Continuum Emission from Spectroscopically Confirmed Ly$\alpha$ Emitters at $z\sim3.1$

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-10-12 v1

Abstract

We present a study of Lyman continuum (LyC) emission in a sample of \sim150 Lyα\alpha emitters (LAEs) at z3.1z\approx3.1 in the Subaru-XMM Deep Survey field. These LAEs were previously selected using the narrowband technique and spectroscopically confirmed with Lyα\alpha equivalent widths (EWs) 45\ge45 \r{A}. We obtain deep UV images using a custom intermediate-band filter UJU_{\rm J} that covers a wavelength range of 333036503330 \sim 3650 \r{A}, corresponding to 810\sim890 \r{A} in the rest frame. We detect 5 individual LyC galaxy candidates in the UJU_{\rm J} band, and their escape fractions (fescf_{\rm esc}) of LyC photons are roughly between 40% and 80%. This supports a previous finding that a small fraction of galaxies may have very high fescf_{\rm esc}. We find that the fescf_{\rm esc} values of the 5 LyC galaxies are not apparently correlated with other galaxy properties such as Lyα\alpha luminosity and EW, UV luminosity and slope, and star-formation rate (SFR). This is partly due to the fact that these galaxies only represent a small fraction (3\sim3%) of our LAE sample. For the remaining LAEs that are not detected in UJU_{\rm J}, we stack their UJU_{\rm J}-band images and constrain their average fescf_{\rm esc}. The upper limit of the average fescf_{\rm esc} value is about 16%, consistent with the results in the literature. Compared with the non-LyC LAEs, the LyC LAEs tend to have higher Lyα\alpha luminosities, Lyα\alpha EWs, and SFRs, but their UV continuum slopes are similar to those of other galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.07283,
  title  = {Lyman Continuum Emission from Spectroscopically Confirmed Ly$\alpha$ Emitters at $z\sim3.1$},
  author = {Yuchen Liu and Linhua Jiang and Rogier A. Windhorst and Yucheng Guo and Zhenya Zheng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.07283},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

13 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ