We present a study of Lyman continuum (LyC) emission in a sample of ∼150 Lyα emitters (LAEs) at z≈3.1 in the Subaru-XMM Deep Survey field. These LAEs were previously selected using the narrowband technique and spectroscopically confirmed with Lyα equivalent widths (EWs) ≥45 \r{A}. We obtain deep UV images using a custom intermediate-band filter UJ that covers a wavelength range of 3330∼3650 \r{A}, corresponding to 810∼890 \r{A} in the rest frame. We detect 5 individual LyC galaxy candidates in the UJ band, and their escape fractions (fesc) of LyC photons are roughly between 40% and 80%. This supports a previous finding that a small fraction of galaxies may have very high fesc. We find that the fesc values of the 5 LyC galaxies are not apparently correlated with other galaxy properties such as Lyα 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%) of our LAE sample. For the remaining LAEs that are not detected in UJ, we stack their UJ-band images and constrain their average fesc. The upper limit of the average fesc 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 luminosities, Lyα EWs, and SFRs, but their UV continuum slopes are similar to those of other galaxies.
@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