Search for z~7 Ly-alpha emitters with Suprime-Cam at the Subaru Telescope

Abstract

We report a search for z=7 Ly-alpha emitters (LAEs) using a custom-made Narrow-Band filter, centered at 9755 Angstroms, with the instrument Suprime-Cam installed at the Subaru telescope. We observed two different fields and obtained two sample of 7 Ly-alpha emitters of which 4 are robust in each field. We are covering the luminosity range of 9.10^{42} - 2.10^{43} erg/s in comoving volumes of ~ 4.10^{5} and 4.3.10^{5} Mpc^{3}. From this result, we derived possible z~7 Ly-alpha luminosity functions for the full samples and for a subsample of 4 objects in each field. We do not observe, in each case, any strong evolution between the z=6.5 and z~7 Ly-alpha luminosity functions. Spectroscopic confirmation for these candidate samples is required to establish a definitive measure of the luminosity function at z~7.

accepted for publication in ApJ