Consistent analysis of the AGN LF in X-ray and MIR in the XMM-LSS field

Abstract

The luminosity function (LF) of active galactic nuclei (AGN) probes the history of supermassive black hole assembly and growth across cosmic time. To mitigate selection biases, we present a consistent analysis of the AGN LFs derived for both X-ray and mid-infrared (MIR) selected AGN in the XMM-Large Scale Structure (XMM-LSS) field. There are 4268 AGN used to construct the MIR luminosity function (IRLF) and 3427 AGN used to construct the X-ray luminosity function (XLF), providing the largest census of the AGN population out to $z=4$ in both bands with significant reduction in uncertainties. We are able for the first time to see the knee of the IRLF at $z>2$ and observe a flattening of the faint-end slope as redshift increases. The bolometric luminosity density, a proxy for the cosmic black hole accretion history, computed from our LFs shows a peak at $z\approx 2.25$ consistent with recent estimates of the peak in the star formation rate density (SFRD). However, at earlier epochs, the AGN luminosity density is flatter than the SFRD. If confirmed, this result suggests that the build up of black hole mass outpaces the growth of stellar mass in high mass systems at $z\gtrsim 2.5$. This is consistent with observations of redshift $z\sim 6$ quasars which lie above the local $M-\sigma$ relationship. The luminosity density derived from the IRLF is higher than that from the XLF at all redshifts. This is consistent with the dominant role of obscured AGN activity in the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes.

arXiv comment17 pages, 14 figures, 1 appendix

References in corpus (50)

• Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies
• The Demography of Massive Dark Objects in Galaxy Centres
• Cosmic Star Formation History
• Mass and environment as drivers of galaxy evolution in SDSS and zCOSMOS and the origin of the Schechter function
• EAZY: A Fast, Public Photometric Redshift Code
• The COSMOS2015 Catalog: Exploring the 1<z<6 Universe with half a million galaxies
• Mid-Infrared Selection of Active Galaxies
• SWIRE: The SIRTF Wide-area InfraRed Extragalactic Survey
• Obscured and unobscured active galactic nuclei in the Spitzer Space Telescope First Look Survey
• Identifying Luminous AGN in Deep Surveys: Revised IRAC Selection Criteria
• X-ray emission from star-forming galaxies - I. High-mass X-ray binaries
• The M(BH)-Sigma Relation for Supermassive Black Holes
• Obscured Active Galactic Nuclei
• Cosmic Reionization after Planck: Could Quasars Do It All?
• The evolution of the hard X-ray luminosity function of AGN
• Cosmic Star Formation History and its Dependence on Galaxy Stellar Mass
• Universal bolometric corrections for AGN over 7 luminosity decades
• Cosmic X-ray Surveys of Distant Active Galaxies: The Demographics, Physics, and Ecology of Growing Supermassive Black Holes
• The Bolometric Quasar Luminosity Function at z = 0-7
• An ALMA [CII] survey of 27 quasars at z>5.94
• The Luminosity Function of X-ray Selected Active Galactic Nuclei: Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes at High Redshift
• Optical spectroscopy and X-ray detections of a sample of quasars and AGN selected in the mid-infrared from two Spitzer wide-area surveys
• The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: The Quasar Luminosity Function from Data Release Nine
• The Evolution of the IR Luminosity Function and Dust-obscured Star Formation in the Last 13 Billion Years
• The Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS): survey definition and goals
• Revisiting Stochastic Variability of AGNs with Structure Functions
• An improved method of constructing binned luminosity functions
• The Kinematics of z ~ 6 Quasar Host Galaxies
• A catalog of mid-infrared sources in the Extended Groth Strip
• The XMM-Newton Serendipitous Survey. VI. The X-ray Luminosity Function
• The XMM-SERVS survey: new XMM-Newton point-source catalog for the XMM-LSS field
• HELP: The Herschel Extragalactic Legacy Project
• Simulating the Spitzer mid-IR color-color diagrams
• The Spitzer mid-infrared AGN survey. I - optical and near-infrared spectroscopy of candidate obscured and normal AGN selected in the mid-infrared
• Photometric redshifts for the next generation of deep radio continuum surveys - I: Template fitting
• HELP: A catalogue of 170 million objects, selected at 0.36-4.5 $\mu$m, from 1270 deg.${}^2$ of prime extragalactic fields
• The Spitzer mid-infrared AGN survey. II-the demographics and cosmic evolution of the AGN population
• The OPTX Project II: Hard X-ray Luminosity Functions of Active Galactic Nuclei for z<5
• The X-ray and Mid-Infrared luminosities in Luminous Type 1 Quasars
• Luminous WISE-selected Obscured, Unobscured, and Red Quasars in Stripe 82
• Photometric redshifts for the next generation of deep radio continuum surveys - II. Gaussian processes and hybrid estimates
• The XMM-LSS survey: the Class 1 cluster sample over the extended 11 deg${}^2$ and its spatial distribution
• The ALPINE-ALMA [C II] Survey: [C II]158micron Emission Line Luminosity Functions at $z\sim 4-6$
• A Spitzer survey of Deep Drilling Fields to be targeted by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time
• Cosmic Star-Formation History Measured at 1.4 GHz
• Active Galactic Nuclei as seen by the Spitzer Space Telescope
• The 2-10 keV unabsorbed luminosity function of AGN from the XMM-Newton LSS, CDFS and COSMOS surveys
• An Active Galactic Nucleus Recognition Model based on Deep Neural Network
• Cosmic evolution of the H2 mass density and the epoch of molecular gas
• The dependency of AGN infrared color-selection on source luminosity and obscuration: An observational perspective in CDFS and COSMOS

Cited by in corpus (5)

• A Preferential Growth Channel for Supermassive Black Holes in Elliptical Galaxies at z<2
• Stellar and black hole assembly in z<0.3 infrared-luminous mergers: intermittent starbursts vs. super-Eddington accretion
• The Past and Future of Mid-Infrared Studies of AGN
• Modelling high-resolution ALMA observations of strongly lensed dustystar forming galaxies detected by Herschel
• The Nature of LoBAL QSOs: II. HST/WFC3 Observations Reveal Host Galaxies Dominated by Mergers