Performance of the Quasar Spectral Templates for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

Abstract

Millions of quasar spectra will be collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), leading to a four-fold increase in the number of known quasars. High accuracy quasar classification is essential to tighten constraints on cosmological parameters measured at the highest redshifts DESI observes ($z>2.0$). We present the spectral templates for identification and redshift estimation of quasars in the DESI Year 1 data release. The quasar templates are comprised of two quasar eigenspectra sets, trained on spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The sets are specialized to reconstruct quasar spectral variation observed over separate yet overlapping redshift ranges and, together, are capable of identifying DESI quasars from $0.05<z<7.0$. The new quasar templates show significant improvement over the previous DESI quasar templates regarding catastrophic failure rates, redshift precision and accuracy, quasar completeness, and the contamination fraction in the final quasar sample.

arXiv commentto be published in Astronomical Journal; 21 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (57)

• Maps of Dust IR Emission for Use in Estimation of Reddening and CMBR Foregrounds
• Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological parameters
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• Correcting for the Effects of Interstellar Extinction
• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III
• Composite Quasar Spectra From the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV: Mapping the Milky Way, Nearby Galaxies, and the Distant Universe
• The Sixteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release from the APOGEE-2 Southern Survey and Full Release of eBOSS Spectra
• The DESI Experiment Part I: Science,Targeting, and Survey Design
• The Multi-Object, Fiber-Fed Spectrographs for SDSS and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Overview and Early Data
• Spectral Classification and Redshift Measurement for the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• An Empirical Ultraviolet Template for Iron Emission in Quasars as Derived from I Zw 1
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Sixteenth Data Release
• Overview of the Instrumentation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• A Catalog of Broad Absorption Line Quasars in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5
• Unusual Broad Absorption Line Quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon acoustic oscillations with Lyman-$\alpha$ forests
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: BAO and RSD measurements from anisotropic clustering analysis of the Quasar Sample in configuration space between redshift 0.8 and 2.2
• The SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection for Data Release Nine
• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: BAO and RSD measurements from the anisotropic power spectrum of the Quasar sample between redshift 0.8 and 2.2
• Improved redshifts for SDSS quasar spectra
• Baryon acoustic oscillations from the complete SDSS-III Ly$\alpha$-quasar cross-correlation function at $z=2.4$
• Spectral Classification of Quasars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Eigenspectra; Redshift and Luminosity Effects
• DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: Final Target Selection, Design, and Validation
• The Spectroscopic Data Processing Pipeline for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Target Selection and Validation of DESI Luminous Red Galaxies
• Composite Spectra from the FIRST Bright Quasar Survey
• The SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Quasar Target Selection
• Target Selection and Validation of DESI Quasars
• The Robotic Multi-Object Focal Plane System of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: Velocity Shifts of Quasar Emission Lines
• Target Selection and Validation of DESI Emission Line Galaxies
• The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: measurement of the growth rate of structure from the anisotropic correlation function between redshift 0.8 and 2.2
• The Target-selection Pipeline for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Principal Component Analysis with Noisy and/or Missing Data
• The large-scale Quasar-Lyman α Forest Cross-Correlation from BOSS
• Detection of Cosmological 21 cm Emission with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment
• The DESI Survey Validation: Results from Visual Inspection of the Quasar Survey Spectra
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) Sample
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS)
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Quasar (QSO) Sample
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Milky Way Survey (MWS)
• Preliminary Target Selection for the DESI Emission Line Galaxy (ELG) Sample
• The multiwavelength properties of red QSOs -- Evidence for dusty winds as the origin of QSO reddening
• Improved Spectrophotometric Calibration of the SDSS-III BOSS Quasar Sample
• Dust Reddened Quasars in FIRST and UKIDSS: Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg
• QuasarNET: Human-level spectral classification and redshifting with Deep Neural Networks
• Classification of Broad Absorption Line Quasars with a Convolutional Neural Network
• Optimal strategies for identifying quasars in DESI
• Spectral Evolution in High Redshift Quasars from the Final BOSS Sample
• Fundamental differences in the properties of red and blue quasars: measuring the reddening and accretion properties with X-shooter
• Variability of Low-ionization Broad Absorption Line Quasars Based on Multi-epoch Spectra from The Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• A New View of Classification in Astronomy with the Archetype Technique: An Astronomical Case of the NP-complete Set Cover Problem
• Modeling the Spectral Diversity of Quasars in the Sixteenth Data Release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Analysis of the impact of broad absorption lines on quasar redshift measurements with synthetic observations

Cited by in corpus (22)

• DESI DR2 Results II: Measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and Cosmological Constraints
• DESI 2024 IV: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from the Lyman Alpha Forest
• DESI 2024 II: Sample Definitions, Characteristics, and Two-point Clustering Statistics
• The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument: One-dimensional power spectrum from first Lyman-$\alpha$ forest samples with Fast Fourier Transform
• Archetype-Based Redshift Estimation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Survey
• Prior-Informed AGN-Host Spectral Decomposition Using PyQSOFit
• ELG Spectroscopic Systematics Analysis of the DESI Data Release 1
• Synthetic spectra for Lyman-$\alpha$ forest analysis in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Positive neutrino masses with DESI DR2 via matter conversion to dark energy
• The most distant HI galaxies discovered by the 500 m dish FAST
• High redshift LBGs from deep broadband imaging for future spectroscopic surveys
• Cosmology from Planck CMB Lensing and DESI DR1 Quasar Tomography
• DESI Massive Post-Starburst Galaxies at $\mathbf{z}\sim 1.2$ have compact structures and dense cores
• Beyond Traditional Diagnostics: Identifying Active Galactic Nuclei with Spectral Energy Distribution Fitting in DESI Data
• 3D Correlations in the Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest from Early DESI Data
• Back to basics: Little Red Dots as galaxies and dust-obscured AGNs in a synthetic NIRCam sky simulated with L-GalaxiesBH
• The Lyman-$\alpha$ Forest from LBGs: First 3D Correlation Measurement with DESI and Prospects for Cosmology
• DESI Mg II Absorbers: Extinction Characteristics & Quasar Redshift Accuracy
• Quiescent Host Galaxies of Extended Quasars Revealed by Spectrophotometric Decomposition
• Measurements of quasar proximity zones with the Ly$\alpha$ forest of DESI Y1 quasars
• DESI DR1 Lyα 1D power spectrum: The Fast Fourier Transform estimator measurement
• Identifying Anomalous DESI Galaxy Spectra with a Variational Autoencoder