The Mid-Infrared Luminosity Evolution and Luminosity Function of Quasars with SDSS and WISE [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00465


We determine the 22$\mu$m luminosity evolution and luminosity function for quasars from a data set of over 20,000 objects obtained by combining flux-limited Sloan Digital Sky Survey optical and Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer mid-infrared data. We apply methods developed in previous works to access the intrinsic population distributions non-parametrically, taking into account the truncations and correlations inherent in the data. We find that the population of quasars exhibits positive luminosity evolution with redshift in the mid-infrared, but with considerably less mid-infrared evolution than in the optical or radio bands. With the luminosity evolutions accounted for, we determine the density evolution and local mid-infrared luminosity function. The latter displays a sharp flattening at local luminosities below $\sim 10^{31}$ erg sec$^{-1}$ Hz$^{-1}$, which has been reported previously at 15 $\mu$m for AGN classified as both type-1 and type-2. We calculate the integrated total emission from quasars at 22 $\mu$m and find it to be a small fraction of both the cosmic infrared background light and the integrated emission from all sources at this wavelength.

Read this paper on arXiv…

J. Singal, J. George and A. Gerber
Tue, 2 Aug 16
56/80

Comments: 13 pages, 11 figures, submitted to ApJ. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1207.3396