Northern XMM-XXL field AGN catalog

The former dominate our sample (70 per cent) due to the relatively bright X-ray flux limit and the optical BOSS magnitude limit. We classify the narrow-emission line objects (22 per cent of the full sample) using standard optical emission line diagnostics: the majority have line ratios indicating the dominant source of ionization is the AGN. A small number (8 per cent of the full sample) exhibit the typical narrow line ratios of star-forming galaxies, or only have absorption lines in their spectra.

We term the latter two classes 'elusive' AGN, which would not be easy to identify correctly without their X-ray emission. We also compare X-ray (XMM-Newton), optical colour (SDSS) and and IR (WISE) AGN selections in this field. X-ray observations reveal, by far, the largest number of AGN.

The overlap between the selections, which is a strong function of the imaging depth in a given band, is also remarkably small. We show using spectral stacking that a large fraction of the X-ray AGNs would not be selectable via optical or IR colours due to host galaxy contamination. A substantial fraction of AGN may therefore be missed by these longer wavelength selection methods.