Deep CFHT imaging of VVDS-F22 field. II. Quasars

The aim is to test the Y-K/g-z and J-K/i-Y color selection criteria for quasars at faint magnitudes to obtain a complete sample of quasars based on deep optical and near-infrared color-color selection and to measure the faint end of the quasar luminosity function (QLF) over a wide redshift range. We carried out a quasar survey based on the Y-K/g-z and J-K/i-Y quasar selection criteria, using the deep Y-band data obtained from our CFHT/WIRCam Y-band images in a two-degree field within the F22 field of the VIMOS VLT deep survey, optical co-added data from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 and deep near-infrared data from the UKIDSS Deep Extragalactic Survey in the same field.

We discovered 25 new quasars at 0.5<z<4.5 and i<22.5 mag within one-square-degree field. The survey significantly increases the number of faint quasars in this field, especially at z~2-3. It confirms that our color selections are highly complete in a wide redshift range (z<4.5), especially over the quasar number density peak at z~2-3, even for faint quasars.