The 0.1<z<1.65 evolution of the bright end of the [OII] luminosity function

Johan Comparat, Johan Richard, Jean-Paul Kneib, Olivier Ilbert, V. Gonzalez-Perez, Laurence Tresse, Julien Zoubian, Stephane Arnouts, Roland Bacon, Joel R. Brownstein, Carlton Baugh, Timothee Delubac, Anne Ealet, Stephanie Escoffier, Jian Ge, Eric Jullo, Cedric Lacey, Nicholas P. Ross, David Schlegel, Donald P. Schneider, Oliver Steele, Lidia Tasca, Christophe Yeche, Michael Lesser, Zhaoji Jiang, Yipeng Jing, Zhou Fan, Xiaohui Fan, Jun Ma, Jundan Nie, Jiali Wang, Zhenyu Wu, Tianmeng Zhang, Xu Zhou, Zhimin Zhou, Hu Zou

Published 2014-08-07, updated 2014-12-19Version 2

We present the [OII] luminosity function measured in the redshift range 0.1<z<1.65 with unprecedented depth and accuracy. Our measurements are based on medium resolution flux-calibrated spectra of emission line galaxies with the FORS2 instrument at VLT and with the SDSS-III/BOSS spectrograph. The FORS2 spectra and the corresponding catalog containing redshifts and line fluxes are released along with this paper. In this work we use a novel method to combine the aforementioned surveys with GAMA, zCOSMOS and VVDS, which have different target selection, producing a consistent weighting scheme to derive the [OII] luminosity function. The measured luminosity function is in good agreement with previous independent estimates. The comparison with two state-of-the-art semi-analytical models is good, which is encouraging for the production of mock catalogs of [OII] flux limited surveys. We observe the bright end evolution over 8.5 Gyr: we measure the decrease of log L* from 42.4 erg/s at redshift 1.44 to 41.2 at redshift 0.165 and we find that the faint end slope flattens when redshift decreases. This measurement confirms the feasibility of the target selection of future baryonic acoustic oscillation surveys aiming at observing [OII] flux limited samples.