Quasar Luminosity Function at z = 7

Abstract

We present the quasar luminosity function (LF) at z = 7, measured with 35 spectroscopically confirmed quasars at 6.55 < z < 7.15. The sample of 22 quasars from the Subaru High- z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs) project, combined with 13 brighter quasars in the literature, covers an unprecedentedly wide range of rest-frame ultraviolet magnitudes over −28 < M _1450 < −23. We found that the binned LF flattens significantly toward the faint end populated by the SHELLQs quasars. A maximum likelihood fit to a double power-law model has a break magnitude ${M}_{1450}^{* }=-{25.60}_{-0.30}^{+0.40}$ , a characteristic density ${{\rm{\Phi }}}^{* }={1.35}_{-0.30}^{+0.47}$ Gpc ^−3 mag ^−1 , and a bright-end slope $\beta =-{3.34}_{-0.57}^{+0.49}$ , when the faint-end slope is fixed to α = −1.2 as observed at z ≤ 6. The overall LF shape remains remarkably similar from z = 4 to 7, while the amplitude decreases substantially toward higher redshifts, with a clear indication of an accelerating decline at z ≥ 6. The estimated ionizing photon density, 10 ^48.2±0.1 s ^−1 Mpc ^−3 , is less than 1% of the critical rate to keep the intergalactic medium ionized at z = 7, and thus indicates that quasars are not a major contributor to cosmic reionization.

Keywords

• Supermassive black holes
• Quasars
• Reionization