The Astronomical Journal (Jan 2023)

Performance of the Quasar Spectral Templates for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

  • Allyson Brodzeller,
  • Kyle Dawson,
  • Stephen Bailey,
  • Jiaxi Yu,
  • A. J. Ross,
  • A. Bault,
  • S. Filbert,
  • J. Aguilar,
  • S. Ahlen,
  • David M. Alexander,
  • E. Armengaud,
  • A. Berti,
  • D. Brooks,
  • E. Chaussidon,
  • A. de la Macorra,
  • P. Doel,
  • K. Fanning,
  • V. A. Fawcett,
  • A. Font-Ribera,
  • S. Gontcho A Gontcho,
  • J. Guy,
  • K. Honscheid,
  • S. Juneau,
  • R. Kehoe,
  • T. Kisner,
  • Anthony Kremin,
  • Ting-Wen Lan,
  • M. Landriau,
  • Michael E. Levi,
  • C. Magneville,
  • Paul Martini,
  • Aaron M. Meisner,
  • R. Miquel,
  • J. Moustakas,
  • N. Palanque-Delabrouille,
  • W. J. Percival,
  • F. Prada,
  • C. Ravoux,
  • Graziano Rossi,
  • C. Saulder,
  • M. Siudek,
  • Gregory Tarlé,
  • B. A. Weaver,
  • S. Youles,
  • Zheng Zheng,
  • Rongpu Zhou,
  • Zhimin Zhou

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ace35d
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 166, no. 2
p. 66

Abstract

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Millions of quasar spectra will be collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), leading to a fourfold increase in the number of known quasars. High-accuracy quasar classification is essential to tighten constraints on cosmological parameters measured at the highest redshifts DESI observes ( z > 2.0). We present spectral templates for identification and redshift estimation of quasars in the DESI Year 1 data release. The quasar templates are comprised of two quasar eigenspectra sets, trained on spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The sets are specialized to reconstruct quasar spectral variation observed over separate yet overlapping redshift ranges and, together, are capable of identifying DESI quasars from 0.05 < z < 7.0. The new quasar templates show significant improvement over the previous DESI quasar templates regarding catastrophic failure rates, redshift precision and accuracy, quasar completeness, and the contamination fraction in the final quasar sample.

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