Predicting the Yields of z > 6.5 Quasar Surveys in the Era of Roman and Rubin

Abstract

About 70 luminous quasars discovered at z > 6.5 are strongly biased toward the bright end, thus not providing a comprehensive view of quasar abundance beyond the cosmic dawn. We present the predicted results of the Roman/Rubin high-redshift quasar survey, yielding 3 times more, 2-4 mag deeper quasar samples, probing high-redshift quasars across a broad range of luminosities, especially faint quasars at L bol ∼ 1010 L ⊙ or M 1450 ∼ −22, which are currently poorly explored. We include high-z quasars, galactic dwarfs, and low-z compact galaxies with similar colors as quasar candidates. We create mock catalogs based on population models to evaluate selection completeness and efficiency. We utilize the classical color dropout method in the z and Y bands to select primary quasar candidates, followed up with the Bayesian selection method to identify quasars. We show that overall selection completeness >80% and efficiency ∼10% at 6.5 < z < 9, with 180 quasars at z > 6.5, 20 at z > 7.5, and 2 at z > 8.5. The quasar yields depend sensitively on the assumed quasar luminosity shape and redshift evolution. Brown dwarf rejection through proper motion up to 50% can be made for stars brighter than 25 mag, low-z galaxies dominate at fainter magnitude. Our results show that Roman/Rubin are able to discover a statistical sample of the earliest and faintest quasars in the Universe. The new valuable data sets are worth follow-up studies with JWST and Extremely Large Telescopes to determine the quasar luminosity function faint end slope and constraint the supermassive black holes growth in the early Universe. © 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.