Preliminary results from a spectroscopic Lyα survey at redshift 5.7 with IMACS

Abstract We describe preliminary results from an ultra-sensitive, spectroscopic emission-line survey and illustrate the challenges inherent in identifying high-redshift Lyα emitters. Our multi-slit windows technique complements other types of emission-line surveys. Narrowband imaging surveys cover large areas of sky but only detect much brighter objects. Longslit spectra taken along cluster caustics yield intrinsically fainter lensed Lyα emitters but probe small volumes of space. We have observed the COSMOS deep field and a field at 15 h +00. To a line flux of a few∼ × 10−18 ergs s−1 cm−2, we found 150 emission-line sources (with no detectable continuum) among 4 masks. These candidates are being re-observed with broad spectral coverage to determine the line identity. To date, the interloper to Lyα ratio is about 8:1. The sky positions of the Lyα candidates generally do not coincide with those of foreground objects in ultra-deep r band or i′ images – consistent with the presence of a strong Lyman break.