The SDSS Quasar Survey

AST-0307582

Schneider

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Quasar Survey, when completed, will cover a quarter of the celestial sphere and will contain approximately 100,000 quasars below redshift 5.5, with consistent and accurate positions, photometry, image morphology, and spectra. This research will produce the main quasar catalog, a broad absorption line (BAL) quasar catalog, and an annual list of new high-redshift quasars, as a service to other researchers. The combination of area coverage, sensitivity, photometric accuracy, broad wavelength coverage, and radio selection make this a uniquely powerful quasar dataset, and its production has the added benefit of training future researchers. Although the catalogs can, and will, be used for many studies, this project will focus its scientific efforts on understanding the quasar luminosity function and its evolution, and promises to produce the definitive luminosity function for many years to come. The research may also be able to verify the validity of photometric redshifts from the high quality SDSS data, enabling the sample to be extended to around a million quasars. The quality control supported by this proposal makes the database of far more use than the 'raw' catalog, whose conditional quality flags can be hard to understand.

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