The Abundance of Low-luminosity Lyman alpha Emitters at High Redshift

Abstract
We derive the luminosity function of high-redshift Lyman alpha emitting sources from a deep, blind, spectroscopic survey that utilized strong-lensing magnification by intermediate-redshift clusters of galaxies. We observed carefully selected regions near 9 clusters, consistent with magnification factors generally greater than 10 for the redshift range 4.5<z<6.7. Eleven emission-line candidates were located in the range 2.2<zL) proportional to L^-1 over 10^41 to 10^42.5 erg/s. When combined with the results of other surveys, limited at higher luminosities, our results suggest evidence for the suppression of star formation in low-mass halos, as predicted in popular models of galaxy formation.

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