The Lyman Continuum escape fraction of faint galaxies at z~3.3 in the CANDELS/GOODS-North, EGS, and COSMOS fields with LBC

Understand

The reionization of the Universe is one of the most important topics of present day astrophysical research.

• The most plausible candidates for the reionization process are star-forming galaxies, which according to the predictions of the majority of the theoretical and semi-analytical models should dominate the HI ionizing background at z~3.
• We aim at measuring the Lyman continuum escape fraction, which is one of the key parameters to compute the contribution of star-forming galaxies to the UV background.
• We have used ultra-deep U-band imaging (U=30.2mag at 1sigma) by LBC/LBT in the CANDELS/GOODS-North field, as well as deep imaging in COSMOS and EGS fields, in order to estimate the Lyman continuum escape fraction of 69 star-forming galaxies with secure spectroscopic redshifts at 3.27<z<3.40 to faint magnitude limits (L=0.2L*, or equivalently M1500~-19).