The PAU camera and the PAU survey at the William Herschel Telescope

Abstract

The Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) is a project whose main goal is the study of dark energy. For this purpose, a new large field of view camera (the PAU Camera, PAUCam) is being built. PAUCam is designed to carry out a wide area imaging survey with narrow and broad band filters spanning the optical wavelength range. The PAU Camera is now at an advance stage of construction. PAUCam will be mounted at the prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope. With the current WHT corrector, it will cover a 1 degree diameter field of view. PAUCam mounts eighteen 2k&times;4k Hamamatsu fully depleted CCDs, with high quantum efficiency up to 1 &mu;m. Filter trays are placed in front of the CCDs with a technologically challenging system of moving filter trays inside the cryostat. The PAU Camera will use a new set of 42 narrow band filters ranging from ~4400 to ~8600 angstroms complemented with six standard broad-band filters, ugrizY. With PAUCam at the WHT we will carry out a cosmological imaging survey in both narrow and broad band filters that will perform as a low resolution spectroscopic survey. With the current survey strategy, we will obtain accurate photometric redshifts for galaxies down to <i>i_AB</i>~22.5 detecting also galaxies down to <i>i_AB</i>~24 with less precision in redshift. With this data set we will obtain competitive constraints in cosmological parameters using both weak lensing and galaxy clustering as main observational probes.