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HUBBLE FRONTIER FIELDS FIRST COMPLETE CLUSTER DATA: FAINT GALAXIES AT z ∼ 5–10 FOR UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS AND COSMIC REIONIZATION

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Published 2015 January 12 © 2015. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
, , Citation Masafumi Ishigaki et al 2015 ApJ 799 12 DOI 10.1088/0004-637X/799/1/12

0004-637X/799/1/12

ABSTRACT

We present comprehensive analyses of faint dropout galaxies up to z  ∼  10 with the first full-depth data set of the A2744 lensing cluster and parallel fields observed by the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) program. We identify 54 dropouts at z  ∼  5–10 in the HFF fields and enlarge the size of the z  ∼  9 galaxy sample obtained to date. Although the number of highly magnified (μ  ∼  10) galaxies is small because of the tiny survey volume of strong lensing, our study reaches the galaxies' intrinsic luminosities comparable to the deepest-field HUDF studies. We derive UV luminosity functions with these faint dropouts, carefully evaluating by intensive simulations the combination of observational incompleteness and lensing effects in the image plane, including magnification, distortion, and multiplication of images, with the evaluation of mass model dependencies. Our results confirm that the faint-end slope, α, is as steep as −2 at z  ∼  6–8 and strengthen the evidence for the rapid decrease of UV luminosity densities, ρUV, at z  >  8 from the large z  ∼  9 sample. We examine whether the rapid ρUV decrease trend can be reconciled with the large Thomson scattering optical depth, τe, measured by cosmic microwave background experiments, allowing a large space of free parameters, such as an average ionizing photon escape fraction and a stellar-population-dependent conversion factor. No parameter set can reproduce both the rapid ρUV decrease and the large τe. It is possible that the ρUV decrease moderates at z ≳ 11, that the free parameters significantly evolve toward high z, or that there exist additional sources of reionization such as X-ray binaries and faint active galactic nuclei.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Cosmic reionization history and sources of reionization are open questions in astronomy today. Studies of QSO Gunn–Peterson absorption indicate that the intergalactic medium (IGM) is rapidly ionized at z  ∼  6 (Fan et al. 2006). A moderately large neutral hydrogen fraction at z ≳ 6 is implied by the Lyα damping wing absorption features in the spectra of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) at z  ∼  6 (Totani et al. 2006, 2014) and Lyα emitters at z  ∼  6–7 (Kashikawa et al. 2006, 2011; Ouchi et al. 2010; Konno et al. 2014). Similarly, there are reports of Lyα-emitting galaxy fraction drops at z  ∼  7 that are probably due to the increase of Lyα damping wing absorption given by the neutral hydrogen in the IGM (Pentericci et al. 2011, 2014; Ono et al. 2012; Schenker et al. 2012, 2014; Treu et al. 2013; Finkelstein et al. 2013). Recent observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) present a large value for the Thomson scattering optical depth of $\tau _e = 0.091^{+0.013}_{-0.014}$ (Planck Collaboration et al. 2014). The large value of τe indicates that the reionization takes place at z = 11.1  ±  1.1 if an instantaneous reionization is assumed. The combination of these data implies that the reionization process is extended at z  ∼  6–11.

Star-forming galaxies are thought to be major sources of cosmic reionization (see reviews of Fan et al. 2006; Robertson et al. 2010). Recent ultradeep observations with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have provided improved estimates of the abundances of star-forming galaxies at z  ∼  7–10 (Ellis et al. 2013; Schenker et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013). Combining these results with the WMAP constraints on the Thomson scattering optical depth (Hinshaw et al. 2013) and stellar mass densities Robertson et al. (2013) suggests that all of these observations can be explained consistently if their population of star-forming galaxies extends below the survey limits down to absolute UV magnitudes of MUV  ∼ − 13. However, it is difficult to translate the UV luminosity function measurements into the ionized hydrogen fraction because of uncertainties in the following three unknown parameters. The first is the escape fraction fesc, which is the fraction of the number of ionizing photons escaping into the IGM to those produced by star formation in a galaxy. The second is the conversion factor ξion, which converts a UV luminosity density to the ionizing photon emission rate in a star-forming galaxy. The third is a clumping factor $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}} \equiv \langle n_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}^2 \rangle / \langle n_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}\rangle^2$, where $n_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ is the local number density of ionized hydrogen and the brackets indicate the spatial average. It is critically important to take into account the uncertainties in these parameters to estimate the contribution of galaxies to reionization.

Moreover, the abundance of faint galaxies at high redshift is unknown. Some theoretical studies indicate that star formation is suppressed in low-mass halos. Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2014) suggest that star formation is suppressed in halos smaller than ∼109M at high redshift, corresponding to MUV ≃ −14. Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of Jaacks et al. (2013) exhibit a turnover of the z = 8 UV luminosity function at MUV  ∼ − 17. Thus it is not obvious whether the UV luminosity function of star-forming galaxies indeed extends down to MUV  ∼ − 13, as assumed in Robertson et al. (2013). Recent observations of nearby dwarf galaxies find that star formation in dwarf galaxies is suppressed at the epoch of reionization (Benitez-Llambay et al. 2014; Weisz et al. 2014). The faint-end slope α of the UV luminosity function is also not well known at high redshift. The steepening of UV luminosity functions toward high z is a general agreement of observational studies. Bouwens et al. (2014b) conclude that the value of α evolves from α  ∼ − 1.6 at z  ∼  4 to α  ∼ − 2.0 at z  ∼  7. However, the determination of α includes a large uncertainty at z ≳ 9 because of the poor statistics of the z ≳ 9 luminosity function measurement.

Gravitational lensing by massive clusters is an effective tool to reveal properties of faint galaxies at high redshift. Lensing magnifications of background sources enable us to observe intrinsically faint sources that are not detected without lensing magnifications. For example, the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH) studies properties of faint star-forming galaxies at z  ∼  6–9 using the lensing technique (Bouwens et al. 2014a; Bradley et al. 2014). Recently, HST has started revolutionary deep imaging on the six massive clusters with parallel observations in the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF; PI: J. Lotz) project, the data from which are ∼1 mag deeper than those of CLASH. The HFF project identifies faint sources reaching ∼29 AB mag, allowing us to detect background sources with intrinsic magnitudes of ≳ 30 mag by lensing magnification (Coe et al. 2014). The HFF first targets the A2744 cluster, followed by other five clusters: MACS J0416.1−2403, MACS J0717.5+3745, MACS J1149.5+2223, Abell S1063 (RXCJ2248.7-4431), and A370. The observations of A32744 were just completed in 2014 July, which provides the first full-depth data set on an HFF target.

In this paper, we identify star-forming galaxies at z  ∼  5–10 magnified by gravitational lensing in the A2744 cluster and its parallel fields. We refer to the former as the cluster field and the latter as the parallel field in the remainder of this paper. This work serves as a precursor study that uses the first one-sixth of the full-depth HFF data set. We construct the mass model of A2744 and derive the UV luminosity functions with the star-forming galaxies at z  ∼  5–10. Calculating the UV luminosity densities from the UV luminosity functions of our and previous studies, we discuss cosmic reionization based on the UV luminosity density measurements and Thomson scattering optical depths from CMB observations with the ionization equation that allows a large free parameter space.

We present details of the observational data in Section 2. The photometric catalog and dropout selection methods are described in Section 3, and our mass model of A2744 is presented in Section 4. Using these data, we derive the parameters of UV luminosity functions in Section 5. In Section 6, we discuss cosmic reionization with the UV luminosity densities and Thomson scattering optical depths. Finally, we summarize our results in Section 7. We adopt a cosmology with Ωm = 0.3, $\Omega _\Lambda = 0.7$, Ωb = 0.04, and H0 = 70 km s−1 Mpc−1.

2. DATA

The A2744 cluster and the parallel fields were observed with the WFC3-IR and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in the HFF project. These data were reduced and released to the public through the HFF official Web site.6 They provide drizzled science images and inverse variance weight images in four WFC3-IR bands, F105W (Y105), F125W (J125), F140W (JH140), and F160W (H160), and in three ACS bands, F435W (B435), F606W (V606), and F814W (i814). We use version 1.0 of the public images with a pixel scale of 0farcs03 pixel−1. For the measurement of object colors, we homogenize the point-spread functions (PSFs) of the WFC3 images with the iraf (Tody 1986, 1993) imfilter package. A summary of the HST data is shown in Table 1. We measure limiting magnitudes in a 0farcs4-diameter circular aperture using sdfred (Yagi et al. 2002; Ouchi et al. 2004). We find that the 5σ limits are 28.5–29.1 mag in the cluster field and 28.6–29.2 mag in the parallel field. The cluster field contains the bright intracluster light (Montes & Trujillo 2014), which makes the depths of the cluster field shallower than those of the parallel field.

Table 1. Summary of HFF A2744 Data

Filter Orbits Detection Limitsa PSF FWHM
(arcsec)
Cluster Field
B435 24 28.51 0.10
V606 15 28.67 0.09
i814 49 28.72 (28.93)b 0.09 (0.18)b
Y105 26 29.05 (29.03)b 0.16 (0.18)b
J125 13.5 28.67 (28.72)b 0.17 (0.18)b
$ {JH}_{140}$ 10 28.74 (28.74)b 0.17 (0.18)b
H160 27 28.75 (28.75)b 0.18 (0.18)b
$ J_{125} + {JH}_{140} + H_{160}$c  ⋅⋅⋅ 28.92 0.17
$ {JH}_{140} + H_{160}$d  ⋅⋅⋅ 28.79 0.17
Parallel field
B435 28 28.66 0.10
V606 16.5 28.98 0.10
i814 42.5 28.90 (28.97)b 0.10 (0.19)b
Y105 24 29.24 (29.20)b 0.19 (0.19)b
J125 12 28.88 (28.87)b 0.18 (0.19)b
$ {JH}_{140}$ 10 28.82 (28.93)b 0.18 (0.19)b
H160 24 28.99 (28.99)b 0.19 (0.19)b
$ J_{125} + {JH}_{140} + H_{160}$c  ⋅⋅⋅ 29.11 0.19
$ {JH}_{140} + H_{160}$d  ⋅⋅⋅ 29.03 0.19

Notes. aMeasured in a 0farcs4-diameter circular aperture. bThe values in the parentheses correspond to the detection limits and the PSF FWHMs of PSF-homogenized images. cThe detection image for i- and Y-dropout selections. dThe detection image for the YJ-dropout selection.

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The 5σ limiting magnitudes presented in Table 1 are measured in the entire field. However, the intracluster light is brighter in the cluster center than in the outskirts, which causes spatial variations of the depth in the HST images. To evaluate the spatial variations, we measure the limiting magnitudes in each of the 4 × 4 grid cells defined in Figure 1. We present the H160-band limiting magnitudes in the cells in Figure 1. In Figure 1, we find that the depth in the third-row, second-column cell (28.61 mag) is about 0.5 mag shallower than those of the cluster outskirts (∼29 mag) because of the bright intracluster light. The peak-to-peak magnitudes of spatial variations of the depths are also ∼0.5 mag in the rest of the WFC3-IR images and the ACS data. In the cluster field, we adopt the space-dependent limiting magnitudes as illustrated in Figure 1. For sources outside the cell, we apply a limiting magnitude of the nearest cell.

Figure 1.

Figure 1. HST/WFC3-IR H160 image of the A2744 cluster field. The numbers denote 5σ limiting magnitudes defined in a 0farcs4-diameter aperture, measured in the 4 × 4 grid cells.

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3. SAMPLES

In this section, we select the i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout candidates in the cluster and parallel fields with the color criteria from our source catalogs. We also compare our dropout samples with those obtained in previous studies.

3.1. Photometric Catalog

Using SWarp (Bertin et al. 2002), we make two detection images that are the coadded data of $(J_{125} + {JH}_{140} + H_{160})$ and $({JH}_{140} + H_{160})$ for our i- and Y-dropout candidates and YJ-dropout candidates, respectively. We match the PSFs of these band images in the same manner as the WFC3-IR images (Section 2) and produce the detection images. To apply the criteria of no blue-continuum detections for our dropout selections, we do not match the PSFs of the blue bands whose wavelengths are shorter than the redshifted Lyα-break feature of our dropout candidates. Because the PSF-unmatched images in the blue bands provide upper limits on the flux densities that are stronger than PSF-homogenized images for point-like sources of high-z galaxies, we use the PSF-unmatched data of the individual ACS images to obtain the upper limits.

We construct our source catalogs from the HFF images using SExtractor (Bertin & Arnouts 1996) in a total area of 9.5 arcmin2 where all of the WFC3 and ACS images are available. We run SExtractor in dual-image mode for each set of images. In the cluster field, we set DEBLEND_NTHRESH to 16 and DEBLEND_MINCONT to a small value of 0.0005 in order to detect objects even in highly crowded regions. In the parallel field, we use more conservative values, ${\tt DEBLEND\_NTHRESH} = 32$ and ${\tt DEBLEND\_MINCONT} = 0.005$, because the parallel field is not crowded.7 The number of objects identified in the detection images is ∼4300 in total. The colors of the objects are measured with magnitudes of MAG_APER (mAP), which are estimated from the flux density within a fixed circular aperture. The aperture diameters used for mAP are two times the FWHMs of the PSFs. We adopt the diameters of 0farcs36 (0farcs38) and ∼0farcs2 for the PSF-matched images and for the PSF-unmatched blue-band images in the cluster (parallel) field, respectively. The detection limits are also defined with 0farcs36 (0farcs38) diameter apertures for the PSF-matched images and ∼0farcs2 diameter apertures for the PSF-unmatched images in the cluster (parallel) field.

We apply an aperture correction that is defined by the following procedure. We create a median stacked J125-band image of our dropout candidates selected in Section 3.2 and measure the aperture flux of the stacked dropout candidate as a function of aperture size. Because the flux almost levels off at around a 1farcs2 diameter, we regard the flux within a 1farcs2-diameter aperture as the total flux corresponding to the total magnitude mtot. In the stacked image, mAP is fainter than mtot by 0.82 mag. We thus estimate the total magnitudes with mtot = mAPcAP, where cAP is the aperture correction factor of 0.82 mag. We also make median stacked images for bright and faint subsamples of our dropout candidates and obtain cAP values. We confirm that the values of cAP do not depend on luminosity beyond the statistical uncertainties in the magnitude range of our dropout candidates. Thus we apply one aperture correction factor of cAP = 0.82 for all of our dropout candidates.

To check the accuracy of our aperture correction, we compare mtot with the magnitude of MAG_AUTO (mAUTO), which is calculated with the Kron elliptical aperture (Kron 1980). Figure 2 presents mAUTOmtot as a function of mAP and indicates that mtot is comparable to mAUTO for bright dropout candidates with mAP < 27 mag. The values of mAUTOmtot have significant scatters at the faint magnitudes, which is mainly due to uncertainties in determining the Kron elliptical apertures of faint sources. We adopt mtot for our estimates of total magnitudes because we expect that the mtot values are more reliable than mAUTO for faint sources.

Figure 2.

Figure 2. Difference between the aperture-corrected total magnitudes (mtot) and the SExtractor's AUTO magnitudes (mAUTO) as a function of the aperture magnitude mAP for our dropout candidates in the cluster (filled circles) and parallel (open circles) fields. The horizontal line corresponds to the case where mAUTO is equal to mtot.

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3.2. Dropout Selection

For the selection of i dropouts at z ∼ 6–7, we use the color criteria defined by Atek et al. (2014b):

Equation (1)

Equation (2)

Equation (3)

For objects fainter than the 3σ limiting magnitude in i814, the i814 3σ upper limiting magnitude is replaced with the i814 magnitude (see Atek et al. 2014b). For secure source detection, we apply the source identification thresholds of the >5σ significance levels both in the Y105 and J125 bands. From our i-dropout candidate catalog, we remove sources detected at the >2σ level in either the B435 or V606 band.

For Y dropouts at z  ∼  8, we adopt the following criteria (Schenker et al. 2013):

Equation (4)

Equation (5)

As described in Schenker et al. (2013), we use the 1σ upper limiting magnitude in the Y105 band. In this selection, sources with >3.5σ levels in both the J125 and JH140 bands are regarded as real objects. We reject sources detected at 2σ in the optical bands. Additionally, we apply a criterion that no more than one of the optical bands shows a detection above the 1.5σ level. We use a collective $\chi _{{\rm opt}}^2$ value to eliminate contamination, the details of which are described in Section 3.3 of Bouwens et al. (2011) and Section 3.2 of Schenker et al. (2013). The corrective $\chi _{{\rm opt}}^2$ is defined by $\chi _{{\rm opt}}^2\equiv \sum _j {\rm SGN}(f_j)({\rm SNR}_j)^2$, where fj is the flux density in the jth band, SNRj is the signal-to-noise ratio of the source in the jth band, and SGN(fj) is a sign function: SGN(fj) = 1 if fj > 0 and −1 if fj < 0. The j index runs across B435, V606, and i814. We remove objects with $\chi _{{\rm opt}}^2 > 5.0$ from our dropout candidates if they are brighter than the 10σ limit in the JH140 band and remove ones with $\chi _{{\rm opt}}^2 > 2.5$ if they are fainter than the 5σ limit. A linear interpolation is used for objects with JH140 between the 5σ and 10σ limits.

For YJ dropouts at z  ∼  9, we use the following criteria:

Equation (6)

Equation (7)

Equation (8)

Equation (9)

We replace the Y105 or J125 magnitude with the 1σ upper limiting magnitude if an object is fainter than the 1σ magnitude in Y105 or J125, following Oesch et al. (2013). For the YJ dropouts, we require detection significance levels beyond 3σ in the JH140 and H160 bands and 3.5σ in at least one of the JH140 and H160 bands. From our YJ-dropout sample, we remove sources detected at the 2σ level in at least one of the optical bands and sources with $\chi ^2_{{\rm opt}} > 2.8$. These criteria are similar to those defined by Oesch et al. (2013), but we slightly relax the criteria to include dropout candidates at z  ∼  9.5.

We select i, Y, and YJ dropouts with the selection criteria shown above. Figure 3 shows the two-color diagrams for our dropout candidates, together with the expected tracks of high-redshift star-forming galaxies with UV slopes of β = −2 and −3 (see Meurer et al. 1999 for the definition of β). Our dropout samples consist of 35 i-dropout, 15 Y-dropout, and six YJ-dropout candidates. These dropout candidates are listed in Tables 24. Figure 4 shows cutout images of our dropout candidates. Note that two out of six YJ-dropout candidates are the objects that are also selected as Y-dropout candidates. The number of dropout candidates in the cluster field is comparable to that in the parallel field, although the cluster field is subject to strong lensing effects. The number of dropout candidates is affected by two effects of the lensing magnification. One is the magnification of surface brightness that enhances the observed brightness of the dropout candidates. The other is the magnification of the observed area, which reduces the effective survey area on the source plane. In the number of dropout candidates, these two effects compensate for one another (Coe et al. 2014). Albeit the small statistics of a single HFF pointing, this would be one of the reasons why the number of dropout candidates is similar in the cluster and the parallel fields. More quantitative arguments of the lensing effects are presented in Section 5.

Figure 3.

Figure 3. Two-color diagrams for i-dropout (top), Y-dropout (middle), and YJ-dropout candidates (bottom). The dropout selection windows are indicated with solid lines. The filled circles (open circles) denote our dropout candidates in the cluster (parallel) field. The arrows indicate that the i814 (Y105 and J125) magnitude is replaced with the 3σ (1σ) limiting magnitude for the i-dropout (Y-dropout and YJ-dropout) candidates. The dashed and dotted lines present the expected colors of star-forming galaxies with UV-continuum slopes of β = −2 and −3, respectively.

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Figure 4.

Figure 4. Cutouts of the detection images of our dropout candidates. The size of each cutout is 3'' × 3''. Each candidate is placed at the image center and marked with the red lines. North is up, and east is to the left.

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Table 2. Dropout Candidates at z ∼ 6–7 in the HFF A2744 Fields

ID R.A. Decl. i814Y105 Y105J125 J125a Magnificationb Photo-z Referencec
(J2000) (J2000)
Cluster Field
HFF1C-i1 3.593804 −30.415447 >2.37 0.05 ± 0.07 26.10 ± 0.05 $3.73^{+0.24}_{-0.21}$ 6.6 ± 0.8 1, 3
HFF1C-i2 3.570654 −30.414659 1.33 ± 0.12 0.11 ± 0.05 26.21 ± 0.03 1.62 ± 0.06 6.0 ± 0.7 1, 3
HFF1C-i3 3.606222 −30.386644 1.07 ± 0.09 0.09 ± 0.04 26.25 ± 0.04 1.69 ± 0.05 5.8 ± 0.7 1, 3
HFF1C-i4 3.606385 −30.407282 1.69 ± 0.21 0.00 ± 0.05 26.37 ± 0.04 $2.25^{+0.12}_{-0.10}$ 6.3 ± 0.7 1, 3
HFF1C-i5 3.580452 −30.405043 >2.10 0.17 ± 0.07 26.60 ± 0.05 5.64 ± 0.39 6.8 ± 0.8 1, 3
HFF1C-i6 3.597834 −30.395961 >1.71 0.27 ± 0.09 26.79 ± 0.07 2.87 ± 0.19 7.0 ± 0.8 1, 3
HFF1C-i7 3.590761 −30.379408 0.95 ± 0.13 −0.16 ± 0.09 27.06 ± 0.08 $1.87^{+0.06}_{-0.05}$ 5.9 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1C-i8 3.585321 −30.397958 >1.10 0.13 ± 0.15 27.19 ± 0.10 $4.60^{+0.43}_{-0.48}$ 6.8 ± 0.8 1, 3
HFF1C-i9 3.601072 −30.403991 1.11 ± 0.27 0.00 ± 0.11 27.26 ± 0.09 $3.56^{+0.26}_{-0.23}$ 5.9 ± 0.7 1, 3
HFF1C-i10 3.600619 −30.410296 >1.43 −0.06 ± 0.11 27.29 ± 0.08 $11.43^{+1.60}_{-1.20}$ 6.4 ± 0.7 3
HFF1C-i11 3.603426 −30.383219 0.87 ± 0.16 −0.13 ± 0.11 27.29 ± 0.09 $1.71^{+0.04}_{-0.05}$ 5.8 ± 0.7 3
HFF1C-i12 3.603214 −30.410350 >1.36 −0.03 ± 0.12 27.32 ± 0.09 $3.88^{+0.29}_{-0.21}$ 6.3 ± 0.7 1, 2, 3
HFF1C-i13 3.592944 −30.413328 >1.25 −0.09 ± 0.20 27.35 ± 0.15 $6.85^{+0.60}_{-0.54}$ 6.1 ± 0.7 3
HFF1C-i14 3.585016 −30.413084 0.85 ± 0.19 −0.23 ± 0.14 27.45 ± 0.12 $2.94^{+0.18}_{-0.17}$ $5.7^{+0.7}_{-1.1}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1C-i15 3.576889 −30.386329 >0.96 0.13 ± 0.18 27.45 ± 0.16 $2.77^{+0.15}_{-0.13}$ $6.1^{+0.8}_{-0.7}$ 3
HFF1C-i16 3.609003 −30.385283 1.35 ± 0.33 −0.07 ± 0.14 27.56 ± 0.12 1.59 ± 0.04 6.1 ± 0.7 3
HFF1C-i17 3.604563 −30.409364 >0.91 0.12 ± 0.16 27.62 ± 0.11 $2.94^{+0.19}_{-0.16}$ 6.1 ± 0.8 3
HFF1C-i18 3.590518 −30.379763 >0.95 −0.02 ± 0.25 28.09 ± 0.19 $1.94^{+0.06}_{-0.05}$ $6.1^{+0.9}_{-1.4}$ 3
Parallel Field
HFF1P-i1 3.474802 −30.362578 >1.80 0.46 ± 0.07 26.52 ± 0.05 1.04 7.3 ± 0.8  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i2 3.480642 −30.371175 1.76 ± 0.34 −0.02 ± 0.09 26.95 ± 0.07 1.05 6.3 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i3 3.487575 −30.364380 1.27 ± 0.33 0.32 ± 0.11 27.06 ± 0.08 1.05 5.8 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i4 3.488924 −30.394630 >1.39 0.25 ± 0.11 27.14 ± 0.08 1.05 6.7 ± 0.8  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i5 3.482550 −30.371559 1.19 ± 0.29 0.17 ± 0.11 27.15 ± 0.09 1.05 $5.8^{+0.7}_{-1.4}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i6 3.483960 −30.397152 >1.57 0.00 ± 0.11 27.20 ± 0.09 1.05 6.3 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i7 3.467582 −30.396908 >1.39 0.15 ± 0.12 27.23 ± 0.09 1.04 6.8 ± 0.8  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i8 3.467097 −30.387686 1.28 ± 0.25 −0.24 ± 0.11 27.30 ± 0.10 1.04 6.0 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i9 3.489520 −30.399528 >1.41 0.05 ± 0.13 27.32 ± 0.10 1.05 6.6 ± 0.8  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i10 3.466056 −30.394409 1.10 ± 0.30 0.00 ± 0.14 27.43 ± 0.11 1.04 6.0 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i11 3.460587 −30.366320 0.92 ± 0.34 0.05 ± 0.18 27.70 ± 0.14 1.04 $5.8^{+0.7}_{-1.1}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i12 3.455844 −30.366359 1.03 ± 0.36 0.00 ± 0.18 27.70 ± 0.14 1.03 $4.5^{+1.6}_{-3.9}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i13 3.488139 −30.367864 >0.91 0.12 ± 0.19 27.73 ± 0.15 1.06 $5.8^{+1.0}_{-5.2}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i14 3.486988 −30.399579 0.91 ± 0.33 −0.07 ± 0.18 27.75 ± 0.15 1.05 $5.9^{+0.7}_{-1.1}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i15 3.484920 −30.376917 >0.85 0.11 ± 0.20 27.82 ± 0.16 1.05 $5.9^{+0.8}_{-0.7}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i16 3.477238 −30.385998 >1.02 −0.22 ± 0.21 27.98 ± 0.18 1.05 6.5 ± 0.7  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-i17 3.481928 −30.389557 >0.99 −0.21 ± 0.22 27.99 ± 0.19 1.05 $6.2^{+0.7}_{-0.8}$  ⋅⋅⋅

Notes. aTotal magnitudes estimated with the aperture correction. bThe magnification errors in the parallel field are less than 1% based on our model extrapolation estimates. Note that the errors in the parallel field would be underestimated because A2744 is a complex merging cluster. cReferences. (1) Atek et al. 2014b; (2) Zheng et al. 2014; (3) Atek et al. 2014a.

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Table 3. Dropout Candidates at z  ∼  8 in the HFF A2744 Fields

ID R.A. Decl. Y105J125 J125H160 JH140a Magnificationb Photo-z Referencec
(J2000) (J2000)
Cluster Field
HFF1C-Y1 3.604518 −30.380467 1.17 ± 0.06 0.04 ± 0.04 25.91 ± 0.02 1.49 ± 0.04 8.0 ± 0.9 1, 2, 4, 5, 6
HFF1C-Y2 3.603378 −30.382254 1.26 ± 0.14 0.09 ± 0.07 26.62 ± 0.05 1.61 ± 0.05 8.2 ± 0.9 2, 4, 6
HFF1C-Y3 3.596091 −30.385833 1.30 ± 0.16 −0.00 ± 0.08 26.67 ± 0.05 2.25 ± 0.09 8.2 ± 0.9 2, 4, 6
HFF1C-Y4 3.606461 −30.380996 1.12 ± 0.13 −0.09 ± 0.08 26.94 ± 0.06 1.49 ± 0.04 8.0 ± 0.9 2, 4, 6
HFF1C-Y5 3.603859 −30.382263 1.92 ± 0.34 0.35 ± 0.10 26.98 ± 0.07 1.60 ± 0.05 8.4 ± 0.9 2, 4, 6
HFF1C-Y6 3.606577 −30.380924 1.09 ± 0.22 0.40 ± 0.12 27.15 ± 0.08 1.48 ± 0.04 $7.9^{+0.9}_{-6.1}$ 2, 6
HFF1C-Y7 3.588980 −30.378668 1.12 ± 0.19 −0.08 ± 0.11 27.28 ± 0.09 $1.82^{+0.06}_{-0.05}$ 7.9 ± 0.9 2, 4, 6
HFF1C-Y8 3.603997 −30.382304 1.05 ± 0.29 0.17 ± 0.17 27.59 ± 0.12 1.60 ± 0.05 $7.9^{+0.9}_{-6.1}$ 2, 6
HFF1C-Y9 3.592349 −30.409892 0.60 ± 0.39 −0.24 ± 0.32 28.00 ± 0.24 $9.82^{+0.65}_{-0.57}$ $7.3^{+0.8}_{-1.9}$ 2, 6
HFF1C-Y10 3.605263 −30.380604 0.76 ± 0.39 0.28 ± 0.27 28.03 ± 0.17 1.48 ± 0.04 $7.6^{+0.8}_{-6.4}$ 3
HFF1C-Y11 3.605062 −30.381463 0.84 ± 0.30 0.02 ± 0.22 28.06 ± 0.18 $1.53^{+0.04}_{-0.05}$ $7.7^{+0.8}_{-6.4}$ 2
Parallel Field
HFF1P-Y1 3.474918 −30.362542 0.61 ± 0.11 0.04 ± 0.08 26.93 ± 0.07 1.05 $7.5^{+0.8}_{-1.5}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-Y2 3.459245 −30.367360 0.73 ± 0.18 0.02 ± 0.13 27.44 ± 0.11 1.04 $7.6^{+0.8}_{-1.7}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-Y3 3.479684 −30.366359 0.85 ± 0.33 0.15 ± 0.21 27.71 ± 0.14 1.05 $7.8^{+0.9}_{-6.4}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-Y4 3.457192 −30.379281 0.84 ± 0.45 0.17 ± 0.29 28.02 ± 0.19 1.03 $7.8^{+0.9}_{-6.6}$  ⋅⋅⋅

Notes. aTotal magnitudes estimated with the aperture correction. bThe magnification errors in the parallel field are less than 1%. cReferences. (1) Atek et al. 2014b; (2) Zheng et al. 2014; (3) Zheng et al. 2014 possible candidates; (4) Coe et al. 2014; (5) Laporte et al. 2014; (6) Atek et al. 2014a.

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Table 4. Dropout Candidates at z  ∼  9 in the HFF A2744 Fields

ID R.A. Decl. $(Y_{105}+J_{125})/2-{JH}_{140}$ ${JH}_{140}-H_{160}$ H160a Magnificationb Photo-z Referencec
(J2000) (J2000)
Cluster Field
HFF1C-YJ1 3.592512 −30.401486 >1.22 0.55 ± 0.30 27.37 ± 0.16 $14.40^{+1.20}_{-1.06}$ $9.6^{+1.0}_{-7.1}$ 1, 2
HFF1C-Y2d 3.603380 −30.382255 0.78 ± 0.07 −0.05 ± 0.07 26.67 ± 0.05 1.61 ± 0.05 8.2 ± 0.9 3, 4, 5
HFF1C-Y5d 3.603859 −30.382262 1.13 ± 0.10 0.19 ± 0.08 26.78 ± 0.05 1.60 ± 0.05 8.4 ± 0.9 3, 4, 5
Parallel Field
HFF1P-YJ1 3.488893 −30.396183 1.61 ± 0.25 −0.26 ± 0.16 27.67 ± 0.11 1.05 8.7 ± 1.0  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-YJ2 3.473522 −30.384024 >1.28 0.26 ± 0.22 27.70 ± 0.11 1.04 $8.8^{+1.0}_{-1.7}$  ⋅⋅⋅
HFF1P-YJ3 3.474445 −30.368728 >1.79 −0.34 ± 0.23 28.14 ± 0.17 1.04 $8.9^{+1.0}_{-6.9}$  ⋅⋅⋅

Notes. aTotal magnitudes estimated with the aperture correction. bThe magnification errors in the parallel field are less than 1%. cReferences. (1) Zitrin et al. 2014; (2) Oesch et al. 2014; (3) Zheng et al. 2014; (4) Coe et al. 2014; (5) Atek et al. 2014a. dIdentified by our two selections for Y dropouts and YJ dropouts.

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We estimate photometric redshifts of our dropout candidates using the Bayesian photometric redshift code bpz (Benítez 2000). Tables 24 include the photometric redshifts. The redshift ranges are 5.7–7.3, 7.2–8.4, and 8.1–9.6 for the i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout candidates, except a candidate with the ID of HFF1P-i12 at z = 4.5. The three samples of dropout candidates cover z  ∼  5–10. We confirm that the ranges of the photometric redshifts are consistent with the redshifts defined by the dropout selections, z  ∼  6–7, 8, and 9. In the remainder of this paper, we refer to i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout candidates as z  ∼  6–7, z  ∼  8, and z  ∼  9 dropouts, respectively.

Recently, Atek et al. (2014b), Zheng et al. (2014), Coe et al. (2014), and Atek et al. (2014a) have identified a total of 16, 18, 7, and 58 dropouts at z  >  6 in the A2744 cluster field, respectively. We recover 10, 12, 6, and 25 dropouts of their samples. Laporte et al. (2014) analyze the spectral energy distribution of a z  ∼  8 dropout, which is identified in our selection with the ID of HFF1C-Y1 and in all of the other three studies. Our dropout with the ID of HFF1C-Y9 is also found in Zheng et al. (2014) as one of the three multiple images. Although we find HFF1C-Y9 by the Y-dropout selection, Zheng et al. (2014) identify the multiply imaged object as an i dropout. The different selections of Y and i dropouts are explained by the fact that the photometric redshift of HFF1C-Y9 is 7.3, which is the border value of the i-dropout and Y-dropout redshift ranges. Zitrin et al. (2014) have reported a triply imaged z  ∼  10 dropout in the cluster field (see also Oesch et al. 2014). We recover one of the multiple images as a YJ dropout with the ID of HFF1C-YJ1. In Section 4.4, we discuss the multiple images, including HFF1C-Y9 and HFF1C-YJ1, with our mass model.

We do not recover 7, 6, 1, and 33 dropouts found in Atek et al. (2014b), Zheng et al. (2014), Coe et al. (2014), and Atek et al. (2014a), respectively. The difference between our and their samples can be explained with the following three reasons. First, we use the full-depth images of HFF A2744 observations, while Atek et al. (2014b), Zheng et al. (2014), and Coe et al. (2014) only use the relatively shallow ACS images observed in HST Cycle 17 (GO 11689, PI: Dupke). Second, the limiting magnitude definitions are different. We take into account the space-dependent limiting magnitudes in the cluster field as described in Section 2. Third, there are differences in galaxy selection techniques. Zheng et al. (2014) and Coe et al. (2014) do not use the well-tested color selections but instead sophisticated photometric redshifts for the selections. Although we concur with all nine confident z  >  8 dropouts from Zheng et al. (2014), we recover only one z  ∼  7–8 dropout from Zheng et al. (2014). Similarly, we recover only 19 out of 50 dropouts at z  ∼  7 from Atek et al. (2014a). This is possibly because our selection criteria for our z < 8 dropouts are more conservative than those of Zheng et al. (2014) and Atek et al. (2014a).

4. MASS MODEL

In this section, we construct a mass model of A2744 at z = 0.308 using the parametric gravitational lensing package glafic (Oguri 2010).8 Our mass model includes three types of mass distributions: cluster-scale halos, cluster member galaxy halos, and external perturbation. With the positions of multiple images provided in the literature, we optimize the free parameters of the mass profiles based on a standard χ2 minimization to determine the best-fit mass model, the parameters of which are summarized in Table 5. We then calculate the magnification factors μ of our dropouts and the positions of the multiple images using the best-fit mass model.

Table 5. Best-fit Mass Model Parameters

Component Model Mass e θe (°) c R.A. Decl.
(h−1M) (°) (J2000) (J2000)
Cluster halo 1 NFW 3.5 × 1014 0.20 30.0 3.41 3.585972 −30.400122
Cluster halo 2 NFW 2.5 × 1014 0.49 −41.9 8.01 3.592074 −30.405165
Cluster halo 3 NFW 1.3 × 1013 0.60 72.2 28.2 3.583417 −30.392069
    σ* (km s−1) rtrun, * ('') η      
Member galaxies PJE 2.0 × 102 5.09 × 10 1.22      
    zs, fid γ θγ (°) κ    
Perturbation PRT 2.0 (fix) 6.21 × 10−2 15.2 0.0 (fix)    

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4.1. Cluster-scale Halos

We place three cluster-scale halos at the positions of the three brightest galaxies in the core of the cluster. We adopt the Navarro–Frenk–White (NFW) profiles (Navarro et al. 1997) for the mass distributions of the cluster-scale halos. The radial profiles of NFW are described as

Equation (10)

where ρs is the characteristic density and rs is the scale radius. The scale radius is defined by

Equation (11)

where rvir is the virial radius of the cluster-scale halo and cvir is the concentration parameter. The scale radius and the characteristic density are related to the virial mass Mvir and the concentration parameter with the equations

Equation (12)

Equation (13)

Equation (14)

where Δ(z) is the nonlinear overdensity (e.g., Nakamura & Suto 1997) and $\bar{\rho }(z)$ is the mean matter density of the universe at redshift z. The surface mass density Σ(r') is obtained as a function of radius $r^{\prime } \equiv \sqrt{x^2 + y^2}$ by integrating ρ(r) along the line of sight:

Equation (15)

In the above discussion, we assumed spherical halos. We then introduce an ellipticity e in the isodensity contour by replacing r' in Σ(r') (Oguri 2010):

Equation (16)

where $\tilde{x}$ and $\tilde{y}$ are defined by the following equations with the position angle θe (measured east of north) of the isodensity contours:

Equation (17)

Equation (18)

We use the ellipsoidal halos in this work. Each cluster-scale halo has four free parameters: Mvir, cvir, e, and θe.

4.2. Cluster Member Galaxy Halos

To estimate contributions from cluster member galaxy halos, we identify cluster member galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts zspec, photometric redshifts zphoto, and B435V606 colors. First, we use zspec as presented in Table 5 of Owers et al. (2011). Galaxies at 0.28 < zspec < 0.34 are regarded as cluster member galaxies. For objects with no zspec, we apply color criteria

Equation (19)

Equation (20)

Equation (21)

and select galaxies on the red sequence of the cluster redshift. Figure 5 presents the B435V606 versus V606 color–magnitude diagram of our objects, together with the color criteria of the red-sequence galaxies shown with the solid-line box. Finally, for objects that are selected neither by zspec nor the red-sequence criteria, we refer zphoto estimated with bpz (Section 3). We select member galaxies with the zphoto criterion and the relaxed color–magnitude criteria

Equation (22)

Equation (23)

Equation (24)

Equation (25)

The dashed-line box in Figure 5 indicates the boundary of the relaxed color–magnitude criteria.

Figure 5.

Figure 5. Color–magnitude diagram for the objects (circles) detected in the optical images. The color code for the circles indicates photometric redshifts estimated with bpz. The solid-line box indicates the color selection window for the cluster members of the red-sequence galaxies at the cluster redshift. The dashed-line box represents the relaxed selection window that is applied with the photometric redshift criterion.

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We describe halo mass distributions of these member galaxies by the sum of pseudo-Jaffe ellipsoids (PJE; Keeton 2001, see also Jaffe 1983). In this model, the mass profile is characterized by the velocity dispersion σ and the truncation radius rtrun. We assume that the parameters of σ and rtrun are scaled with the galaxy luminosity L in the i814 band:

Equation (26)

Equation (27)

where L* is the normalization luminosity at the cluster redshift, and σ*, rtrun, *, and η are free parameters. The mass-to-light ratio is constant for η = 0.5. The ellipticities and position angles of the member galaxy halos are determined from the shapes of the member galaxies in the JH140 band.

4.3. External Perturbation

Although the mass distribution of A2744 is mostly explained by the contributions from the three cluster-scale halos (Section 4.1) and the member galaxy halos (Section 4.2), we include perturbation induced by external sources to improve our mass model. If the perturbation is weak, its potential can be described by (e.g., Kochanek 1991)

Equation (28)

where κ is the constant convergence and γ is the constant tidal shear. The amplitude of the potential ϕ is defined for a given fiducial source redshift zs, fid. We refer to this potential as PRT. In this paper, γ and θγ are free parameters. We fix zs, fid and κ; zs, fid ≡ 2.0 and κ ≡ 0.

4.4. Model Optimization

To constrain the mass-model parameters of the cluster, we use the positions of multiply imaged systems. We identify multiply imaged galaxies based on their colors and morphologies while iteratively refining the mass-model parameters. In total, we use the positions of 67 multiple images of 24 systems, as summarized in Table 6. Seventeen out of the 24 systems, IDs 1.1–17.2 (Table 6), are the same as those listed in Table 1 of the document provided by the HFF map-making team (PI: K. Sharon; see also Johnson et al. 2014).9 Similarly, four high-redshift systems from the 24 systems, IDs 19.1–22.2, are listed in Table 3 of Atek et al. (2014b), among which IDs 19.1, 19.2, and 19.3 are identified as z  ∼  6–7 dropouts in Section 3.2. The images of IDs 19.1, 19.2, and 19.3 are referred to as HFF1C-i5, HFF1C-i6, and HFF1C-i8 in Table 2. We also find three new sets of multiple images, IDs 18, 23, and 24.

Table 6. Multiple Images

ID R.A. Decl. zmodela zphotob zspecb Referencec
(J2000) (J2000)
1.1 3.595958 −30.40682 1.61 0.5–2.2  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
1.2 3.597542 −30.40392        
1.3 3.586208 −30.40999        
2.1 3.596417 −30.40612 1.63 0.5–2.2  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
2.2 3.597042 −30.40475        
2.3 3.585744 −30.41010        
3.1 3.585417 −30.39990 2.00 0.5–2.9  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
3.2 3.583250 −30.40335        
3.3 3.597292 −30.39672        
3.4 3.586417 −30.40213        
4.1 3.596750 −30.39630 1.97 0.5–2.9  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
4.2 3.582542 −30.40227        
4.3 3.586250 −30.40085        
4.4 3.584500 −30.39929        
5.1 3.589375 −30.39388 2.17  ⋅⋅⋅ 3.98 1
5.2 3.588792 −30.39380        
5.3 3.577500 −30.39957        
6.1 3.592125 −30.40263 3.58d  ⋅⋅⋅ 3.58 1
6.2 3.595625 −30.40162        
6.3 3.580417 −30.40892        
6.4 3.593208 −30.40491        
6.5 3.593583 −30.40511        
7.1 3.583417 −30.39207 1.18  ⋅⋅⋅   1
7.2 3.585000 −30.39138        
7.3 3.579958 −30.39476        
8.1 3.598535 −30.40180 2.02d  ⋅⋅⋅ 2.019 1
8.2 3.594042 −30.40801        
8.3 3.586417 −30.40937        
9.1 3.598261 −30.40232 2.71 0.3–3.4  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
9.2 3.595233 −30.40741        
9.3 3.584601 −30.40982        
10.1 3.589708 −30.39434 2.59  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
10.2 3.588833 −30.39422        
11.1 3.588375 −30.40527 3.76 0.6–2.8  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
11.2 3.587125 −30.40624        
11.3 3.600150 −30.39715        
12.1 3.588417 −30.40588 5.38 1.8–3.2  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
12.2 3.587375 −30.40648        
12.3 3.600721 −30.39709        
13.1 3.597264 −30.40143 2.73 0.4–2.8  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
13.2 3.582792 −30.40891        
14.1 3.593239 −30.40325 3.32 1.4–3.1  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
14.2 3.594555 −30.40300        
15.1 3.592375 −30.40256 1.46 0.6–2.6  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
15.2 3.593792 −30.40216        
15.3 3.582792 −30.40804        
16.1 3.589750 −30.39464 1.79 1.8–3.2  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
16.2 3.588458 −30.39444        
17.1 3.590750 −30.39556 1.44 1.5–5.4  ⋅⋅⋅ 1
17.2 3.588375 −30.39564        
18.1 3.598676 −30.40491 2.19  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅
18.2 3.587053 −30.41126        
18.3 3.596818 −30.40783        
19.1 3.580452 −30.40504 7.94  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅ 2
19.2 3.597831 −30.39596        
19.3 3.585321 −30.39796        
20.1 3.596572 −30.40900 7.50  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅ 2
20.2 3.600058 −30.40440        
20.3 3.585801 −30.41175        
21.1 3.591432 −30.39669 4.64  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅ 2
21.2 3.576122 −30.40449        
22.1 3.593552 −30.40971 3.73  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅ 2
22.2 3.600541 −30.40182        
23.1 3.578090 −30.39964 1.75  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅
23.2 3.589237 −30.39444        
24.1 3.584284 −30.40893 2.62  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅  ⋅⋅⋅
24.2 3.598125 −30.40098        

Notes. aRedshift from the best-fit mass model. bNumbers quoted from Johnson et al. (2014). cReferences. (1) http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/frontier/lensmodels/hlsp_frontier_model_abell2744_sharon_v1_readme.pdf, see also Johnson et al. 2014 and (2) Atek et al. 2014b. dFixed to zspec.

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We search for the best-fit mass model that reproduces the positions of the multiple images. We optimize the 23 free parameters described in Sections 4.14.3 based on a χ2 minimization with the downhill-simplex algorithm (see Oguri 2010 for more details). We assign a positional error of 0farcs4 in the image plane for each multiple image, following Oguri (2010), and obtain the best-fit parameters as summarized in Table 5. The best-fit model has χ2 = 52.8 for 41 degrees of freedom (dof), suggesting that our model is reasonable.

In the following sections, we use this best-fit mass model to estimate the lensing effects in both the cluster and parallel fields. Because the parallel field has no multiple images to constrain the parameters of the mass model, it should be noted that the lensing effects in the parallel field are estimated from the extrapolation of the mass model determined at the cluster field. However, the extrapolation gives negligibly small uncertainties in our final results because of the very small magnification factors (see Section 4.5).

4.5. Magnification Factors and Multiple Images

Figure 6 displays the critical lines for z = 8 sources and the positions of our z  ∼  5–10 dropouts in the cluster field. Because most of the dropouts are located far from the critical lines, the magnification factors are generally small, μ  ∼  1.5–2, as presented in Tables 2 and 4. However, some of the dropouts are placed near the critical line and highly magnified. In particular, the magnification factors of three dropouts, HFF1C-i10, HFF1C-Y9, and HFF1C-YJ1, are estimated to be μ  ∼  10–14. The intrinsic absolute magnitudes of these three dropouts are −17.00, −16.66, and −17.06 mag, respectively. Figure 7 shows the positions of our z  ∼  5–10 dropouts in the parallel field. The magnification factors in the parallel field are almost the same and near unity, typically ∼1.05. Thus, the lensing effects in the parallel field are negligibly small, and the parallel field may be regarded as a blank field. Although the magnification of the parallel field is very small, we adopt the lensing magnifications to our dropouts both in the cluster and in the parallel fields in our analysis. We estimate the errors of the magnification factors with a Markov chain Monte Carlo method. These errors are shown in Tables 2 and 4.

Figure 6.

Figure 6. False-color image of the A2744 cluster field (red: $J_{125}+{JH}_{140}+H_{160}$, green: i814 + Y105, blue: B435 + V606). The cyan, magenta, and red circles denote the positions of our dropout candidates at z  ∼  6–7, z  ∼  8, and z  ∼  9, respectively. The green circles indicate the multiply imaged systems used for determination of our mass model. The critical lines for background sources at z = 8 are shown with white lines.

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Figure 7.

Figure 7. Same as Figure 6, but for the A2744 parallel field.

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Our mass model predicts that three systems in our dropout samples have counterimages. We discuss the positions and redshifts of these multiple images using our mass model. Because the predicted positions of multiple images depend on the source redshifts, we estimate the redshifts of multiple images from the positions in the image plane.

HFF1C-YJ1 at z  ∼  9. HFF1C-YJ1 is a highly magnified dropout at z  ∼  9 that is also reported in Zitrin et al. (2014). Zitrin et al. (2014) claim two counterimages of this dropout, which we refer to as HFF1C-YJ1-2 and HFF1C-YJ1-3. In Figure 8, we show the predicted positions of the counterimages of HFF1C-YJ1 whose redshifts are assumed to be z = 4–12. The positions of the counterimages are consistent with our estimates if the redshift of HFF1C-YJ1 is z > 6. In fact, the predicted positions of the counterimages are largely separated, >2'', if HFF1C-YJ1 resides at z = 4. Thus, our mass model predicts that the redshift of HFF1C-YJ1 is z > 6, which is consistent with the findings of Zitrin et al. (2014). The multiple image positions rule out the possibility that HFF1C-YJ1 is a low redshift galaxy at z < 4 and imply that the HFF1C-YJ1 system is a strong candidate for a high redshift galaxy. Combining the photometric redshift result, we find that the system of HFF1C-YJ1, HFF1C-YJ1-2, and HFF1C-YJ1-3 is located at z ≃ 9.6.

Figure 8.

Figure 8. Predicted positions of multiple images of HFF1C-YJ1 using our mass model. The red circles show the positions of HFF1C-YJ1 and its multiple images with IDs HFF1C-YJ1-2 and HFF1C-YJ1-3. The radius of each circle is 0farcs3. The white crosses in the upper (lower) panel indicate the predicted position of image HFF1C-YJ1-2 (HFF1C-YJ1-3) at z = 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 with the tracks over a redshift range 4 < z < 12. Our mass model predicts that the redshift of YJ1 is z > 6, as discussed in Zitrin et al. (2014).

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HFF1C-Y9 at z  ∼  8. HFF1C-Y9 is a highly magnified dropout at z  ∼  8. Zheng et al. (2014) find two counterimages of this dropout, which are referred to as HFF1C-Y9-2 and HFF1C-Y9-3 in this paper. Figure 9 presents the predicted positions of the counterimages of HFF1C-Y9. Our mass model predicts that HFF1C-Y9 has more than two counterimages if HFF1C-Y9 resides at z = 6–8. However, we cannot investigate the positions of these additional counterimages because of the bright galaxies along the lines of sight. We compare the observed images of HFF1C-Y9-2 and HFF1C-Y9-3 with the predicted positions. The observed images fall into the predicted positions for the system at z = 4–6, implying that HFF1C-Y9 would be a source at a redshift slightly lower than that estimated in the dropout selection.

Figure 9.

Figure 9. Same as Figure 8, but for HFF1C-Y9. The magenta circles show the positions of HFF1C-Y9 and its multiple images of HFF1C-Y9-2 and HFF1C-Y9-3. The cyan (magenta) crosses represent the positions of the other multiple images at z = 6 (z = 8) near a bright foreground galaxy.

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HFF1C-i5, -i6, and -i8 at z  ∼  6–7. We find three multiple images of an i dropout, which are HFF1C-i5, HFF1C-i6, and HFF1C-i8. We use the positions of these three multiple images for the construction of our mass model. Their IDs in Table 6 are 19.1, 19.2, and 19.3, respectively. In addition to these three multiple images, Atek et al. (2014b) report another counterimage, which is named Image 5.4 in Table 3 of Atek et al. (2014b). In our paper, we refer to Image 5.4 as HFF1C-i5-2. In Figure 10, we plot the predicted positions of these four multiple images. The predicted position of HFF1C-i5-2 is about 8'' away from the images reported by Atek et al. (2014b). Instead, it is close to the position predicted by Jauzac et al. (2014), shown with the green circle in Figure 10. The observed images of the other three multiple images lie near the predicted positions at z = 6 and 8. Our mass model predicts that the best-fit value of their redshift is z = 7.94, as shown in Table 6.

Figure 10.

Figure 10. Same as Figure 8, but for HFF1C-i5, HFF1C-i6, and HFF1C-i8. The cyan circles show the positions of HFF1C-i5, HFF1C-i6, HFF1C-i8 and their multiple images. The green circle presents the position of HFF1C-i5-2 predicted by Jauzac et al. (2014).

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4.6. Comparisons with the Public Mass Models

Mass models of A2744 are also made by other groups (e.g., Lam et al. 2014). Eight public mass models are accessible through the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) Web site10 that are made by the five independent groups M. Bradač (PI), The Clusters As TelescopeS (CATS) team (co-PIs J. P. Kneib, P. Natarajan; see Richard et al. 2014), J. Merten & A. Zitrin (co-PIs), K. Sharon (PI; see Johnson et al. 2014), and L. Williams (PI). Figure 11 compares the magnification factors of our mass model and these public mass models at the positions of our dropout candidates in the cluster field. The vertical axes show Δμ/μ, where μ is the magnification factor from our mass model and Δμ ≡ μother − μ is the difference between magnification factors of our model and a public mass model (μother). In the cluster field, the magnification factors from our mass model are broadly consistent with those from the public mass models. We especially find excellent agreement with the CATS and Zitrin-NFW models. The Merten group extends their mass model to the parallel field using weak lensing data covering both the cluster and parallel fields. The magnification factors in the parallel field from the Merten model are ∼1.08–1.22. Our mass model estimates the magnifications of the dropouts in the parallel field to be ∼1.05, which is consistent with those from the Merten model.

Figure 11.

Figure 11. Comparison of the magnification factors of our dropouts for the different mass models in the cluster field. The horizontal axes show the magnification factor μ from our mass model, and the vertical axes present the difference Δμ between the magnification factors of our model and a public model normalized by μ. Eight panels present the public models of CATS, Sharon version 1, Sharon version 2, Zitrin-NFW, Zitrin-LTM, Williams, Bradač, and Merten. The upper and lower segments of each panel represent Δμ/μ in the wide and narrow dynamic ranges, respectively.

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5. UV LUMINOSITY FUNCTIONS

In this section, we derive UV luminosity functions of dropout galaxies at z  ∼  6–9 based on the z  ∼  5–10 dropouts identified by our HFF study and the previous blank-field surveys. In Section 5.1, we estimate the contamination rates of our dropout samples. In Section 5.2, we conduct Monte Carlo simulations with the gravitational lensing effects, and in Section 5.3 we obtain simulated number counts of dropouts in the image plane. Incorporating the contamination estimates, we search for the best-fit Schechter parameters for the UV luminosity functions of dropout galaxies at z  ∼  6–9.

5.1. Contamination Estimates

One of the major sources of contamination in high-redshift dropout galaxy samples is galaxies at z  ∼  2 whose Balmer break mimics a Lyα break in the spectra of high-z star-forming galaxies. Although bright z  ∼  2 interlopers are removed by detection of a blue continuum in deep optical images, faint interlopers are selected because of the photometric uncertainties. Here we estimate the expected number of such contaminants that meet our dropout selection criteria, basically following the method described in Section 3.3 of Schenker et al. (2013, see also Section 3.1 of Ouchi et al. 2004).

To obtain the expected number of contaminants, we make use of our catalog of bright objects detected in the HFF fields. We assume that bright objects with 22 < H160 < 25 that do not satisfy the dropout selection criteria are bright interlopers and that faint interlopers have the same color distribution as that of bright ones. We create artificial objects with faint magnitudes of H160 = 25.0–29.5 using the mkobjects package in the iraf (Tody 1986, 1993) software. Their number counts are matched to the observed number counts extrapolated from the bright magnitudes. These artificial objects are placed in random positions in our HFF images. We conduct the source extraction and the dropout selection in the same manner as our dropout galaxy identification in the real HFF data. The artificial objects selected as dropouts are regarded as contaminants. We derive the number of contamination objects as a function of magnitude, which is used in our UV luminosity function estimates in Section 5.3. We find that the fraction of total number of contaminants to our dropout candidates down to 29.5 magnitude is ∼27%. This fraction is relatively larger than the contamination rate estimated by some previous studies, which are, for example, ∼7% at z ∼ 7–8 in Bouwens et al. (2011) and ∼23% at z  ∼  9–10 in Bouwens et al. (2014a). In Section 6, we discuss the discrepancy between the UV luminosity densities and the Thomson scattering optical depth. Because the differences in the number counts given by the contamination estimates are at most 30%, which is smaller than the discrepancy discussed in Section 6, our conclusion does not change.

5.2. Completeness Estimates

The gravitational lensing effects are important in interpreting the observational results of our dropouts in the HFF fields. The brightness of dropouts is magnified, and multiple images appear for some of the dropouts. Thus, the number counts of our HFF dropout candidates are changed from those of the blank field by the gravitational lensing effects, especially in the cluster field. Moreover, to derive UV luminosity functions, one needs to correct for the selection incompleteness of dropouts that is a function of both magnitude and source redshift. In our study, we carry out Monte Carlo simulations in the image plane to evaluate the gravitational lensing effects as well as the selection completeness. The simulations contain all lensing effects: magnification, distortion, and multiplication of images. This is called the image plane technique.

There is another method for the luminosity function estimates that is referred to as the source plane technique (Atek et al. 2014b). The source plane technique determines an absolute magnitude of each dropout candidate with a magnification factor to derive the number of dropout candidates per unit source plane volume. However, distortion and multiplication effects are not included in the source plane technique. Note that our method for the image plane technique is self consistent and more complete than the source plane technique.

We first estimate the completeness of dropouts identified by our selections in the HFF images, where the completeness depends on redshift and magnitude. We create a mock catalog of ∼1, 000, 000 galaxies uniformly distributed at z = 5.0–10.4 in the magnitude range of 25.0–30.5 mag. To define the UV continuum colors of the galaxies, we assume a spectral UV slope of β = −2.0, which is the same as that used in Schenker et al. (2013). IGM attenuation is given with the prescription given by Madau et al. (1996). For the galaxies' intrinsic surface brightness profiles, we adopt a Sérsic index of 1.0 and half-light radii of ≃ 0.6 kpc and ≃ 0.3 kpc for bright (MUV ≲ −19.5 mag) and faint (MUV ≳ −19.5 mag) dropout candidates, respectively, which are motivated by recent size measurements for z  ∼  7–8 dropout candidates (Ono et al. 2013, see also Oesch et al. 2010). We assume a uniform distribution of the intrinsic ellipticity in the range of 0.0–0.9 because the observed ellipticities of z  ∼  3–5 dropouts have roughly uniform distributions (Ravindranath et al. 2006).

Then, we produce simulated images of the galaxies that include the HST PSFs and the A2744's gravitational lensing effects with writeimage command of glafic. We randomly select about 3000 simulated images of galaxies in a magnitude bin of Δm = 0.5 and place these simulated galaxy images at random positions on the real HFF images to make simulated HFF images. In the same manner as the procedure for the identification of our real dropouts (Section 3.1), we perform source extractions for the simulated HFF images with SExtractor and construct photometric catalogs. Applying the color selection criteria used in Section 3.2 and the magnitude-dependent contamination rates estimated in Section 5.1, we obtain simulated dropout galaxies. We make a simulated dropout galaxy sample for the magnitude bin. We conduct the same simulations over the given magnitude range of 25.0–30.5 mag and derive the completeness for our i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout selections that depend on redshift and magnitude. Figure 12 shows the completeness derived from our simulations. The left (right) panels indicate the selection windows in the cluster (parallel) field. At bright magnitudes of ∼25–27 mag, our i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout selection criteria provide a high completeness sample of star-forming galaxies at 6.0 < z < 7.4, 7.4 < z < 8.6, and 8.2 < z < 9.4, respectively.

Figure 12.

Figure 12. Completeness values of our dropout selections that depend on redshift and apparent magnitude in the cluster (left) and parallel (right) fields. The top, middle, and bottom panels are the completeness of the i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout candidates, respectively. The completeness values are normalized to 1.0 at the maximum completeness values in the selection. The darker shades indicate higher completeness.

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5.3. Best-fit Schechter Parameters of UV Luminosity Functions

These completeness estimates are then used to predict the observed galaxy number counts. We calculate the predicted number counts from the completeness estimates and a UV luminosity function expressed as a Schechter function with a set of parameters, (M*, ϕ*, α) and repeat it for various sets of Schechter parameters covering a wide parameter space. In this way, we obtain the predicted number counts for various sets of Schechter parameters. Because the completeness values are estimated with all of the observational effects in the image plane, these predicted number counts include the lensing magnifications, magnification, distortion, and multiplication as well as the corresponding detection incompleteness in the redshift and magnitude space.

Using the predicted number counts, we search for the best-fit Schechter parameters that reproduce the observed number counts of our dropout candidates. We adopt a maximum likelihood method, assuming a Poisson distribution of the number counts. The likelihood is written as

Equation (29)

where nexp, i is the expected number count from a given Schechter function in a magnitude interval i, and nobs, i is the observed number count in the magnitude interval. Constraining the Schechter parameters, we simultaneously fit both the observed HFF number counts and the UV luminosity function data points obtained in the previous studies. For our dropouts at z  ∼  6–7, we compare our number counts of z  ∼  6–7 with the luminosity function data points of z  ∼  7 in previous studies, assuming that the UV luminosity function does not rapidly change in z  ∼  6–7. We take the previous blank-field survey results from the studies of CANDELS, HUDF09, HUDF12, ERS, and BORG/HIPPIES (Bouwens et al. 2014b), UltraVISTA+UKIDSS UDS (Bowler et al. 2014), BoRG (Bradley et al. 2012), SDF+GOODS-N (Ouchi et al. 2009), and HUDF12/XDF+CANDELS (Oesch et al. 2013). We regard M*, ϕ*, and α as free parameters for the fitting of number counts at z  ∼  6–7 and z  ∼  8. Because the statistics of the z  ∼  9 luminosity function is poor, we choose ϕ* for a free parameter and M* and α to be fixed to the best-fit values of z  ∼  8. Maximizing the Poisson likelihood, we obtain the best-fit parameters of $(M_\ast, \log \phi _\ast {\rm (Mpc^{-3})}, \alpha) =(-20.45^{+0.1}_{-0.2}, -3.30^{+0.10}_{-0.20}, -1.94^{+0.09}_{-0.10})$ for the z  ∼  6–7 dropout candidates, $(-20.45^{+0.3}_{-0.2}, -3.65^{+0.15}_{-0.25}, -2.08^{+0.21}_{-0.12})$ for the z  ∼  8 dropout candidates, and (− 20.45[fixed], −4.00 ± 0.15, −2.08[fixed]) for the z  ∼  9 dropout candidates. Table 7 summarizes these parameters, together with those obtained by the previous studies. We find that our results are consistent with the previous results within the 1σ uncertainties. Figure 13 shows the 1σ confidence intervals on the α versus M* plane for the UV luminosity functions at z  ∼  6–7 and z  ∼  8, respectively. To test our results, we also perform Schechter function fittings without the results from the HUDF09+ERS data at z  ∼  6–7 and z  ∼  8. We confirm that the fitting results without the HUDF09+ERS data are consistent with the previous results, although the uncertainties are substantially larger because of the small statistics of the HFF samples.

Figure 13.

Figure 13. 68% and 95% confidence level contours of Schechter parameters, M* and α, for the UV luminosity functions at z  ∼  6–7 (black) and z  ∼  8 (red), respectively. The contours indicate our best-estimate results with our HFF data and all of the previous measurements. The crosses denote the best-fit parameter values.

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Table 7. Best-fit Schechter Parameters of Luminosity Functions

Reference M* log ϕ* α
(Mpc−3)
z  ∼  6–7      
This work $-20.45^{+0.1}_{-0.2}$ $-3.30^{+0.10}_{-0.20}$ $-1.94^{+0.09}_{-0.10}$
Atek et al. (2014a) $-20.63^{+0.69}_{-0.56}$ −3.34 ± 0.36 $-1.88^{+0.17}_{-0.20}$
Bouwens et al. (2014b) −21.04 ± 0.26 $-3.65^{+0.27}_{-0.17}$ −2.06 ± 0.12
Bouwens et al. (2011) −20.14 ± 0.26 −3.07 ± 0.26 −2.01 ± 0.21
Ouchi et al. (2009) −20.10 ± 0.76 −3.16 ± 0.68 −1.72 ± 0.65
Schenker et al. (2013) $-20.14^{+0.36}_{-0.48}$ $-3.19^{+0.27}_{-0.24}$ $-1.87^{+0.18}_{-0.17}$
z  ∼  8      
This work $-20.45^{+0.3}_{-0.2}$ $-3.65^{+0.15}_{-0.25}$ $-2.08^{+0.21}_{-0.12}$
Bouwens et al. (2014b) −19.97 ± 0.34 −3.19 ± 0.30 −1.86 ± 0.27
Bouwens et al. (2011) −20.10 ± 0.52 −3.22 ± 0.43 −1.91 ± 0.32
Bradley et al. (2012) $-20.26^{+0.29}_{-0.34}$ $-3.37^{+0.26}_{-0.29}$ $-1.98^{+0.23}_{-0.22}$
Schenker et al. (2013) $-20.44^{+0.47}_{-0.35}$ $-3.50^{+0.35}_{-0.32}$ $-1.94^{+0.21}_{-0.24}$
z  ∼  9      
This work −20.45 (fixed) −4.00 ± 0.15 −2.08 (fixed)
Oesch et al. (2013) −18.8 ± 0.3 −2.94 (fixed) −1.73 (fixed)
Bouwens et al. (2014a) −20.04 (fixed) $-3.95^{+0.39}_{-0.56}$ −2.06 (fixed)

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The top and bottom panels of Figures 1416 present the best-fitting number counts and Schechter functions, respectively. In the bottom panels, we present recent studies of z  ∼  7 and 8 luminosity functions, Schenker et al. (2013), Finkelstein et al. (2014), and Atek et al. (2014a), for comparison. The best-fitting results broadly agree with the observed number counts. The observed number counts of z  ∼  8 at the bright end are larger than the best-fit function. It is probably caused by the field-to-field variance because our effective survey area is only ≃ 6 arcmin2 in the source plane. In fact, eight of the z  ∼  8 dropouts are found within a small region with a radius of 6'' (corresponding to a physical length of ∼30 kpc at z = 8). This overdensity of z  ∼  8 dropouts is originally claimed by Zheng et al. (2014) with the early optical images shallower than our full-depth data by ∼1 magnitudes. Because one cannot remove a number of foreground interlopers with the shallow early optical data, the existence of overdensity is an open question (see the discussion in Coe et al. 2014). In our study with the full-depth HFF data deep enough to remove such foreground interlopers reliably, there is the overdensity of z  ∼  8 dropouts, indicating that the overdensity is real. If this is true, the existence of the overdensity would significantly enhance the source number counts of dropouts at z ∼ 8 in the HFF fields.

Figure 14.

Figure 14. Number counts, histograms, and luminosity functions of z  ∼  6–7 dropouts. Top panel: our observed number counts in the cluster and parallel fields (red circles) and the simulated number counts of the best-fit Schechter parameters (black line) with the 1σ uncertainties (gray region). The horizontal axis presents the observed apparent magnitude in the J125 band. Middle panel: the histograms of the number of dropouts found in our HFF study (red) and in previous work, Bouwens et al. (2014b; blue), Ouchi et al. (2009; green), and Bowler et al. (2014; yellow). Bottom panel: our best-fit luminosity function (black line) and the 1σ error (gray region). The blue, green, and yellow circles, white triangles, white squares, and black crosses denote luminosity functions derived by Bouwens et al. (2014b), Ouchi et al. (2009), Bowler et al. (2014), Finkelstein et al. (2014), Schenker et al. (2013), and Atek et al. (2014a), respectively. The horizontal axis shows intrinsic absolute magnitude in the J125 band.

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Figure 15.

Figure 15. Same as Figure 14, but for z  ∼  8. The horizontal axes in the top and bottom panels present apparent magnitude and intrinsic absolute magnitude in the JH140 band, respectively. We show the results of Bradley et al. (2012) with the green histogram and circles in the middle and bottom panels, respectively.

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Figure 16.

Figure 16. Same as Figure 14, but for z  ∼  9. The horizontal axes in the top and bottom panels present apparent magnitude and intrinsic absolute magnitude in the H160 band, respectively. The yellow histogram shows the number of dropouts found in Bouwens et al. (2014a). The blue histogram and circles are the numbers and luminosity functions, respectively, obtained by Oesch et al. (2013).

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The middle panels of Figures 1416 show the histograms of the number of dropout galaxies used for the UV luminosity function determinations. We also show the number of dropout galaxies newly identified in the observations of the HDF12 at z  ∼  7–8 (Schenker et al. 2013) and those of CLASH at z  ∼  9.2 (Bouwens et al. 2014a). These histograms indicate that our HFF samples enable us to probe the UV luminosity functions down to a faint UV magnitude of ≃ − 17, which is comparable to the survey limits of the deepest blank-field observations of the HUDF (Ellis et al. 2013; Oesch et al. 2013), thanks to the gravitational lensing effects. In addition to the lensing effects, the HFF A2744 observations provide two new ultradeep imaging regions of the cluster and parallel fields, allowing us to significantly increase the number of z  ∼  9 dropouts (see the z  ∼  9 dropout samples in UDF12 and CANDELS Oesch et al. 2013).

6. DISCUSSION

In Section 5, we have derived the UV luminosity functions of dropout galaxies at z  ∼  6–9 based on our HFF and previous study data. We improve the faint-end luminosity function determinations with the large samples extending across the magnitude range. The UV luminosity functions are tightly connected with the production rates of ionizing photons escaping to the IGM, which are important observational quantities in understanding the process of cosmic reionization. In this section, we carry out a joint analysis of the UV luminosity functions and the electron scattering optical depth τe measured by the CMB observations to discuss the ionizing sources of the IGM.

6.1. Evolution of the UV Luminosity Density

To investigate the ionizing sources for the cosmic reionization, we first estimate the UV luminosity densities ρUV from our UV luminosity functions. The value ρUV is calculated by

Equation (30)

where Mtrunc is the truncation magnitude of the UV luminosity function where no galaxies exist beyond this magnitude. Because the Mtrunc parameter is not constrained by observations, in this study we assume two Mtrunc values that bracket the plausible range of the parameter: Mtrunc = −17 mag corresponding to the current observational limit and Mtrunc = −10 mag being the predicted magnitude of minimum-mass halos that can host star-forming galaxies (Faucher-Giguère et al. 2011).

We use the best-fit Schechter functions shown in Section 5 and those in the literature for z  ∼  4–6 (Bouwens et al. 2007), z  ∼  9.2 (Bouwens et al. 2014a), and z  ∼  10.4 (Bouwens et al. 2014b). For comparison purposes, we plot the data for z  ∼  7–8 taken from Schenker et al. (2013) and McLure et al. (2013). Because the data of Schenker et al. (2013) and McLure et al. (2013) are included in our luminosity function estimates via Bouwens et al. (2014b) data points, we do not use the data points of Schenker et al. (2013) and McLure et al. (2013) for the fitting analyses carried out in Section 6.2. The top and bottom left panels of Figure 17 present ρUV as a function of redshift under the assumptions of Mtrunc = −17 and −10, respectively. The solid and dashed lines show the best-fit functions of ρUV with the two fitting methods detailed in Section 6.2. We confirm that our ρUV values at z  ∼  6–9 are broadly consistent with the previous results and that there is a rapid decrease of ρUV from z  ∼  8 toward high redshifts, which is claimed by Oesch et al. (2013) and Bouwens et al. (2014b). With the improved measurements of ρUV in our study, this trend of rapid decrease is strengthened. To test whether the rapid decrease is confirmed with the HFF data alone, we derive the luminosity function at z  ∼  9 with the HFF data alone and estimate ρUV at z  ∼  9. The gray circles in the left panels of Figure 17 indicate the ρUV obtained with our HFF data alone. Although the uncertainty is large, the HFF data independently support the rapid decrease of ρUV from z  ∼  8. A similar analysis is found in Oesch et al. (2014). They derive the luminosity function at z  ∼  10 from the HFF cluster data alone. We plot ρUV at z  ∼  10 calculated from the luminosity function derived by Oesch et al. (2014) with the gray squares. These plots are also consistent with the rapid decrease from z  ∼  8.

Figure 17.

Figure 17. Upper left panel: the UV luminosity densities calculated with Mtrunc = −17. The filled and open circles represent the UV luminosity densities from this work and other studies (Bouwens et al. 2007; Schenker et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013; Bouwens et al. 2014a, 2014b), respectively. The gray circles and squares denote the UV luminosity densities from the HFF data only in this work and in Oesch et al. (2014), respectively. The solid and dashed lines present our best-fit functions of ρUV with the SC and the EWC method, respectively. The right axes show cosmic SFR densities at a given UV luminosity density estimated with Equation (2) of Madau et al. (1998). Bottom left panel: same as the top left panel, but for Mtrunc = −10. Upper right panel: electron scattering optical depth integrating from z  ∼  0 to a redshift, z, for our best-fit parameters by the SC method with Mtrunc = −17 (blue solid line), the EWC method with Mtrunc = −10 (red solid line), the EWC method with Mtrunc = −17 (blue dashed line), and the EWC method with Mtrunc = −10 (red dashed line), respectively. The hatched and gray regions indicate the 1σ range of τe obtained by WMAP+Planck+highL (Planck Collaboration et al. 2014) and the nine-year WMAP (Hinshaw et al. 2013; Bennett et al. 2013), respectively. Bottom right panel: the evolution of ionized hydrogen fraction $Q_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ of IGM for our best-fit parameters with four lines, whose notations are the same as the right upper panel. Each symbol represents the observational limit of Bolton et al. (2011), Carilli et al. (2010; filled squares), Totani et al. (2006), McQuinn et al. (2008; open circle), McQuinn et al. (2007), Ouchi et al. (2010; filled diamond), Ouchi et al. (2010), Ota et al. (2008; open pentagon), Mesinger (2010), McGreer et al. (2011; open triangles), McQuinn et al. (2007), Mesinger & Furlanetto (2008), Dijkstra et al. (2011; filled pentagon), and Konno et al. (2014; open diamond; see also Robertson et al. 2013).

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Robertson et al. (2014) estimate the cosmic variance uncertainties of the high-redshift galaxies in the A2744 cluster field. The uncertainties are ∼35% at z  ∼  7 and ≳ 65% at z  ∼  10. Our errors of ρUV slightly increase by the cosmic variance uncertainties. However, our conclusion does not change because our ρUV at z  ∼  9 is smaller than ρUV at z  ∼  8 by a factor of two, which is significantly larger than the uncertainties of the cosmic variance.

6.2. Properties of the Ionizing Sources Revealed from the ρUV and τe Measurements

The evolution of the ionized hydrogen fraction in the IGM, $Q_{{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}}$, is described by the following ionization equation (e.g., Robertson et al. 2013):

Equation (31)

where the dots denote time derivatives.

The first term in the right-hand side of Equation (31) is a source term proportional to the ionizing photon emissivity. The variables $\dot{n}_{{\rm ion}}$ and 〈nH〉 are the production rate of ionizing photons and the mean hydrogen number density, respectively. They are defined by

Equation (32)

Equation (33)

Here, Xp is the primordial mass fraction of hydrogen, ρc is the critical density, and mH is the mass of the hydrogen atom. Note that fesc and ξion are parameters that appear in the product form for our analysis. If one assumes that fesc and ξion depend on MUV, <fescξion > is a magnitude-averaged value defined in Equation (32).

The second term in the right-hand side of Equation (31) is a sink term due to recombinations; trec is the averaged gas recombination time,

Equation (34)

where αB is the case-B hydrogen recombination coefficient, T is the IGM temperature at a mean density, and Yp is the primordial helium mass fraction. Substituting Equations (32)–(34) into Equation (31), we obtain

Equation (35)

Equation (36)

Equation (37)

Once the evolution of $Q_{{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}}$ is determined by these equations, τe at a redshift z is estimated (e.g., Kuhlen & Faucher-Giguère 2012) from

Equation (38)

where c is the speed of light, H(z) is the Hubble parameter, and σT is the Thomson scattering cross section. We assume that helium is singly ionized (η = 1) at z > 4 and doubly ionized (η = 2) at z < 4 (Kuhlen & Faucher-Giguère 2012). The value of τe is measured to be $\tau _e = 0.091^{+0.013}_{-0.014}$ (Planck Collaboration et al. 2014) from the combination of the Planck temperature power spectrum, the WMAP polarization low-multipole (l ⩽ 23) likelihood (Bennett et al. 2013), and the high-resolution ground-based CMB data (e.g., Reichardt et al. 2012; Story et al. 2013).

We assume that ρUV is approximated by a logarithmic double power law,

Equation (39)

where ρUV, z = 8 is a normalization factor, and a and b determine the slopes of ρUV(z). This double power-law function recovers the rapid decrease of ρUV from z  ∼  8 toward high redshifts.

With the analytic reionization models described with Equations (35)–(39), we carry out a χ2 fitting to the observational data of τe and ρUV to search for reionization models allowed by these observational constraints. There are six free parameters in the fit, ρUV, z = 8, a, b, <fescξion >, and $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$. Because there is no observational data point of ρUV at z  >  11, we extrapolate the best-fit ρUV function of z < 11 to z = 30. At z  >  30, we assume ρUV = 0. In conjunction with this assumption, we regard that τe(z = 30) should agree with the τe value from the CMB measurements.

For the data of ρUV in the fitting, we use all of the ρUV data points presented in Figure 17 (Section 6.1), except for those given by Schenker et al. (2013) and McLure et al. (2013) at z = 7 and 8. Note that the data from these two studies are already included in our ρUV estimates via our best-fit UV luminosity functions in Section 5.3. We, thus, use a total of eight ρUV data points for the fitting.

The fitting ranges of $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ and <fescξion > are 1.0–9.9 and 0–1025.2 erg−1 Hz, respectively. The range of <fescξion > is motivated by the estimate of spectral properties of high-redshift galaxies in Robertson et al. (2013). We calculate the χ2 value by simply summing up the χ2 value of each data point of ρUV and τe and obtain the best-fitting parameters. We refer to this fitting method as a simple χ2 (SC) method.

From the χ2 minimization of the SC method, we find the best-fit parameters for Mtrunc = −17 and −10. The best-fit parameters and the χ2 values are shown in Table 8. Figure 18 presents Δχ2 values on the <fescξion > versus $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ plane calculated by the SC method. The Δχ2 is determined by $\Delta \chi ^2 \equiv \chi ^2 - \chi ^2_{\rm min}$, where $\chi ^2_{\rm min}$ is the minimum χ2 value. In Figure 17, we show the best-fit functions of ρUV(z) and τe(z) for Mtrunc = −17 and −10. Figure 17 indicates that the best-fit ρUV(z) agrees with the data points but that the best-fit τe is significantly lower than the one of the CMB measurement. The χ2 values and the dof shown in Table 8 suggest that the probabilities of these χ2 values occurring by chance are 0.4% and 1.8% with Mtrunc = −17 and −10, respectively. It indicates that our analytic reionization models may not be good enough to explain the reionization history and sources of reionization.

Figure 18.

Figure 18. Δχ2 maps and confidence contours of $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ and <fescξion > by the SC method with Mtrunc = −17 (upper panel) and Mtrunc = −10 (bottom panel). The upper axes indicate the average escape fraction <fesc > under the assumptions of the constant value of ξion = 1025.2 erg−1 Hz, which is used in Robertson et al. (2013). The darker shade indicates the lower Δχ2. The solid and dashed lines show the 68% and 95% likelihood contours, respectively.

Standard image High-resolution image

Table 8. Best-fit Parameters and χ2 Values

  Mtrunc log < fescξion > CH ii log ρUV, z = 8 a b χ2/dof
  (log erg−1 Hz) (log ergs s−1 Hz−1 Mpc−3)
SC method −17 24.85 1.9 25.60 0.13 0.40 15.53/4
  −10 24.38 1.0 26.11 0.11 0.09 11.95/4
EWC method −17 24.50 1.1 25.97 0.01 0.01  ⋅⋅⋅
  −10 24.20 1.1 26.26 0.004 0.01  ⋅⋅⋅

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The best-fit functions by the SC method are weighted by the ρUV data more strongly than the τe(z) data because the number of data points of ρUV is eight, while that of τe(z) is one. Here, we calculate χ2 values by another method that gives equal weight to the ρUV and τe data sets. In this method, we divide the χ2 values of the ρUV data by eight, that is, the number of the data points. We refer to this method as an equally weighted χ2 (EWC) method. The best-fit parameters and functions by the EWC method are shown in Table 8 and Figure 17, respectively. In the case of EWC, the best-fit τe falls in the error range of the CMB measurement, as we expect. However, there is a discrepancy between the best-fit ρUV(z) and the observational ρUV data points, especially at z ≳ 9, where the observational ρUV data exhibit the rapid decrease toward high z.

Even if we change the weights of the fitting and allow the large parameter space of <fescξion > and $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$, we have found that no single model can reproduce both the τe and ρUV data points from the observations. This is because the data points of ρUV decrease too rapidly at z  >  8 to contribute to adding to τe. This conclusion is in contrast with the claims of the pioneering study of Robertson et al. (2013), who find a parameter space of the similar analytic models explaining the observational τe and ρUV data available in 2013. While the best measurement value of τe is almost unchanged since then, the rapid decrease of ρUV at z  >  8 is clearly identified by the subsequent observational studies, including our HFF work. The strong constraints on the evolution of ρUV at z  > 8 probably allow us to find the discrepancy between the analytic models and the observational data.

There are three possible explanations for the discrepancy between the models and the observational data of ρUV and τe. First, the decrease of ρUV at z > 11 may not be as rapid as that found at z = 8–11. Because there is no ρUV data at z > 11, in our model we extrapolate the best-fit power-law ρUV(z) of z = 8–11 toward z = 30. If the real ρUV values at z > 11 are larger than this extrapolation, the τe value becomes larger, which eases the tension between the model prediction and the observations. The slow decrease of ρUV at z  >  11 may be made by a Mtrunc fainter than −10 mag or a luminosity function slope (α) steeper than the values found at z  ∼  6–8 (Table 7). In other words, the discrepancy that we find may suggest that faint galaxies dominate at z  >  11 even more than at z  ∼  6–8. It is also possible that the rapid decrease would be weakened by the luminosity function slope steepening or the Mtrunc becoming fainter at z  ∼  9–10. Second, the evolution of <fescξion > or $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ can increase $Q_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$, as suggested by Kuhlen & Faucher-Giguère (2012). If the <fescξion > value becomes large toward high z, $Q_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ (accordingly τe) could be boosted. Similarly, the small $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ would enhance τe, although $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ can be as low as unity by definition. Third, another source of ionizing photons besides massive stars of galaxies may exist, which contributes to the cosmic reionization significantly. X-ray sources such as X-ray binaries and faint active galactic nuclei would not leave a clear signature in the ρUV measurements but provide a fraction of ionizing photons via X-ray that are necessary for the cosmic reionization (Fragos et al. 2013; Madau et al. 2004; Mesinger et al. 2013).

The bottom right panel of Figure 17 shows $Q_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ as a function of redshift, reproduced by our best-fit models. In Figure 17, we also plot $Q_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ estimated from the observational results of the Lyα forest transmission (Mesinger 2010; McGreer et al. 2011), Lyα near-zone sizes around high-redshift quasars (Carilli et al. 2010; Bolton et al. 2011), Lyα damping wing absorption in a GRB spectrum (Totani et al. 2006; McQuinn et al. 2008), evolution of the Lyα luminosity function and Lyα emitter clustering (Ota et al. 2008; Ouchi et al. 2010; Konno et al. 2014), and the Lyα emitting galaxy fraction evolution (Pentericci et al. 2011; Schenker et al. 2012; Ono et al. 2012). Because these measurements have uncertainties too large to constrain our model parameters, we do not use these measurements for our model fitting. However, Figure 17 illustrates that our best-fit models are in good agreement with most of the $Q_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$ measurements.

7. SUMMARY

We conduct comprehensive analyses of the full-depth HFF A2744 cluster and parallel field data observations completed in 2014 July and study faint dropout galaxies at z  ∼  5–10. We construct a mass model for A2744 to evaluate the gravitational lensing effects of the cluster. Then we estimate number densities of our dropout candidates with realistic Monte Carlo simulations in the image plane, including detection completeness, contamination, and all lensing effects such as magnification, distortion, and multiplication of images.

The major results of our study are as follows.

  • 1.  
    We identify 54 dropout candidates at z  ∼  5–10 with the i-, Y-, and YJ-dropout selection criteria. The magnifications of our dropout candidates range from 1.03 to 14. The intrinsic magnitudes of our dropout candidates reach MUV  ∼ − 17 mag, which is comparable to the survey limits of the deepest blank-field observations of the HUDF.
  • 2.  
    The number densities of our dropout candidates are consistent with the previous results of blank-field surveys. However, we find a slight excess in the number of our bright dropout candidates at z  ∼  8, probably because of field-to-field variance.
  • 3.  
    We derive the UV luminosity functions at z  ∼  6–9, combining our HFF results with the previous blank-field surveys. We confirm that the faint-end slopes of the luminosity functions (α) are as steep as −2 both at z  ∼  6–7 and z  ∼  8. The number of dropout candidates at z  ∼  9 is increased significantly by our HFF study, and this strengthens the early claim of the rapid decrease from z  ∼  8 to ∼10 from the evolution of ρUV.
  • 4.  
    We use the simple analytic reionization models to explain the observational results of the ρUV evolution and the CMB's τe. None of our models can reproduce both of these observational measurements because of the rapid decrease of ρUV and the large τe value, even if we allow a large parameter space of Mtrunc, <fescξion >, and $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$. This problem could be resolved by the slow decrease of ρUV at z  >  11, the evolution of <fescξion > or $C_{\rm H{\, \scriptsize{II}}}$, or another source of reionization such as X-ray-bright populations of X-ray binaries and faint active galactic nuclei.

The HFF program will provide a significantly large sample of high-redshift galaxies when the observations of the planned six clusters are completed. In the A2744 cluster field, we find three dropout candidates whose magnifications are ≳ 10. A simple scaling suggests that the complete HFF observations will provide ∼20 highly magnified (μ ≳ 10) systems at high redshift, which will uncover the properties of the faint galaxies at the epoch of cosmic reionization and greatly improve our understanding of sources of reionization up to z  ∼  12.

We are grateful to Rychard Bouwens, Richard Ellis, Andrea Ferrara, Akio Inoue, Akira Konno, Jennifer Lotz, Kentaro Nagamine, Brant Robertson, Tomoki Saito, Takatoshi Shibuya, Dan Stark, and Masayuki Umemura for useful information, comments, and discussions. We particularly thank Hakim Atek and Rychard Bouwens for providing their data tables. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. The HST image mosaics were produced by the Frontier Fields Science Data Products Team at STScI. This work utilizes gravitational lensing models produced by PIs Bradač, Kneib & Natarajan, Merten & Zitrin, Sharon, and Williams, funded as part of the HST Frontier Fields program conducted by STScI. We thank these teams for their invaluable help. We are grateful to Dan Coe for the help in posting our mass model on the Web site. This work was supported by the KAKENHI (23244025) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) through the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). This work was supported in part by the World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI Initiative), MEXT, Japan, and Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the JSPS (26800093). The work of M.I. is partly supported by an Advanced Leading Graduate Course for Photon Science grant.

Facility: HST (WFC3, ACS) - Hubble Space Telescope satellite

Footnotes

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10.1088/0004-637X/799/1/12