The Physics of the Accelerating Universe Camera

The PAU (Physics of the Accelerating Universe) Survey goal is to obtain photometric redshifts (photo-z) and Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) of astronomical objects with a resolution roughly one order of magnitude better than current broad band photometric surveys. To accomplish this, a new large field of view camera (PAUCam) has been designed, built, commissioned and is now operated at the William Herschel Telescope (WHT). With the current WHT Prime Focus corrector, the camera covers ~1-degree diameter Field of View (FoV), of which, only the inner ~40 arcmin diameter are unvignetted. The focal plane consists of a mosaic of 18 2k$x4k Hamamatsu fully depleted CCDs, with high quantum efficiency up to 1 micrometers in wavelength. To maximize the detector coverage within the FoV, filters are placed in front of the CCDs inside the camera cryostat (made out of carbon fiber) using a challenging movable tray system. The camera uses a set of 40 narrow band filters ranging from ~4500 to ~8500 Angstroms complemented with six standard broad-band filters, ugrizY. The PAU Survey aims to cover roughly 100 square degrees over fields with existing deep photometry and galaxy shapes to obtain accurate photometric redshifts for galaxies down to i_AB~22.5, detecting also galaxies down to i_AB~24 with less precision in redshift. With this data set we will be able to measure intrinsic alignments, galaxy clustering and perform galaxy evolution studies in a new range of densities and redshifts. Here, we describe the PAU camera, its first commissioning results and performance.
Comment: 34 pages, 55 figures