Introducing the Texas Euclid Survey for Lyα (TESLA) Survey: Initial Study Correlating Galaxy Properties to Lyα Emission

We present the Texas Euclid Survey for Ly α (TESLA), a spectroscopic survey in the 10 deg ^2 of the Euclid North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) field. Using TESLA, we study how the physical properties of Ly α emitters (LAEs) correlate with Ly α emission to understand the escape of Ly α emission from galaxies at redshifts of 2–3.5. We present an analysis of 43 LAEs performed in the NEP field using early data from the TESLA survey. We use Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging in the grizy bands, Spitzer/IRAC channels 1 and 2 from the Hawaii 20 deg ^2 (H20) survey, and spectra acquired by the Visible Integral-Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) on the Hobby–Eberly Telescope. We perform spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to compute the galaxy properties of 43 LAEs, and study correlations between stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), and dust to the Ly α rest-frame equivalent width ( W _Ly _α ). We uncover marginal (1 σ significance) correlations between stellar mass and W _Ly _α , and SFR and W _Ly _α , with a Spearman correlation coefficient of −0. ${34}_{-.14}^{+.17}$ and −0. ${37}_{-.14}^{+.16}$ , respectively. We show that the W _Ly _α distribution of the 43 LAEs is consistent with being drawn from an exponential distribution with an e-folding scale of W _0 = 150 Å. Once complete the TESLA survey will enable the study of ≳50,000 LAEs to explore more correlations between galaxy properties and W _Ly _α . The large sample size will allow the construction of a predictive model for W _Ly _α as a function of SED-derived galaxy properties, which could be used to improve Ly α -based constraints on reionization.