The survey is described in the paper XQ-100: A legacy survey of one hundred 3.5 < z < 4.5 quasars observed with VLT/XSHOOTER by Lopez et al. (2016, A&A, 594, 91) arXiv:1607.08776

The fully reduced spectra are now available to the community through the ESO User Portal -> Archive Services -> Phase 3 Catalogs.

The characteristics of the sample are dictated mainly by our principal science case: the measurement of the matter power spectrum with the Ly-alpha forest at high redshift, with statistical errors comparable with those of the SDSS measure but free of the systematics affecting that sample. The proposed timing would allow us to constrain cosmological parameters with a joint analysis of these and the Planck publicly released data.

The other primary science objectives, which exploit X-shooter's unique combination of resolution, equivalent width sensitivity and wavelength coverage, include:

1. -the first comparison of metallicity indicators and accurate measurements of black hole mass, L/Led, Fe II/Mg II in the same QSO sample and the comparison of QSO emission and absorption metallicities to test galaxy evolution models;
   

2. - the first determination of Mg II incidence at z > 2.5 to test predictions from the cosmic star formation rate;
   

3. - the first complete measurement of the contribution of Lyman limit systems to the Universe's opacity at 912 A. The data will also enable the first major absorption line surveys in the IR.

Team members only

Reduced spectra of all observed objects can be retrieved from the owncloud database

Relevant documents are available at this password protected page.