Speaker:	Gary J Hill (University of Texas at Austin) and Maximilian Fabricius (MPE)
Title:	The Hobby-Eberly Telescope VIRUS Deep Fields Initiative – tracing Ly-alpha emission from the cosmic web at z=2-3
Date (JST):	Tue, Mar 31, 2026, 11:00 - 12:00
Place:	Seminar Room A
Abstract:	We report first results from the VIRUS Deep Field Initiative (VDFI) that is spectrally mapping five regions with the wide-field VIRUS integral field spectrograph on the 10 m Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). VIRUS and the HET wide-field upgrade enabled the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) by observing spectra from 35,000 fibers simultaneously. Each VDFI region has 18 arcminutes diameter, with exposures in excess of 4 hours per spatial element over 350-550 nm wavelength range (redshift 1.9 < z < 3.5 for Ly-alpha). Total volume surveyed is two orders of magnitude larger than is possible with other integral field spectrographs. VDFI aims to achieve direct detection of filamentary Ly-alpha emission from the cosmic web, with sufficient volume to provide a blind search and statistics on the incidence of detected features for comparison with theoretical predictions. Fields are chosen to overlap with data from HST/JWST and with the best available HI tomography from the Ly-alpha forest. Combination of LAE galaxy distributions, regions of extended emission, and HI tomography provide three independent tracers of the matter distribution in the cosmic web at “Cosmic Noon”. We will describe the project design and status and then focus on early results from the well-studied SSA22 field that harbors a known protocluster complex at z = 3.09

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