A Survey of z~6 Quasars in the SDSS Deep Stripe: I. a Flux-Limited Sample at z_{AB}<21

Abstract

We present the discovery of five quasars at z~6 selected from 260 deg^2 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) southern survey, a deep imaging survey obtained by repeatedly scanning a stripe along the Celestial Equator. The five quasars with 20 =6.0 and =-25.8 is (5.0+/-2.1) x 10^{-9} Mpc^{-3} mag^{-1}. We model the bright-end quasar luminosity function (QLF) at z~6 as a power law Phi(L_{1450}) \propto L_{1450}^{beta}. The slope beta calculated from a combination of our sample and the luminous SDSS quasar sample is -3.1+/-0.4, significantly steeper than the slope of the QLF at z~4. Based on the derived QLF, we find that the quasar/AGN population cannot provide enough photons to ionize the intergalactic medium (IGM) at z~6 unless the IGM is very homogeneous and the luminosity (L*_{1450}) at which the QLF power law breaks is very low.