# The Large Zenith Telescope: Redshifts and Physical Parameters of Faint Objects from a Principal Component Analysis

## 1. The Large Zenith Telescope Survey

The Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) is a 6-m liquid mirror telescope (Hickson 1998; Borra et al. 1992; Cabanac et al. 1998). It is a transient instrument dedicated to a survey of faint objects (Table 1). The final input of the survey will be a catalog giving the photometric fluxes in $`40`$ narrow-band filters (3700Å-1$`\mu `$ range), as well as basic morphological information for $`10^6`$ objects. Here we investigate the potential of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract meaningful physical parameters from such a large dataset.

## 2. Principal Component Analysis and Mock Catalogs

The application of the PCA to the classification of galaxies is described elsewhere (Murtagh & Heck 1987; Galaz & de Lapparent 1998 and references therein). After a PCA, the spectrophotometric energy distribution (SED) of each object can be approximated as $`S_{approx}=\alpha _1E_1+\alpha _2E_2+\alpha _3E_3+\mathrm{},`$ where $`S_{approx}`$ is the SED, $`\alpha _1,\alpha _2,\alpha _3\mathrm{}`$ are the eigenvalues, $`E_1,E_2,E_3\mathrm{}`$ are the eigenvectors. We build realistic mock catalogs of LZT SEDs to a limiting magnitude $`R_{mag}<23`$ for stars (number counts and color distribution from the Bahcall-Soneira model, ARAA 1986), galaxies (Fioc & Rocca-Volmerange GISSEL and Bruzual & Charlot PEGASE spectra, luminosity functions by Autofib for $`0<z_{shift}<0.5`$, and CFRS luminosity function for $`0.5<z_{shift}<2`$), and QSOs (number counts and counts vs $`z_{shift}`$ from 2dF QSO Survey).

## 3. Results: morphological discrimination and redshift

(i) Most of the information in the LZT spectral energy distributions is contained in the continua. Only strong emission lines are detected ($`W_{line}>50\AA `$). (ii) The PCA is robust to discriminate different species at a resolution of $`40`$, and at low $`S/N`$. (iii) Redshifts of galaxies can be derived for $`z_{shift}<1.5`$. Strong degeneracies occur at higher redshifts between high $`z_{shift}`$ blue galaxies and local red galaxies because the H & K (Ca II) break exits the observed spectral range.

## References

Borra, E.F., Content, R., & Girard, L. 1992, ApJ, 393, 829

Cabanac, R.A., Borra E.F., & Beauchemin, M. 1998, ApJ, 509, 309

Murtagh & Heck, 1987, Multivariate Data Analysis (Dordrecht: Reidel)

Hickson, P., et al. 1998, Proc. SPIE, 3356, Kona

Galaz, G., & de Lapparent, V. 1998, A&A, 332, 459