Pascale Hibon from Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille has been visiting our team. She is a student under the supervision of Jean-Gabriel Cuby and Chris Lidman.

For her thesis she is trying to find very distant Ly-alpha emitters, at redshift z~8. The detection of these faint objects is made trough the narrow-band technique, in the near infrared in this case, using ISAAC at the VLT and WIRCAM at the CFHT. One of the main goals of her work is constrain the neutral fraction of the IGM during this epoch, through the Ly-alpha luminosity function.

Our group began a collaboration with Cuby after reading their paper narrow-band search for Ly alpha emitting galaxies at z = 8.8 astro-ph/0611272 when they report on the detection of emitting galaxies found using ISAAC at the ESO VLT. The observational set up that they used could detect also Hα emitters at z=0.8 as a secondary result. To find these emission-line galaxies at z=0.8 are the primary target of our group and the work of Víctor Villar for his PhD. Cuby et al. provide fully reduced images and we  search for and identify the Halpha candidates.

The work of PhD students  P. Hibon and V. Villar has been very succesful finding some Hα emitters at z~0.8 and [OIII] emitters at z~1.4, being confirmed by spectroscopy or by photometric redshifts. These are encouraging results as the selection success was very high for a first approach. More refined techniques will be employed in future work.