Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is a wide-field imaging camera on the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. A team of scientists from Japan, Taiwan and Princeton University is using HSC to carry out a 300-night multi-band imaging survey of the high-latitude sky. The survey includes three layers: the Wide layer will cover 1400 deg 2 in five broad bands (grizy), with a 5 σ point-source depth of r ≈ 26. The Deep layer covers a total of 26 deg 2 in four fields, going roughly a magnitude fainter, while the UltraDeep layer goes almost a magnitude fainter still in two pointings of HSC (a total of 3.5 deg 2). Here we describe the instrument, the science goals of the survey, and the survey strategy and data processing. This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue of the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan, which includes a large number of technical and scientific papers describing results from the early phases of this survey.

We present an updated version of the so-called Madau model for the attenuation by the intergalactic neutral hydrogen against the radiation from distant objects. First, we derive a distribution function of the intergalactic absorbers from the latest observational statistics of the Lyα forest, Lyman limit systems, and damped Lyα systems. The distribution function excellently reproduces the observed redshift evolutions of the Lyα depression and of the mean-free-path of the Lyman continuum simultaneously. Then, we derive a set of the analytic functions which describe the mean intergalactic attenuation curve for objects at z > 0.5. The new model predicts less (or more) Lyα attenuation for z ≃ 3-5 (z > 6) sources through usual broad-band filters relative to the original Madau model. This may cause a systematic difference in the photometric redshift estimates, which is, however, still as small as about 0.05. Finally, we find a more than 0.5 mag overestimation of the Lyman continuum attenuation in the original Madau model at z > 3, which causes a significant overcorrection against direct observations of the Lyman continuum of galaxies.

Knowing the amount of ionizing photons from young star-forming galaxies is of particular importance to understanding the reionization process. Here we report initial results of Subaru/Suprime-Cam deep imaging observation of the SSA22 proto-cluster region at z = 3.09, using a special narrow-band filter to optimally trace ionizing radiation from galaxies at z ∼ 3. The unique wide field-of-view of Suprime-Cam enabled us to search for ionizing photons from 198 galaxies (73 Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) and 125 Ly-α emitters (LAEs)) with spectroscopically measured redshifts z ≃ 3.1. We detected ionizing radiation from 7 LBGs, as well as from 10 LAE candidates. Some of the detected galaxies show significant spatial offsets of ionizing radiation from non-ionizing UV emission. For some LBGs the observed non-ionizing UV to Lyman continuum flux density ratios are smaller than values expected from population synthesis models with a standard Salpeter initial mass function (IMF) with moderate dust attenuation (which is suggested from the observed UV slopes), even if we assume very transparent IGM along the sightlines of these objects. This implies an intrinsically bluer spectral energy distribution, e.g, that produced by a top-heavy IMF, for these LBGs. The observed flux desity ratios of non-ionizing UV to ionizing radiation of 7 detected LBGs range from 2.4 to 23.8 and the median is 6.6. The observed flux density ratios of the detected LAEs are even smaller than LBGs, if they are truly at z ≃ 3.1. We find that the median value of the flux density ratio for the deteced LBGs suggest that their escape fractions is likely to be higher than 4%, if the Lyman continuum escape is isotropic. The results imply that some of the LBGs in the proto-cluster at z ∼ 3 have the escape fraction significantly higher than that of galaxies (in a general field) at z ∼ 1 studied previously.