The PAU survey: photometric redshift estimation in deep wide fields.

We present photometric redshifts (photo- z) for the deep wide fields of the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS), covering an area of |$\sim$| 50 deg |$^{2}$|⁠ , for |$\sim$| 1.8 million objects up to |$i_{\rm {AB}}\lt 23$|⁠. The PAUS deep wide fields overlap with the W1 and W3 fields from CFHTLenS and the G09 field from KiDS/GAMA. Photo- z are estimated using the 40 narrow bands (NB) of PAUS and the broad-bands (BB) of CFHTLenS and KiDS. We compute the redshifts with the SED template-fitting code bcnz , with a modification in the calibration technique of the zero-point between the observed and the modelled fluxes, that removes any dependence on spectroscopic redshift samples. We enhance the redshift accuracy by introducing an additional photo- z estimate (⁠|$z_{\textrm {b}}$|⁠), obtained through the combination of the bcnz and the BB-only photo- z. Comparing with spectroscopic redshift estimates (⁠|$z_{\textrm {s}}$|⁠), we obtain a |$\sigma _{68} \simeq 0.020$| for all galaxies with |$i_{\rm {AB}}\lt 23$| and a typical bias |$|z_{\textrm {b}}\!-\!z_{\textrm {s}}|$| smaller than 0.01. For |$z_{\textrm {b}} \sim (0.10\!-\!0.75)$|⁠ , we find |$\sigma _{68} \simeq (0.003\!-\!0.02)$|⁠ , this is a factor of |$10\!-\!2$| higher accuracy than the corresponding BB-only results. We obtain similar performance when we split the samples into red (passive) and blue (active) galaxies. We validate the redshift probability |$p(z)$| obtained by bcnz and compare its performance with that of |$z_{\textrm {b}}$|⁠. These photo- z catalogues will facilitate important science cases, such as the study of galaxy clustering and intrinsic alignment at high redshifts (⁠|$z \lesssim 1$|⁠) and faint magnitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]