The XMM-Newton wide-field survey in the COSMOS field: III. optical identification and multiwavelength properties of a large sample of X-ray selected sources

[ABRIGED] We present the optical identification of a sample of 695 X-ray sources detected in the first 1.3 deg^2 of the XMM-COSMOS survey, down to a 0.5-2 keV (2-10 keV) limiting flux of ~10^-15 erg cm-2 s-1 (~5x10^-15 erg cm^-2 s-1). We were able to associate a candidate optical counterpart to ~90% (626) of the X-ray sources, while for the remaining ~10% of the sources we were not able to provide a unique optical association due to the faintness of the possible optical counterparts (I_AB>25) or to the presence of multiple optical sources within the XMM-Newton error circles. We also cross-correlated the candidate optical counterparts with the Subaru multicolor and ACS catalogs and with the Magellan/IMACS, zCOSMOS and literature spectroscopic data; the spectroscopic sample comprises 248 objects (~40% of the full sample). Our analysis reveals that for ~80% of the counterparts there is a very good agreement between the spectroscopic classification, the morphological parameters as derived from ACS data, and the optical to near infrared colors. About 20% of the sources show an apparent mismatch between the morphological and spectroscopic classifications. All the ``extended'' BL AGN lie at redshift
17 pages, ApJS COSMOS Special Issue, 2007 in press. Full resolution version is available at http://www.mpe.mpg.de/XMMCosmos/PAPERS/