VIPERS: The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey

The “VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey” (VIPERS) is an European Southern Observatory (ESO) Large Program that mapped the spatial distribution of galaxies over an unprecedented volume of Universe up to z~1. The project used the VIMOS spectrograph at the 8 m Very Large Telescope to measure the spectra for more than 90000 galaxies. Optimizing the combination of multi-band photometry with the multiplexing capability of VIMOS, VIPERS fills a unique niche in galaxy surveys at this redshift.

A color-color pre-selection allowed the survey to focus on the 0.5 < z < 1.2 redshift range, yielding an optimal combination of large volume and high effective spectroscopic sampling. VIPERS has produced a data set that in many respects represents for the first time the equivalent at z~1 of the large surveys of the "local" (z<0.2) Universe built at the beginning of this century like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the 2df Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS).

Our group collaborates internationally to expand and compare the study a low redshift to higher redshift with VIPERS data and the application of machine learning techniques in order to study how galaxies evolve.