Extragalactic source population studies at very high energies in the Cherenkov Telescope Array era

International audienceThe Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation ground-based $\gamma$-ray observatory. It will provide an order of magnitude better sensitivity and an extended energy coverage, 20 GeV--300 TeV, relative to current Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs). IACTs, despite featuring an excellent sensitivity, are characterized by a limited field of view that makes the blind search of new sources very time inefficient. Fortunately, the Fermi-LAT collaboration recently released a new catalog of 1,556 sources detected in the 10 GeV -- 2 TeV range by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the first 7 years of its operation (the 3FHL catalog). This catalog is currently the most appropriate description of the sky that will be accessible to CTA. Here, we discuss a detailed analysis of the extragalactic source population (mostly blazars) that will be studied in the near future by CTA. This analysis is based on simulations built from the expected array configurations and information reported in the 3FHL catalog. These results show the improvements that CTA will provide on the extragalactic TeV source population studies, which will be carried out by Key Science Projects as well as dedicated proposals