The COSMOS-WIRCam Near-Infrared Imaging Survey. I. BzK-Selected Passive and Star-Forming Galaxy Candidates at z ≳ 1.4

We present a new near-infrared survey covering the 2 deg^2 COSMOS field conducted using WIRCam at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. By combining our near-infrared data with Subaru B and z images, we construct a deep, wide-field optical-infrared catalog. At K_s < 23 (AB magnitudes), our survey completeness is greater than 90% and 70% for stars and galaxies, respectively, and contains 143,466 galaxies and 13,254 stars. Using the BzK diagram, we divide our galaxy catalog into quiescent and star-forming galaxy candidates. At z ~ 2, our catalogs contain 3931 quiescent and 25,757 star-forming galaxies representing the largest and most secure sample at these depths and redshifts to date. Our counts of quiescent galaxies turns over at K_s ~ 22, an effect that we demonstrate cannot be due to sample incompleteness. Both the number of faint and bright quiescent objects in our catalogs exceed the predictions of a recent semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, indicating potentially the need for further refinements in the amount of merging and active galactic nucleus feedback at z ~ 2 in these models. We measure the angular correlation function for each sample and find that the slope of the field galaxy correlation function flattens to 1.5 by K_s ~ 23. At small angular scales, the angular correlation function for passive BzK galaxies is considerably in excess of the clustering of dark matter. We use precise 30-band photometric redshifts to derive the spatial correlation length and the redshift distributions for each object class. At K_s < 22, we find r^(γ/1.8)_0 = 7.0 ± 0.5 h^(–1) Mpc for the passive BzK candidates and 4.7 ± 0.8 h^(–1) Mpc for the star-forming BzK galaxies. Our pBzK galaxies have an average photometric redshift of z_p ~ 1.4, in approximate agreement with the limited spectroscopic information currently available. The stacked K_s image will be made publicly available from IRSA