Evolution of AGN in the cosmic web: The XMM-Newton Cosmos Survey

The Deep XMM-Newton/Cosmos survey will homogeneously cover the 2 deg2 contiguous area of the Cosmos field to a sensitivity level of 5× 10-16 erg s-1 cm-2 in the 0.5-2.0 keV energy band, which is a factor of two fainter compared to the deepest surveys performed with the ROSAT satellite. As of October 2004, we have collected six XMM-Newton pointings with exposure times of 30 ksec each covering a 0.8 deg2 area. We have detected 522 new X-ray sources so far. The remaining 19 XMM-Newton pointings will be taken by the end of 2004.The Cosmos field has already a superb multiwavelength coverage from Radio to X-rays (e.g., GALEX, HST ACS I814 and deep Subaru BVriz images). Major redshift surveys with the VLT VIMOS and with the Magellan IMACS instruments are proposed to provide redshift for more than 40000 galaxies, for about 1000 Far-UV (Galex) sources, and up to 3000 X-ray sources. The first optical spectroscopy is already accumulated with VIMOS at the VLT in May 2004.The XMM-Newton observations are very efficient in localizing and identifying active galactic nuclei (AGN) and distant clusters of galaxies. We expect to obtain about 2000 spectroscopically confirmed obscured and un-obscured AGN/quasars and about 100 clusters of galaxies (z>0.3). One of the primary goals of the XMM-Newton/Cosmos survey is to study the co-evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black holes out to high redshift. Further we can study the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes, the evolution of the spatial distribution amd the correlation with galaxy morphology and evolution