The Canada-France Redshift Survey. VI. Evolution of the Galaxy Luminosity Function to Z approximately 1

The cosmic evolution of the field galaxy population has been studied out to a redshift of z ∼ 1 using a sample of 730 I-band selected galaxies, of which 591 have secure redshifts with median ∼ 0.56. The trivariate luminosity function φ(M, color, z) shows unambiguously that the population evolves and that this evolution is strongly differential with color and, less strongly, with luminosity. The luminosity function of red galaxies shows very little change in either number density or luminosity over the entire redshift range 0 0.5. By 0.5 <z <0.75 the blue luminosity function appears to have uniformly brightened by approximately 1 mag. At higher redshifts, the evolution appears to saturate at the brightest magnitudes but continues at fainter levels, which leads to a steepening of the luminosity function. A significant excess of galaxies relative to the local luminosity function described by Loveday et al. in 1992 is seen at low redshifts z