The Deep Evolutionary Exploratory Probe 2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: The Galaxy Luminosity Function toz ∼ 1

The evolution of the B-band galaxy luminosity function is measured using asample of more than 11,000 galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts from the DEEP2Redshift Survey. The rest-frame M_B versus U-B color-magnitude diagram of DEEP2galaxies shows that the color-magnitude bi-modality seen in galaxies locally isstill present at redshifts z > 1. Dividing the sample at the trough of thiscolor bimodality into predominantly red and blue galaxies, we find that theluminosity function of each galaxy color type evolves differently. Blue countstend to shift to brighter magnitudes at constant number density, while the redcounts remain largely constant at a fixed absolute magnitude. Using Schechterfunctions with fixed faint-end slopes we find that M*_B for blue galaxiesbrightens by ~ 1.3 magnitudes per unit redshift, with no significant evolutionin number density. For red galaxies M*_B brightens somewhat less with redshift,while the formal value of phi* declines. When the population of blue galaxiesis subdivided into two halves using the rest-frame color as the criterion, themeasured evolution of both blue subpopulations is very similar.Comment: Accepted by ApJ, emulateapj format, 24 pages, 17 figures, 4 in JPEG, includes referee's comment