December 17 and 18, 2019, Caltech, Hameetman Auditorium

A workshop to further explore science cases for KWFI

The Keck Wide-Field Imager (KWFI) is a proposed prime focus camera mounted on the Keck telescopes and will be the world’s most sensitive wide-field optical imager. With up to ~1 deg diameter field of view, KWFI will be sensitive to wavelengths from 3000A – 10000A and optimized for high throughput in the UV to exploit the advantages of the Mauna Kea site.

KFWI on Keck will be the most powerful wide-field imager for the foreseeable future and will enable new and exciting science. It will provide deep imaging to complement existing ground- and space-based facilities and upcoming/proposed instruments and facilities, such as FOBOS, BIRES, PFS, MSE, DUET, HALO, WFIRST, Euclid, JWST, and TMT.

Paper describing KWFI

Workshop program here

Upload your talk here

Aim of the workshop:

KWFI is to be a facility instrument tuned to the needs of the Keck and NASA communities. A main goal of the workshop is to further develop science cases and encourage new ideas that will drive the instrument design.

Deep, wide-field imaging has broad science applications and deep UV-sensitive wide-field imaging opens up new areas of science and redshift regimes (see below).

Key Dates:
 • Abstract Submission closing date: 8 November 2019
 • Travel support requests:  8 November 2019
 • Registration deadline (no abstract):  30 November, 2019
 • KWFI Science Workshop: 17 and 18 December 2019

Registration is free. Limited travel support is available.

Example science cases:

Lyman Continuum at high redshift: KWFI will be the only wide-field instrument in the world capable of detecting faint Lyman continuum flux from z ~ 3 – 4 galaxies, including low-mass galaxies, to understand the main sources responsible for cosmic reionization.

WFIRST, Euclid, and JWST: WFIRST and Euclid have a 0.28 deg^2 and 0.53 deg^2 fields of view, respectively, and will conduct deep (m ~ 27–28) programs and surveys from ~5000A–20000A. KWFI is the only instrument capable of complementary deep (m ~ 28–29) wide-field optical imaging down to ~3000A and will help detect key targets for JWST.

Gravitational Wave counterparts: KWFI is necessary for early detection of distant BNS kilonovae and faint NS-BH counterparts well localized by future 5-detector and 3G gravitational wave observatories for many science goals, including measuring the Hubble constant, understanding heavy element synthesis, and the physics of compact object mergers.

Near-field cosmology: Deep wide-field imaging and UV imaging will progress near-field cosmology research via powerful selection and identification of extremely metal-poor stars, globular clusters, and faint, dwarf galaxies.

High redshift galaxies: KWFI deep, blue, wide-field imaging will enable high redshift galaxy and large-scale clustering study to low masses, explore Lyman alpha emitters down to z ~ 1.5, detect rare lensed objects, and provide FOBOS, PFS, MSE, and TMT spectroscopic and adaptive optics targets.

High redshift supernovae: Deep galaxy surveys acquired with smart cadence enable the detection and study of UV-luminous supernovae to z ~ 6. Classical observing (i.e., no ToO observations) can acquire spectroscopy of the slow evolution of superluminous supernovae and time dilated evolution of other supernovae at high redshift.