We present the [OII] luminosity function measured in the redshift range 0.1<z<1.65 with unprecedented depth and accuracy. Our measurements are based on medium resolution flux-calibrated spectra of emission line galaxies with the FORS2 instrument at V
LT and with the SDSS-III/BOSS spectrograph. The FORS2 spectra and the corresponding catalog containing redshifts and line fluxes are released along with this paper. In this work we use a novel method to combine the aforementioned surveys with GAMA, zCOSMOS and VVDS, which have different target selection, producing a consistent weighting scheme to derive the [OII] luminosity function. The measured luminosity function is in good agreement with previous independent estimates. The comparison with two state-of-the-art semi-analytical models is good, which is encouraging for the production of mock catalogs of [OII] flux limited surveys. We observe the bright end evolution over 8.5 Gyr: we measure the decrease of log L* from 42.4 erg/s at redshift 1.44 to 41.2 at redshift 0.165 and we find that the faint end slope flattens when redshift decreases. This measurement confirms the feasibility of the target selection of future baryonic acoustic oscillation surveys aiming at observing [OII] flux limited samples.
The Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) feature in the power spectrum of galaxies provides a standard ruler to probe the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The current surveys covering a comoving volume sufficient to unveil the BAO scale are limite
d to redshift $z lesssim 0.7$. In this paper, we study several galaxy selection schemes aiming at building an emission-line-galaxy (ELG) sample in the redshift range $0.6<z<1.7$, that would be suitable for future BAO studies using the Baryonic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) spectrograph on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope. We explore two different colour selections using both the SDSS and the Canada France Hawai Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHT-LS) photometry in the u, g, r, and i bands and evaluate their performance selecting luminous ELG. From about 2,000 ELG, we identified a selection scheme that has a 75 percent redshift measurement efficiency. This result confirms the feasibility of massive ELG surveys using the BOSS spectrograph on the SDSS telescope for a BAO detection at redshift $zsim1$, in particular the proposed eBOSS experiment, which plans to use the SDSS telescope to combine the use of the BAO ruler with redshift space distortions using emission line galaxies and quasars in the redshift $0.6<z<2.2$.
