Miguel Sanchez-Portal
ESA Herschel


I'm currently working as a scientist within the Herschel Project
Scientist's Group. My main current research interests deal with:

a) The OSIRIS instrument at GTC. OSIRIS is the acronym for "Optical
System for Imaging and  low-Resolution Integrated Spectroscopy" and
is an optical (365-1000 nm) instrument to perform broad and
narrow-band imaging with tuneable filters in a large 8.6 x 8.6
armin FOV and multi-object low-resolution spectroscopy. Will be
commissioned next year at a Nasmyth focus of the 10.4m GTC 
telescope at La Palma observatory. I have been involved in the
instrument definition since the very beginning.

b) The OTELO survey: the Osiris Tuneable Emission Line Object
survey is the OSIRIS  key scientific project. This survey is
designed to detect Halpha emitters at two windows located at z=0.24
and z=0.4 and it is aimed to be the deepest emission-line survey to
date, reaching a flux of 1.0e-18 erg/s/cm^2. The tuneable filter
scanning strategy will allow us to separate the Halpha  and [NII]
lines. Of course, we'll be able to detect other emission lines at
different z,  e.g. Lyman alpha up to z ~ 6.5. We intend to cover an
area of 1 square degree, including "popular" blank fields like
HDF-N, Groth, SXDS etc.   Our scientific targets include: 1. Study
of SFR evolution. 2. AGNs (this is my main topic of interest). 3.
High-redshift QSOs. 4. Chemical evolution of the Universe up to z
~1.5.  5. Lyman-alpha emitters up to z~6.5 The survey is intended
to provide a sample large enough to carry out the different
scientific programs. We expect to detect more than 10,000
emission-line objects. OTELO is aimed to be a multi-wavelength
study. For instance, we are currently studying the population of
X-ray emitters based on public XMM-Newton and Chandra data. In the
future we'll also exploit Herschel's  capabilities in the FIR to
produce extinction-corrected SFR estimates and to address the study
of highly obscured AGNs.  We are currently working on a broadband
survey (carried out at the WHT 4.2m telescope at La Palma) to 
provide us with photometric redshifts and information on the
morphology of the sample.