Clustering at High Redshift: Precise Constraints from a Deep, Wide‐Area Survey

We present constraints on the evolution of large-scale structure from a catalog of 710, 000 galaxies with IAB = 0 for I 20, our best fit values shift towards lower rₒ and more negative epsilon. A strong covariance between rₒ and epsilon prevent us from rejecting epsilon > 0 even at faint magnitudes but if epsilon > 1, we strongly reject rₒ <= 4/h Mpc (co-moving). The above expression for xi (r, z) and our data give a correlation length of rₒ (z=0. 5) approx 3. 0 +/- 0. 4 Mpc/h, about a factor of 2 larger than the correlation length at z = 0. 5 derived from the Canada--France Redshift Survey (CFRS). The small volume sampled by the CFRS and other deep redshift probes, however, make these spatial surveys strongly susceptible to cosmic scatter and will tend to bias their derived correlation lengths low. Our galaxy counts agree well with those from the HDF survey and, thus, argue against a significant inclusion of sub-galactic components in the latter census for I < 24.