Discovering Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies at a Redshift of 4.5

Hydrogen Lyman-$\alpha $ (Ly$\alpha )$ emission has been a vital tool in surveying the high-redshift universe for galaxy evolution. Of interest are Ly$\alpha $ emitting galaxies (LAEs), young star-forming galaxies that trace large-scale structure in the high-redshift universe. The One-hundred-square-degree DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN) survey uses the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to collect deep images of seven fields in the 673nm narrowband filter, corresponding to the Ly$\alpha $ line at a redshift of 4.5. We search for excess narrowband flux density that would reveal Ly$\alpha $ emission for over two million galaxies. We refine the candidate sample by requiring a color excess corresponding to the rest-frame equivalent width (EW) of \textgreater 20{\AA}, to remove continuum-only objects and reduce contamination from lower-EW objects. The derived estimates for EW and Ly$\alpha $ luminosity show reasonable distributions, with a median Ly$\alpha $ luminosity of 7.78 x 10$^{42}$ erg/s. We mask the selection field in regions of known bright stars to reduce clustering bias from bright-star artifacts. We find a final sample of approximately 4,000 LAE candidates at z $=$ 4.5. We aim to further refine the sample by eliminating possible contamination from galaxies emitting singly-ionized oxygen to improve the LAE catalog for clustering analysis.