Introducing the Texas Euclid Survey for Lya (TESLA) Survey: Initial Study Correlating Galaxy Properties to Ly alpha Emission

We present the Texas Euclid Survey for Ly alpha (TESLA), a spectroscopic survey in the 10 deg(2) of the Euclid North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) field. Using TESLA, we study how the physical properties of Lya emitters (LAEs) correlate with Lya emission to understand the escape of Ly alpha emission from galaxies at redshifts of 2-3.5. We present an analysis of 43 LAEs performed in the NEP field using early data from the TESLA survey. We use Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging in the grizy bands, Spitzer/IRAC channels 1 and 2 from the Hawaii 20 deg(2) (H20) survey, and spectra acquired by the Visible Integral-Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope. We perform spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to compute the galaxy properties of 43 LAEs, and study correlations between stellar mass, star formation rate (SFR), and dust to the Lya rest-frame equivalent width (W-Ly alpha). We uncover marginal (1 sigma significance) correlations between stellar mass and W-Ly alpha, and SFR and W-Ly alpha, with a Spearman correlation coefficient of -0. 34(-.17)(+.14) and -0. 37(-.16)(+.14), respectively. We show that the WLya distribution of the 43 LAEs is consistent with being drawn from an exponential distribution with an e-folding scale of W-0 = 150 angstrom. Once complete the TESLA survey will enable the study of greater than or similar to 50,000 LAEs to explore more correlations between galaxy properties and W-Ly alpha. The large sample size will allow the construction of a predictive model for W-Ly alpha as a function of SED-derived galaxy properties, which could be used to improve Ly alpha-based constraints on reionization.