1320024

Swift/BAT and INTEGRAL/IBIS have revolutionized our view of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the local Universe. While their successful ongoing surveys count hundreds of AGN essential issues related to properties and evolution of AGN call for more sensitive surveys rather than larger numbers of AGN. To address these issues we have developed a new survey technique by merging the independent observations of BAT and IBIS/ISGRI: the Swift-INTEGRAL X-ray (SIX) survey. This survey capitalizes on the very uniform BAT sensitivity over the entire sky and the very deep sensitivity of IBIS/ISGRI over selected sky areas. Here we propose to perform a very deep IBIS/ISGRI survey of 9 Ms over a selected sky area in order to obtain the most sensitive survey of the local Universe. We will use the SIX survey to study properties and evolution of AGN in the local Universe. This will be the reference sample of local AGN in terms of redshift luminosity parameter space. Our simulations of the proposed observations show that the lowest fluxes will be sampled on a sky area of ~300 deg^2 that is much larger compared to what NuSTAR can cover with its focusing optics. Only IBIS/ISGRI observations can lead to these achievements. [truncated! Please see actual data for full text]