086514

Heavily obscured accretion is believed to be an extremely important phase in the growth of supermassive black holes comma and to produce a signi cant fraction of the Cosmic X-ray background. Studying in detail the broad-band X-ray emission of the 830 AGN reported in the 70-months Swift-BAT catalog comma we found evidence of CT obscuration in 55 objects comma which makes this the largest sample of CT AGN in the local Universe. We propose to observe the remaining 10-55 sources which lack an XMM-Newton or Suzaku observation as a ful l program. These observations will constrain the brightest end of the luminosity function of CT AGN and the evolution of the covering factor of the CT material comma besides serving as a benchmark to study luminous CT AGN at higher redshifts.