Introducing the Photometric Maximum Likelihood Method: Galaxy Luminosity
  Functions at z<1.2 in MUSYC-ECDFS
  We present a new maximum likelihood method for the calculation of galaxy
luminosity functions from multi-band photometric surveys without spectroscopic
data. The method evaluates the likelihood of a trial luminosity function by
directly comparing the predicted distribution of fluxes in a multi-dimensional
photometric space to the observations, and thus does not require the
intermediate step of calculating photometric redshifts. We apply this algorithm
to ~27,000 galaxies with m_R<=25 in the MUSYC-ECDFS field, with a focus on
recovering the luminosity function of field galaxies at z<1.2. Our deepest LFs
reach M_r=-14 and show that the field galaxy LF deviates from a Schechter
function, exhibiting a steep upturn at intermediate magnitudes that is due to
galaxies of late spectral types.
