Large-scale outflows in luminous QSOs revisited: The impact of beam
  smearing on AGN feedback efficiencies
  [Abridged] Enormous observational efforts have been made to constrain the
energetics of AGN feedback by mapping the kinematics of the ionized gas on kpc
scale. We study how the observed kinematics and inferred energetics are
affected by beam smearing of a bright unresolved NLR due to seeing. We analyse
IFU spectroscopy of a sample of twelve QSOs initially presented by Liu et al.
(2014). The PSF for the observations is directly obtained from the light
distribution of the broad Hb line component. We are able to compare the ionized
gas kinematics and derived energetics of the total, spatially extended, and
unresolved [OIII] emission. We find that the spatially resolved [OIII] line
width on kpc scales is significantly narrower than the one before PSF
deblending. The ENLRs appear offset from the QSO position or more elongated
which can be interpreted in favour of a conical outflow on large scales while a
spherical geometry cannot be excluded for the unresolved NLR. We find that the
kinetic power at 5kpc distance from the spherical model by Liu et al. (2013) is
reduced by two magnitudes for a conical outflow and one magnitude for the
unresolved NLR after PSF deblending. This reduced kinetic power corresponds to
0.01-0.1% of the bolometric AGN luminosity. This is smaller than the 5-10%
feedback efficiency required by some simulations to reproduce the massive
galaxy population. The injected momentum fluxes are close or below the simple
radiation-pressure limit Lbol/c for the conical outflow model for the NLR and
ENLR when beam smearing is considered. IFU spectroscopy is a powerful tool to
investigate the energetics of AGN outflows, but the impact of beam smearing has
to be taken into account. For the majority of observations in the literature,
this has not been addressed carefully so that the incidence and energetics of
presumed kpc-scale AGN-driven outflows still remain an unsolved issue.
