Hunting heavily obscured AGN: the X-ray multi-observatory approach

According to the different models of Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB), the diffuse X-ray emission observed in the 1 to ∼200-300 keV band, is mainly caused by accreting supermassive black holes, the so-called active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Particularly, at the peak of the CXB (∼30 keV) a significant fraction of emission (10-25%) is expected to be produced by a numerous population of heavily obscured, Compton thick (CT-) AGN, having intrinsic column density N_{H}≥10^{24} cm^{-2}. Nonetheless, in the nearby Universe (z≤0.1) the observed fraction of CT-AGN with respect to the total population appears to be lower than the one expected on the basis of the majority of CXB model predictions (∼20-30%), being between 5 and 10%. This discrepancy between data and models is one of the open challenges for X-ray astronomers, and needs to be solved to get a complete understanding of the AGN population.In this presentation, I will discuss a multi-observatory X-ray approach to find and characterize heavily obscured AGN. Candidate sources are first selected in the 100-month Swift-BAT catalog, the result of a ∼7 years all-sky survey in the 15-150 keV band. These objects are then targeted with snapshot (5-10 ks) observations with Chandra andSwift-XRT, which allow us to constrain the intrinsic absorption value within a 20-30% uncertainty. Finally, deep (25-50 ks) observations with XMM-Newton and NuSTAR allow us to study the physics of these complex and elusive sources.