The role of nuclear activity as the power source of ultraluminous infrared galaxies

We present the results of a 5-8 mu m spectral analysis performed on the largest sample of local ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) selected so far, consisting of 164 objects up to a redshift of similar to 0.35. The unprecedented sensitivity of the Infrared Spectrograph onboard Spitzer allowed us to develop an effective diagnostic method to quantify the active galactic nucleus (AGN) and starburst (SB) contribution to this class of objects. The large AGN over SB brightness ratio at 5-8 mu m and the sharp difference between the spectral properties of AGN and SB galaxies in this wavelength range make it possible to detect even faint or obscured nuclear activity, and disentangle its emission from that of star formation. By defining a simple model we are also able to estimate the intrinsic bolometric corrections for both the AGN and SB components, and obtain the relative AGN/SB contribution to the total luminosity of each source. Our main results are the following. The AGN detection rate among local ULIRGs amounts up to 70 per cent, with 113/164 convincing detections within our sample, while the global AGN/SB power balance is similar to 1/3. A general agreement is found with optical classification; however, among the objects with no spectral signatures of nuclear activity, our IR diagnostics find a subclass of elusive, highly obscured AGN. We analyse the correlation between nuclear activity and IR luminosity, recovering the well-known trend of growing AGN significance as a function of the overall energy output of the system: the sources exclusively powered by star formation are mainly found at L-IR < 1012.3 L-circle dot, while the average AGN contribution rises from similar to 10 to similar to 60 per cent across the ULIRG luminosity range. From a morphological point of view, we confirm that the AGN content is larger in compact systems, but the link between activity and evolutionary stage is rather loose. By analysing a control sample of IR-luminous galaxies around z similar to 1, we find evidence for only minor changes with redshift of the large-scale spectral properties of the AGN and SB components. This underlines the potential of our method as a straightforward and quantitative AGN/SB diagnostic tool for ULIRG-like systems at high redshift as well, and hints to possible photometric variants for fainter sources.