Studying Cosmic Evolution with the XMM-Newton Distant Cluster Project

Investigating X-ray luminous galaxy clusters at high redshift
(z>~1) provides a challenging but fundamental constraint on
evolutionary studies of the largest virialized structures in the
Universe, the baryonic matter component in form of the hot
intracluster medium (ICM), their galaxy populations, and the
effects of the mysterious Dark Energy. The main aim of this thesis
work is to establish the observational foundation for the
XMM-Newton Distant Cluster Project (XDCP). This new generation
serendipitous X-ray survey is focused on the most distant galaxy
clusters at z>1, based on the selection of extended X-ray
sources, their identification as clusters and redshift estimation
via two-band imaging, and their final spectroscopic confirmation.
As a first step, I have analyzed 80 deg^2 (469 fields) of deep
XMM-Newton archival X-ray data with a new pipeline processing
system and selected almost 1000 extended sources as galaxy cluster
candidates, 75% of which could be identified as clusters or groups
at z