A study of quasar radio emission from the VLA FIRST survey

Using the most recent (1998) version of the VLA FIRST survey radio catalog, we have searched for radio emission from 1704 quasars taken from the most recent (1993) version of the Hewitt & Burbidge quasar catalog. These quasar s lie in the roughly 5000 deg(2) of sky already covered by the VLA FIRST su rvey. Our work has resulted in positive detection of radio emission from 38 9 quasars, of which 69 quasars have been detected for the first time at rad io wavelengths. We find no evidence of a correlation between optical and ra dio luminosities for optically selected quasars. We find indications of a b imodal distribution of radio luminosity, even at a low flux limit of 1 mJy. We show that radio luminosity is a good discriminant between radio-loud an d radio-quiet. quasar populations, and that it may be inappropriate to make such a division on the basis of the radio-to-optical luminosity ratio. We discuss the dependence of the radio-loud fraction on optical luminosity and redshift.