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The low-redshift Ly-alpha forest of absorption lines provides a probe of large-scale baryonic structures in the intergalactic medium, some of which may be remnants of physical conditions set up during the epoch of galaxy formation. We…
We use medium- and high-resolution spectroscopy of close pairs of quasars to analyze the circumgalactic medium (CGM) surrounding 32 damped Ly$\alpha$ absorption systems (DLAs). The primary quasar sightline in each pair probes an intervening…
Measurements of the Ly$\alpha$ forest based on large numbers of quasar spectra from sky surveys such as SDSS/eBOSS accurately probe the distribution of matter on small scales and thus provide important constraints on several ingredients of…
We present deep ground based imaging of the environments of five QSOs that contain sub-Damped Lyman-alpha systems at z<1 with the SOAR telescope and SOI camera. We detect a clear surplus of galaxies in these small fields, supporting the…
We use the current sample of ~10,000 zCOSMOS spectra of sources selected with I(AB) < 22.5 to define the density field out to z~1, with much greater resolution in the radial dimension than has been possible with either photometric redshifts…
We report coincident damped Lyman alpha (DLA) and sub-DLA absorption at z = 2.66 and z = 2.94 towards the z ~ 3 13.8 arcsecond separation binary quasar SDSS 1116+4118 AB. At the redshifts of the absorbers, this angular separation…
We present Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) measurements of metal abundances in eight 0.083<z<0.321 damped Lyman-\alpha (DLA) and sub-damped Ly-\alpha\ absorption systems serendipitously discovered in the COS-Halos survey. We find that…
We study the nature of damped Lya absorption (DLA) systems at z<=1 using a sample of 11 DLA galaxies, for which accurate redshift measurements are available. We demonstrate that the precision of photometric redshifts is sufficient for…
We present the first clustering measurement of Strong Blended Lyman $\alpha$ (SBLA) absorption systems by measuring their cross-correlation with the Lyman $\alpha$ forest. SBLAs are a new population of absorbers detected within the Lyman…
The recently discovered discrepancy between galaxy mass measurements from weak lensing and predictions from abundance matching questions our understanding of cosmology, or of the galaxy-halo connection, or of both. We re-examined this…
We use spectroscopy of close pairs of quasars to study diffuse gas in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) surrounding a sample of 40 Damped Lya systems (DLAs). The primary sightline in each quasar pair probes an intervening DLA in the redshift…
Faint star-forming galaxies at $z\sim 2-3$ can be used as alternative background sources to probe the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest in addition to quasars, yielding high sightline densities that enable 3D tomographic reconstruction of the…
We study the transverse clustering properties of high matter density peaks as traced by high column density absorption systems (either Lyman limit systems characterized by N(HI)> 2 x 10^{17} cm^{-2} or CIV systems with W_{r}> 0.5 A) at…
We report the detection of diffuse Ly$\alpha$ emission, or Ly$\alpha$ halos (LAHs), around star-forming galaxies at $z\approx3.78$ and $2.66$ in the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey Bo\"otes field. Our samples consist of a total of $\sim$1400…
We study the galaxy number density (smoothed on a 5h^{-1} Mpc scale) around 18 low-redshift Lyman-alpha absorbers previously observed with HST. The absorbers lie in the foregrounds of Mrk 335, Mrk 421, Mrk 501, I Zw 1, and 3C 273, all…
Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Data Release 5, we survey proximate damped Lya systems (PDLAs): absorption line systems with HI column density N(HI)> 2x10^20 cm^{-2} at velocity separation dv < 3000 km/s from their background quasar.…
We identify a concordant model for the intergalactic medium (IGM) at redshift z=1.9 that uses popular values for cosmological and astrophysical parameters and accounts for all baryons with an uncertainty of 6%. We have measured the amount…
We study the abundance of substructure in the matter density near galaxies using ALMA Science Verification observations of the strong lensing system SDP.81. We present a method to measure the abundance of subhalos around galaxies using…
Studying the flow of baryons into and out of galaxies is an important part of understanding the evolution of galaxies over time. We present a detailed case study of the environment around an intervening Ly $\alpha$ absorption line system at…
We measure the large-scale cross-correlation of quasars with the Lyman \alpha\ forest absorption in redshift space, using ~ 60000 quasar spectra from Data Release 9 (DR9) of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). The…