Galaxies associated to DLA absorbers at z>4: Infrared Imaging

Rodney Guimarães¹
Reinaldo Ramos de Carvalho², George Djorgovski³, Patrick Petitjean⁴, Sandra Castro⁵,
Sergei Andrievsky⁵, Yuri Mishurov⁶

(1) ON - MCT (2) INPE - MCT (3) California Institute of Technology (4) Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (5) European Southern Observatory

We have a very large amount of spectroscopic data for high redshift quasars (4.0 < z < 5.0), obtained with KECK and ESO(VLT). For 35% of them we have identified Damped Lyman Alpha absorbers. The camera SPARTAN, with a high-spatial resolution in the near-infrared plus AO, makes SOAR the best telescope to do ground based infrared imaging to detect galaxies associated to DLA absorbers. We propose a high resolution imaging program to search and study, using PSF subtraction and deconvolution techniques, the nature of galaxies responsible for DLAs at high redshifts addressing important cosmological questions.