Measurement of the Spatial Cross-Correlation Function of Damped Lyman α Systems and Lyman Break Galaxies

We present the first spectroscopic measurement of the spatial cross-correlation function between damped Lyman α systems (DLAs) and Lyman break galaxies (LBGs). We obtained deep uBVRI images of nine QSO fields with 11 known z ∼ 3 DLAs and spectroscopically confirmed 211 R < 25.5 photometrically selected z > 2 LBGs. We find strong evidence for an overdensity of LBGs near DLAs versus random, the results of which are similar to that of LBGs near other Visiting Astronomer, W. M. Keck Telescope. The Keck Observatory is a joint facility of the University of California, the California Institute of Technology, and NASA and was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. Center for Cosmology, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697; [email protected] NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow