Survey for Galaxies Associated withz∼ 3 Damped Lyα Systems. II. Galaxy‐Absorber Correlation Functions

We use 211 galaxy spectra from our survey for Lyman break galaxies (LBGs)associated with 11 damped Lyman alpha systems (DLAs) to measure thethree-dimensional LBG auto-correlation and DLA-LBG cross-correlation functionswith the primary goal of inferring the mass of DLAs at z~3. Conventionalbinning of the data while varying both r_0 and gamma parameters of the fiducialmodel of the correlation function xi(r)=(r/r_0)^{-gamma} resulted in the bestfit values and 1 sigma uncertainties of r_0=2.65+/-0.48, gamma=1.55+/-0.40 forthe LBG auto-correlation and r_0=3.32+/-1.25, gamma=1.74+/-0.36 for DLA-LBGcross-correlation function. To circumvent shortcomings found in binning smalldatasets, we perform a maximum likelihood analysis based on Poisson statistics. The best fit values and 1 sigma confidence levels from this analysis werefound to be r_0=2.91(+1.0,-1.0), gamma=1.21(+0.6,-0.3) for the LBGauto-correlation and r_0=2.81(+1.4,-2.0), gamma=2.11(+1.3,-1.4) for the DLA-LBGcross-correlation function. We report a redshift spike of five LBGs with Deltaz = 0.015 of the z=2.936 DLA in the PSS0808+5215 field and find that theDLA-LBG clustering signal survives when omitting this field from the analysis.Using the correlation functions measurements and uncertainties, we compute thez~3 LBG galaxy bias b_LBG to be 1.5

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