Connecting Galaxy and Supermassive Black Hole Growth During the Last 8 Billion Years

Abstract

It has become increasingly clear that a complete picture of galaxy evolution requires a better understanding of the role of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In particular, they could be responsible for regulating star formation and galaxy growth via feedback processes. There are also competing views about the main modes of stellar growth and supermassive black hole growth in galaxies that need to be resolved. With high infrared luminosities (thus star formation rates) and a frequent occurrence of AGN, galaxies selected in the far-infrared wavebands form an ideal sample to search for a connection between AGN and star formation. The first part of this thesis contains a detailed analysis of the molecular gas properties of nearby infrared luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs and ULIRGs). We find that the enhanced molecular gas density in the most IR-luminous systems can be explained by major galaxy mergers, and that AGN are more likely to reside in higher-density systems. While the frequent concurrence of AGN and galaxy mergers in ULIRGs was already established, this work provides a coherent framework that explains trends observed with five molecular gas tracers with a broad range of critical densities, and a comparison with simulations that reproduce observed molecular line ratios without invoking AGN-induced chemistry. The second part of the thesis presents an analysis of the AGN content of intermediate redshift galaxies (0.3