PROFESSOR NISSIM KANEKAR

The nature of damped Lyman-alpha absorbers (DLAs), ``normal'' galaxies at high redshifts selected by their gas absorption signatures in QSO spectra, has been an open question in the field of galaxy evolution for more than three decades. The critical problem in the field has been simply identifying the DLA host galaxies, before characterizing them, due to the difficulty of detecting a faint galaxy in the presence of a bright background QSO. This talk will describe new results from Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array studies of the host galaxies of DLAs over a wide range of redshifts, z~0.1-4.5, in carbon monoxide (CO) and ionized carbon (CII-158 micron) emission lines. These are the first CO and CII-158 micron detections in DLA host galaxies, yielding a new window on the nature of absorption-selected galaxies at high redshifts.