BUILDING THE BRIDGE BETWEEN DAMPED LY ABSORBERS AND LYMAN-BREAK GALAXIES

In 2000, we started the program \Building the Bridge between Damped Lyman- Absorbers and LymanBreak Galaxies: Ly Selection of Galaxies" at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). This project is an attempt to use the Ly selection of high-redshift galaxies to bridge the gap between absorption- and emission-line selected galaxies by creating a large database of z 3 galaxies belonging to the abundant population of faint (R > 25:5) galaxies associated to Damped Ly Absorbers (DLAs). Here we present the rst part of our program, namely results from a deep Ly study of the eld of the z = 2:85 DLA toward the quasar Q 2138 4427.