Research and Teaching in Small Business Finance: A Note on Resources

In an emerging field of scholarship such as Small Business Finance, there is often a chicken-and-egg problem at the outset. Prospective researchers are generally discouraged by an initial lack of infrastructure such as relevant bibliographic facilities, journals, conferences and data sources. In the interests of conserving resources, the following details of research and teaching resources developed at or through the School of Accounting, Finance, and Management at The Flinders University of South Australia are made available

Heavily reddened type 1 quasars at z > 2 I: Evidence for significant obscured black-hole growth at the highest quasar luminosities

We present a new population of z>2 dust-reddened, Type 1 quasars with 0.5<E(B-V)<1.5, selected using near infra-red (NIR) imaging data from the UKIDSS-LAS, ESO-VHS and WISE surveys. NIR spectra obtained using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) for 24 new objects bring our total sample of spectroscopically confirmed hyperluminous (>10^{13}L_0), high-redshift dusty quasars to 38. There is no evidence for reddened quasars having significantly different H$\alpha$ equivalent widths relative to unobscured quasars. The average black-hole masses (~10^9-10^10 M_0) and bolometric luminosities (~10^{47} erg/s) are comparable to the most luminous unobscured quasars at the same redshift, but with a tail extending to very high luminosities of ~10^{48} erg/s. Sixty-six per cent of the reddened quasars are detected at $>3\sigma$ at 22um by WISE. The average 6um rest-frame luminosity is log10(L6um/erg/s)=47.1+/-0.4, making the objects among the mid-infrared brightest AGN currently known. The extinction-corrected space-density estimate now extends over three magnitudes (-30 < M_i < -27) and demonstrates that the reddened quasar luminosity function is significantly flatter than that of the unobscured quasar population at z=2-3. At the brightest magnitudes, M_i < -29, the space density of our dust-reddened population exceeds that of unobscured quasars. A model where the probability that a quasar becomes dust-reddened increases at high luminosity is consistent with the observations and such a dependence could be explained by an increase in luminosity and extinction during AGN-fuelling phases. The properties of our obscured Type 1 quasars are distinct from the heavily obscured, Compton-thick AGN that have been identified at much fainter luminosities and we conclude that they likely correspond to a brief evolutionary phase in massive galaxy formation.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures (+ 2 appendices), Accepted for publication in MNRA

Cosmological Evolution of the Universe Neutral Gas Mass Measured by Quasar Absorption Systems

The cosmological evolution of neutral hydrogen is an efficient way of tracing structure formation with redshift. It indicates the rate of evolution of gas into stars and hence the gas consumption and rate star formation history of the Universe. In measuring HI, quasar absorbers have proven to be an ideal tool and we use observations from a recent survey for high-redshift quasar absorption systems together with data gathered from the literature to measure the cosmological comoving mass density of neutral gas. This paper assumes Omega_M=0.3, Omega_lambda=0.7 and h=0.65.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the "Cosmic Evolution" conference, held at l'Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, November 13-17, 200

An Extremely Luminous Galaxy at z=5.74

We report the discovery of an extremely luminous galaxy lying at a redshift of z=5.74, SSA22-HCM1. The object was found in narrowband imaging of the SSA22 field using a 105 Angstrom bandpass filter centered at 8185 Angstroms during the course of the Hawaii narrowband survey using LRIS on the 10 m Keck II Telescope, and was identified by the equivalent width of the emission W_lambda(observed)=175 Angstroms, flux = 1.7 x 10^{-17} erg cm^{-2} s^{-1}). Comparison with broadband colors shows the presence of an extremely strong break (> 4.2 at the 2 sigma level) between the Z band above the line, where the AB magnitude is 25.5, and the R band below, where the object is no longer visible at a 2 sigma upper limit of 27.1 (AB mags). These properties are only consistent with this object's being a high-z Ly alpha emitter. A 10,800 s spectrum obtained with LRIS yields a redshift of 5.74. The object is similar in its continuum shape, line properties, and observed equivalent width to the z=5.60 galaxy, HDF 4-473.0, as recently described by Weymann et al. (1998), but is 2-3 times more luminous in the line and in the red continuum. For H_0 = 65 km s^{-1} Mpc^{-1} and q_0 = (0.02, 0.5) we would require star formation rates of around (40, 7) solar masses per year to produce the UV continuum in the absence of extinction.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Latex with emulateapj style file; to appear in the Astrophysical Journal (Letters

A Homogeneous Sample of Sub-DLAs IV: Global Metallicity Evolution

An accurate method to measure the abundance of high-redshift galaxies consists in the observation of absorbers along the line of sight toward a background quasar. Here, we present abundance measurements of 13 z>3 sub-Damped Lyman-alpha Systems (quasar absorbers with HI column density 19 < log N(HI) < 20.3 cm^-2) based on the high resolution observations with VLT UVES spectrograph. These observations more than double the metallicity information for sub-DLAs previously available at z>3. This new data, combined with other sub-DLA measurements from the literature, confirm the stronger metallicity redshift evolution than for the classical Damped Lyman-alpha absorbers. Besides, these observations are used to compute for the first time the fraction of gas ionised from photo-ionisation modelling in a sample of sub-DLAs. Based on these results, we calculate that sub-DLAs contribute no more than 6% of the expected amount of metals at z~2.5. We therefore conclude that even if sub-DLAs are found to be more metal-rich than classical DLAs, they are insufficient to close the so-called ``missing metals problem''.Comment: 30 figures, 24 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA