Studying the physics of high-redshift galaxy evolution with VANDELS

VANDELS is a new, ultra-deep, optical spectroscopic survey of the high-redshift Universe using the VIMOS spectrograph on the VLT telescope. Using unprecedentedly long integration times (20-80 hours on-source), VANDELS will produce high signal-to-noise spectra covering the rest-frame UV/optical of galaxies within the redshift interval 1 z 7. Moreover, by targeting samples drawn from the CANDELS HST imaging surveys of the GOODS-S and UKIDSS UDS fields, galaxies
targeted by VANDELS benefit from the very best available multi-wavelength ancillary data. The main focus of the this PhD project will be to derive physical parameters (i.e. age, stellar mass, metallicity etc) for the VANDELS galaxies by performing spectro-photometric modelling of the combined spectra and multi-wavelength photometry, using multi-component SED models. Initially the project will focus on analysing passive galaxies at redshift z 1.5, attempting to break the well known age-metallicity degeneracy and comparing stellar masses derived from SED fitting with dynamical masses derived from the VANDELS spectra and HST imaging.