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H. -W. Chen, P. J. McCarthy, S. Persson, A. Oemler, P. Martini (Carnegie Observatories), R. Carlberg, R. Abraham (U. of Toronto), R. Marzke (San Francisco State University), A. Firth, R. McMahon, O. Lahav, C. Sabby (Institute of Astronomy), R. Ellis (Caltech), R. Somerville (U. of Michigan)
The angular clustering of galaxies with I - H > 3 in the Las Campanas IR survey increases strongly as a function of apparent magnitude. At faint levels 20 < H < 21 the amplitude of the angular correlation function is 7'', at brighter levels it rises to nearly 1'. The strength of this angular clustering ranges from 10 to 40 times that of the full H selected sample. We use photometric redshifts and a simple non-evolving galaxy population model to estimate the characteristic redshift and redshift extents of our color and magnitude selected sub-samples. We show that the very strong angular clustering signal is the result of very narrow redshift shells selected by our color-magnitude cuts. At z ~1 the physical clustering length that we derive is 9h-1 Mpc for all magnitudes within our I - H > 3 sample. This is larger than other classes of high redshift galaxies or faint field galaxy samples, but is comparable to that of luminous early-type galaxies at the present day. We suggest that our color selection has isolated a population of massive early-type galaxies at z > 1 with properties very similar to those seen at low redshift.