UC San Diego

This dissertation uses large galaxy redshift surveys and multi-wavelength imaging to place observational constraints on the evolution of galaxies and the supermassive black holes that they host since the Universe was roughly half its current age. In the first chapter, we use data from the AEGIS survey to present quantitative morphological measurements of green valley galaxies, to constrain the mechanism(s) responsible for quenching star formation in this transition population and creating elliptical galaxies. We show that green galaxies are generally massive (M.) ̃ 10¹⁰·⁵ M/[sun]) disk galaxies with high concentrations of light. We find that major mergers are not the dominant mechanism responsible for quenching star formation, and we find that either more mild external processes or internal secular processes play a crucial role in halting star formation. In the second chapter, we use data from the PRIMUS survey to investigate Spitzer/IRAC and X-ray AGN selection techniques in order to quantify the overlap, uniqueness, contamination, and completeness of each AGN selection. For roughly similar depth IR and X-ray data, we find that ̃75% of IR-selected AGN are also identified as X-ray AGN. For the deepest X- ray data, this fraction increases to ̃90%, indicating that at most ̃10% of IR-selected AGN may be heavily obscured. While similar overall, the IR-AGN samples preferentially contain more luminous AGN, while the X-ray AGN samples identify AGN with a wider range of accretion rates, where the host galaxy light dominates at IR wavelengths. A more complete AGN sample is created by combining both IR and X- ray selected AGN. Finally, we present a clustering study of X-ray AGN, radio AGN and IR AGN selected AGN using spectroscopic redshifts from the PRIMUS and DEEP2 redshift surveys. Using the cross-correlation of AGN with dense galaxy samples, we find differences in the clustering of AGN selected at different wavelengths. However, we find no significant differences in the clustering of each AGN sample with matched galaxy samples that have the same redshift, stellar mass, and star formation rate distributions. The differences in the clustering of AGN selected at different wavelengths can therefore be explained by the clustering differences of their host populations