Origin of Metals around Galaxies. I.

In this work we extract and build catalogs of metal absorbers that will be used in future analyses, and make our results publicly available to the community. We design a fully automatic algorithm to search for absorption metal-line doublets of the species CIV, NV, SiIV, and MgII in high-resolution (R>=30000) quasar spectra without human intervention, and apply it to the high-resolution and signal-to-noise ratio spectra of 690 quasars, observed with the UVES and HIRES instruments.

We obtain 5656 CIV doublets, 7919 doublets of MgII, 2258 of SiIV, and 239 of NV, constituting the largest high-resolution metal-doublet samples to date, and estimate the dependence of their completeness and purity on various doublet parameters such as equivalent width and redshift, using real and artificial quasar spectra. The catalogs include doublets with rest-frame line-equivalent widths down to a few m{AA}, all detected at a significance above 3{sigma}, and covering the redshifts between 1<z<=5, properties that make them useful for a wide range of chemical evolution studies.