Constraining the Size of the Circumgalactic Medium Using the Transverse Autocorrelation Function of C IV Absorbers in Paired Quasar Spectra

The circumgalactic medium (CGM) plays a vital role in the formation and evolution of galaxies, acting as a lifeline between galaxies and the surrounding intergalactic medium. In this study, we leverage a unique sample of quasar pairs to investigate the properties of the CGM with absorption line tomography. We present a new sample of medium-resolution Keck/ESI, Magellan/MagE, and VLT/XSHOOTER spectra of 29 quasar pairs at redshift 2 < z < 3. We supplement the sample with additional spectra of 32 pairs from the literature, creating a catalog of 61 quasar pairs with angular separations between 1.'' 7 and 132.'' 19 and projected physical separations (r(perpendicular to)) between 14 kpc and 887 kpc. We construct a catalog of 906 metal-line absorption doublets of C IV (lambda lambda 1548, 1550) with equivalent widths ranging from 6 m angstrom <= W-r,W-1550 <= 2053 m angstrom. The best-fit linear model to the log-space equivalent width frequency distribution (log f (K) = m log (K)b) of the sample yields coefficients of m = -1.44 +/- 0.16 and b = -0.43 +/- 0.16. To constrain the projected extent of C IV, we calculate the transverse autocorrelation function. The flattening of the autocorrelation function at low r(perpendicular to) provides a lower limit for the coherence length of the metal enriched CGM-on the order of 200 h(-1) comoving kpc. This physical size constraint allows us to refine our understanding of the metals in the CGM, where the extent of C IV in the CGM depends on gas flows, feedback, timescale of metal injection and mixing, and the mass of the host galaxies.