Morphologically-Identified Merging Galaxies in the SWIRE Fields
  We investigate the evolutional and environmental effects on star formation
efficiency for more than 400 merging galaxies. The ~400 merging systems, with
photometric redshifts smaller than 0.7, are obtained from a catalog of ~15000
morphologically identified merging galaxies derived from observations of the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We also obtained the IR data of the merging
galaxies from the Spitzer Wide-area InfraRed Extragalactic Survey (SWIRE). The
redshift differences \Delta z between the member galaxies of these merging
pairs show a large distribution with 0 < \Delta z < 0.4. We divide our merging
pairs into two sub-samples with \Delta z < 0.05 and > 0.05 for further
analyses. We find a statistically significant anti-correlation between the
specific star formation rate (SSFR) and the separation of the merging galaxies
for both sub-samples. Our analyses also show that although most of the merging
systems do have enhanced star formation activity, only very rare ones display
extremely high SFRs. Additionally, the SSFR of the merging galaxies also
decreases when the magnitude difference between two member galaxies becomes
large. However, we find that for the merging pairs with large luminosity
contrast, the fainter components show higher SSFR than the brighter ones.
Finally, there is a higher fraction of gas-poor mergers in galaxy clusters, and
the SSFR of gas-rich mergers is reduced in cluster environments.
