The Fine Line Between Normal and Starburst Galaxies
  Recent literature suggests that there are two modes through which galaxies
grow their stellar mass - a normal mode characterized by quasi-steady star
formation, and a highly efficient starburst mode possibly triggered by
stochastic events such as galaxy mergers. While these differences are
established for extreme cases, the population of galaxies in-between these two
regimes is poorly studied and it is not clear where the transition between
these two modes of star formation occurs. We utilize ALMA observations of the
CO J=3-2 line luminosity in a sample of 20 infrared luminous galaxies that lie
in the intermediate range between normal and starburst galaxies at z ~ 0.25-0.6
in the COSMOS field to examine the gas content and star formation efficiency of
these galaxies. We compare these quantities to the galaxies' deviation from the
well-studied "main sequence" correlation between star formation rate and
stellar mass (MS) and find that at log($SFR/SFR_{MS}$) < 0.6, a galaxy's
distance to the main sequence is mostly driven by increased gas content, and
not a more efficient star formation process.
