2011ApJ...732..110J

We report detections of 39 2175 Å dust extinction bump candidates associated with strong Mg II absorption lines at z∼ 1-1.8 on quasar spectra in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR3. These strong Mg II absorption line systems are detected among 2951 strong Mg II absorbers with a rest equivalent width W_rλ2796> 1.0 Å at 1.0 < z < 1.86, which is part of a full sample of 7421 strong Mg II absorbers compiled by Prochter et al. The redshift range of the absorbers is chosen to allow the 2175 Å extinction features to be completely covered within the SDSS spectrograph operation wavelength range. An upper limit of the background quasar emission redshift at z = 2.1 is set to prevent the Lyα forest lines from contaminating the sensitive spectral region for the 2175 Å bump measurements. The FM90 parameterization is applied to model the optical/UV extinction curve in the rest frame of Mg II absorbers of the 2175 Å bump candidates. The simulation technique developed by Jiang et al. is used to derive the statistical significance of the candidate 2175 Å bumps. A total of 12 absorbers are detected with 2175 Å bumps at a 5σ level of statistical significance, 10 are detected at a 4σ level, and 17 are detected at a 3σ level. Most of the candidate bumps in this work are similar to the relatively weak 2175 Å bumps observed in the Large Magellanic Cloud LMC2 supershell rather than the strong ones observed in the Milky Way. This sample has greatly increased the total number of 2175 Å extinction bumps measured on SDSS quasar spectra. Follow-up observations may rule out some of the possible false detections and reveal the physical and chemical natures of 2175 Å quasar absorbers.