Detecting Massive Galaxies at High Redshift using the Dark Energy Survey

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) will be unprecedented in its ability to probe ex-ceptionally large cosmic volumes to relatively faint optical limits. Primarily designed for the study of comparatively low redshift (z < 2) galaxies with the aim of con-straining dark energy, an intriguing byproduct of the survey will be the identification of massive (> 1012.0M) galaxies at z & 4. This will greatly improve our understand-ing of how galaxies form and evolve. By both passively evolving the low redshift mass function and extrapolating the observed high redshift mass function, we find that such galaxies should be rare but nonetheless present at early times, with predicted numbe