Testing hierarchical galaxy evolution models with the luminosity-size relation of distant field galaxies

The observed luminosity-size relation of galactic disks out to z = 1.1 is used to test simple disk evolution models. Three different theoretical models are directly compared to observations by "observing" mock galaxy parameter catalogs generated from those models with the same survey disk selection function as determined from the observations. None of the three models appear to provide a convincing fit to the observations. This type of quantitative comparison should be extended to other disk scaling relations to develop a more comprehensive test of disk galaxy evolution models.