The radio properties of low-z LoBAL quasars: comparison between different catalogs

Currently, there are no targeted studies of the radio properties of Low-ionization Broad Absorption Line quasars (LoBALs), a rare population of objects characterized by extreme outflows in Mg II. LoBALs might be a short-lived, evolutionary phase in the life of quasars when accretion onto the central supermassive black hole gives rise to disk winds capable of affecting the growth of the host galaxy, but there is little consensus on the location of the observed outflows and what drives them. Using newly available data from Epochs 1-3 (2017-2024) of the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS), we find radio emission in a small sample of 22 optically-selected 0.5 < z < 0.6 LoBAL quasars at a rate three times higher than in non-BAL quasars matched in luminosity and redshift. This hints at a possible interplay between emerging, young radio jets and the characteristic outflows in those systems. In this work, we expand the redshift range and analyze the available radio continuum images (2-4 GHz) from VLASS to classify the radio detections and morphologies in all known LoBALs (103 objects in total) in the redshift range 0.5 < z < 0.8 selected by three different BAL quasar catalogs, and explore biases in the selection criteria related to their radio properties.