Abstract
As fuel feeding supermassive black hole and star formation, cold molecular gas is the key to many fundamental processes in galaxy evolution. In the last decade and especially with the advent of Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), it has become feasible to spatially resolve giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in a large number and a wide variety of galaxies. Here, I summarise my work as part of the mm-Wave Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high-resolution (~50 pc) survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. First, I will discuss the molecular gas morphology and kinematics in three megamaser (Seyfert-II) galaxies at intermediate resolution (≈100 pc). Then, I talk about giant molecular clouds (resolution≈20 pc) and star formation in an S0 galaxy, NGC1387. It surprisingly has late-type-like GMC properties (e.g. perfect Virialisation) together with early-type-like low star formation efficiency. To constrain the physical drivers of GMC properties and star formation, I discuss these results in light of models describing the impact of shear and cloud-cloud collisions. Finally, I briefly introduce ongoing work trying to understand the (mis-)alignment between GMC spin and disc kinematics.
