The UCSD HIRES/KECK I Damped Lya Abundance Database: IV. Probing Galactic Enrichment Histories with Nitrogen

Abstract

We present 14 N^0 measurements from our HIRES/Keck database of damped Lya abundances. These data are combined with measurements from the recent and past literature to build an homogeneous, uniform set of observations. We examine photoionization diagnostics like Fe^++ and Ar^0 in the majority of the complete sample and assess the impact of ionization corrections on N/alpha and alpha/H values derived from observed ionic column densities of N^0, Si^+, H^0, and S^+. Our final sample of 19 N/alpha, alpha/H pairs appears bimodal; the majority of systems show N/alpha values consistent with metal-poor emission regions in the local universe but a small sub-sample exhibit significantly lower N/alpha ratios. Contrary to previous studies of N/alpha in the damped systems, our sample shows little scatter within each sub-sample. We consider various scenarios to explain the presence of the low N/alpha sightlines and account for the apparent bimodality. We favor a model where at least some galaxies undergo an initial burst of star formation with suppressed formation of intermediate-mass stars. We found a power-law IMF with slope 0.10 or a mass cut of ~5-8 Msolar would successfully reproduce the observed LN-DLA values. If the bimodal distribution is confirmed by a larger sample of measurements, this may present the first observational evidence for a top heavy initial mass function in some early stellar populations.

23 pages, 14 figs, uses onecolfloat.sty. Accepted for publication to PASP on June 14, 2002. Visit http://kingpin.ucsd.edu/~hiresdla

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• The First Stars

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