Tracing the Evolution of High Redshift Galaxies Using Stellar Abundances

This paper presents the first results from a model for chemical evolution that can be applied to N-body cosmological simulations and quantitatively compared to measured stellar abundances from large astronomical surveys. This model convolves the chemical yield sets from a range of stellar nucleosynthesis calculations (including AGB stars, Type Ia and II supernovae, and stellar wind models) with a user-specified stellar initial mass function (IMF) and metallicity to calculate the time-dependent chemical evolution model for a "simple stellar population" of uniform metallicity and formation time. These simple stellar population models are combined with a semi-analytic model for galaxy formation and evolution that uses merger trees from N-body cosmological simulations to track several $\alpha$- and iron-peak elements for the stellar and multiphase interstellar medium components of several thousand galaxies in the early ($z \geq 6$) universe. The simulated galaxy population is then quantitatively compared to two complementary datasets of abundances in the Milky Way stellar halo, and is capable of reproducing many of the observed abundance trends. The observed abundance ratio distributions are qualitatively well matched by our model, and the observational data is best reproduced with a Chabrier IMF, a chemically-enriched star formation efficiency of $0.2$, and a redshift of reionization of $7$.