The UCSD HIRES/Keck I Damped Lyα Abundance Database. IV. Probing Galactic Enrichment Histories with Nitrogen

We present 14 N 0 measurements from our High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer/Keck database of damped Lyα abundances. These data are combined with measurements from the recent and past literature to build a homogeneous, uniform set of observations. We examine photoionization diagnostics such as Fe ++ and Ar 0 in the majority of the complete sample and assess the impact of ionization corrections on N/α and α/H values derived from observed ionic column densities of N 0 , Si + , H 0 , and S + . Our final sample of 19 N/α, α/H pairs appears bimodal; the majority of systems show N/α values consistent with metal‐poor emission regions in the local universe, but a small subsample exhibits significantly lower N/α ratios. Contrary to previous studies of N/α in the damped systems, our sample shows little scatter within each subsample. We consider various scenarios to explain the presence of the low N/α sight lines 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 that a power‐law initial mass function with slope 0.10 or a mass cut of ≈5–8 M ⊙ would successfully reproduce the observed low‐nitrogen damped Lyα 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.