Tracing the Metallicity in High Redshift Quasars with FeII Spectra

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AST-0206150Verner, Ekaterina M.High-redshift quasars are currently the only objects that can give us information aboutnucleosynthesis in the very Early Universe. Many exhibit prominent FeII emission features in their spectra. Because the relative abundance of Fe is tightly correlated with Type-Ia supernovae, FeII becomes a very important chronological indicator of the age of star formation activity at the earliest epochs. The principal goal of this work is to develop diagnostic tools to interpret this FeII emission. These FeII diagnostics will be used as cosmological probes of star-formation and to determine the iron abundance in the quasars of the Early Universe. This project is designed to combine the efforts of the leading theoretical, observational and experimental groups working on FeII from the USA, Europe and Japan, and is therefore international in scope. It includes both space- and ground-based spectroscopic observations, theoretical and experimental input from atomic physics, and finally will culminate in theoretical modeling of the observed FeII.***