Quantifying Element Importance for Mass Recovery from Population III Supernova Yield Fits

TL;DR

This study identifies key elements like C, N, Na, and K that are crucial for accurately inferring the initial mass function of Population III stars from supernova yield models, demonstrating the potential of stellar archaeology.

Contribution

It systematically evaluates element importance in progenitor mass recovery, highlighting which elements most improve IMF constraints from supernova yield fits.

Findings

C, N, Na, and K are most important for mass recovery.

Including O, Al, Co, and Ni improves results.

Current measurable elements can constrain Population III IMF.

Abstract

Massive Population III stars are currently not observed, but their initial mass function (IMF) can be inferred through stellar archaeology: fitting core-collapse supernova yield models to elemental abundances of low-mass, long-lived metal-poor stars. While prior work demonstrates that yield fitting can recover progenitor properties, it remains unclear which measured elements most control mass recovery quality and what level of IMF precision is achievable for a measured element set. We perform a systematic study of element importance for progenitor mass recovery. Using the Heger & Woosley (2010) yield grid, we generate mock observations, fit the initial mass, and evaluate the typical performance on the fractional mass recovery. Add/remove-one-element experiments and comparisons among different baseline element sets are used to rank elements by importance. We find that the most important elements for accurate mass recovery are C, N, Na, and K, with O, Al, Co, and Ni consistently improving performance when available. Overall, with currently measurable elements from high-resolution spectroscopy, stellar archaeology can deliver practical Population III IMF constraints assuming the core-collapse supernova yield models provide a good representation of stellar evolution in the early universe.