Zinc as a tracer of metallicity evolution of damped Lyα systems

Zinc is a good indicator of metallicity in damped Ly alpha (DLA) systems because it is almost unaffected by dust depletion. However, the use of zinc as a tracer of metallicity evolution has been hampered by the difficulty of detecting the Zn II resonance lines at high redshift. The measurement of zinc abundance in a DLA system at z(abs) > 3 obtained by means of the UVES spectrograph at the VLT prompted us to reanalyze the full sample of zinc abundances present in the literature to search for a metallicity-redshift relation in DLA systems. A study of the metallicities of individual systems shows evidence for an anticorrelation between [Zn/H] and redshift, supported by different types of statistical tools. The zinc metallicity decreases by -0.3 +/- 0.1 dex per unit redshift interval in the range 0.5 less than or similar to z(abs) less than or similar to 3.5. This rate is in good agreement with that found by Savaglio, Panagia, & Stiavelli in their recent study of DLA abundances corrected for dust depletion. The present result does not require a knowledge of the dust depletion pattern(s) in DLA systems. On the other hand, analysis of the column-density-weighted metallicity of the sample, [Z], does not show a clear evidence for redshift evolution, consistent with previous studies of zinc abundances. We propose that the apparent lack of evolution of [Z] is due to the combination of selection bias effects together with the extreme sensitivity of [Z] to low-number statistics.