Dynamics and Morphology of the Milky Way Spiral Arms from the
  Metallicity Distribution and Radial Mixing
  Albeit radial migration must be a ubiquitous process in disc galaxies, its
significance in the evolution of stellar discs is not always reflected through
global trends. However, there are other key observables, such as the
metallicity distribution function (MDF), that may shed some light in this
matter. We argue that the shape of the MDF not only tells us whether the
stellar disc experienced radial migration, but it also contains important clues
on the structure that triggered it. Specifically, the MDF contains information
about the dynamics and morphology of the spiral pattern. To constrain the
spiral parameters, we have included a detailed chemical tagging in our
simulations; this allows us to produce a restriction of the structural
parameters of the spiral arms in the Milky Way as well as a method to constrain
chemical evolution models towards the center of the Galactic disc, where no
chemical model provides information. We also found that it is unlikely that the
Sun was formed near its current galactocentric position, therefore it might be
inaccurate to consider the Sun as representative of the chemical abundances in
the solar neighborhood. We also show that a stellar disc of the Milky Way,
after evolving dynamically and chemically for 5 Gyr, preserves 80% of its
original global metallicity gradient despite having suffered important heating
and radial migration; this means that the presence of a metallicity gradient in
a given galaxy, does not guarantee that radial mixing has not played a role in
its evolution.
