Radial migration in a bar-dominated disk galaxy I: Impact on chemical
  evolution
  We study radial migration and chemical evolution in a bar-dominated disk
galaxy, by analyzing the results of a fully self-consistent, high resolution
N-body+SPH simulation. We find different behaviours for gas and star particles.
Gas within corotation is driven in the central regions by the bar, where it
forms a pseudo-bulge (disky-bulge), but it undergoes negligible radial
displacement outside the bar region. Stars undergo substantial radial migration
at all times, caused first by transient spiral arms and later by the bar.
Despite the important amount of radial migration occurring in our model, its
impact on the chemical properties is limited. The reason is the relatively flat
abundance profile, due to the rapid early evolution of the whole disk. We show
that the implications of radial migration on chemical evolution can be studied
to a good accuracy by post-processing the results of the N-body+SPH calculation
with a simple chemical evolution model having detailed chemistry and a
parametrized description of radial migration. We find that radial migration
impacts on chemical evolution both directly (by moving around the long-lived
agents of nucleosynthesis, like e.g. SNIa or AGB stars, and thus altering the
abundance profiles of the gas) and indirectly (by moving around the long-lived
tracers of chemical evolution and thus affecting stellar metallicity profiles,
local age-metallicity relations and metallicity distributions of stars, etc.).
