Galaxy chemical evolution models: The role of molecular gas formation
  In our grid of multiphase chemical evolution models (Moll\'a & D\'iaz, 2005),
star formation in the disk occurs in two steps: first, molecular gas forms, and
then stars are created by cloud-cloud collisions or interactions of massive
stars with the surrounding molecular clouds. The formation of both molecular
clouds and stars are treated through the use of free parameters we refer to as
efficiencies. In this work we modify the formation of molecular clouds based on
several new prescriptions existing in the literature, and we compare the
results obtained for a chemical evolution model of the Milky Way Galaxy
regarding the evolution of the Solar region, the radial structure of the
Galactic disk, and the ratio between the diffuse and molecular components,
HI/H$_2$. Our results show that the six prescriptions we have tested reproduce
fairly consistent most of the observed trends, differing mostly in their
predictions for the (poorly-constrained) outskirts of the Milky Way and the
evolution in time of its radial structure. Among them, the model proposed by
Ascasibar et al. (2017), where the conversion of diffuse gas into molecular
clouds depends on the local stellar and gas densities as well as on the gas
metallicity, seems to provide the best overall match to the observed data.
