Metal-Enriched Plasma in Protogalactic Halos: A Survey of N V Absorption
  in High-z Damped & Sub-Damped Lyman-alpha Systems
  We continue our recent work to characterize the plasma content of
high-redshift damped and sub-damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs/sub-DLAs), which
represent multi-phase gaseous (proto)galactic disks and halos seen toward a
background source. We survey N V absorption in a sample of 91 DLAs and 18
sub-DLAs in the redshift range 1.67<z<4.28 with unblended coverage of the N V
doublet, using data from VLT/UVES, Keck/HIRES, and Keck/ESI. In DLAs, we find
eight secure N V detections, four marginal detections, and 79 non-detections.
The detection rate of N V in DLAs is therefore 13^{+5}_{-4}%. Two sub-DLA N V
detections are found among a sample of 18, at a similar detection rate of
11^{+15}_{-7}%. We show that the N V detection rate is a strong function of
metallicity, increasing by a factor of ~4 at [N/H]=[NI/HI]>-2.3. The N V and
CIV component b-value distributions in DLAs are statistically similar, but the
median b(N V) of 18 km/s is lower than the median b(O VI) of 25 km/s. Some ~20%
of the N V components have b<10 km/s and thus arise in warm photoionized plasma
at log (T/K)<4.92; local sources of ionizing radiation (as opposed to the
extragalactic background) are required to keep the cloud sizes physically
reasonable. The nature of the remaining ~80% of (broad) N V components is
unclear; models of radiatively-cooling collisionally-ionized plasma at
log(T/K)=5.2-5.4 are fairly successful in reproducing the observed integrated
high-ion column density ratios and the component line widths, but we cannot
rule out photoionization by local sources. Finally, we identify several unusual
DLAs with extremely low metallicity (<0.01 solar) but strong high-ion
absorption [log N(N V)>14 or log N(O VI)>14.2] that present challenges to
either galactic inflow or outflow models.
