The Ubiquity of the Rapid Neutron-Capture Process
  To better characterize the abundance patterns produced by the r-process, we
have derived new abundances or upper limits for the heavy elements zinc (Zn),
yttrium (Y), lanthanum (La), europium (Eu), and lead (Pb). Our sample of 161
metal-poor stars includes new measurements from 88 high resolution and high
signal-to-noise spectra obtained with the Tull Spectrograph on the 2.7m Smith
Telescope at McDonald Observatory, and other abundances are adopted from the
literature. We use models of the s-process in AGB stars to characterize the
high Pb/Eu ratios produced in the s-process at low metallicity, and our new
observations then allow us to identify a sample of stars with no detectable
s-process material. In these stars, we find no significant increase in the
Pb/Eu ratios with increasing metallicity. This suggests that s-process material
was not widely dispersed until the overall Galactic metallicity grew
considerably, perhaps even as high as [Fe/H]=-1.4. We identify a dispersion of
at least 0.5 dex in [La/Eu] in metal-poor stars with [Eu/Fe]<+0.6 attributable
to the r-process, suggesting that there is no unique "pure" r-process elemental
ratio among pairs of rare earth elements. We confirm earlier detections of an
anti-correlation between Y/Eu and Eu/Fe bookended by stars strongly enriched in
the r-process (e.g., CS 22892-052) and those with deficiencies of the heavy
elements (e.g., HD 122563). We can reproduce the range of Y/Eu ratios using
simulations of high-entropy neutrino winds of core-collapse supernovae that
include charged-particle and neutron-capture components of r-process
nucleosynthesis. The heavy element abundance patterns in most metal-poor stars
do not resemble that of CS 22892-052, but the presence of heavy elements such
as Ba in nearly all metal-poor stars without s-process enrichment suggests that
the r-process is a common phenomenon.
