Discovery of Hydrogen Fluoride in the Cloverleaf Quasar at z = 2.56
  We report the first detection of hydrogen fluoride (HF) toward a high
redshift quasar. Using the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) we detect
the HF J = 1 - 0 transition in absorption toward the Cloverleaf, a broad
absorption line (BAL) quasi-stellar object (QSO) at z=2.56. The detection is
statistically significant at the ~ 6 sigma level. We estimate a lower limit of
4 \times 1014 cm-2 for the HF column density and using a previous estimate of
the hydrogen column density, we obtain a lower limit of 1.7 \times 10-9 for the
HF abundance. This value suggests that, assuming a Galactic N(HF)/NH ratio, HF
accounts for at least ~10% of the fluorine in the gas phase along the line of
sight to the Cloverleaf quasar. This observation corroborates the prediction
that HF should be a good probe of the molecular gas at high redshift.
Measurements of the HF abundance as a function of redshift are urgently needed
to better constrain the fluorine nucleosynthesis mechanism(s).
