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The chemical evolution history of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) has been amatter of debate for decades. The challenges in understanding the SMC chemicalevolution are related to a very slow star formation rate (SFR) combined withbursts triggered by the multiple interactions between the SMC and the LargeMagellanic Cloud, a significant (~0.5 dex) metallicity dispersion for the SMCcluster population younger than about 7.5 Gyr, and multiple chemical evolutionmodels tracing very different paths through the observed age-metallicityrelation of the SMC. There is no doubt that these processes were complex.Therefore, a step-by-step strategy is required in order to better understandthe SMC chemical evolution. We adopted an existing framework to split the SMCinto regions on the sky, and we focus on the west halo in this work, whichcontains the oldest and most metal-poor stellar populations and is moving awayfrom the SMC, that is, in an opposite motion with respect to the MagellanicBridge. We present a sample containing ~60% of all west halo clusters torepresent the region well, and we identify a clear age-metallicity relationwith a tight dispersion that exhibits a 0.5 dex metallicity dip about 6 Gyrago. We ran chemical evolution models and discuss possible scenarios to explainthis metallicity dip, the most likely being a major merger accelerating the SFRafter the event. This merger should be combined with inefficient internal gasmixing within the SMC and different SFRs in different SMC regions because thesame metallicity dip is not seen in the AMR of the SMC combining clusters fromall regions. We try to explain the scenario to better understand the SMCchemo-dynamical history.

The VISCACHA survey -- VIII. Chemical evolution history of Small Magellanic Cloud West Halo cluster