What Can the Distribution of Intergalactic Metals Tell Us about the History of Cosmological Enrichment?

I study the relationship between the spatial distribution of intergalacticmetals and the masses and ejection energies of the sources that produced them.Over a wide range of models, metal enrichment is dominated by the smallestefficient sources, as the enriched volume scales roughly as E^{3/5} ~ M^{3/5}while the number density of sources goes as 1/M. In all cases, the earliestsources have the biggest impact, because fixed comoving distances correspond tosmaller physical distances at higher redshifts. This means that most of theenriched volume is found around rare peaks, and intergalactic metals arenaturally highly clustered. Furthermore, this clustering is so strong as tolead to a large overlap between individual bubbles. Thus the typical radius ofenriched z ~ 3 regions should be interpreted as a constraint on groupings ofsources rather than the ejection radius of a typical source. Similarly, theclustering of enriched regions should be taken as a measurement of source biasrather than mass.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, ApJL in pres