Relating Stellar Radial Migration in Disk Galaxies to Orbital Circularity through Elemental Abundances

Stars in thin disk of the Milky Way are expected undergo radial migration via resonant interactions with transient gravitational perturbations such as spiral arms. Inside-out models of disk formation predict radial gradients in rates of star formation, leading to potentially detectable differences in elemental abundances patterns that can indicate the occurrence of radial migration. We test the hypothesis that stars with lower orbital eccentricity have more likely migrated radially by quantifying the dispersion in elemental abundances at fixed iron abundance as a function of eccentricity, measured for red giant and red clump stars currently within 2 kpc of the solar neighborhood. We use data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) survey public Data Release 17 and the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) Survey public Data Release 4. We are able to isolate a low-eccentricity population with higher-than-expected scatter in alpha-abundance enrichment as candidates for migrated stars.