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One of the key questions in galaxy evolution is how metals travel in and out of galaxies and how the metal enriched gas inside galactic disks mixes into the surrounding circumgalactic gas. An important diagnostic for this gas flow is the gas-phase metallicity gradient. However, measurements of gradients are often affected by limited spatial resolution. We produce mock IFU datacubes from hydrodynamic simulations of an isolated galaxy in order to quantify the said effect. I will present the application of our models on current IFU surveys -- MaNGA, SAMI and CALIFA -- by correcting the observed metallicity gradients for the effects of spatial resolution. However, isolated simulations do not capture the dynamics of gas flow between the disk and the CGM. For this we turn to a suite of cosmological, zoom-in simulations with high spatial and time resolution -- FOGGIE. Using the FOGGIE simulations we demonstrate that a high cadence (~few Myr) is indispensable for accurately tracking the metallicity gradient evolution, particularly at high-redshift (z). FOGGIE galaxies spend ~40% of their time during z>2 outside the typical observational uncertainty away from the mean behaviour. Additionally, we present a novel, non-parametric method of quantifying the metallicity distribution which is free from geometric assumptions. We investigate how efficiently our new method responds to metal-mixing stimuli, such as star-formation, mergers and outflows. Our models pave the way for interpreting upcoming JWST observations of high-z metallicity gradients. |
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