Enhanced rates of stellar radial migration in gas-rich discs at high redshift

ABSTRACT Radial migration and dynamical heating redistribute stars within galactic discs and thereby modify the chemo-kinematic structure of their host galaxies. Usually, these secular processes are studied in N-body and hydrodynamical simulations of Milky Way analogues with stellar-dominated discs. In contrast, discs at high redshift are gas rich, which may qualitatively change how secular evolution proceeds. We use the Nexus framework to construct and evolve a suite of isolated galaxies with fixed halo and disc mass but varying initial disc gas fraction, from 0 to 100 per cent. We show that in gas-rich models, the root-mean-square change in stellar angular momentum is up to a factor of 2 larger than in gas-poor analogues and is accompanied by stronger radial and vertical heating, leading to enhanced radial mixing. We further dissect the role of gas in specific migration channels. For bar-driven migration, corotation-resonance dragging dominates in gas-poor discs, whereas in gas-rich discs stars more readily reach and accumulate at the outer Lindblad resonance, which acts as a barrier. The high radial mixing efficiency in gas-rich phases can flatten the stellar metallicity gradient relative to that of the initial gaseous disc within only a few orbital time-scales. Together, these results imply that radial mixing in early, gas-rich discs is substantially more vigorous than in late-time, gas-poor discs, naturally producing distinct evolutionary tracks for chemically bimodal discs such as that of the Milky Way.