Abundances of Galactic red giants

To establish the chemical differences and similarities between the bulge and other stellar populations, we performed an elemental abundance analysis of alpha- (O, Mg, Si, Ca, and Ti) and Z-odd (Na and Al) elements of red giant stars in the bulge as well as of local thin disk, thick disk and halo giants.

We use high-resolution optical spectra of 25 bulge giants in Baade's window and 55 comparison giants (4 halo, 29 thin disk and 22 thick disk giants) in the solar neighborhood. All stars have similar stellar parameters but cover a broad range in metallicity (-1.5<[Fe/H]<+0.5). A standard 1D local thermodynamic equilibrium analysis using both Kurucz and MARCS models yielded the abundances of O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti and Fe.