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Description
We present initial results of a deep near-IR spectroscopic survey covering the 15 fields of the Keck Baryonic Structure Survey using the recently commissioned MOSFIRE spectrometer on the Keck 1 telescope. We focus on a sample of 251 galaxies with redshifts 2.0<z<2.6, star formation rates (SFRs) 2<~SFR<~200 M_{sun}_/yr, and stellar masses 8.6<log(M_*_/M_{sun}_)<11.4, with high-quality spectra in both H- and K-band atmospheric windows. We show unambiguously that the locus of z~2.3 galaxies in the "BPT" nebular diagnostic diagram exhibits an almost entirely disjointed, yet similarly tight, relationship between the line ratios [N II] {lambda}6585/H{alpha} and [O III]/H{beta} as compared to local galaxies. Using photoionization models, we argue that the offset of the z~2.3 BPT locus relative to that at z~0 is caused by a combination of harder stellar ionizing radiation field, higher ionization parameter, and higher N/O at a given O/H compared to most local galaxies, and that the position of a galaxy along the z~2.3 star-forming BPT locus is surprisingly insensitive to gas-phase oxygen abundance. The observed nebular emission line ratios are most easily reproduced by models in which the net stellar ionizing radiation field resembles a blackbody with effective temperature T_eff_=50000-60000 K, the gas-phase oxygen abundances lie in the range 0.2<Z/Z_{sun}_<1.0, and the ratio of gas-phase N/O is close to the solar value. We critically assess the applicability at high redshift of commonly used strong line indices for estimating gas-phase metallicity, and consider the implications of the small intrinsic scatter of the empirical relationship between excitation-sensitive line indices and M_*_(i.e., the "mass-metallicity" relation) at z=~2.3.
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