Metal abundances and kinematics of quasar absorbers - I. Absorption systems toward J2233–606

The metal line proles of dierent ions observed in high H i column density systems (N(H i)> 10 16 cm 2 ) in quasar spectra can be used to constrain the ionization structure and kinematic characteristics of the absorbers. For these purposes, a modied Monte Carlo Inversion (MCI) procedure was applied to the study of three absorption systems in the spectrum of the HDF-South quasar J2233{606 obtained with the UVES spectrograph at the VLT/Kueyen telescope. The MCI does not conrm variations of metal abundances within separate systems which were discussed in the literature. Instead, we found that an assumption of a homogeneous metal content and a unique photoionizing background is sucient to describe the observed complex metal proles. It was also found that the linear size L and the line-of-sight velocity dispersion v measured within the absorbers obey a scaling relation, namely, v increases with increasing L, and that metal abundance is inversely proportional to the linear size of the system: the highest metallicity was measured in the system with the smallest L.