Abstract

  It is now well-established that the elemental abundance patterns of stars hold key clues not only to their formation but also to the assembly histories of galaxies. One of the most exciting possibilities is the use of stellar abundance patterns as "chemical tags" to identify stars that were born in the same molecular cloud. We find that different cluster mass functions imprint different degrees of clumpiness in chemical space. These differences provide the opportunity to statistically reconstruct the slope and high mass cutoff of CMF and its evolution through cosmic time. By studying the APOGEE data set, we show that the Galactic disk is unlikely to have formed clusters more massive than 3x10^7 Msun at any point in its history and put a first abundance-based constraint on the cluster mass function for the old disk stars in the Milky Way.