Abstract :
We review studies of the elemental abundances of very metal-poor stars conducted with the High Dispersion Spectrograph on the 8.2m Subaru Telescope. These include (i) investigations of seven very metal-poor giant stars with relatively high r-process-abundances, which suggest the existence of stars with high Th/Eu ratios, (ii) studies of s-process-element-enhanced, metal-poor stars, indicating the existence of a large (∼1 dex) dispersion in the Pb/Ba ratios, and (iii) examination of abundance patterns in carbon-rich, very metal-poor stars, including the extremely iron-poor star CS 29498-043, which exhibits large excesses of C, N, Mg, and Si. The meanings of these findings in the context of nucleosynthesis studies and cosmochronology are discussed.
