  The chemical compositions of seven Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor (CEMP) turn-off
stars are determined from high-resolution spectroscopy. Five of them are
selected from the SDSS/SEGUE sample of metal-poor stars. The effective
temperatures of these objects are all higher than 6000 K, while their
metallicities, parametrized by [Fe/H], are all below -2. Six of our program
objects exhibit high abundance ratios of barium ([Ba/H]> +1), suggesting large
contributions of the products of former AGB companions via mass transfer across
binary systems. Combining our results with previous studies provides a total of
20 CEMP main-sequence turn-off stars for which the abundances of carbon and at
least some neutron-capture elements are determined. Inspection of the [C/H]
ratios for this sample of CEMP turn-off stars show that they are generally
higher than those of CEMP giants; their dispersion in this ratio is also
smaller. We take these results to indicate that the carbon-enhanced material
provided from the companion AGB star is preserved at the surface of turn-off
stars with no significant dilution. In contrast, a large dispersion in the
observed [Ba/H] is found for the sample of CEMP turn-off stars, suggesting that
the efficiency of the s-process in very metal-poor AGB stars may differ greatly
from star to star. Four of the six stars from the SDSS/SEGUE sample exhibit
kinematics that are associated with membership in the outer-halo population, a
remarkably high fraction.

Astrophysics