Evolution of the Milky Way with radial motions of stars and gas: I. The solar neighbourhood and the thin and thick disks

We study the role of radial migration of stars on the chemical evolution of the Milky Way disk. We are interested in the impact of that process on the local properties of the disk and on the morphological properties of the resulting thick and thin disks. We use a model with several new or up-dated ingredients: atomic and molecular gas phases, star formation that depends on molecular gas, yields from a recent homogeneous grid and observationally inferred SNIa rates. Our model reproduces current values of most of the main global observables of the MW disk and bulge, and also the observed "stacked" evolution of MW-type galaxies. The thick disk extends up to ~11 kpc and has a scale length of 1.8 kpc, which is considerably shorter than the thin disk, because of the inside-out formation scheme. We also show how, in this framework, current and forthcoming spectroscopic observations can constrain the nucleosynthesis yields of massive stars for the metallicity range of 0.1 Z to 2-3 Z.