Damped Lyα absorber at high redshift:: Large disks or galactic building blocks?

We investigate the nature of the physical structures giving rise to damped Ly alpha absorption systems (DLAS) at high redshift. In particular, we examine the suggestion that rapidly rotating large disks are the only viable explanation for the characteristic observed asymmetric profiles of low-ionization absorption lines. Using hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation in a cosmological context, we demonstrate that irregular protogalactic clumps can reproduce the observed velocity width distribution and asymmetries of the absorption profiles equally well. The velocity broadening in the simulated clumps is the result of a mixture of rotation, random motions, infall, and merging. The observed velocity width correlates with the virial velocity of the dark matter halo of the forming protogalactic clump (Delta v approximate to 0.6(vir) for the median values, with a large scatter, on the order of a factor of 2, between different lines of sight). The typical virial velocity of the halos required to give rise to the DLAS population is about 100 km s(-1), and most standard hierarchical structure formation scenarios can easily account for even the largest observed velocity widths. We conclude that the evidence that DLAS at high redshift are related to large, rapidly rotating disks with v(circ) greater than or similar to 200 km s(-1) is not compelling.