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S. Turcotte (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Stellar abundances are known to be very good tracers of dynamic processes, such as convection, turbulent mixing, and mass loss amongst others, in some stars. Improved models of chemical evolution in stars which take diffusion and turbulent mixing into account have been calculated in recent years . They have allowed detailed comparisons of predicted and observed surface chemical composition in a variety of stars. In addition to the classical analysis of surface composition, the models provide for the first time an opportunity of studying internal abundance profiles through the comparison of observed chemically peculiar variable stars to representative models. As chemical composition can affect the stability of stars to pulsations excited by the opacity (kappa) mechanism, the modeling of variable stars in which diffusion is expected to occur can provide important constraints on internal abundances which are not necessarily accessible otherwise. In this paper, models of main sequence stars ranging from types F to B are presented and the constraints on mixing mechanisms and convection inferred in those stars are discussed.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: sturcotte@igpp.ucllnl.org