The effect of heavy element opacity on pre-main sequence Li depletion

Abstract

Recent 3-D analysis of the solar spectrum data suggests a significant change of the solar chemical composition. This may affect the temporal evolution of the surface abundance of light elements since the extension of the convective envelope is largely affected by the internal opacity value. We analyse the influence of the adopted solar mixture on the opacity in the convective envelope of pre-main sequence (PMS) stars and thus on PMS lithium depletion. The surface Li abundance depends on the relative efficiency of several processes, some of them still not known with the required precision; this paper thus analyses one of the aspects of this ``puzzle''. Focusing on PMS evolution, where the largest amount of Li burning occurs, we computed stellar models for three selected masses (0.8, 1.0 and 1.2 Msun, with Z=0.013, Y=0.27, alpha=1.9) by varying the chemical mixture, that is the internal element distribution in Z. We analysed the contribution of the single elements to the opacity at the temperatures and densities of interest for Li depletion. Several mixtures were obtained by varying the abundance of the most important elements one at a time; we then calculated the corresponding PMS Li abundance evolution. We found that a mixture variation does change the Li abundance: at fixed total metallicity, the Li depletion increases when increasing the fraction of elements heavier than O.