Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2016
Since the last IAU Colloquium devoted to Ap stars, die continuous development of high signal to noise observations and of computerized analysis tools have greatly increased the effectiveness of abundance anomalies as a probe of hydrodynamical processes in stars. Until the 1980s, they seemed limited to ApBp and AmFm stars where the effects are largest. More recently the abundances of Li and He have been suggested to play important diagnostic roles for hydrodynamics in both the Sun (Proffitt and Michaud 1991b, Pinsonneault et al. 1989) and Halo stars (Proffitt and Michaud 1991a, Pinsonneault et al. 1992, Vauclair 1988, Charbonnel et al. 1992, Deliyannis and Demarque 1991). The observation of a Li abundance gap in F stars of clusters has raised the question of the link between these objects and the AmFm stars (Michaud 1986, Charbonneau and Michaud 1988, 1991) or alternately with solar type stars. The observed Li abundance on die subgiant branch sheds some light on this problem (Charbonneau et al. 1989; Charbonnel and Vauclair 1992). In solar type stars, the observed Li abundance constrains the superficial turbulence that may inhibit surface He gravitational settling (Proffitt and Michaud 1991b) whose effects can be detected using solar seismology (Guzik and Cox 1992, Dziembowski et al. 1992).