Thermohaline mixing and the photospheric composition of low-mass giant stars

TL;DR

This study models thermohaline mixing in low-mass red giant stars using advanced theories, finding that observed surface abundance changes cannot be fully explained by thermohaline mixing alone without artificially increasing its efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent double-diffusive convection model and compares it with observations, highlighting the limitations of thermohaline mixing in explaining stellar surface abundances.

Findings

Thermohaline instability occurs after the hydrogen burning shell encounters the chemical discontinuity.

The unstable region does not reach the stellar surface under natural mixing efficiencies.

Artificially increasing mixing efficiency by 4 orders of magnitude is needed to match observed abundances.

Abstract

We compute full evolutionary sequences of red giant branch stars close to the luminosity bump by including state of the art composition transport prescriptions for the thermohaline mixing regimes. In particular we adopt a self-consistent double-diffusive convection theory, that allows to handle the instabilities that arise when thermal and composition gradients compete against each other, and a very recent empirically motivated and parameter free asymptotic scaling law for thermohaline composition transport. In agreement with previous works, we find that during the red giant stage, a thermohaline instability sets in shortly after the hydrogen burning shell (HBS) encounters the chemical discontinuity left behind by the first dredge-up. We also find that the thermohaline unstable region, initially appearing at the exterior wing of the HBS, is unable to reach the outer convective envelope, with the consequence that no mixing of elements that produces a non-canonical modification of the stellar surface abundances occurs. Also in agreement with previous works, we find that by artificially increasing the mixing efficiency of thermohaline regions it is possible to connect both unstable regions, thus affecting the photospheric composition. However, we find that in order to reproduce the observed abundances of red giant branch stars close to the luminosity bump, thermohaline mixing efficiency has to be artificially increased by about 4 orders of magnitude from that predicted by recent 3D numerical simulations of thermohaline convection close to astrophysical environments. From this we conclude the chemical abundance anomalies of red giant stars cannot be explained on the basis of thermohaline mixing alone.