Investigation of the dependence of rare-earth element abundances on the effective temperature and magnetic field in the atmospheres of chemically peculiar (Ap) stars

We have derived the abundances of the rare-earth elements (REEs) Ce, Pr, Nd, and Eu in the atmospheres of 26 magnetic peculiar (Ap) stars in the range of effective temperatures 7000–10 000 K from spectra with resolutions R = 48 000 and 80 000 and investigated the dependence of the CePrNdEu anomalies (the difference in the element abundances determined separately from lines of the first and second ionization stages) on the effective temperature. The REE anomaly is shown to decrease with increasing effective temperature virtually to the point of disappearance for all of the investigated elements, except Eu. For the best-studied element Nd the Nd anomaly has also been found to decrease with increasing magnetic field strength for cool stars. For hot stars there is no Nd anomaly in a wide range of magnetic field strengths. Since the presence of anomalies in cool Ap stars is associated with the REE concentration in the upper atmospheric layers, the lower boundary of the REE layer apparently sinks into deeper layers with increasing effective temperature and magnetic field, causing the anomalies to disappear. We have detected an anticorrelation between the abundances of iron-peak elements and rare-earth elements, which serves as additional evidence for different stratification of these elements in the atmospheres of Ap stars.