Thermohaline instability and rotation-induced mixing

III. Grid of stellar models and asymptotic asteroseismic quantities from the pre-main sequence up to the AGB for low- and intermediate-mass stars of various metallicities^⋆

¹ Geneva Observatory, University of Geneva, Chemin des Maillettes 51, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland
e-mail: Nadege.Lagarde@unige.ch
² IRAP, UMR 5277 CNRS and Université de Toulouse, 14 Av. E. Belin, 31400 Toulouse, France
³ LUPM, Université Montpellier II, CNRS, UMR 5299, Place E. Bataillon, 34095 Montpellier, France

Received: 25 October 2011
Accepted: 13 April 2012

Abstract

Context. The availability of asteroseismic constraints for a large sample of stars from the missions CoRoT and Kepler paves the way for various statistical studies of the seismic properties of stellar populations.

Aims. We evaluate the impact of rotation-induced mixing and thermohaline instability on the global asteroseismic parameters at different stages of the stellar evolution from the zero age main sequence to the thermally pulsating asymptotic giant branch to distinguish stellar populations.

Methods. We present a grid of stellar evolutionary models for four metallicities (Z = 0.0001, 0.002, 0.004, and 0.014) in the mass range from 0.85 to 6.0 M_⊙. The models are computed either with standard prescriptions or including both thermohaline convection and rotation-induced mixing. For the whole grid, we provide the usual stellar parameters (luminosity, effective temperature, lifetimes, ... ), together with the global seismic parameters, i.e. the large frequency separation and asymptotic relations, the frequency corresponding to the maximum oscillation power ν_max, the maximal amplitude A_max, the asymptotic period spacing of g-modes, and different acoustic radii.

Results. We discuss a signature of rotation-induced mixing on the global asteroseismic quantities, that can be detected observationally. Thermohaline mixing whose effects can be identified using spectroscopic studies cannot be characterized by the global seismic parameters studied here. However, we cannot exclude that individual mode frequencies or other well chosen asteroseismic quantities might help us to constrain this mixing.