Mixing by Internal Waves

Abstract

That mixing take place in the radiative zone of many stars, is an event that cannot be forgotten when we try to explain observational results as the lithium abundance in the atmosphere of different stars, its dependence on spectral type, age or rotation velocity... During the last years many processes have been proposed as being responsible of this mixing: overshooting, turbulence induced by rotational instabilities, internal waves, etc... We will consider, following the results obtained by Press (1981), the role of this last mechanism in the transport of lithium to the burning level, not as generators of turbulence (in Press, 1981, and García-López and Spruit, 1991, it is shown that turbulence induced by internal waves decays very quickly inside the radiative zone), but as generators of a diffusive process due to non linear dissipative effects.