While it is well known that mass transfer in binaries can pollute the surfaces of the accretors , it is still unclear whether this mechanism can reproduce the observed chemical inhomogeneities in globular clusters .
We study the surface abundances of the accretors in low-mass binaries , as a first step towards understanding whether mass transfer in low-mass binaries is one of the potential origins of the aforementioned abundance anomalies in globular clusters .
We use the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics code to calculate binary evolutionary models with different initial donor masses between 0.9 and 1.9 M _ { \odot } for an initial metallicity of Z = 0.0034 .
The results show that in some low-mass binary systems , the accretors exhibit peculiar chemical patterns when they are still unevolved stars , e.g .
C and O depletion ; Na and N enhancement ; constant Mg , Al and C+N+O .
The abundance patterns of the accretors are significantly different from their initial abundances ( or that of normal single stars ) , and can match the observed populations .
These abundance patterns strongly depend not only on the initial parameters of binaries ( donor mass , mass ratio , and orbital period ) , but also on the assumptions regarding mass-transfer efficiency and angular momentum loss .
These results support the hypothesis that mass transfer in low-mass binaries is at least partly responsible for the unevolved anomalous stars in globular clusters .
More work on binary evolutionary models and binary population synthesis is required to fully evaluate the contribution of this scenario .