Non-LTE analysis of neutral magnesium in cool stars

Calculations of the statistical equilibrium of magnesium in the solar photosphere have shown that NLTE populations hardly affect Mg line formation in the Sun. However, in metal-poor dwarfs and giants the influence of electron collisions is reduced, and the ultraviolet radiation field, enhanced due to reduced background line opacity, results in more pronounced NLTE effects. In the photosphere of a cool star excitation and ionization due to collisions with neutral hydrogen can outweigh electron collisions. Analyses based on NLTE populations lead to significantly higher Mg abundances than those calculated from LTE. We calculate magnesium abundances in 10 cool dwarfs and subgiants with metallicities from −2.29 to 0.0. The results are based on spectra of high-resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio. Stellar effective temperatures are derived from Balmer line profiles, surface gravities from Hipparcos parallaxes and the wings of the Mg ib triplet, and metal abundances and microturbulence velocities are obtained from LTE analyses of Fe ii line profiles. For stars with metallicities between −2.0 < [Fe/H] < −1.0 abundance corrections ∆[Mg/H]NLTE−LTE ∼ 0.05–0.11 are found. As expected the corrections increase with decreasing metal abundance, and they increase slightly with decreasing surface gravity. We also calculate the statistical equilibrium of magnesium for series of model atmospheres with different stellar parameters and find that ∆[Mg/H]NLTE−LTE increases with effective temperature between 5200 and 6500 K. For extremely metal-poor stars the abundance corrections approach ∆[Mg/H]NLTE−LTE ∼ 0.23 at [Fe/H] ∼ −3.0.