Helium in Chemically Peculiar Stars

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For the purpose of deriving the helium abundances in chemically peculiar stars, the importance of assuming a correct helium abundance has been investigated for determining the effective temperature and gravity of main sequence B-type stars, making full use of the present capability of reproducing their helium lines. Even if the flux distribution of main sequence B-type stars appears to depend only on the effective temperature for any helium abundance, the effective temperature, gravity and helium abundance have to be determined simultaneously by matching the Balmer line profiles. New MULTI NLTE calculations, performed adopting ATLAS9 model atmospheres and updated helium atomic parameters, reproduce most of the observed equivalent widths of neutral helium lines for main sequence B-type stars and they make us confident of the possibility to correctly derive the helium abundance in chemically peculiar stars. An application of previous methods to the helium rich star HD 37017 shows that helium could be stratified in the magnetic pole regions, as expected in the framework of the diffusion theory in the presence of mass loss.