Radiative forces and pulsation in beta Cephei stars

Recently radiatively-driven diffusion in beta Cephei stars has been suggested as a possible explanation to account for excitation of the observed oscillation modes of the beta Cephei stars nu Eridani and 12 Lacertae. Preliminary results (Bourge and Alecian 2006) show that microscopic diffusion of iron could indeed occur in a region situated just above the opacity bump of the iron group elements. This diffusion has little influence on the position of the star in the HR diagram and on the spectrum of low radial order eigenfrequencies. It does, however, increase the number of excited frequencies. We show here that the ratio between the number of p-modes to the number of g-modes could be used as a signature of this diffusion process.