6Li in metal-poor halo stars: real or spurious?

The presence of convective motions in the atmospheres of metal-poor halo stars leads to systematic asymmetries of the emergent spectral line profiles. Since such line asymmetries are very small, they can be safely ignored for standard spectroscopic abundance analysis. However, when it comes to the determination of the 6 Li/7 Li isotopic ratio, q(Li)=n(6 Li)/n(7Li), the intrinsic asymmetry of the 7Li line must be taken into account, because its signature is essentially indistinguishable from the presence of a weak 6 Li blend in the red wing of the 7Li line. In this contribution we quantity the error of the inferred 6 Li/7 Li isotopic ratio that arises if the convective line asymmetry is ignored in the fitting of the λ 6707 ˚A lithium blend. Our conclusion is that 6 Li/7 Li ratios derived by Asplund et al. (2006), using symmetric line profiles, must be reduced by typically Δq(Li) ≈ 0.015. This diminishes the number of certain 6 Li detections from 9 to 4 stars or less, casting some doubt on the existence of a 6 Li plateau.