  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 $ \rm {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.
