Metal abundances of eld A and Am stars?

Abstract. Detailed abundances of 9 eld A and Am stars are derived for Mg, Ca, Sc, Cr, Fe, and Ni using high res-olution spectroscopy. Most of our sample Am stars show the characteristic deciencies of Ca and Sc on one hand, and the overabundances of the iron peak elements on the other, which is consistent with the predictions of the dif-fusion model for Main Sequence or slightly evolved stars. There seems to be a correlation between abundances of Ca and Sc and the eective temperature for stars of sim-ilar age: the abundance of Ca increases with increasing mass whereas that of Sc decreases. Two of our Am stars have a dierent abundance pattern: Ca is overabundant in the hot magnetic Am star o Peg and its abundance is nearly normal in the metallic giant star Pup. The other objects of our sample have globally a solar composition ex-cept 28 And, which shows signicant deciencies for most the studied elements. Key words: stars: abundances; chemically peculia