Department of Physics & Astronomy, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Highlights are presented from a theoretical study of the photometric characteristics of slowly-pulsating B stars. One outstanding result is the discovery, for l  2 modes, of cancellation between the flux variations originating from surface temperature perturbations, and those arising from radius perturbations. In addition to reducing greatly the variability generated by such modes, the cancellation introduces significant phase differences between the flux changes in each passband. On the grounds that similarly-large phase differences are not seen in observational data, it is suggested that the light variations of slowly-pulsating B stars might be due primarily to l = 1 modes.

To be published in Proc IAU Coll. 185, Radial and Nonradial Pulsations as Probes of Stellar Physics, eds. Conny Aerts, Tim Bedding, Joergen Christensen-Dalsgaard
Preprints from rhdt@star.ucl.ac.uk
or on the web at
http://www.star.ucl.ac.uk/~rhdt/publications/preprints/iau185.ps.gz