THE HOT COMPONENTS OF AM CVn HELIUM CATACLYSMICS

We present the results of a multi-component synthetic spectral analysis of the archival far-ultraviolet spectra of the hot components of several AM CVn double degenerate interacting binaries with known distances from trigonometric parallaxes. Our analysis was carried out using the code BINSYN, which takes into account the donor companion star, the shock front which forms at the disk edge, and the FUV and NUV energy distribution. We fixed the distance of each system at its parallax-derived value and adopted appropriate values of orbital inclination and white dwarf (WD) mass. We find that the accretion-heated 'DO/DB' WDs are contributing significantly to the FUV flux in five of the systems (ES Ceti, CR Boo, V803 Cen, HP Lib, GP Com). In three of the systems, GP Com, ES Ceti, and CR Boo, the WD dominates the FUV/NUV flux. We present model-derived accretion rates which agree with the low end of the range of accretion rates derived earlier from blackbody fits over the entire spectral energy distribution. We find that the WD in ES Ceti is very likely not a direct impact accretor but has a small disk. The WD in ES Ceti has T{sub eff} {approx} 40, 000 {+-} 10, 000 K. This is far cooler than the previous estimate of Espaillat et al.. We find that the WD in GP Com has T{sub eff} = 14, 800 {+-} 500 K, which is hotter than the previously estimated temperature of 11,000 K. We present a comparison between our empirical results and current theoretical predictions for these systems.