Disk mass loss in Algol systems

It has become clear that a significant fraction of stars has one or more companions. Stars in a binary, or higher order, systems often interact by transferring mass, drastically altering their evolution compared to single stars. The transfer of material from one star to the other affects the mass ratio, orbital evolution and can even lead to the stars merging together. This process is not always conservative, and in many systems we expect some mass to have been lost in this process. The transferred material does not always directly hit the accreting object, in certain cases it forms an accretion disk. Viscous processes within the disk transport the angular momentum outward
and tidal interactions with the edge of the disk are expected to transport the excess angular momentum back into the binary orbit. Material at the outer edge potentially carries a very large specific angular momentum, and would some of that material be lost from the disk before being able to return its angular momentum to the orbit, it could alter the orbital evolution, as well as estimates for the mass transfer efficiency. In this talk I will show several results of synthetic populations of Algol systems, comparing different assumptions of disk mass loss.