The velocity field of pulsation, described in the corotating frame, is
given by the time derivative of the Lagrangian displacement field
which we calculate on a spherical grid of typically more than 5000
equally sized visible surface elements. For each visible element, the
corresponding rotational velocity of a uniformly rotating sphere is
added.
Neglecting all atmospheric effects due to the pulsation, we
attribute to each surface element a Gaussian intrinsic line profile
with width W
where the free parameter 
is a measure of the line depth
and 
the central velocity position of the
Doppler-shifted line profile of the regarded surface element. The
line profile I(V) is then obtained by a weighted integration of the
Doppler-shifted Gaussian profiles of all visible surface elements.
Finally, the profile I(V) is normalized by means of a division by
its continuum value.
We note that our conclusions will not depend on the actual shape of
the intrinsic line profile. The difference between profiles calculated
with either a Gaussian or, for example, a rectangular shape is only
noticeable in the wings of the rotationally broadened line profile. If
the rotational broadening is large enough (i.e. 
> W), only the effective width of the intrinsic line profile is
important.
The weights in the integration are determined by the aspect angle of
each element, neglecting the rotational and pulsational deformation of
the stellar surface, and by a linear limb-darkening correction of the
form
in which 
is the angle between the surface normal of
the sphere and the line of sight. We adopt a limb-darkening
coefficient 
, which is appropriate for early B-type stars
in the optical region (Wade & Rucinski 1985). For simplicity we apply
the same limb-darkening correction to the continuum and to the
wavelength region of the intrinsic line profile itself. This means
that we keep the shape of the intrinsic profile constant over the
stellar disk. For very strong lines this might not be a good
approximation.
We checked whether or not the use of other values of the
limb-darkening coefficient 
affects the validity of any of the
conclusions in this paper. The phases of variability across the
profiles do not change, but the amplitude distribution (see
Sect. 4 (click here)) does. In our representation of the amplitudes of
line-profile variability (see Sect. 4.1 (click here)), a high
limb-darkening coefficient results in higher variational amplitudes at
the line center, and lower amplitudes at the wings of the profile. A
limb-darkening coefficient of 1.0 can lead to changes up to 20% of
the variational amplitudes with respect to the case with no limb
darkening. Nevertheless, our conclusions do not depend on our choice
for the limb-darkening coefficient.
In this work we aim to investigate the observational characteristics of line-profile variations in the best situation one can consider, namely that of perfect data. Following this approach, we can establish which pulsation parameters one may ultimately derive from observations. For this reason, we generate data that perfectly sample the pulsation period, with sufficient spectral resolution, and we do not include noise in the synthesis of our spectra.
In the case of real data, the data sampling and data quality (e.g.\ signal to noise ratio, S/N, spectral resolution, and correct continuum rectification) govern the detectability of the pulsation characteristics. The interplay between the time sampling and the S/N is complicated and may hamper the detection of characteristics of certain pulsation modes in a complex fashion. Generally, we expect that from lengthy data sets the most conclusive results can be derived.