loop for character variable names in r

I have a list of variables, like a1, a2, a3. Then I want to do a loop for these variable, for instance, assign values. I tried paste, which just gave character like "a1", that was not what I am really look for. Can anyone provide a solution?

We can use mget to get the values in a list

lst <- mget(paste0("a", 1:3))

and then loop through the list and apply the function

lapply(lst, yourFunction)