Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013

Poster 2S055

Particle Trapping at Planet-Induced Gap Edges and Vortices

zhu, zhaohuan (Princeton University)
Stone, James (Princeton University)
Rafikov, Roman (Princeton University)
Bai, Xuening (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Espaillat, Catherine (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Abstract:
We use numerical simulations to perform a systematic study on the dynamics of dust particles in protoplanetary disks under the influence of a planet in disks. Dust particles in viscous disks (representing turbulent regions in disks) and inviscid hydro disks (``dead zone’’) have been simulated separately using our newly developed Two-Fluids FARGO and ATHENA+Particle codes. For inviscid 3-D disks, we found that a low mass planet (8 M_earth) open almost unnoticeable gaps in gas which can still lead to significant dust piling up at gap edges. Sharp gap edges carved out by a massive planet are unstable to the formation of vortices, which can efficiently trap particles with a wide range of sizes(at least 4 orders of magnitude in our cases). Thus gaps and vortices in particle disks should be very common if there are planets in the``dead zones’’. For viscous disks, the dust features are significantly smoothed out by the parameterized turbulent diffusion, and small dust particles can follow the accreting gas flowing to the inner disk. Thus, the so-called ``dust filtration’’ mechanism by the gap edges can differentiate big and small dust particles. MHD simulations are developed to understand the gap opening and particle concentration in realistic turbulent disks.

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