Electric charging of dust aggregates and its effect on dust coagulation in protoplanetary disks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electric charging influences dust coagulation in protoplanetary disks, revealing that electrostatic repulsion can significantly hinder dust growth and affect disk ionization, with implications for planetesimal formation.

Contribution

It introduces a new semi-analytical method for calculating dust charge states and demonstrates the inhibitory effect of electric charging on dust aggregate growth in protoplanetary disks.

Findings

Electric charging can prevent dust aggregates from growing beyond fractal sizes.

Electrostatic repulsion leads to a 'freeze-out' of dust growth in early stages.

Dust growth limitations influence disk ionization and stability regions.

Abstract

Mutual sticking of dust aggregates is the first step toward planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks. In spite that the electric charging of dust particles is well recognized in some contexts, it has been largely ignored in the current modeling of dust coagulation. In this study, we present a general analysis of the dust charge state in protoplanetary disks, and then demonstrate how the electric charging could dramatically change the currently accepted scenario of dust coagulation. First, we describe a new semianalytical method to calculate the dust charge state and gas ionization state self-consistently. This method is far more efficient than previous numerical methods, and provides a general and clear description of the charge state of gas-dust mixture. Second, we apply this analysis to early evolutionary stages where the dust has been thought to grow into fractal ($D \sim 2$) aggregates with a quasi-monodisperse (i.e., narrow) size distribution. We find that, for a wide range of model parameters, the fractal growth is strongly inhibited by the electric repulsion between colliding aggregates and eventually "freezes out" on its way to the subsequent growth stage involving collisional compression. Strong disk turbulence would help the aggregates to overcome this growth barrier, but then it would cause catastrophic collisional fragmentation in later growth stages. These facts suggest that the combination of electric repulsion and collisional fragmentation would impose a serious limitation on dust growth in protoplanetary disks. We propose a possible scenario of dust evolution after the freeze-out. Finally, we point out that the fractal growth of dust aggregates tends to maintain a low ionization degree and, as a result, a large magnetorotationally stable region in the disk.