Electrostatic Barrier against Dust Growth in Protoplanetary Disks. II. Measuring the Size of the "Frozen" Zone

TL;DR

This paper investigates the 'frozen' zone where dust growth stalls due to electrostatic charging in protoplanetary disks, and explores how dust transport can counteract this freezeout, affecting dust evolution timescales.

Contribution

It quantifies the size of the frozen zone in protoplanetary disks and examines how global dust transport can prevent complete dust growth freezeout.

Findings

Frozen zone covers major parts of disks at 1-100 AU.

Maximum aggregate mass is about 10^{-7} g at 1 AU.

Global dust transport can supply macroscopic aggregates over 10^6 years.

Abstract

Coagulation of submicron-sized dust grains into porous aggregates is the initial step of dust evolution in protoplanetary disks. Recently, it has been pointed out that negative charging of dust in the weakly ionized disks could significantly slow down the coagulation process. In this paper, we apply the growth criteria obtained in Paper I to finding out a location ("frozen" zone) where the charging stalls dust growth at the fractal growth stage. For low-turbulence disks, we find that the frozen zone can cover the major part of the disks at a few to 100 AU from the central star. The maximum mass of the aggregates is approximately 10^{-7} g at 1 AU and as small as a few monomer masses at 100 AU. Strong turbulence can significantly reduce the size of the frozen zone, but such turbulence will cause the fragmentation of macroscopic aggregates at later stages. We examine a possibility that complete freezeout of dust evolution in low-turbulence disks could be prevented by global transport of dust in the disks. Our simple estimation shows that global dust transport can lead to the supply of macroscopic aggregates and the removal of frozen aggregates on a timescale of 10^6 yr. This overturns the usual understanding that tiny dust particles get depleted on much shorter timescales unless collisional fragmentation is effective. The frozen zone together with global dust transport might explain "slow" (\sim 10^6 yr) dust evolution suggested by infrared observation of T Tauri stars and by radioactive dating of chondrites.