Rossby-wave instability in viscous discs

TL;DR

This paper investigates how viscosity influences the Rossby wave instability in protoplanetary discs, revealing that high viscosity significantly affects the instability's occurrence, which is crucial for understanding planet formation and angular momentum transport.

Contribution

The study extends previous work by incorporating viscosity effects into the analysis of RWI using numerical methods across different viscosity regimes.

Findings

High viscosity suppresses RWI occurrence.

Low viscosity has negligible effect on RWI.

Results inform planet formation and disc evolution models.

Abstract

The Rossby wave instability (RWI), which depends on the density bumps and extremum in the vortensities in the differentially rotating discs, plays an important role in the evolution of the protoplanetary discs. In this article, we investigate the effect of viscosity on the non-axisymmetric RWI in the self-graviting accretion discs. For this purpose, we add the viscosity to the work of Lovelace and Hohlfeld (2013). Consideration of viscosity complicates the problem so that we use the numerical method to investigate the stable and unstable modes. We consider three ranges of viscosities: high viscosity in the ranges $0.1\leq \alpha\leq 0.4$, moderate viscosity in the ranges $0.01\leq \alpha < 0.1$, and low viscosity in the ranges $\alpha < 0.01$. The results show that the occurrence of the RWI is related to the value of viscosity so that the effect of high viscosity is important, while the low viscosity is negligible. These results may be applied for the study of the RWI role in planet formation and angular momentum transport for different kinds of the protoplanetary discs with different viscosities.