Particle Trapping and Streaming Instability in Vortices

TL;DR

This study investigates how particles concentrate in vortices within protoplanetary disks, revealing that high dust densities can trigger streaming instability, which influences planetesimal formation even with small particles and low initial dust ratios.

Contribution

It introduces 2D shearing sheet simulations including dust back-reaction, demonstrating particle trapping and streaming instability effects in vortices with varying dust-to-gas ratios.

Findings

High particle concentrations occur in vortices across a range of Stokes numbers.

Dust-to-gas ratios can be reversed inside vortices, reaching up to 100:1.

Streaming instability limits maximum overdensities, affecting planetesimal formation.

Abstract

We analyse the concentration of solid particles in vortices created and sustained by radial buoyancy in protoplanetary disks, i.e. baroclinic vortex growth. Besides the gas drag acting on particles we also allow for back-reaction from dust onto the gas. This becomes important when the local dust-to-gas ratio approaches unity. In our 2D, local, shearing sheet simulations we see high concentrations of grains inside the vortices for a broad range of Stokes numbers, ${\rm St}$. An initial dust-to-gas ratio of 1:100 can easily be reversed to 100:1 for ${\rm St}=1$. The increased dust-to-gas ratio triggers the streaming instability, thus counter-intuitively limiting the maximal achievable overdensities. We find that particle trapping inside vortices opens the possibility for gravity-assisted planetesimal formation even for small particles ($\rm{St}=0.01$) and low initial dust-to-gas ratios (1:$10^4$)