Analysis of the instability due to gas-dust friction in protoplanetary discs

TL;DR

This study investigates how the presence of multiple dust grain sizes affects the linear stability and growth of instabilities in protoplanetary discs, revealing that diverse grain sizes can significantly accelerate dust clumping.

Contribution

It introduces a two-grain-size model for dust-gas interactions in protoplanetary discs, showing enhanced instability growth compared to single-size models.

Findings

Two grain sizes increase the efficiency of drag-driven instability.

Small-mass dust phases can reduce growth timescales by over a factor of two.

Presence of multiple dust sizes accelerates dust clumping.

Abstract

We study stability of a dust layer in a gaseous disc subject to the linear axisymmetric perturbations. Instead of considering single-size particles, however, the population of dust particles is assumed to consist of two grain species. Dust grains exchange momentum with the gas via the drag force and their self-gravity is also considered. We show that the presence of two grain sizes can increase the efficiency of the linear growth of drag-driven instability in the protoplanetary discs. A second dust phase with a small mass, comparing to the first dust phase, would reduce the growth timescale even by a factor of two or more especially when its coupling to the gas is weak. It means that once a certain amount of large dust particles form, even though it is much smaller than that of small dust particles, the dust layer becomes more unstable and dust clumping are accelerated. Thus, presence of dust particles with various sizes must be considered in studies of dust clumping in protoplanetary discs where both large and small dust grains are present.