Analysis of Methods for Computing the Trajectories of Dust Particles in a Gas-Dust Circumstellar Disk

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes computational methods for dust particle trajectories in gas-dust circumstellar disks, focusing on stability, accuracy, and efficiency for particles strongly coupled to the gas, and introduces fast, stable algorithms applicable across particle sizes.

Contribution

It presents new fast, first-order accurate methods for computing dust trajectories that avoid timestep restrictions due to gas drag, with analysis of their stability and errors in astrophysical disk conditions.

Findings

Stable methods can produce large velocity errors if timestep exceeds stopping time.

Asymptotic approximation yields a relative error proportional to St^2 in radial velocity.

Fast methods enable accurate simulations without restrictive timestep constraints.

Abstract

A systematic analysis of methods for computing the trajectories of solid-phase particles applied in modern astrophysics codes designed for modeling gas-dust circumstellar disks has been carried out for the first time. The motion of grains whose velocities are determined mainly by the gas drag, that is, for which the stopping time or relaxation time for the velocity of the dust to the velocity of the gas t_{stop} is less than or comparable to the rotation period, are considered. The methods are analyzed from the point of view of their stability for computing the motions of small bodies, including dust grains less than 1 micron, which are strongly coupled to the gas. Two test problems are with analytical solutions. Fast first order accurate methods that make it possible to avoid additional restriction on the time step due to gas drag in computations of the motion of grains of any size are presented. For the conditions of a circumstellar disks, the error in the velocity computations obtained when using some stable methods become unacceptably large when the time step size \tau>t_{stop}. For the radial migration of bodies that exhibit drifts along nearly Keplerian orbits, an asymptotic approximation, sometimes called the short friction time approximation or drift flux model, gives a relative error for the radial velocity equals to St^2 where St is the Stokes number, the ratio of the stopping time of the body to some fraction of the rotation period (dynamical time scale) in the disk.