Polydisperse Streaming Instability II. Methods for solving the linear stability problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces advanced numerical methods for solving the linear stability problem of polydisperse streaming instability in protoplanetary discs, improving accuracy and computational efficiency over previous approaches.

Contribution

It presents novel numerical techniques, including polynomial root finding and root counting methods, for analyzing the linear stability of polydisperse streaming instability, with implementations in a Python package.

Findings

Methods reproduce and surpass previous accuracy

New techniques reduce computational cost

Benchmark results validate methods

Abstract

Occurring in protoplanetary discs composed of dust and gas, streaming instabilities are a favoured mechanism to drive the formation of planetesimals. The Polydispserse Streaming Instability is a generalisation of the Streaming Instability to a continuum of dust sizes. This second paper in the series provides a more in-depth derivation of the governing equations and presents novel numerical methods for solving the associated linear stability problem. In addition to the direct discretisation of the eigenproblem at second order introduced in the previous paper, a new technique based on numerically reducing the system of integral equations to a complex polynomial combined with root finding is found to yield accurate results at much lower computational cost. A related method for counting roots of the dispersion relation inside a contour without locating those roots is also demonstrated. Applications of these methods show they can reproduce and exceed the accuracy of previous results in the literature, and new benchmark results are provided. Implementations of the methods described are made available in an accompanying Python package psitools.