Dust growth, fragmentation and self-induced dust traps in PHANTOM

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new dust growth and fragmentation module for the PHANTOM SPH code, enabling simulations of dust evolution in circumstellar discs and supporting observational comparisons with ALMA.

Contribution

The paper presents a publicly available dust growth and fragmentation module integrated into PHANTOM, including tests and applications to disc simulations and synthetic observations.

Findings

Reproduction of self-induced dust trap mechanism in simulations

Detection prospects of dust traps with ALMA as bright rings

Validation of the module through typical circumstellar disc tests

Abstract

We present the implementation of a dust growth and fragmentation module in the public Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code PHANTOM. This module is made available for public use with this paper. The coagulation model considers locally monodisperse dust size distributions around single values that are carried by the SPH particles. Along with the presentation of the model, implementation and tests, we showcase growth and fragmentation in a few typical circumstellar disc simulations and revisit previous results. The module is also interfaced with the radiative transfer code MCFOST, which facilitates the comparison between simulations and ALMA observations by generating synthetic maps. Circumstellar disc simulations with growth and fragmentation reproduce the `self-induced dust trap' mechanism first proposed by Gonzalez et al., which supports its existence. Synthetic images of discs featuring this mechanism suggest it would be detectable by ALMA as a bright axisymmetric ring at several tens of au from the star. With this paper, our aim is to provide a public tool to be able to study and explore dust growth in a variety of applications related to planet formation.