Effective reaction temperatures of irreversible dust chemical reactions in a protoplanetary disk

TL;DR

This study develops semi-analytical formulas to estimate effective reaction temperatures of dust in protoplanetary disks, based on Monte Carlo simulations, and applies them to understand silicate dust crystallization and isotope exchange.

Contribution

The paper introduces new formulas for predicting effective reaction temperatures and their dispersions in dust, validated against simulations, enhancing understanding of dust chemistry in disks.

Findings

Effective reaction temperature distribution follows a log-normal pattern.

Formulas predict temperatures within 5.5-24% accuracy across 200-1400 K.

Silicate dust can efficiently exchange oxygen isotopes at lower temperatures than crystallization.

Abstract

Dust particles in protoplanetary disks experience various chemical reactions under different physicochemical conditions through their accretion and diffusion, which results in the radial chemical gradient of dust. We performed three-dimensional Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the dust trajectories and the progress of fictitious irreversible reactions, of which kinetics is expressed by the Johnson-Mehl-Avrami equation. The distribution of the highest temperature that each particle experiences before the degree of reaction exceeds a certain level shows the log-normal distribution, and its mode temperature was used as the effective reaction temperature. Semi-analytical prediction formulas of the effective reaction temperature and its dispersion were derived by comparing a reaction timescale with a diffusive transport timescale of dust as a function of the reaction parameters and the disk parameters. The formulas reproduce the numerical results of the effective reaction temperatures and their dispersions within 5.5 and 24 %, respectively, in a wide temperature range (200-1400 K). We applied the formulas for the crystallization of amorphous silicate dust and its oxygen isotope exchange with the H2O vapor based on the experimentally determined kinetics. For sub-micron sized amorphous forsterite dust, the predicted effective reaction temperature for the oxygen isotope exchange was lower than that of crystallization without overlap even considering their dispersions. This suggests that the amorphous silicate dust in the protosolar disk could exchange their oxygen isotopes efficiently with the 16O-poor H2O vapor, resulting in the distinct oxygen isotope compositions from the Sun.