Cosmic very small dust grains as a natural laboratory of mesoscopic physics: Modeling thermal and optical properties of graphite grains

TL;DR

This paper models the thermal and optical properties of cosmic graphite very small dust grains, revealing their unique emission characteristics across infrared to millimeter wavelengths due to mesoscopic effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of energy level statistics and Monte Carlo simulations to understand the thermal behavior of graphite VSGs in space.

Findings

Graphite VSGs emit from mid-infrared to millimeter wavelengths.

Irregular grain shapes enable sub-millimeter photon absorption and emission.

Thermal energy storage is limited at low temperatures due to small volume.

Abstract

Cosmic very small dust grains (VSGs) contain 100 to 10,000 atoms, making it a mesoscopic system with specific thermal and optical characteristics due to the finite number of atoms within each grain. This paper focuses on graphite VSGs which contain free electrons. The energy level statistics devised by Kubo (1962, J.Phys.Soc.Jpn., 17, 975-986) were used for the first time to understand the thermal properties of free electrons in graphite VSGs. We showed that the shape irregularity of the grains allows graphite VSGs to absorb or emit photons at sub-millimeter wavelengths or longer; otherwise, the frequency is limited to above a few THz. Additionally, we considered the decrease in Debye temperature due to the surface effect. VSGs have an extremely small volume, resulting in limited thermal energy storage, especially at low temperatures. Since a VSG is able to emit a photon with energy smaller than its internal energy, this determines the maximum frequency of the emitted photon. We developed a Monte-Carlo simulation code to track the thermal history of a dust grain, considering the stochastic heating from the absorption of ambient photons and radiative cooling. This approach was applied to the interstellar environment to compute the spectral energy distributions from the interstellar graphite dust grains. The results showed that graphite VSGs emit not only the mid-infrared excess emission, but also a surplus emission from sub-millimeter to millimeter wavelengths.