Modelling dust coagulation, dynamical drag and turbulent mixing during star and disc formation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 3D hydrodynamical simulation method combining dust coagulation, dynamical gas drag, and turbulent mixing to model early star and disc formation, revealing turbulence enhances dust growth.

Contribution

It develops an integrated SPH code that models dust growth, mixing, and migration during star and disc formation, incorporating new implicit methods for turbulence and gas drag effects.

Findings

Turbulent diffusion significantly accelerates dust grain growth.

The combined model captures dust evolution during early star formation.

Turbulence supplies small grains that promote larger grain growth.

Abstract

Planet formation in the discs around young stars involves the coagulation of sub-micron sized dust grains into much larger grains that may be mixed by turbulence and migrate through the disc. In this paper, we describe how we have combined a method for modelling the coagulation of a population of dust grains with the MULTIGRAIN algorithm for modelling the dynamical evolution of a population of dust grains that are subject to strong gas drag. We solve the dynamical evolution of the dust grains due to gas drag using a recently-developed implicit integration method, and we introduce a new implicit method to model the diffusion of the dust due to unresolved hydrodynamic turbulence. The resulting smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code allows us, for the first time, to model the growth, mixing and migration of dust grain populations during the early stages of star formation and the formation, growth and evolution of a young protoplanetary disc using three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations. In doing so, we find that including turbulent dust diffusion within the disc provides a substantial enhancement of the rate of dust grain growth due to the fact that the turbulent diffusion provides a source of small and intermediate dust grains to the regions in which the largest dust grains are growing.