event
Tuesday 20 Mar 2018: [Seminar} Dust dynamics in protoplanetary discs
Dr. Min-Kai Lin - Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Physics 4th Floor 11:30-12:30
Planets are built from planetesimals, themselves built from small dust grains in gaseous protoplanetary discs. Understanding how small grains interact with the gas flow is a fundamental to any planet formation theory. However, coupling gas dynamics and solids is a challenging problem for both analytical and numerical calculations. In this talk, I present a novel framework to study dusty-gas interaction in protoplanetary discs. I describe how this problem is analogous to pure gas dynamics with heating and cooling. It is thus possible to understand dusty-gas dynamics in the language of standard, textbook hydrodynamics. I will demonstrate several applications of this framework, including the streaming instability for planetesimal formation, dust-trapping by pressure bumps, dust-settling with and without turbulence, and dust-rich disk-planet interaction. I will also discuss how this framework can be exploited to find new phenomena in dusty protoplanetary discs.
