Ionisation Chemistry in the Inner Disc

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• Morgan Williams [Imperial College London]
• Monday 19 May 2025, 14:00-15:00
• MR14 DAMTP and online.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Samuel Turner.

In the inner regions of protoplanetary discs, ionisation chemistry controls the fluid viscosity, and is thus key to understanding various accretion, outflow and planet formation processes. The ionisation is driven by thermal and non-thermal processes in the gas phase, as well as by dust-gas interactions that lead to grain charging and ionic and thermionic emission from grain surfaces. The latter dust–gas interactions are moreover a strong function of the grain size distribution. Previous chemical networks, including these chemical processes, did not accurately capture this dependence on the grain size distribution. In this talk, I will explain how our network – which explicitly includes a distribution of grains, at minimal extra computational cost – shows that chemical abundances (and thus resistivities) may vary by orders of magnitude for a reasonable set of dust distributions. Furthermore, I will illustrate how the charge derived on the surface of the grains is expected to severely hinder collisions between these grains in the inner disc – an important effect to be included in solving the Smoluchowski equation, governing the growth and fragmentation of grains. Finally, I will show the progress we have made towards developing 2D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations of the inner disc, including: multi-species (gas + dust distribution) hydrodynamics, radiation transport, our self-consistent chemistry, MHD resistivities and charge-dependent fragmentation and coagulation of grains.

This talk is part of the DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars series.

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