Heating and cooling processes in disks

Abstract

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7-2011 under grant agreement no 284405. 10th Lecture from Summer School “Protoplanetary Disks: Theory and Modelling Meet Observations”This chapter summarises current theoretical concepts and methods to determine the gas temperature structure in protoplanetary disks by balancing all relevant heating and cooling rates. The processes considered are non-LTE line heating/cooling based on the escape probability method, photo-ionisation heating and recombination cooling, free-free heating/cooling, dust thermal accommodation and high-energy heating processes such as X-ray and cosmic ray heating, dust photoelectric and PAH heating, a number of particular follow-up heating processes starting with the UV excitation of H2, and the release of binding energy in exothermal reactions. The resulting thermal structure of protoplanetary disks is described and discussed.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe