Toroidal vortices as a solution to the dust migration problem

Abstract

PublishedJournal Article© 2016 The Authors.In an earlier letter, we reported that dust settling in protoplanetary discs may lead to a dynamical dust-gas instability that produces global toroidal vortices. In this Letter, we investigate the evolution of a dusty protoplanetary disc with two different dust species (1 mm and 50 cm dust grains), under the presence of the instability. We show how toroidal vortices, triggered by the interaction of mm grains with the gas, stop the radial migration of metre-sized dust, potentially offering a natural and efficient solution to the dust migration problem.The figures were created using SPLASH (Price 2007), an SPH visualization tool publicly available at http://users.monash.edu.au/∼dprice/splash. This Letter was supported by the STFC consolidated grant ST/J001627/1, and by the European Research Council under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013 grant agreement no. 339248). This Letter used the DiRAC Complexity system, operated by the University of Leicester IT Services, which forms part of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). This equipment is funded by BIS National E-Infrastructure capital grant ST/K000373/1 and STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/K0003259/1. DiRAC is part of the National E-Infrastructure. This Letter also used the University of Exeter Supercomputer, a DiRAC Facility jointly funded by STFC, the Large Facilities Capital Fund of BIS and the University of Exeter