Context: Since circumstellar dust in debris disks is short-lived,
dust-replenishing requires the presence of a reservoir of planetesimals. These
planetesimals in the parent belt of debris disks orbit their host star and
continuously supply the disk with fine dust through their mutual collisions.
Aims: We aim to understand effects of different collisional parameters on the
observational appearance of eccentric debris disks.
Methods: The collisional evolution of selected debris disk configurations was
simulated with the numerical code ACE. Subsequently, selected observable
quantities are simulated with our newly developed code DMS. The impact of the
eccentricity, dynamical excitation, and the material strength is discussed with
respect to the grain size distribution, the spectral energy distribution, and
spatially resolved images of debris disk systems.
Results: The most recognizable features in different collisional evolutions
are as follows. First, both the increase of dynamical excitation in the
eccentric belt of the debris disk system and the decrease of the material
strength of dust particles result in a higher production rate of smaller
particles. This reduces the surface brightness differences between the
periastron and the apastron sides of the disks. For very low material
strengths, the "pericenter glow" phenomenon is reduced and eventually even
replaced by the opposite effect, the "apocenter glow". Second, it is possible
to constrain the level of collisional activity from the appearance of the disk,
for example, the wavelength-dependent apocenter-to-pericenter flux ratio.
Within the considered parameter space, the impact of the material strength on
the appearance of the disk is stronger than that of dynamical excitation of the
system. Finally, we find that the impact of the collisional parameters on the
net spectral energy distribution is weak.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A, 15 pages, 17 figure
