English

On the Grain-Modified Magnetic Diffusivities in Protoplanetary Disks

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2016-03-16 v1

Abstract

Weakly ionized protoplanetary disks (PPDs) are subject to non-ideal-magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effects including Ohmic resistivity, the Hall effect and ambipolar diffusion (AD), and the resulting magnetic diffusivities (ηO,ηH\eta_O, \eta_H and ηA\eta_A) largely control the disk gas dynamics. The presence of grains not only strongly reduces disk ionization fraction, but also modify the scalings of ηH\eta_H and ηA\eta_A with magnetic field strength. We derive analytically asymptotic expressions of ηH\eta_H and ηA\eta_A in both strong and weak field limits and show that towards strong field, ηH\eta_H can change sign (at a threshold field strength BthB_{\rm th}), mimicking a flip of field polarity, and AD is substantially reduced. Applying to PPDs, we find that when small 0.1\sim0.1 (0.010.01)μ\mum grains are sufficiently abundant [mass ratio 0.01\sim0.01 (10410^{-4})], ηH\eta_H can change sign up to 23\sim2-3 scale heights above midplane at modest field strength (plasma β100\beta\sim100) over a wide range of disk radii. Reduction of AD is also substantial towards the AD dominated outer disk and may activate the magneto-rotational instability. We further perform local non-ideal MHD simulations of the inner disk (within 10 AU) and show that with sufficiently abundant small grains, magnetic field amplification due to the Hall-shear instability saturates at very low level near the threshold field strength BthB_{\rm th}. Together with previous studies, we conclude by discussing the grain-abundance-dependent phenomenology of PPD gas dynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.07199,
  title  = {On the Grain-Modified Magnetic Diffusivities in Protoplanetary Disks},
  author = {Rui Xu and Xue-Ning Bai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07199},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

12 pages, 6 figures. submitted to ApJ

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:51:58.250Z