Related papers: Electric Dipole Radiation from Spinning Dust Grain…
Nine lectures reviewing the astrophysics of dust in interstellar clouds. Topics include: (1) Summary of observational evidence concerning interstellar dust: broadband extinction, scattering of starlight, polarization of starlight,…
Polarized microwave emission from dust is an important foreground that may contaminate polarized CMB studies unless carefully accounted for. We discuss potential difficulties associated with this foreground, namely, the existence of…
Context. Anomalous microwave emission (AME) is a component of interstellar medium emission peaking at 10-60 GHz. Its polarization is both a CMB foreground and a probe of the alignment physics of very small dust grains. Aims. We quantify…
We present a comprehensive treatment of the spectrum of electric dipole emission from spinning dust grains, updating the commonly used model of Draine and Lazarian. Grain angular velocity distributions are computed using the Fokker-Planck…
The degree to which interstellar grains align with respect to the interstellar magnetic field depends on disaligning as well as aligning mechanisms. For decades, it was assumed that disalignment was due primarily to the random angular…
Nearly twenty years after the discovery of anomalous microwave emission (AME) that contaminates to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, its origin remains inconclusive. Observational results from numerous experiments have…
The optical and magnetic properties of dust grains are reviewed, as they relate to the problem of interstellar grain alignment. Grain geometry plays an important role in determining the optical properties, and scattering and absorption of…
Spinning dust grains in front of the bright Galactic synchrotron background can produce a weak absorption signal that could affect measurements of high redshift 21 cm absorption. At frequencies near 80 MHz where the EDGES experiment has…
We argue that impact velocities between dust grains with sizes less than $\sim 0.1$ $\mu m$ in molecular cloud cores are dominated by drift arising from ambipolar diffusion. This effect is due to the size dependence of the dust coupling to…
Aligned grains present a foreground for cosmic microwave emission studies. We review basic physical processes involved in grain alignment and discuss the niches for different alignment mechanisms. We show that mechanisms which were favored…
Electric dipole emission arising from PAHs is often invoked to explain the anomalous microwave emission (AME). This assignation is based on an observed tight correlation between the mid-IR emission of PAHs and the AME; and a good agreement…
The quantization of energy levels in very nanoparticles suppresses dissipative processes that convert grain rotational kinetic energy into heat. For grains small enough to have GHz rotation rates, the suppression of dissipation can be…
The interaction of dust grains originating from the local interstellar cloud with the environment inside the heliosphere is investigated. As a consequence of this interaction the spatial distribution of interstellar dust grains changes with…
We present a new puzzle involving Galactic microwave emission and attempt to resolve it. On one hand, a cross-correlation analysis of the WHAM H-alpha map with the Tenerife 10 and 15 GHz maps shows that the well-known DIRBE correlated…
Interstellar medium is turbulent and this induces relative motions of dust grains. We calculate relative velocities of charged grains in a partially ionized magnetized gas. We account for anisotropy of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence,…
We have calculated the radiation field, dust grain temperatures, and far infrared emissivity of numerical models of turbulent molecular clouds. When compared to a uniform cloud of the same mean optical depth, most of the volume inside the…
In a previous work, Hoang and Tram discovered a new mechanism for destruction of nanoparticles due to suprathermal rotation of grains in stationary C-shocks, which is termed rotational disruption. In this paper, we extend our previous study…
Our current understanding of interstellar dust is summarized at an introductory level. Submicron-sized interstellar dust grains absorb and scatter light, and reradiate the absorbed energy in the infrared. The grain population spans a range…
Outflows of pre-main-sequence stars drive shocks into molecular material within 0.01 - 1 pc of the young stars. The shock-heated gas emits infrared, millimeter and submillimeter lines of many species including. Dust grains are important…
Anomalous microwave emission (AME) is an important Galactic foreground of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It is believed that the AME arises from rotational emission by spinning polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in the…