Related papers: Lonely adatoms in space
Gas-grain and gas-phase reactions dominate the formation of molecules in the interstellar medium (ISM). Gas-grain reactions require a substrate (e.g. a dust or ice grain) on which the reaction is able to occur. The formation of molecular…
A study of a reacting boundary layer flow with heat transfer at conditions typical for configurations at elevated pressures has been performed using a set of direct numerical simulations. Effects of wall temperatures are investigated,…
At very fine grain sizes, grain boundary segregation can deviate from conventional behavior due to triple junction effects. While this issue has been addressed in prior work for substitutional alloys, here we develop a framework that…
Reionization is inhomogeneous for two reasons: the clumpiness of the intergalactic medium (IGM) and clustering of the discrete ionizing sources. While numerical simulations can in principle take both into account, they are at present…
The study of the formation of molecular hydrogen on low temperature surfaces is of interest both because it allows to explore elementary steps in the heterogeneous catalysis of a simple molecule and because of the applications in…
We investigate the role of thermal fluctuations and of the finite number of monomers in small clusters of carbon atoms on the nucleation rate of carbonaceous grains. Thermal fluctuations are due to the quantized nature of the energy…
We have studied deuterium fractionation on interstellar grains with the use of an exact method known as the direct master equation approach. We consider conditions pertinent to dense clouds at late times when the hydrogen is mostly in…
In spite of accounting for only a small fraction of the mass of the Interstellar Medium (ISM), dust plays a primary role in many physical and chemical processes in the Universe. It is the main driver of extinction of radiation in the…
The majority of hydrogen in the interstellar medium (ISM) is in atomic form. The transition from atoms to molecules and, in particular, the formation of the H$_2$ molecule, is a key step in cosmic structure formation en route to stars.…
Understanding the evolution of dust and molecular hydrogen (H$_2$) is a critical aspect of galaxy evolution, as they affect star formation and the spectral energy distribution of galaxies. We use the $N$-body/smoothed-particle-hydrodynamics…
The basic physics of nucleation in solid \hl{single-crystal} nanoparticles is revealed by a phase-field theory that includes surface energy, chemical reactions and coherency strain. In contrast to binary fluids, which form arbitrary contact…
Although still poorly understood, the chemistry that occurs on the surfaces of interstellar dust particles profoundly affects the growth of molecules in the interstellar medium. An important set of surface reactions produces icy mantles of…
The discrepancies in different measurements of the lifetime of isolated neutrons could be resolved by considering an extra neutron decay channel into dark matter, with a branching ratio of the order of $O(1$\%). Although the decay channel…
Molecules in space are synthesized via a large variety of gas-phase reactions, and reactions on dust-grain surfaces, where the surface acts as a catalyst. Especially, saturated, hydrogen-rich molecules are formed through surface chemistry.…
Grain growth by accretion of gas-phase metals is a common assumption in models of dust evolution, but in dense gas, where the timescale is short enough for accretion to be effective, material is accreted in the form of ice mantles rather…
Surface tension of small grains and droplets makes them stable only at a much lower temperature than in bulk. This makes spontaneous nucleation unfavorable in many cases. Kinetic approaches are delicate in that one can easily generate…
We present observational evidences that dust in the circumnuclear region of AGNs has different properties than in the Galactic diffuse interstellar medium. By comparing the reddening of optical and infrared broad lines and the X-ray…
Meta-stable dark sector particles decaying into electrons or photons may non-trivially change the Hubble rate, lead to entropy injection into the thermal bath of Standard Model particles and may also photodisintegrate light nuclei formed in…
The process of recombination for the hydrogen atom in the heat bath creating the blackbody radiation is descibed within the frameworks of quantum electrodynamics. For this purpose the self-energy for unbound electron in the field of the…
Variations in the grain size distribution are to be expected in the interstellar medium (ISM) due to grain growth and destruction. In this work, we present a dust collision model to be implemented inside a magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) code…