Enhanced Pebble Drift Across Planet-Opened Gaps in Windy Protoplanetary Disks
Abstract
When a giant planet forms in a protoplanetary disks, it carves a gap around its orbit separating the disk into two parts: inner disk and outer disk. Traditional disk accretion models, which assume material transport is driven by viscosity, reveal that the planet-induced gap acts like a filter which blocks large dust grains from flowing into the inner disk. However, there is growing evidence that material transport may be driven by magnetically-driven winds instead. By carrying out a suite of two-dimensional multi-fluid hydrodynamic simulations where wind is implemented with a parameterized model, we explored how dust filtration efficiency and the size of dust grains filtered change in disks where gas accretion is dominated by magnetically-driven winds. We found that the inward gas flow driven by the wind can enable dust to overcome the pressure bump at the outer gap edge and penetrate the planet-induced gap. The maximum size of dust grains capable of penetrating the gap increasing with the wind strength. Notably, we found that when wind is strong (mass loss rate = 1e-7 M_sun/yr), mm-sized grains can penetrate the gap opened by a multi-Jovian-mass planet. Our results suggest that magnetically driven winds can significantly enhance pebble drift and impact planet formation in the inner protoplanetary disk.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.07428,
title = {Enhanced Pebble Drift Across Planet-Opened Gaps in Windy Protoplanetary Disks},
author = {Lorraine Nicholson and Jaehan Bae},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07428},
year = {2025}
}