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We provide simple polynomial fits to the X-ray photoelectric cross-sections (0.03 < E < 10keV) for mixtures of gas and dust found in protoplanetary disks. Using the solar elemental abundances of Asplund et al. (2009) we treat the gas and dust components separately, facilitating the further exploration evolutionary processes such as grain settling and gain growth. We find that blanketing due to advanced grain-growth (a_max > 1 micron) can reduce the X-ray opacity of dust appreciably at E_X ~ 1keV, coincident with the peak of typical T Tauri X-ray spectra. However, the reduction of dust opacity by dust settling, which is known to occur in protoplanetary disks, is probably a more significant effect. The absorption of 1-10keV X-rays is dominated by gas opacity once the dust abundance has been reduced to about 1% of its diffuse interstellar value. The gas disk establishes a floor to the opacity at which point X-ray transport becomes insensitive to further dust evolution. Our choice of fitting function follows that of Morrison & McCammon (1983), providing a degree of backward-compatibility., 34 pages, 7 figures. To be published in in ApJ

We present results from a model of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks. In our models we directly calculate the changing propagation and penetration of a high energy radiation field with Lyman alpha radiation included. We also explore the effect on our models of including dust grain settling. We find that, in agreement with earlier studies, the evolution of dust grains plays a large role in determining how deep the UV radiation penetrates into the disk. Significant grain settling at the midplane leads to much smaller freeze-out regions and a correspondingly larger molecular layer, which leads to an increase in column density for molecular species such as CO, CN and SO. The inclusion of Lyman alpha radiation impacts the disk chemistry through specific species that have large photodissociation cross sections at 1216 A. These include HCN, NH3 and CH4, for which the column densities are decreased by an order of magnitude or more due to the presence of Lyman alpha radiation in the UV spectrum. A few species, such as CO2 and SO, are enhanced by the presence of Lyman alpha radiation, but rarely by more than a factor of a few., Comment: 17 pages, 15 Figures. Accepted to ApJ

Young stars surrounded by disks with very low mass accretion rates are likely in the final stages of inner disk evolution and therefore particularly interesting to study. We present ultraviolet (UV) observations of the ~5-9 Myr old stars RECX-1 and RECX-11, obtained with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as optical and near-infrared spectroscopic observations. The two stars have similar levels of near-UV emission, although spectroscopic evidence indicates that RECX-11 is accreting and RECX-1 is not. The line profiles of Hα and He I λ10830 in RECX-11 show both broad and narrow redshifted absorption components that vary with time, revealing the complexity of the accretion flows. We show that accretion indicators commonly used to measure mass accretion rates, e.g., U-band excess luminosity or the Ca II triplet line luminosity, are unreliable for low accretors, at least in the middle K spectral range. Using RECX-1 as a template for the intrinsic level of photospheric and chromospheric emission, we determine an upper limit of 3 × 10^(–10) M_☉ yr–1 for RECX-11. At this low accretion rate, recent photoevaporation models predict that an inner hole should have developed in the disk. However, the spectral energy distribution of RECX-11 shows fluxes comparable to the median of Taurus in the near-infrared, indicating that substantial dust remains. Fluorescent H2 emission lines formed in the innermost disk are observed in RECX-11, showing that gas is present in the inner disk, along with the dust.

We study the role resonant scattering plays in the transport of Lyman-alpha photons in accreting protoplanetary disk systems subject to varying degrees of dust settling. While the intrinsic stellar FUV spectrum of accreting T Tauri systems may already be dominated by a strong, broad Lyman-alpha line (~80% of the FUV luminosity), we find that resonant scattering further enhances the Lyman-alpha density in the deep molecular layers of the disk. Lyman-alpha is scattered downwards efficiently by the photodissociated atomic hydrogen layer that exists above the molecular disk. In contrast, FUV-continuum photons pass unimpeded through the photodissociation layer, and (forward-)scatter inefficiently off dust grains. Using detailed, adaptive grid Monte Carlo radiative transfer simulations we show that the resulting Lyman-alpha/FUV-continuum photon density ratio is strongly stratified; FUV-continuum dominated in the photodissociation layer, and Lyman-alpha dominated field in the molecular disk. The enhancement is greatest in the interior of the disk (r~1AU) but is also observed in the outer disk (r~100AU). The majority of the total disk mass is shown to be increasingly Lyman-alpha dominated as dust settles towards the midplane.