Dust Concentration at the Boundary Between Steady Super/Sub-Keplerian Flow Created by Inhomogeneous Growth of MRI

How to create planetesimals from tiny dust particles in a proto-planetary disk before the dust particles spiral to the central star is one of the most challenging problems in the theory of planetary system formation. In our previous paper Kato et al. (2009), we have shown that a steady angular velocity profile that consists of both super and sub-Keplerian regions is created in the disk through non-uniform excitation of Magneto-Rotational Instability (MRI). Such non-uniform MRI excitation is reasonably expected in a part of disks with relatively low ionization degree. In this paper, we show through three-dimensional resistive MHD simulations with test particles that this radial structure of the angular velocity indeed leads to prevention of spiral-in of dust particles and furthermore to their accumulation at the boundary of super-Keplerian and sub-Keplerian regions. Treating dust particles as test particles, their motions under the influence of the non-uniform MRI through gas drag are simulated. In the most favorable cases (meter-size dust particles in the disk region with a relatively large fraction of MRI-stable region), we found that the dust concentration is peaked around the super/sub-Keplerian flow boundary and the peak dust density is 10,000 times as high as the initial value. The peak density is high enough for the subsequent gravitational instability to set in, suggesting a possible route to planetesimal formation via non-uniformly excited MRI in weakly ionized regions of a disk.
Comment: 40 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ