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Main Authors: Dang, Yixuan, Cui, Can, Barraza-Alfaro, Marcelo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15414
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author Dang, Yixuan
Cui, Can
Barraza-Alfaro, Marcelo
author_facet Dang, Yixuan
Cui, Can
Barraza-Alfaro, Marcelo
contents The vertical shear instability (VSI) is a promising mechanism to drive turbulence in protoplanetary disks. Numerical simulations in the literature demonstrate that the VSI non-linear saturation is predominated by the linear corrugation modes. These modes possess vertical wavelengths crucially longer than radial wavelengths. This paper aims to investigate the natural radial wavelength of corrugation modes upon VSI saturation, by a series of numerical simulations conducted in Athena++ at different grid resolutions, disk aspect ratios, and viscosity parameterized by $ν$. We find a sign of convergence emerges at 64 cells per gas scale height for fiducial simulations, below which a continuous reduction of wavelengths with grid resolution is observed. Synthetic ALMA molecular line observations of $^{12}\rm CO(2-1)$ are performed to inspect the observability of the corrugation modes feature, which is significantly diminished with more than 32 cells per scale height. Flared and viscous disks, exhibiting longer saturation wavelengths, may mitigate the observational difficulty.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_15414
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On corrugation mode radial wavelengths of the vertical shear instability
Dang, Yixuan
Cui, Can
Barraza-Alfaro, Marcelo
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
The vertical shear instability (VSI) is a promising mechanism to drive turbulence in protoplanetary disks. Numerical simulations in the literature demonstrate that the VSI non-linear saturation is predominated by the linear corrugation modes. These modes possess vertical wavelengths crucially longer than radial wavelengths. This paper aims to investigate the natural radial wavelength of corrugation modes upon VSI saturation, by a series of numerical simulations conducted in Athena++ at different grid resolutions, disk aspect ratios, and viscosity parameterized by $ν$. We find a sign of convergence emerges at 64 cells per gas scale height for fiducial simulations, below which a continuous reduction of wavelengths with grid resolution is observed. Synthetic ALMA molecular line observations of $^{12}\rm CO(2-1)$ are performed to inspect the observability of the corrugation modes feature, which is significantly diminished with more than 32 cells per scale height. Flared and viscous disks, exhibiting longer saturation wavelengths, may mitigate the observational difficulty.
title On corrugation mode radial wavelengths of the vertical shear instability
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.15414