学术报告—Planet Formation in a Polarized View

报告摘要：

(Sub)millimeter disk polarization is an exciting new field of research that has been revolutionized by ALMA. In contrast to its canonical picture, the polarization on the disk scale revealed does not come from magnetic fields but mostly from scattering. This scattering-induced polarization is very sensitive to the sizes of dust grains and local radiation fields. It is a powerful tool for studying grain growth and dust settling. I will discuss how the polarization signatures depends on the dust scale height and present detailed modeling on protoplanetary disks and constraints on the dust settling. Theoretically, the large (mm-sized) grains in protoplanetary disks cannot be aligned by magnetic fields due to their long Larmor precision timescale and short gas-damping timescale, which agrees with ALMA’s non-detection of magnetic fields. The magnetic alignment conditions are much better in the disk atmosphere, inhabited by micron-sized dust grains. We propose a brand-new method to probe magnetic fields using the near-IR polarimetry. Last but not the least, I will introduce our recent development of a Neural-Network aided GPU MCRT code to solve scattering by large aligned dust grains.

报告人简介：

Haifeng Yang is currently a Tenure-track Research professor at Zhejiang University. He got his bachelor from Peking University and Ph.D. from University of Virginia. He worked at Institute for Advanced Study at Tsinghua University from 2018 to 2021, followed by a Boya fellow at Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics from 2021 to 2024. His works focus on protoplanetary disks and planet formation, using (sub)millimeter wavelength polarimetric observations, radiation transfer simulations, and magnetohydrodynamic simulations.