TY - JOUR
T1 - Short Circuits in Thermally Ionized Plasmas
T2 - A Mechanism for Intermittent Heating of Protoplanetary Disks
AU - Hubbard, A.
AU - McNally, Colin Powel
AU - Mac Low, M.M.
PY - 2012/12/10
Y1 - 2012/12/10
N2 - Many astrophysical systems of interest, including protoplanetary accretion disks, are made of turbulent magnetized gas with near-solar metallicity. Thermal ionization of alkali metals in such gas exceeds non-thermal ionization when temperatures climb above roughly 1000 K. As a result, the conductivity, proportional to the ionization fraction, gains a strong, positive dependence on temperature. In this paper, we demonstrate that this relation between the temperature and the conductivity triggers an exponential instability that acts similarly to an electrical short, where the increased conductivity concentrates the current and locally increases the Ohmic heating. This contrasts with the resistivity increase expected in an ideal magnetic reconnection region. The instability acts to focus narrow current sheets into even narrower sheets with far higher currents and temperatures. We lay out the basic principles of this behavior in this paper using protoplanetary disks as our example host system, motivated by observations of chondritic meteorites and their ancestors, dust grains in protoplanetary disks, that reveal the existence of strong, frequent heating events that this instability could explain.
AB - Many astrophysical systems of interest, including protoplanetary accretion disks, are made of turbulent magnetized gas with near-solar metallicity. Thermal ionization of alkali metals in such gas exceeds non-thermal ionization when temperatures climb above roughly 1000 K. As a result, the conductivity, proportional to the ionization fraction, gains a strong, positive dependence on temperature. In this paper, we demonstrate that this relation between the temperature and the conductivity triggers an exponential instability that acts similarly to an electrical short, where the increased conductivity concentrates the current and locally increases the Ohmic heating. This contrasts with the resistivity increase expected in an ideal magnetic reconnection region. The instability acts to focus narrow current sheets into even narrower sheets with far higher currents and temperatures. We lay out the basic principles of this behavior in this paper using protoplanetary disks as our example host system, motivated by observations of chondritic meteorites and their ancestors, dust grains in protoplanetary disks, that reveal the existence of strong, frequent heating events that this instability could explain.
U2 - 10.1088/0004-637X/761/1/58
DO - 10.1088/0004-637X/761/1/58
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 761
SP - 58
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 1
ER -