Enhanced Erosion of Carbon Grains in a Hot Plasma

Details Enhanced Erosion of Carbon Grains in a Hot Plasma Enhanced Erosion of Carbon Grains in a Hot Plasma

Dec 2001

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agufm.p22c..03b&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #P22C-03

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

2116 Energetic Particles, Planetary, 2129 Interplanetary Dust, 5465 Rings And Dust, 6213 Dust, 7851 Shock Waves

Scientific paper

Grain creation and survival plays an important role in the overall mass balance, ionization state, and chemistry in the interstellar medium (ISM), in the early solar nebula and in the giant planet magnetospheres. Grain erosion by a high temperature plasma or in a shocked gas depends strongly on the values of the sputtering yield, Y. For instance, Draine [1] considered an energy dependence for Y extrapolated from high energy data and calculated a fractional erosion of less than 1% for a grain which encounters a shocked gas moving with a velocity vo < 90 km/s). Since carbon grains rapidly become hydrogenated in a space environment, we present new data based on accurate simulations for the sputtering of hydrogenated carbon surfaces [2]. The yield is larger at low velocities and is found to have a lower threshold for sputter erosion due to chemical sputtering effects. Here we present results of two sets of calculations. First we use the Draine model for erosion of a grain in a shock as in Jurac et al [3], but change the energy dependence of the sputtering yield based on our new simulation data. This leads to a grain destruction rate which is much larger than Draine's estimate. This worsens the problem of grain destruction in the ISM, which is already larger than currently accepted grain formation rates. Second we give the erosion rates vs. plasma temperature for such grains in a stationery plasma. These data can now be used for modeling grain erosion in the early solar system, in the solar wind or in a trapped plasma in a planetary magnetosphere. [1] B.T. Draine, Astrophys. Space Sci. 233, 111 (1995).\newline [2] E. Salonen et {al}, Phys. Rev. B 63, 195415 (2001).\newline [3] S. Jurac, R.E. Johnson and B. Donn, Astrophys. J. 503, 247 (1998).

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