Barnett Relaxation in Thermally-Rotating Grains

Details Barnett Relaxation in Thermally-Rotating Grains Barnett Relaxation in Thermally-Rotating Grains

1997-02-16

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9702138v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

17 pages, 5 figures. Accepted to ApJ.

Scientific paper

10.1086/304309

We present an exact formulation of the physics of Barnett relaxation. Our formulation is based on a realistic kinetic model of the relaxation mechanism which includes the alignment of the grain angular momentum in body coordinates by Barnett dissipation, disalignment by thermal fluctuations, and coupling of the angular momentum to the gas via gas damping. We solve the Fokker-Planck equation for the measure of internal alignment using numerical integration of the equivalent Langevin equation for Brownian rotation. The accuracy of our results is calibrated by comparing our numerical solutions with exact analytic results obtained for special cases.We describe an analytic approximation for the measure of alignment which fits our numerical results for cases of practical interest.

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