Co-evolution of dust grains and protoplanetary disks

We propose a new evolutionary process of protoplanetary disks "co-evolution of dust grains and protoplanetary disks", revealed by dust-gas two-fluid non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics simulations considering the growth of dust and associated changes in magnetic resistivity. We found that the dust growth significantly affects disk evolution by changing the coupling between the gas and magnetic field. Moreover, once the dust grains sufficiently grow and the adsorption of charged particles on dust grains becomes negligible, the physical quantities (e.g., density and magnetic field) of the disk are well described by characteristic power laws. In this disk structure, the radial profile of density is steeper and the disk mass is smaller than those of the model ignoring dust growth. We analytically derive these power laws from the basic equations of non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics. The analytical power laws are determined only by observable physical quantities, e.g., central stellar mass and mass accretion rate, and do not include difficult-to-determine parameters e.g., viscous parameter $α$. Therefore, our model is observationally testable and this disk structure is expected to provide a new perspective for future studies on protostar and disk evolution.