The dynamics of charged dust in magnetized molecular clouds

Abstract

We study the dynamics of large, charged dust grains in turbulent giant molecular clouds (GMCs). Massive dust grains behave as aerodynamic particles in primarily neutral dense gas, and thus are able to produce dramatic small-scale fluctuations in the dust-to-gas ratio. Hopkins & Lee directly simulated the dynamics of neutral dust grains in supersonic magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, typical of GMCs, and showed that the dust-to-gas fluctuations can exceed factor ∼1000 on small scales, with important implications for star formation, stellar abundances and dust behaviour and growth. However, even in primarily neutral gas in GMCs, dust grains are negatively charged and Lorentz forces are non-negligible. Therefore, we extend our previous study by including the effects of Lorentz forces on charged grains (in addition to drag). For small-charged grains (sizes ≪ 0.1 μm), Lorentz forces suppress dust-to-gas ratio fluctuations, while for large grains (sizes ≳ 1 μm), Lorentz forces have essentially no effect, trends that are well explained with a simple theory of dust magnetization. In some special intermediate cases, Lorentz forces can enhance dust–gas segregation. Regardless, for the physically expected scaling of dust charge with grain size, we find the most important effects depend on grain size (via the drag equation) with Lorentz forces/charge as a second-order correction. We show that the dynamics we consider are determined by three dimensionless numbers in the limit of weak background magnetic fields: the turbulent Mach number, a dust drag parameter (proportional to grain size) and a dust Lorentz parameter (proportional to grain charge); these allow us to generalize our simulations to a wide range of conditions.