Dust Clumping in Outer Protoplanetary Disks: The Interplay among Four Instabilities

Abstract Dust concentration in protoplanetary disks (PPDs) is the first step toward planetesimal formation, a crucial yet highly uncertain stage in planet formation. Although the streaming instability (SI) is widely recognized as a powerful mechanism for planetesimal formation, its properties can be sensitive to the gas dynamical environment. The outer region of PPDs is subject to the vertical shear instability (VSI), which could further induce the Rossby wave instability (RWI) to generate numerous vortices. In this work, we use the multifluid dust module in Athena++ to perform a 3D global simulation with mesh refinement to achieve an adequate domain size and resolution to resolve and accommodate all these instabilities. The VSI mainly governs the overall gas dynamics, which are dominated by the breathing mode due to dust mass loading. The dust strongly settles to the midplane layer, which is much more densely populated with small vortices compared to the dust-free case. Strong dust clumping is observed, which is likely owing to the joint action of the SI and dusty RWI, and those sufficient for planetesimal formation reside only in a small fraction of such vortices. Dust clumping becomes stronger with increasing resolution, and has not yet achieved numerical convergence in our exploration. In addition, we find evidence of the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability operating at certain parts of the dust–gas interface, which may contribute to the temporary destruction of dust clumps.