Chen, Kan; (2025) Concertos of planet-disk interactions: thermal and kinematic fingerprints. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Planets form in protoplanetary disks, where interactions with their natal environments shape disk evolution and leave observable signatures. High-resolution observations over the past decade have revealed substructures such as gaps, rings, and non-Keplerian motions, often linked to forming planets. My research explores planet-disk interactions and thermal and kinematic imprints on disks. We develop a novel iterative modeling framework combining 2D hydrodynamical and 3D radiative transfer simulations to study how gap-opening by giant planets alters disk thermal structures. Our results show that such planets carve deep gaps and significantly heat the surrounding regions by several tens of Kelvin. This temperature rise shifts volatile ice lines outward and can create multiple ice lines for a single species, influencing disk chemistry (e.g., the C/O ratio) and subsequent planet composition. Incorporating multiple dust species into our iterative models, we find temperature deviations similar to the gas-only cases. Dust rings created by pressure bumps can cool by several Kelvin, forming localized freeze-out zones, although overall ice distributions remain largely unchanged. We also explore how varying the $\alpha$ viscosity affects ice line locations and find no simple one-to-one relationship in structured disks. While recent observations have detected non-Keplerian gas motions, their origins remain debated. We study planet-induced kinematic signatures using 3D simulations and synthetic channel maps. Our results show that hydrodynamical simulations need to run for $\sim$1000 orbits to reach steady state and that high resolution ($\ge$14 cells per scale height) is necessary to capture spiral features accurately, a requirement that most previous Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) or grid-based simulations do not satisfy. Our studies offer new insights into how planets shape disk structure, composition, and kinematics, enhancing our understanding of planet formation. These results also inform future observations with ALMA, NgVLA, JWST, and Ariel.

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