Dust Rotational Dynamics in C-shocks: Rotational Disruption of Nanoparticles by Stochastic Mechanical Torques and Spinning Dust Emission

Abstract

Abstract Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and nanoparticles are expected to play an important role in many astrophysical processes due to their dominant surface area, including gas heating, chemistry, star formation, and anomalous microwave emission. In dense magnetized molecular clouds where C-shocks are present, PAHs and nanoparticles are widely believed to originate from grain shattering due to grain–grain collisions. The remaining question is whether these nanoparticles can survive in the dense and hot shocked regions, and how to constrain their size and abundance with observations. In this paper, we present a new mechanism to destroy nanoparticles in C-shocks based on centrifugal stress within rapidly spinning nanoparticles spun up by stochastic atomic bombardment, which is termed rotational disruption. We find that, due to supersonic neutral gas-charged grain drift in C-shocks, nanoparticles can be spun up to suprathermal rotation by stochastic torques exerted by supersonic neutral flow. The resulting centrifugal stress within suprathermally rotating nanoparticles can exceed the maximum tensile strength of grain material (S max), resulting in rapid disruption of nanoparticles smaller than a ∼ 1 nm for . The proposed disruption mechanism is shown to be more efficient than thermal sputtering in controlling the lower cutoff of grain size distribution in C-shocks. We model microwave emission from spinning nanoparticles in C-shocks subject to supersonic neutral drift and rotational disruption. We find that suprathermally rotating nanoparticles can emit strong microwave radiation, and both peak flux and peak frequency increase with increasing shock velocity. We suggest spinning dust as a new method to constrain nanoparticles and trace shock velocities in shocked dense regions.