N. Patra^1,3, P. Král^1,2 and H. R. Sadeghpour³

¹Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA
²Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA
³ITAMP, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA

We study the conditions under which carbon clusters of different sizes form and stabilize. We describe the approach to equilibrium by simulating tenuous carbon gas dynamics to long times. First, we use reactive molecular dynamics simulations to describe the nucleation of long chains, large clusters, and complex cage structures in carbon- and hydrogen-rich interstellar gas phases. We study how temperature, particle density, the presence of hydrogen, and carbon inflow affect the nucleation of molecular moieties with different characteristics, in accordance with astrophysical conditions. We extend the simulations to densities that are orders of magnitude lower than current laboratory densities, to temperatures that are relevant to circumstellar environments of planetary nebulae, and microsecond formation times. We correlate cluster size distributions from the simulations with thermodynamic equilibrium at low temperatures and gas densities, where entropy plays a significant role.

Reference
Patra N, Král P and Sadeghpour HR (2014) Nucleation and Stabilization of Carbon-rich Structures in Interstellar Media. The Astrophysical Journal 785:6.
[doi:10.1088/0004-637X/785/1/6]

Link to Article