Cottrell Fellowship: Distorted Accretion Disks: The Restless Environments of Planet-Forming Systems

Most of the computational efforts in accretion disk simulations have focused on local effects or in “adding more physics” to the equations of motion. Nevertheless, we still have a limited understanding of disk evolution under global effects such as large-scale warping and eccentricity. Disk distortions are difficult to simulate directly because (i) even state-of-the- art simulation codes often struggle with significant departures from the ideal axisymmetric disk morphology; and (ii) because these distortions evolve on timescales that, while shorter than the lifetime of disks, are much longer that the duration of most simulations, which makes them a very difficult computational problem. I will address (i) by using cutting-edge, coordinate-independent hydrodynamical simulations (Mun˜oz et al. 2013; Mun˜oz et al. 2014) using my expanded version of the Lagrangian-Eulerian scheme AREPO (Springel 2010). I will bridge the timescale gap (ii) by informing my simulations with perturbation theory, which allows us to study the evolution of warps and eccentricities analytically (Mun˜oz & Lithwick 2020). In the following, I lay out my plan to quantify the effects of distortion on the evolution of accre- tion disks, with a focus on planet formation, but with broad implications to disks in general. Using a novel multi-pronged approach, I will study warped and eccentric disks via theoretical calculations and hydrodynamical simulations. In addition, I will process the results of my models with radiative transfer calculations, to produce astronomical images directly comparable to observations.