arXiv subjects

Guillaume Laibe

Publications and source records attributed to Guillaume Laibe.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Revisiting the picture of circumbinary disc truncation

Circumbinary discs are observed to develop central cavities carved by the gravitational influence of the binary. Analytical estimates of cavity sizes predict truncation at $\sim 2 \textrm{--} 3$ binary separations, depending on the binary properties. However, numerical studies show only qualitative agreement with these predictions: cavity sizes often evolve on long timescales and can exceed substantially the analytically predicted values. In this work, we revise this paradigm, suggesting that tidal truncation in circumbinary discs responds to additional dynamical parameters that have so far been neglected. We analyse a suite of 80 numerical simulations of circumbinary discs to re-examine the physical mechanism responsible for cavity truncation and to provide a prescription for the cavity size independent of the state of evolution of the system. We find that truncation depends not only on the binary parameters $a_{\rm bin}$, $e_{\rm bin}$, and mass ratio $q$, but also on the instantaneous cavity eccentricity $e_{\rm cav}$ and the relative apsidal orientation $\varpi_{\rm bin}-\varpi_{\rm cav}$. These quantities jointly determine the pericentre of the innermost stable disc orbit $R_{\rm p}$, in a way that shares some similarities with orbital stability in the restricted three body problem. Hydrodynamical effects introduce secondary corrections, with the disc scale height $H$ and viscosity $α$ mildly shifting the cavity edge relative to the purely gravitational prediction. We introduce a semi-analytical prescription that captures these dependences for $R_{\rm p}$ and cavity semi-major axis $a_{\rm cav}$. We conclude that cavity truncation for binaries with mass ratios $q>0.05$ is a process where the instantaneous orbital properties of the disc ($e_{\rm cav}$, $\varpi_{\rm cav}$) play a fundamental role and should be taken into account to accurately evaluate the truncation efficiency.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2026

Full one-fluid dusty gas with multiple grain species in SPH

We present a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) implementation of the full one-fluid dusty gas algorithm for multiple dust species, generalising our previous terminal velocity approach to handle arbitrary drag regimes. By construction, mass, momentum, angular momentum, and energy are all conserved. We benchmark our method against a suite of tests -- DUSTYBOX, DUSTYWAVE, DUSTYSHOCK, DUSTYSETTLE, and DUSTYDISC -- each probing different aspects of the algorithm. Compared to the terminal velocity approximation, the full one-fluid approach incurs a computational cost increase of a factor of five to ten due to the added overhead of evolving the differential velocities and solving the drag terms implicitly. However, it accurately recovers analytic behaviour in regimes where the terminal velocity approximation fails. In such cases, errors from the terminal velocity approximation accumulate and propagate to other dust phases. We show that the stopping-time limiter commonly used in the terminal velocity approximation for numerical stability can substantially affect simulations containing large grains (Stokes numbers $\gtrsim 1$). While disabling the limiter leads to different outcomes, the discrepancy with the full one-fluid solution remains comparable, underscoring the importance of using a more general formulation for large grains. The full one-fluid formalism may be useful when including processes such as coagulation and fragmentation, where accurate treatment of large grains becomes essential. While the inability to model orbit-crossing dust trajectories remains a key limitation of the one-fluid formalism, this may eventually be addressed through the introduction of an effective dust pressure, mirroring how fluid models encapsulate microscopic velocity dispersion in gases.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2026

Rescaling Transforms for Local Models of Spherical Flows

Previously we developed a local model for a spherically contracting/expanding gas cloud that can be used to study turbulence and small scale instabilities in such flows. In this work we generalise the super-comoving variables used in studies of cosmological structure formation to our local spherical flow model, which make it significantly easier to derive analytical solutions and analyse the interactions of more complex flows with the background. We show that a wide class of solutions to the local spherical flow model can be obtained via a mapping from the corresponding solutions in regular Cartesian flows. The rescaling of time in the transformation results in a modification of the linear instabilities that can occur in spherical flows, causing them to have a time dependent growth rate in the physical time coordinate, and can prevent slower instabilities from operating. Finally, we show that the small scale flows in isotropic contraction/expansion can be mapped directly to Cartesian, inviscid, incompressible hydrodynamics, meaning that one expects a form of rescaled Kolmogorov-turbulence at the small scale of isotropically contracting/expanding flows.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Radial modes of pressure bumps and dips in astrophysical discs

This study investigates the signatures of pressure extrema on global oscillations in discs. To this end, we use the framework of wave topology to establish a generalised local dispersion relation that includes pressure gradients. We highlight the influence of a previously unrecognized epicyclic-acoustic frequency and derive an analytical criterion for the existence of a branch of modes transiting between the inertial and the pressure bands. We find that pressure extrema consist of wave guides in which such topological modes propagate. The fundamental mode trapped at a pressure bump can propagate at all frequencies, allowing it to resonate with any temporal forcing, while the mode associated with a pressure gap propagates at a fixed frequency, propagates with arbitrary vertical phase velocity. These specific features make them attractive candidates for future discoseismology.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2025

A core-sensitive mixed $f$/$g$ mode of the Sun predicted by wave topology and hydrodynamical simulation

Helioseismology has revolutionized our understanding of the Sun by analyzing its global oscillation modes. However, the solar core remains elusive, limiting a full understanding of its evolution. In this work, we study a previously unnoticed global oscillation mode of the Sun using a fully compressible, hydrodynamical simulation of the solar interior, and assess that it is a mixed $f$/$g$ mode with a period of about one hour. This is the first global stellar hydrodynamics simulation that successfuly couple compressible and gravity modes. To understand this coupling, we invoke a recent theory on the nature of $f$-modes seen through the prism of wave topology, characterizing their ability to propagate deep into stellar interiors. We demonstrate that the mixed $f$/$g$ mode is highly sensitive to the core's rotation rate, providing a new promising pathway to explore the Sun's core.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

The importance of Berry phase in solar acoustic modes

An analytic expression for the frequencies of standing waves in stars, applicable to any radial order n, is derived from ray-tracing equations by the mean of Wigner-Weyl calculus. A correction to previous formulas currently employed in asteroseismology is identified as the Berry phase, which accounts for the vectorial nature of wave propagation in stars. Accounting for this quantity significantly improves upon previous laws for low n modes of the Sun, and we show that the Berry phase is indeed present in the available observational data of solar modes. This phase is due to inhomogeneities of the medium.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

The Shamrock code: I- Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics on GPUs

We present Shamrock, a performance portable framework developed in C++17 with the SYCL programming standard, tailored for numerical astrophysics on Exascale architectures. The core of Shamrock is an accelerated parallel tree with negligible construction time, whose efficiency is based on binary algebra. The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics algorithm of the Phantom code is implemented in Shamrock. On-the-fly tree construction circumvents the necessity for extensive data communications. In tests displaying a uniform density with global timesteping with tens of billions of particles, Shamrock completes a single time step in a few seconds using over the thousand of GPUs of a super-computer. This corresponds to processing billions of particles per second, with tens of millions of particles per GPU. The parallel efficiency across the entire cluster is larger than $\sim 90\%$.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2024

Developing a Non-Newtonian Fluid Model for Dust, for Application to Astrophysical Flows

In the astrophysics community it is common practice to model collisionless dust, entrained in a gas flow, as a pressureless fluid. However a pressureless fluid is fundamentally different from a collisionless fluid - the latter of which generically possess a non-zero anisotropic pressure or stress tensor. In this paper we derive a fluid model for collisionless dust, entrained in a turbulent gas, starting from the equations describing the motion of individual dust grains. We adopt a covariant formulation of our model to allow for the geometry and coordinate systems prevalent in astrophysics, and provide a closure valid for the accretion disc context. We show that the continuum mechanics properties of a dust fluid corresponds to a higher-dimensional anisotropic Maxwell fluid, after the extra dimensions are averaged out, with a dynamically important rheological stress tensor. This higher-dimensional treatment has the advantage of keeping the dust velocity and velocity of the fluid seen, and their respective moments, on the same footing. This results in a simplification of the constitutive relation describing the evolution of the dust Rheological stress.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2024

Wave topology of stellar inertial oscillations

Inertial waves in convective regions of stars exhibit topological properties linked to a Chern number of 1. The first of these is a unique, unidirectional, prograde oscillation mode within the cavity, which propagates at arbitrarily low frequencies for moderate azimuthal wavenumbers. The second one are phase singularities around which the phase winds in Fourier space, with winding numbers of $\pm 1$ depending on the hemisphere. Phase winding is a collective effect over waves propagating in all directions that is strongly robust to noise. This suggests a topology-based method for wave detection in noisy observational data.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

Topology of shallow-water waves on the rotating sphere

Topological properties of the spectrum of shallow-water waves on a rotating spherical body are established. Particular attention is paid to its spectral flow, i.e. the modes whose frequencies transit between the Rossby and inertia-gravity wavebands as the zonal wave number is varied. Organising the modes according to the number of zeros of their meridional velocity, we conclude that the net number of modes transiting between the shallow-water wavebands on the sphere is null, in contrast with the Matsuno spectrum. This difference can be explained by a miscount of zeros under the $β$-plane approximation. We corroborate this result with the analysis of Delplace et al (2017) by showing that the curved metric discloses a pair of degeneracy points in the Weyl symbol of the wave operator, non-existent under the $β$-plane approximation, each of them bearing a Chern number $-1$.

physics.flu-dyn↗

arXiv2024

Local Spherical Collapsing Box in Athena++: Numerical Implementation and Benchmark Tests

We implement a local model for a spherical collapsing/expanding gas cloud into the Athena++ magnetohydrodynamic code. This local model consists of a Cartesian periodic box with time-dependent geometry. We present a series of benchmark test problems, including non-linear solutions and linear perturbations of the local model, confirming the code's desired performance. During a spherical collapse, a horizontal shear flow is amplified, corresponding to angular momentum conservation of zonal flows in the global problem; wave speed and amplitude of sound waves increase in the local frame, due to the reduction in the characteristic length scale of the box, which can lead to an anisotropic effective sound speed in the local box. Our code conserves both mass and momentum to machine precision. This numerical implementation of the local model has potential applications to the study of local physics and hydrodynamic instabilities during protostellar collapse, providing a powerful framework for better understanding the earliest stages of star and planet formation.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

PT and anti-PT symmetries for astrophysical waves

Context: Discrete symmetries have found numerous applications in photonics and quantum mechanics, but remain little studied in fluid mechanics, particularly in astrophysics. Aims: We aim to show how PT and anti-PT symmetries determine the behaviour of linear perturbations in a wide class of astrophysical problems. They set the location of Exceptional Points in the parameter space and the associated transitions to instability, and are associated to the conservation of quadratic quantities that can be determined explicitly. Methods: We study several classical local problems: the gravitational instability of isothermal spheres and thin discs, the Schwarzschild instability, the Rayleigh-Bénard instability and acoustic waves in dust-gas mixtures. We calculate the locations and the order of the Exceptional Points with a method of resultant, as well as the conserved quantities in the different regions of the parameter space using Krein theory. Results: All problems studied here exhibit discrete symmetries, even though Hermiticity is broken by different physical processes (self-gravity, buoyancy, diffusion, drag). This analysis provides genuine explanations for certain instabilities, and for the existence of regions in the parameter space where waves do not propagate. Those correspond to breaking of PT and anti-PT symmetries respectively. Not all instabilities are associated to symmetry breaking (e.g. the Rayleigh-Benard instability).

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

Weighing protoplanetary discs with kinematics: physical model, method and benchmark

The mass of protoplanetary discs sets the amount of material available for planet formation, determines the level of coupling between gas and dust, and possibly sets gravitational instabilities. Measuring mass of discs is challenging, since it is not possible to directly detect H$_2$, and CO-based estimates remain poorly constrained. An alternative method that does not rely on tracers-to-H$_2$ ratios has recently been proposed to dynamically measure the disc mass altogether with the star mass and the disc critical radius by looking at deviations from Keplerian rotation induced by the self-gravity of the disc. So far, this method has been applied to weigh three protoplanetary discs: Elias 2-27, IM Lup and GM Aurigae. We provide here a numerical benchmark of the method by simulating isothermal self-gravitating discs with a range of masses from 0.01 to $0.2 \,M_{\odot}$ with the phantom code and post-process them with radiative transfer (mcfost) to obtain synthetic observations. We find that dynamical weighing allows to retrieve the expected value of disc masses as long as the disc-to-star mass ratio is larger than $M_d/M_\star=0.05$. The estimated uncertainty for the disc mass measurement is $\sim 25\%$.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2024

Mixing is easy: New insights for cosmochemical evolution from pre-stellar core collapse

Signposts of early planet formation are ubiquitous in substructured young discs. Dense, hot and high-pressure regions formed during gravitational collapse process, integral to star formation, facilitate dynamical mixing of dust within the protostellar disc. This provides an incentive to constrain the role of gas-dust interaction and resolve zones of dust concentration during star-disc formation. We explore if thermal and dynamical conditions developed during disc formation can generate gas flows that efficiently mix and transport well-coupled gas and dust components. We simulated the collapse of dusty molecular cloud cores with the hydrodynamics code PLUTO augmented with radiation transport and self-gravity. We used a 2D axisymmetric geometry and follow the azimuthal component of velocity. Dust was treated as Lagrangian particles that are subject to drag from the gas, whose motion is computed on a Eulerian grid. We considered 1, 10 and 100 micron-sized neutral spherical dust. Importantly, the equation of state accurately includes molecular hydrogen dissociation. We focus on molecular cloud core masses of 1 and 3 Msun and explore effects of initial rotation rates and cloud core sizes. Our study underlines mechanisms for early transport of dust from inner hot disc regions via the occurrence of meridional flows and outflow. The vortical flow fosters dynamical mixing and retention of dust while thermal pressure driven outflow replenishes dust in the outer disc. Young dynamical precursors to planet-forming discs exhibit regions with complex hydrodynamical gas features and high-temperature structures. These can play a crucial role in concentrating dust for subsequent growth into protoplanets. Dust transport, especially, from sub-au scales surrounding the protostar to outer relatively cooler parts, offers an efficient pathway for thermal reprocessing during pre-stellar core collapse. [Abridged]

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

Probing the eccentricity in protostellar discs -- Modeling kinematics and morphologies

Protostellar discs are mostly modelled as circular structures of gas and dust orbiting a protostar. However, a number of physical mechanisms, e.g. the presence of a (sub)stellar companion or initial axial asymmetry, can cause the gas and dust orbital motion to become eccentric. Theoretical studies have revealed that, when present, disc eccentricity is expected to occur with predictable profiles that can be long-lasting and potentially observable in protostellar systems. We construct an analytical model predicting the typical features of the kinematics and morphology of eccentric protostellar discs, with the final goal of characterising the observational appearance of eccentricity in discs. We validate the model using a numerical simulation of a circumbinary disc (where the binary makes the disc eccentric). We finally post-process the simulation with Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer to study how eccentric features would appear through the "eyes" of ALMA. Besides the motion of the material on eccentric Keplerian orbits in the disc orbital plane, the most characteristic eccentric feature emerging from the analytical model is strong vertical motion with a typical anti-symmetric pattern (with respect to the disc line of pericentres). A circumbinary disc with a $\approx 40$ au eccentric cavity ($e_{\rm cav}=0.2$), carved by an $a_{\rm bin}=15$ au binary, placed at a distance $d=130$ pc, is expected to host in its upper emission surface vertical oscillations up to $v_{z}\sim 400\, {\rm ms}^{-1}$ close to the cavity edge, i.e. well within ALMA spectral and spatial resolution capabilities. A residual spiral pattern in the vertical velocity $Δv_{z}\sim 150\, {\rm ms}^{-1}$ of the simulation cannot be captured by the theoretical model, we speculate it to be possibly linked to the presence of a companion in the system.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2023

The Exceptional Ring of buoyancy instability in stars

We reveal properties of global modes of linear buoyancy instability in stars, characterised by the celebrated Schwarzschild criterion, using non-Hermitian topology. We identify a ring of Exceptional Points of order 4 that originates from the pseudo-Hermitian and pseudo-chiral symmetries of the system. The ring results from the merging of a dipole of degeneracy points in the Hermitian stablystratified counterpart of the problem. Its existence is related to spherically symmetric unstable modes. We obtain the conditions for which convection grows over such radial modes. Those are met at early stages of low-mass stars formation. We finally show that a topological wave is robust to the presence of convective regions by reporting the presence of a mode transiting between the wavebands in the non-Hermitian problem, strengthening their relevance for asteroseismology.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2023

A Local Model for the Spherical Collapse/Expansion Problem

Spherical flows are a classic problem in astrophysics which are typically studied from a global perspective. However, much like with accretion discs, there are likely many instabilities and small scale phenomena which would be easier to study from a local perspective. For this purpose, we develop a local model for a spherically contracting/expanding gas cloud, in the spirit of the shearing box, $β$-plane and expanding box models which have had extensive use in studies of accretion discs, planets and stellar winds respectively. The local model consists of a, spatially homogeneous, periodic box with a time varying aspect ratio, along with a scale factor (analogous to that in FRW/Newtonian cosmology) relating the box coordinates to the physical coordinates of the global problem. We derive a number of symmetries and conservation laws exhibited by the local model. Some of these reflect symmetries of the periodic box, modified by the time dependant geometry, while others are local analogues for symmetries of the global problem. The energy, density and vorticity in the box also generically increase(/decrease) as a consequence of the collapse(/expansion). We derive a number of nonlinear solutions, including a local analogue of uniform density zonal flows, which grow as a consequence of angular momentum conservation. Our model is closely related to the accelerated expanding box model of Tenerani \& Velli and is an extension of the isotropic model considered by Robertson \& Goldreich.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

Dynamics of dust grains in turbulent molecular clouds. Conditions for decoupling and limits of different numerical implementations

Dust grain dynamics in molecular clouds is regulated by its interplay with supersonic turbulent gas motions. The conditions under which dust grains decouple from the dynamics of gas remain poorly constrained. We first aim to investigate the critical dust grain size for dynamical decoupling, using both analytical predictions and numerical experiments. Second, we aim to set the range of validity of two fundamentally different numerical implementations for the evolution of dust and gas mixtures in turbulent molecular clouds. We carried out a suite of numerical experiments using two different schemes. First, we used a monofluid formalism in the terminal velocity approximation (TVA) on a Eulerian grid. Second, we used a two-fluid scheme, in which the dust dynamics is handled with Lagrangian super-particles, and the gas dynamics on a Eulerian grid. The monofluid results are in good agreement with the theoretical critical size for decoupling. We report dust dynamics decoupling for Stokes number St>0.1, that is, dust grains of $s>4~μ$m in size. We find that the TVA is well suited for grain sizes of 10 $μ$m in molecular clouds, in particular in the densest regions. However, the maximum dust enrichment measured in the low-density material where St>1 is questionable. In the Lagrangian dust experiments, we show that the results are affected by the numerics for all dust grain sizes. At St<<1, the dust dynamics is largely affected by artificial trapping in the high-density regions, leading to spurious variations of the dust concentration. At St>1, the maximum dust enrichment is regulated by the grid resolution used for the gas dynamics. The results of previous similar numerical work should therefore be revisited with respect to the limitations we highlight in this study. Dust enrichment of submicron dust grains is unlikely to occur in the densest parts of molecular clouds.

astro-ph.GA↗