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

Understand

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.