Formation and properties of astrophysical carbonaceous dust

摘要

The classical theory of grain nucleation suffers from both theoretical and predictive deficiencies. We strive to alleviate these deficiencies in our understanding of dust formation and growth by utilizing an atomistic model of nucleation. Carbon cluster geometries are determined with a set of global minimization algorithms. Using density functional theory, the binding energies of carbon clusters from n=2 to n = 99 are then calculated. These energies are used to calculate the critical size and nucleation rate of carbon clusters.