Thermal Flipping of Interstellar Grains

Abstract

In interstellar dust grains, internal processes dissipate rotational kinetic energy. The dissipation is accompanied by thermal fluctuations, which transfer energy from the vibrational modes to rotation. Together, these processes are known as internal relaxation. For the past several years, internal relaxation has been thought to give rise to thermal flipping, with profound consequences for grain alignment theory. I show that thermal flipping is not possible in the limit that the inertia tensor does not vary with time.

5 pages, accepted by ApJ

References in corpus (13)

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Grain Alignment by Radiative Torques in Special Conditions and Implications
• Improving the model of emission from spinning dust: effects of grain wobbling and transient spin-up
• Radiative torques alignment in the presence of pinwheel torques
• Magnetic Properties of Dust Grains, Effect of Precession and Radiative Torque Alignment
• Alignment and rotational disruption of dust
• Modeling Grain Alignment by Radiative Torques and Hydrogen Formation Torques in Reflection Nebula
• Two modes of carbonaceous dust alignment
• Electric dipole moments and disalignment of interstellar dust grains
• The alignment of interstellar dust grains: thermal flipping and the Davis-Greenstein mechanism
• Barnett relaxation in non-symmetric grains