Grain Alignment by Radiative Torques

Abstract

Grain alignment is a notoriously difficult problem, that is extremely rich in underlying physics. The long history of attempts theoretical handling of the problem resulted in rather sceptical approach to the theory on the part of some polarimetry practitioners. However, recently the theory has been very successful in accounting for the observational data. In view of that, I present a very concise discussion of the most promising mechanism of grain alignment, namely, radiative torque alignment. In particular, I discuss a new analytical model which excellently reproduces properties of radiative torques, as well as the application of the model to predicting the degree of alignment.

7 pages, 3 figures