Efficient simulations of gas-grain chemistry in interstellar clouds

Abstract

Chemical reactions on dust grains are of crucial importance in interstellar chemistry because they produce molecular hydrogen and various organic molecules. Due to the submicron size of the grains and the low flux, the surface populations of reactive species are small and strongly fluctuate. Under these conditions rate equations fail and the master equation is needed for modeling these reactions. However, the number of equations in the master equation grows exponentially with the number of reactive species, severely limiting its feasibility. Here we present a method which dramatically reduces the number of equations, thus enabling the incorporation of the master equation in models of interstellar chemistry.

10 pages + 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Molecular Hydrogen Formation on Astrophysically Relevant Surfaces
• Master Equation for Hydrogen Recombination on Grain Surfaces
• On the master equation approach to diffusive grain-surface chemistry: the H, O, CO system
• Deuterium fractionation on interstellar grains studied with the direct master equation approach
• Lonely adatoms in space

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• The sweeping rate in diffusion-mediated reactions on dust grain surfaces
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• Modeling of negative autoregulated genetic networks in single cells
• Reaction Kinetics in a Tight Spot
• Spatial First-passage Statistics of Al/Si(111)-(root3 x root3) Step Fluctuations
• Evaluation of the Multiplane Method for Efficient Simulations of Reaction Networks
• Astrochemistry: Synthesis and Modelling