Getting the dirt on exozodis with the MMA

The next generation of millimeter wavelength telescopes will have important capabilities relevant to the search for and characterization of zodiacal dust disks around nearby stars and extrasolar planets. Three instruments are at various stages of the planning and design phase: The Large Millimeter and Submillimeter Array (Japan), the Large Southern Array (Europe), and the Millimeter Array (USA). These instruments will be capable of detecting the thermal photospheric emission from thousands of stars, with the astrometric resolution and sensitivity required in searches for extrasolar planets. In addition, these instruments should be capable of the direct detection of dusty disks surrounding nearby stars, for disks as tenuous as 10 to 100 times the density of our own zodiacal dust cloud. In this talk I will outline the potential of millimeter wave radio telescopes for detecting and resolving exozodiacal dust disks ("exozodis") which may exist around nearby stars. Adopting a simple model for the dust emission, I have estimated the thermal emission from exozodis at submillimeter wavelengths. Applying this calculation to stars in the recently released Hipparcos catalog yields a large number of nearby stars which are potential targets for a search for exozodis at millimeter wavelengths.