Chemical Evolution and Network Analysis in Protoplanetary Disks

We present a study of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks focusing on the characteristics of the chemical network. Species of particular interest include H2O, CO, OCS, CH3OH and CH3OCH3. We simulate the evolution in a static bi-dimensional disk between the radii of 0.4 and 300 AU. The chemical network is built upon the UMIST rate database. The network is evolved until a stationary state is reached. Each species of interest's sub-network is analyzed to identify the most active reactions. In most cases, a small sub-set of reactions (2-5) is clearly dominant, accounting for more than 90% of the activity for a given species, at a given location. Because of the wide-ranging physical conditions in the disk, with temperatures from 10K to 2000K, these subsets of reactions vary with the location. For example, in the inner disk (0.4 AU), with temperatures over 2000K, H2O chemistry is dominated (in stationary state) by the reversible reaction H2 + OH ⇌ H2O + H ; at radius 0.7 AU, at a temperature of 950K, the activity is divided between H3O+ + HCN → HCNH+ + H2O and H3+ + H2O → H3O+ + H2 ; at 6 AU, with T=135K, between O- +H2 → H2O + e-; and H3+ + H2O → H3O+ + H2. There are two major benefits to identifying these reactions. The first is to reduce the number of chemical reactions to compute realistic abundances, and lower the cost of a future dynamical disk model coupled with the chemical evolution. The second benefit is to pick some reactions to be part of a current project to refine their rates using computational quantum chemistry techniques to address a major shortcoming: the lack of information or reliability concerning the temperature dependence of the reaction rates outside of the experimental window for which data was collected. A large number of rates form the UMIST database have no temperature dependence, and the ones that do are based on the classic Arrhenius law, which can be highly inaccurate if extrapolated over a large temperature range (typically from room temperature laboratory measurements). A clear artefact is the dominance, at the hottest locations in the protoplanetary nebula, of the reactions that do have a temperature dependence, and the apparition of the others in the outer colder parts of the disk.