Dust Growth and Evolution in Protoplanetary Disks

Over the past decade, advancement of observational capabilities, specifically the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instruments, alongside theoretical innovations like pebble accretion, have reshaped our understanding of planet formation and the physics of protoplanetary disks. Despite this progress, mysteries persist along the winded path of micrometer-sized dust, from the interstellar medium, through transport and growth in the protoplanetary disk, to becoming gravitationally bound bodies. This review outlines our current knowledge of dust evolution in circumstellar disks, yielding the following insights:

• ▪  Theoretical and laboratory studies have accurately predicted the growth of dust particles to sizes that are susceptible to accumulation through transport processes like radial drift and settling.
• ▪  Critical uncertainties in that process remain the level of turbulence, the threshold collision velocities at which dust growth stalls, and the evolution of dust porosity.
• ▪  Symmetric and asymmetric substructure are widespread. Dust traps appear to be solving several long-standing issues in planet formation models, and they are observationally consistent with being sites of active planetesimal formation.
• ▪  In some instances, planets have been identified as the causes behind substructures. This underlines the need to study earlier stages of disks to understand how planets can form so rapidly.

In the future, better probes of the physical conditions in optically thick regions, including densities, turbulence strength, kinematics, and particle properties will be essential for unraveling the physical processes at play.