Princeton University Star Formation/ISM Rendezvous (SFIR)

The outer layers of molecular clouds are submitted to the ambient radiation field and the presence of charged species favours their coupling to the ambient magnetic field. In particular, charged dust grains may affect the turbulent state and the chemical evolution of the cloud, since their dynamics in this regime is governed partly by the magnetic fields and dust grains may form filaments decoupled from the gas, or favour the propagation of MHD waves into the cloud. In the last few years, great efforts have been put into coupling the dynamical evolution of charged dust grains with the evolution of the gas in MHD simulations. In this talk, I will present my implementation of charged dust grains in Athena to model the evolution of charged dust grains in molecular cloud envelopes, the results I have obtained so far and some potential research that could be carried out with this module.