The circumprimary disks in close binary star systems

The gradual discovery of exoplanets in multiple star systems, especially in close binaries, has triggered investigations on planetary formation in binaries systems. Studies on both circumprimary and circumbinary disks are of great interest since the planetesimal accumulating in the early stage of planet formation is considered to be very sensitive to the perturbation of a secondary star. The formation of circumprimary planets in the binaries with orbital eccentricity is more challenging given the limited size and lifetime of the truncated disks (Artymowicz & Lubow 1994; Kraus et al. 2002). On the other hand, some work on circumbinary disks indicates that the tidal torque from an binary on the disk could be weaker in retrograde cases than that in prograde cases (Nixon & Lubow 2015).

Since there are examples of likely retrograde circumprimary planets but most work on circumprimary disks has focused on prograde cases, we propose to systematically investigate the differences in disk features, the stability, forced and equilibrium eccentricities, and encounter velocities of planetesimals in prograde and retrograde circumprimary disks. We hope to use the HPC computing resources for numerical simulations of the disks with 2D and 3D fixed grid hydrodynamical code.