Research

Turbulence is essential to many fundamental processes in protoplanetary disks, including angular momentum transport, dust evolution, and planet migration. I will focus on two instabilities that can drive turbulent motions in outer disks. In the first part of this talk, a series of global 3D non-ideal MHD simulations via Athena++ code will be presented. The outer disk is found to be weakly MRI turbulent, and annular substructures arise due to magnetic flux concentration. The weak MRI turbulence permits the growth of the vertical shear instability. In the second part of this talk, the saturation of the vertical shear instability mediated via a parametric instability will be covered. Once the parametric instability prevails, it is anticipated that the vertical shear instability is far more incoherent than extant published simulations suggest. Finally, I will touch on a new topic I recently started to work on - debris disk gas evolution.

BIO

Dr. Cui's research focuses on theoretical and computational astrophysics, in the context of protoplanetary and debris disks. She received her bachelor degree from Pennsylvania State University in Physics and Astronomy in 2014. She obtained a Master degree in Astrophysics (Part III Astrophysics) from the University of Cambridge in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, she was a PhD student at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory. Since 2020, Dr. Cui has been a postdoc in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.