Davis—Greenstein alignment of oblate spheroidal grains

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 1999-05, Vol.305 (3), p.615-630
• Main Authors: Roberge, W. G., Lazarian, A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: dust; dust, extinction; extinction; ISM: magnetic fields; polarization
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1046/j.1365-8711.1999.02464.x

We present extensive calculations on the efficiency of grain alignment by the Davis-Greenstein (DG) mechanism. We model the grains as oblate spheroids with arbitrary axis ratios. Our description of the grain dynamics includes (i) magnetic dissipation and the inverse process driven by thermal fluctuations in the grain magnetization, (ii) gas-grain collisions and thermal evaporation of molecules from the grain surface, (iii) the transformation of rotational energy into heat by the Barnett effect and the inverse process driven by thermal fluctuations, and (iv) rapid Larmor precession of the grain angular momentum about the interstellar magnetic field. For ordinary paramagnetic grains, we calculate the Rayleigh reduction factor, R, for >1000 combinations of the three dimensionless parameters which characterize the alignment. For superparamagnetic grains, we calculate R from an exact analytic solution for the relevant distribution function. Our results are compared with classical studies of DG alignment, which did not include the Barnett effect. We calibrate the accuracy of a recently proposed perturbative approximation, which includes the Barnett effect, and show that it yields R values with a mean error of ≈ 17 per cent.