Kinetic Field Theory Applied to Planetesimal Formation I: Freely Streaming Dust Particles

Abstract: Planet formation in the solar system was started when the first planetesimals were formed from the gravitational collapse of pebble clouds. Numerical simulations of this process, especially in the framework of streaming instability, produce various power laws for the initial mass function for planetesimals. While recent advances have shed light on turbulence and its role in particle clustering, a comprehensive theoretical framework linking turbulence characteristics to particle cluster properties and planetesimal mass function remains incomplete. Recently, a kinetic field theory for ensembles of point-like classical particles in or out of equilibrium has been applied to cosmic structure formation. This theory encodes the dynamics of a classical particle ensemble by a generating functional specified by the initial probability distribution of particles in phase space and their equations of motion. Here, we apply kinetic field theory to planetesimal formation. A model for the initial probability distribution of dust particles in phase space is obtained from a quasi-initial state for a three-dimensional streaming-instability simulation that is a particle distribution with velocities for gas and particles from the Nakagawa relations. The equations of motion are chosen for the simplest case of freely streaming particles. We calculate the non-linearly evolved density power spectrum of dust particles and find that it develops a universal $k^{-3}$ tail at small scales, suggesting scale-invariant structure formation below a characteristic and time-dependent length scale. Thus, the KFT analysis indicates that the initial state for streaming instability simulations does not impose a constraint on structure evolution during planetesimal formation.