New results in the theory of dust grain alignment
Two complementary approaches are used in an attempt to propose an appropriate formulation of the solution to the problem of magnetic alignment of grains in the diffuse and/or the more denser clouds, whatever the mechanism of rotational excitation can be. The interest of such a unified formulation is mainly that the same theoretical expression for polarization can be used everywhere, allowing for easier comparisons between regions where the physical conditions are highly different. The first consists in applying a Monte-Carlo method to a limited number of representative cases, for which all the torques acting on the grain are taken into account: impulsive random torques due to direct collisions with gas atoms, to evaporation of atoms from the surface, and to exo-energetic recombinations forming hydrogen molecules, followed by violent ejections from peculiar sites; magnetic torques. Three characteristic times are associated with these torques: the collisional damping time, the time necessary to change completely the actual sites configuration narrowly bound to the correlation time of the suprathermal torque; and the magnetic damping time. The second approach starts from a heuristic point of view. It consists in a generalization of results (Cugnon, 1983; see also Purcell and Spitzer, 1971; Greenberg, 1978) obtained for thermal alignment to the suprathermal case. It appears indeed that in two extreme cases, the thermal formulation may be used after redefinition of involved times and temperatures.