2017MNRAS.469.2602K

High-mass stars are expected to form from dense prestellar cores. Their precise formation conditions are widely discussed, including their virial condition, which results in slow collapse for supervirial cores with strong support by turbulence or magnetic fields, or fast collapse for subvirial sources. To disentangle their formation processes, measurements of the deuterium fractions are frequently employed to approximately estimate the ages of these cores and to obtain constraints on their dynamical evolution. We here present 3D magnetohydrodynamical simulations including for the first time an accurate non-equilibrium chemical network with 21 gas-phase species plus dust grains and 213 reactions. With this network we model the deuteration process in fully depleted prestellar cores in great detail and determine its response to variations in the initial conditions. We explore the dependence on the initial gas column density, the turbulent Mach number, the mass-to-magnetic flux ratio and the distribution of the magnetic field, as well as the initial ortho-to-para ratio (OPR) of H₂. We find qualitatively good agreement with recent observations of deuterium fractions in quiescent sources. Our results show that deuteration is rather efficient, even when assuming a conservative OPR of 3 and highly subvirial initial conditions, leading to large deuterium fractions already within roughly a free-fall time. We discuss the implications of our results and give an outlook to relevant future investigations.