2018ApJ...862..116H

Electric dipole emission from rapidly spinning polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is widely believed to be an origin of anomalous microwave emission (AME), but recently it has encountered a setback owing to the noncorrelation of AME with PAH abundance seen in a full-sky analysis. Microwave observations for specific regions with well-constrained PAH features would be crucial to test the spinning dust hypothesis. In this paper, we present physical modeling of microwave emission from spinning PAHs from protoplanetary disks (PPDs) around Herbig Ae/Be stars and T Tauri stars where PAH features are well observed. Guided by the presence of 10 µm silicate features in some PPDs, we also model microwave emission from spinning nanosilicates. Thermal emission from big dust grains is computed using the Monte Carlo radiative transfer code (RADMC-3D). Our numerical results demonstrate that microwave emission from either spinning PAHs or spinning nanosilicates dominates over thermal dust at frequencies ν < 60 GHz, even in the presence of significant grain growth. Finally, we attempt to fit millimeter-centimeter observational data with both thermal dust and spinning dust for several disks around Herbig Ae/Be stars that exhibit PAH features and find that spinning dust can successfully reproduce the observed excess microwave emission (EME). Future radio observations with ngVLA, SKA, and ALMA Band 1 would be valuable for elucidating the origin of EME and potentially open a new window for probing nanoparticles in circumstellar disks.