Revealing Fine Structure in Protoplanetary Disks with Physics Constrained Neural Fields
Aviad Levis, Nhan Luong, Richard Teague, Katherine Bouman, Marcelo Barraza-Alfaro, Kevin Flaherty
arXiv · 2025
Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planets, and resolving their three-dimensional structure is key to understanding disk evolution. The unprecedented resolution of ALMA demands modeling approaches that capture features beyond the reach of traditional methods. We introduce a computational framework that integrates physics-constrained neural fields with differentiable rendering and present RadJAX, a GPU-accelerated, fully differentiable line radiative transfer solver achieving up to 10,000x speedups over conventional ray tracers, enabling previously intractable, high-dimensional neural reconstructions. Applied to ALMA CO observations of HD 163296, this framework recovers the vertical morphology of the CO-rich layer, revealing a pronounced narrowing and flattening of the emission surface beyond 400 au - a feature missed by existing approaches. Our work establish a new paradigm for extracting complex disk structure and advancing our understanding of protoplanetary evolution.
BibTeX
@misc{levis2025revealingfinestructureprotoplanetary,
title={Revealing Fine Structure in Protoplanetary Disks with Physics Constrained Neural Fields},
author={Aviad Levis and Nhan Luong and Richard Teague and Katherine. L. Bouman and Marcelo Barraza-Alfaro and Kevin Flaherty},
year={2025},
eprint={2509.03623},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={astro-ph.EP},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03623},
}