Stumbling over Planetary Building Blocks: AU Microscopii as an Example of the Challenge of Retrieving Debris-disk Dust Properties

We explore whether assumptions about dust grain shape affect the resulting estimates of the composition and grain size distribution of the AU Microscopii (AU Mic) debris disk from scattered-light data collected by Lomax et al. The near edge-on orientation of the AU Mic debris disk makes it ideal for studying the effect of the scattering phase function on the measured flux ratios as a function of wavelength and projected distance. Previous efforts to model the AU Mic debris disk have invoked a variety of dust grain compositions and explored the effect of porosity, but did not undertake a systematic effort to explore a full range of size distributions and compositions to understand possible degeneracies in fitting the data. The degree to which modeling dust grains with more realistic shapes compounds these degeneracies has also not previously been explored. We find differences in the grain properties retrieved depending on the grain shape model used. We also present here our calculations of porous grains of size parameters x = 0.1 to 48 and complex refractive indices (m = n + i kappa) ranging from n = 1.1 to 2.43 and k = 0 to 1.0, covering multiple compositions at visible and near-infrared wavelengths such as ice, silicates, amorphous carbon, and tholins.