Protoplanetary disks are important astronomical structures that are believed to form planets. Protoplanetery disks contain dust that scatters and emits light that comes from a star(s) that lie in the center of the disk. The objective of my research is to use a computer code to run numerical simulations to understand how dust scatters the polarized light in these disks. The question of how to handle dust scattering of polarized light in coding language was explored and answered. Since this project is a part of an ongoing project, a previous electron scattering code was used to first understand how the light scattering worked and functioned in the code. A function was added to the existing code to develop the dust scattering aspect in a protoplanetary disk. The difference between electron scattering and dust scattering is that an electron is so small it is treated as point particle; in contrast, dust particle’s size can be comparable to wavelength of the polarized light, therefore the scattering angle is dependent upon the frequency of the light. The example of a binary star system was used to simulate because this one of the celestial objects a protoplanetary disk forms around.
