Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planets, which are crucial to understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems. This talk focuses on the characterization of dust, the building blocks of the planets in protoplanetary disks.
We introduce popular observational techniques used to study protoplanetary disks and the information they provide about dust grains.
Then we focus on the polarimetric differential imaging (PDI) technique using observations from the SPHERE instrument at the VLT, and discuss the challenges of obtaining accurate photo- polarimetric measurements. We showcase the application of such measurements to constrain dust scattering parameters. Our findings support the presence of micron-sized dust aggregates in protoplanetary disks. We also derive the wavelength dependence of polarized reflectivity for a sample of disks, which hints at the influence of environmental factors on the dust properties.
In future studies, we aim to further constrain dust aggregate properties to deepen our understanding of dust evolution processes across diverse disk environments.
