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Description
Transition disks are protoplanetary disks with inner depleted dust cavities and excellent candidates to investigate the dust evolution under the existence of a pressure bump. A pressure bump at the outer edge of the cavity allows dust grains from the outer regions to stop their rapid inward migration towards the star and efficiently grow to millimetre sizes. Dynamical interactions with planet(s) have been one of the most exciting theories to explain the clearing of the inner disk. We look for evidence of the presence of millimetre dust particles in transition disks by measuring their spectral index {alpha}_mm_ with new and available photometric data. We investigate the influence of the size of the dust depleted cavity on the disk integrated millimetre spectral index. We present the 3-millimetre (100GHz) photometric observations carried out with Plateau de Bure Interferometer of four transition disks: LkH{alpha} 330, UX Tau A, LRLL 31, and LRLL 67. We use available values of their fluxes at 345GHz to calculate their spectral index, as well as the spectral index for a sample of twenty transition disks. We compare the observations with two kind of models. In the first set of models, we consider coagulation and fragmentation of dust in a disk in which a cavity is formed by a massive planet located at different positions. The second set of models assumes disks with truncated inner parts at different radius and with power-law dust size distributions, where the maximum size of grains is calculated considering turbulence as the source of destructive collisions. We show that the integrated spectral index is higher for transition disks (TD) than for regular protoplanetary disks (PD) with mean values of <{alpha}_mm_^TD^>=2.70+/-0.13 and <{alpha}_mm_^PD^>=2.20+/-0.07 respectively. For transition disks, the probability that the measured spectral index is positively correlated with the cavity radius is 95%. High angular resolution imaging of transition disks is needed to distinguish between the dust trapping scenario and the truncated disk case.
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