The Spin History of Protostars: Disk Locking, Revisited

In this talk, we take a new look at the theory of disk locking, which assumes that an accreting protostar rids itself of accreted angular momentum through a magnetic coupling with the accretion disk. We consider that differential rotation between the star and disk twists the field lines. For large enough twist, the magnetic field lines connecting the star and disk open and disconnect. This significantly reduces the spin-down torque on the star by the disk, and so we find that disk-locking theory predicts spin periods that are much too short to account for typical observed systems.