Probing the Dust Grain Alignment Mechanisms in Spiral Galaxies with M51 as the Case Study

Magnetic fields (B fields) in galaxies have recently been traced using far-infrared and submillimeter polarimetric observations with the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. The main assumption is that dust grains are magnetically aligned with the local B-field in the interstellar medium (ISM). However, the range of physical conditions of the ISM, dust grain sizes, and B-field strengths in galaxies where this assumption is valid has not been characterized yet. Here, we use the well-studied spiral galaxy M51 as a case study. We find that the timescale for the alignment mechanism arising from magnetically aligned dust grains (B-RAT) dominates over other alignment mechanisms, including radiative precession (k-RAT) and mechanical alignment (v-MAT), as well as the randomization effect (gas damping). We estimate the sizes of the aligned dust grain to be in the range of 0.009-0.182 mu m and 0.019-0.452 mu m for arms and interarms, respectively. We show that the difference in the polarization fraction between arms and interarms may arise from the enhancement of small dust grain sizes in the arms resulting from large grains being broken into small grains as an effect of the grain alignment disruption (RAT-D) mechanism. We argue that the RAT-D mechanism needs to have additional effects, e.g., intrinsic variations of the B-field structure and turbulence, in the galaxy's components to fully explain the polarization fraction variations within the arms and interarms.