  Collisions between centimeter- to decimeter-sized dusty bodies are important
to understand the mechanisms leading to the formation of planetesimals. We thus
performed laboratory experiments to study the collisional behavior of dust
aggregates in this size range at velocities below and around the fragmentation
threshold. We developed two independent experimental setups with the same goal
to study the effects of bouncing, fragmentation, and mass transfer in free
particle-particle collisions. The first setup is an evacuated drop tower with a
free-fall height of 1.5 m, providing us with 0.56 s of microgravity time so
that we observed collisions with velocities between 8 mm/s and 2 m/s. The
second setup is designed to study the effect of partial fragmentation (when
only one of the two aggregates is destroyed) and mass transfer in more detail.
It allows for the measurement of the accretion efficiency as the samples are
safely recovered after the encounter. Our results are that for very low
velocities we found bouncing as could be expected while the fragmentation
velocity of 20 cm/s was significantly lower than expected. We present the
critical energy for disruptive collisions Q*, which showed up to be at least
two orders of magnitude lower than previous experiments in the literature. In
the wide range between bouncing and disruptive collisions, only one of the
samples fragmented in the encounter while the other gained mass. The accretion
efficiency in the order of a few percent of the particle's mass is depending on
the impact velocity and the sample porosity. Our results will have consequences
for dust evolution models in protoplanetary disks as well as for the strength
of large, porous planetesimal bodies.
