  Dusty primordial disks surrounding young low-mass stars are revealing tracers
of stellar and planetary formation. The evolution and lifetime of these disks
define the boundary conditions of the mechanisms of planet formation. Stellar
companions, however, can significantly change this evolution through their
tidal interactions. Stellar evolution and planet formation in binaries have to
respond to an environment of truncated, quickly disappearing disks--very
different compared to an isolated star environment. In order to investigate
details of the influence of binarity on circumstellar disk evolution, we
obtained adaptive optics supported near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy of
the individual components of 22 low-mass binaries in the well-known Orion
Nebula Cluster. Brackett gamma emission, which we detect in several systems, is
used as a tracer for the presence of an active accretion disk around each
binary component. We find a low fraction of accreting binary components, when
compared to the disk fraction of single stars in the ONC. This might indicate a
significantly faster evolution of disks in binaries. This finding is
paticularly interesting, since the target sample consists of wide >100AU
binaries--separations for which the disks are typically expected to evolve
similarly to single star disks.
