  It is believed that large-scale horseshoe-like brightness asymmetries found
in dozens of transitional protoplanetary discs are caused by anticyclonic
vortices. These vortices can play a key role in planet formation, as mm-sized
dust -- the building blocks of planets -- can be accumulated inside them.
Anticyclonic vortices are formed by the Rossby wave instability, which can be
excited at the gap edges opened by a giant planet or at sharp viscosity
transitions of accretionally inactive regions. It is known that vortices are
prone to stretching and subsequent dissolution due to disc self-gravity for
canonical disc masses in the isothermal approximation. To improve the
hydrodynamic model of protoplanetary discs, we include the disc thermodynamics
in our model. In this paper, we present our results on the evolution of the
vortices formed at the outer edge of an accretionally inactive region (dead
zone) assuming an ideal equation of state and taking $PdV$ work, disc cooling
in the $\beta$-approximation, and disc self-gravity into account.
Thermodynamics affects the offset and the mode number (referring to the number
of small vortices at the early phase) of the RWI excitation, as well as the
strength, shape, and lifetime of the large-scale vortex formed through merging
of the initial small vortices. We found that the inclusion of gas
thermodynamics results in stronger, however decreased lifetime vortices. Our
results suggest that a hypothetical vortex-aided planet formation scenario
favours effectively cooling discs.
