  The presence of giant gaseous planets that reside in close proximity to their
host stars may be a consequence of large-scale radial migration through the
proto-planetary nebulae. Within the context of this picture, significant
orbital obliquities characteristic of a substantial fraction of such planets
can be attributed to external torques that perturb the disks out of alignment
with the spin axes of their host stars. Therefore, the acquisition of orbital
obliquity exhibits sensitive dependence on the physics of disk-star
interactions. Here, we analyze the primordial excitation of spin-orbit
misalignment of Sun-like stars, in light of disk-star angular momentum
transfer. We begin by calculating the stellar pre-main sequence rotational
evolution, accounting for spin-up due to gravitational contraction and
accretion as well as spin-down due to magnetic star-disk coupling. We devote
particular attention to angular momentum transfer by accretion, and show that
while generally subdominant to gravitational contraction, this process is
largely controlled by the morphology of the stellar magnetic field (i.e.
specific angular momentum accreted by stars with octupole-dominated surface
fields is smaller than that accreted by dipole-dominated stars by an order of
magnitude). Subsequently, we examine the secular spin-axis dynamics of
disk-bearing stars, accounting for the time-evolution of stellar and disk
properties and demonstrate that misalignments are preferentially excited in
systems where stellar rotation is not overwhelmingly rapid. Moreover, we show
that the excitation of spin-orbit misalignment occurs impulsively, through an
encounter with a resonance between the stellar precession frequency and the
disk-torquing frequency. Cumulatively, the model developed herein opens up a
previously unexplored avenue towards understanding star-disk evolution and its
consequences in a unified manner.
