  Several nearby protoplanetary disks have been observed to display large scale
crescents in the (sub)millimeter dust continuum emission. One interpretation is
that these structures correspond to anticyclonic vortices generated by the
Rossby wave instability within the gaseous disk. Such vortices have local gas
over-densities and are expected to concentrate dust particles with Stokes
number around unity. This process might catalyze the formation of
planetesimals. Whereas recent observations showed that dust crescent are indeed
regions where millimeter-size particles have abnormally high concentration
relative to the gas and smaller grains, no observations have yet shown that the
gas within the crescent region counter-rotates with respect to the
protoplanetary disk. Here we investigate the detectability of anticyclonic
features through measurement of the line-of-sight component of the gas velocity
obtained with ALMA. We carry out 2D hydrodynamic simulations and 3D radiative
transfer calculation of a protoplanetary disk characterized by a vortex created
by the tidal interaction with a massive planet. As a case study, the disk
parameters are chosen to mimic the IRS 48 system, which has the most prominent
crescent observed to date. We generate synthetic ALMA observations of both the
dust continuum and 12CO emission around the frequency of 345 GHz. We find that
the anticyclonic features of vortex are weak but can be detected if both the
source and the observational setup are properly chosen. We provide a recipe for
maximizing the probability to detect such vortex features and present an
analysis procedure to infer their kinematic properties.
