  ALMA observations of protoplanetary disks in dust continuum emission reveal a
variety of annular structures. Attributing the existence of such features to
embedded planets is a popular scenario, supported by studies using
hydrodynamical models. Recent work has shown that radiative cooling greatly
influences the capability of planet-driven spiral density waves to transport
angular momentum, ultimately deciding the number, position, and depth of rings
and gaps that a planet can carve in a disk. However, radiation transport has
only been treated via local thermal relaxation, not taking into account
radiative diffusion along the disk plane. We compare the previous
state-of-the-art models of planet-disk interaction with local cooling
prescriptions to our new models that include cooling in the vertical direction
and radiative diffusion in the plane of the disk, and show that the response of
the disk to the induced spiral waves can differ significantly when comparing
these two treatments of the disk thermodynamics. We follow up with synthetic
emission maps of ALMA systems, and show that our new models reproduce the
observations found in the literature better than models with local cooling. We
conclude that appropriate treatment of radiation transport is key to
constraining the parameter space when interpreting ALMA observations using the
planet-disk interaction scenario.
