The advent of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-Millimeter Array (ALMA) has marked a fundamental turning point in the field of protoplanetary disks. Large sample surveys of entire star-forming regions have uncovered remarkable correlations between several disk-star observables. In this context, the importance of disk population studies emerges as they make it possible to investigate such correlations.
We carried out a disk population study which simulated the evolution of dust and gas over millions of years of the protoplanetary disk's life to constrain the initial conditions needed to reproduce the correlations and distributions observed. We exploited the twopoppy evolution code, which captures the viscous evolution of gas and dust surface density and particle size with high accuracy and short simulation times, thus providing a perfect tool for disk population studies. In particular, we focused on the distributions observed for disks' spectral index in the Lupus, Taurus and Ophiuchus regions.
Our simulations have shown the importance and necessity of the presence of substructures to reproduce the observed spectral indexes. Moreover, we outlined the characteristics of the required substructures and constrained the disks' initial conditions.