Observability of photoevaporation signatures in the dust continuum emission of transition discs

Photoevaporati ve disc winds play a key role in our understanding of circumstellar disc evolution, especially in the final stages, and they might affect the planet formation process and the final location of planets. The study of transition discs (i.e. discs with a central dust cavity) is central for our understanding of the photoe v aporation process and disc dispersal. Ho we ver, we need to distinguish cavities created by photoe v aporation from those created by giant planets. Theoretical models are necessary to identify possible observational signatures of the two different processes, and models to find the differences between the two processes are still lacking. In this paper, we study a sample of transition discs obtained from radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of internally photoe v aporated discs, and focus on the dust dynamics rele v ant for current Atacama Large Millimetre Array observations. We then compared our results with gaps opened by a super-Earth/giant planets, finding that the photoe v aporated cavity steepness depends mildly on gap size, and it is similar to that of a 1 M(J )planet. Ho we ver, the dust density drops less rapidly inside the photoe v aporated cavity compared to the planetary case due to the less efficient dust filtering. This effect is visible in the resulting spectral index, which shows a larger spectral index at the cavity edge and a shallower increase inside it with respect to the planetary case. The combination of cavity steepness and spectral index might reveal the true nature of transition discs.