AKARI AND SPINNING DUST: INVESTIGATING THE NATURE OF ANOMALOUS MICROWAVE EMISSION VIA INFRARED SURVEYS

Our understanding of dust emission, interaction, and evolution, is evolving. In recent years, electric dipole emission by spinning dust has been suggested to explain the anomalous microwave excess (AME), appearing between 10 and 90 Ghz. The observed frequencies suggest that spinning grains should be on the order of 10nm in size, hinting at polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules (PAHs). We present data from the AKARI/Infrared Camera (IRC) due to its high sensitivity to the PAH bands. By inspecting the IRC data for a few AME regions, we find a preliminary indication that regions well-fitted by a spinning-dust model have a higher $9{\mu}m$ than $18{\mu}m$ intensity vs. non-spinning-dust regions. Ongoing efforts to improve the analysis by using DustEM and including data from the AKARI Far Infrared Surveyor (FIS), IRAS, and Planck High Frequency Instrument (HFI) are described.