Double Compton and cyclo-synchrotron in super-Eddington discs, magnetized coronae and jets

Jonathan C. McKinney*, Jens Chluba, Maciek Wielgus, Ramesh Narayan, Aleksander Sadowski

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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    Abstract

    Black hole accretion discs accreting near the Eddington rate are dominated by bremsstrahlung cooling, but above the Eddington rate, the double Compton process can dominate in radiationdominated regions, while the cyclo-synchrotron can dominate in strongly magnetized regions like a corona or a jet.We present an extension to the general relativistic radiationmagnetohydrodynamic code HARMRAD to account for emission and absorption by thermal cyclo-synchrotron, double Compton, bremsstrahlung, low-temperature OPAL opacities, as well as Thomson and Compton scattering. The HARMRAD code and associated analysis and visualization codes have been made open-source and are publicly available at the github repository website. We approximate the radiation field as a Bose-Einstein distribution and evolve it using the radiation number-energy-momentum conservation equations in order to track photon hardening. We perform various simulations to study how these extensions affect the radiative properties of magnetically arrested discs accreting at Eddington to super-Eddington rates.We find that double Compton dominates bremsstrahlung in the disc within a radius of r ~ 15rg (gravitational radii) at hundred times the Eddington accretion rate, and within smaller radii at lower accretion rates. Double Compton and cyclo-synchrotron regulate radiation and gas temperatures in the corona, while cyclo-synchrotron regulates temperatures in the jet. Interestingly, as the accretion rate drops to Eddington, an optically thin corona develops whose gas temperature of T ~ 109K is ~100 times higher than the disc's blackbody temperature. Our results show the importance of double Compton and synchrotron in super-Eddington discs, magnetized coronae and jets.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)2241-2265
    Number of pages25
    JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
    Volume467
    Issue number2
    Early online date24 Feb 2017
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - May 2017

    Keywords

    • Accretion
    • Accretion discs
    • Black hole physics
    • Galaxies: jets
    • MHD
    • Radiation: dynamics
    • X-rays: binaries

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