Post-merger electromagnetic emissions from disks perturbed by binary black holes

TL;DR

This paper models electromagnetic emissions from disks perturbed by recoiling supermassive black holes, incorporating detailed radiation transfer and absorption physics to predict luminosity and variability across frequencies.

Contribution

It introduces a radiation transfer model including bremsstrahlung and blackbody effects to accurately simulate emissions from perturbed black hole disks.

Findings

Good agreement with previous bremsstrahlung estimates above 10^{14} Hz

Identification of self-eclipsing behavior causing variability at lower frequencies

Demonstration of frequency-dependent emission characteristics in perturbed disks

Abstract

We simulate the possible emission from a disk perturbed by a recoiling super-massive black hole. To this end, we study radiation transfer from the system incorporating bremsstrahlung emission from a Maxwellian plasma and absorption given by Kramer's opacity law modified to incorporate blackbody effects. We employ this model in the radiation transfer integration to compute the luminosity at several frequencies, and compare with previous bremsstrahlung luminosity estimations from a transparent limit (in which the emissivity is integrated over the computational domain and over all frequencies) and with a simple thermal emission model. We find close agreement between the radiation transfer results and the estimated bremsstrahlung luminosity from previous work for electromagnetic signals above $10^{14}$ Hz. For lower frequencies, we find a self-eclipsing behavior in the disk, resulting in a strong intensity variability connected to the orbital period of the disk.