Acceleration and collimation of relativistic MHD disk winds

TL;DR

This study uses relativistic MHD simulations to explore how accretion disk conditions influence jet acceleration and collimation, revealing structured flows with relativistic cores and potential links to observed AGN winds.

Contribution

First application of boundary-driven relativistic MHD simulations to study jet acceleration and collimation from accretion disks, enabling detailed parameter studies.

Findings

Jets are collimated with half-opening angles of 3-7 degrees.

Lorentz factors up to 6 achieved with increased Poynting flux.

Flow structure includes a relativistic core and subrelativistic outer wind.

Abstract

We perform axisymmetric relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations to investigate the acceleration and collimation of jets and outflows from disks around compact objects. The fiducial disk surface (respectively a slow disk wind) is prescribed as boundary condition for the outflow. We apply this technique for the first time in the context of relativistic jets. The strength of this approach is that it allows us to run a parameter study in order to investigate how the accretion disk conditions govern the outflow formation. Our simulations using the PLUTO code run for 500 inner disk rotations and on a physical grid size of 100x200 inner disk radii. In general, we obtain collimated beams of mildly relativistic speed and mass-weighted half-opening angles of 3-7 degrees. When we increase the outflow Poynting flux by injecting an additional disk toroidal field into the inlet, Lorentz factors up to 6 are reached. These flows gain super-magnetosonic speed and remain Poynting flux dominated. The light surface of the outflow magnetosphere tends to align vertically - implying three relativistically distinct regimes in the flow - an inner sub-relativistic domain close to the jet axis, a (rather narrow) relativistic jet and a surrounding subrelativistic outflow launched from the outer disk surface - similar to the spine-sheath structure currently discussed for asymptotic jet propagation and stability. The outer subrelativistic disk wind is a promising candidate for the X-ray absorption winds that are observed in many radio-quiet AGN.