Black Hole Binaries and Microquasars

TL;DR

This review summarizes recent advances in understanding black hole X-ray binaries and microquasars, focusing on accretion physics, black hole parameters, and the unification of accretion-outflow phenomena across different black hole systems.

Contribution

It provides an updated synthesis of observational and theoretical developments, including new insights into black hole spin, hot accretion flows, and accretion-outflow connections, with an emphasis on comprehensibility for non-experts.

Findings

Unification scheme for accretion-outflow connections across black hole systems.

Recent progress in measuring black hole spins and accretion flow properties.

Enhanced understanding of state transitions and thermal stability in accretion disks.

Abstract

This is a general review on the observations and physics of black hole X-ray binaries and microquasars, with the emphasize on recent developments in the high energy regime. The focus is put on understanding the accretion flows and measuring the parameters of black holes in them. It includes mainly two parts: (1) Brief review of several recent review article on this subject; (2) Further development on several topics, including black hole spin measurements, hot accretion flows, corona formation, state transitions and thermal stability of standard think disk. This is thus not a regular bottom-up approach, which I feel not necessary at this stage. Major effort is made in making and incorporating from many sources useful plots and illustrations, in order to make this article more comprehensible to non-expert readers. In the end I attempt to make a unification scheme on the accretion-outflow (wind/jet) connections of all types of accreting BHs of all accretion rates and all BH mass scales, and finally provide a brief outlook.