The Kozai-Lidov Mechanism in Hydrodynamical Disks. II. Effects of binary and disk parameters

TL;DR

This study uses 3D hydrodynamical simulations to explore how binary and disk parameters influence the Kozai-Lidov mechanism in accretion disks, revealing its robustness across diverse conditions.

Contribution

It systematically investigates the dependence of the Kozai-Lidov mechanism on multiple binary and disk parameters using detailed hydrodynamical simulations.

Findings

Kozai-Lidov oscillations occur across a wide range of parameters.

Gas pressure and viscosity influence the oscillation behavior.

The mechanism is robust despite variations in system properties.

Abstract

Martin et al. (2014b) showed that a substantially misaligned accretion disk around one component of a binary system can undergo global damped Kozai-Lidov oscillations. During these oscillations, the inclination and eccentricity of the disk are periodically exchanged. However, the robustness of this mechanism and its dependence on the system parameters were unexplored. In this paper, we use three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations to analyze how various binary and disk parameters affect the Kozai-Lidov mechanism in hydrodynamical disks. The simulations include the effect of gas pressure and viscosity, but ignore the effects of disk self-gravity. We describe results for different numerical resolutions, binary mass ratios and orbital eccentricities, initial disk sizes, initial disk surface density profiles, disk sound speeds, and disk viscosities. We show that the Kozai-Lidov mechanism can operate for a wide range of binary-disk parameters. We discuss the applications of our results to astrophysical disks in various accreting systems.