Accretion flow dynamics of MAXI J1836-194 during its 2011 outburst from TCAF solution

TL;DR

This study analyzes the 2011 outburst of MAXI J1836-194 using spectral and timing data, revealing it remained in hard states with sporadic QPOs, and estimates the black hole mass and viscous timescale through TCAF modeling.

Contribution

It applies the TCAF model to detailed spectral analysis of MAXI J1836-194's outburst, providing insights into its accretion dynamics and state behavior.

Findings

Source remained in hard and hard-intermediate states only.

Black hole mass estimated between 7.5 and 11 solar masses.

Viscous timescale of approximately 10 days.

Abstract

The Galactic transient X-ray binary MAXI~J1836-194 was discovered on 29th August 2011. Here we make a detailed study of the spectral and timing properties of its 2011 outburst using archival data of RXTE Proportional Counter Array instrument. The evolution of accretion flow dynamics of the source during the outburst through spectral analysis with Chakrabarti-Titarchuk's two-component advective flow (TCAF) solution as a local table model in XSPEC. We also fitted spectra with combined disk blackbody and power-law models and compared it with the TCAF model fitted results. The source is found to be in hard and hard-intermediate spectral states only during entire phase of this outburst. No soft or soft-intermediate spectral states are observed. This could be due to the fact that this object belongs to a special class of sources (e.g., MAXI~J1659-152, Swift~J1753.5-0127, etc.) that have very short orbital periods and that companion is profusely mass-losing or the disk is immersed inside an excretion disk. In these cases, flows in the accretion disk is primarily dominated by low viscous sub-Keplerian flow and the Keplerian rate is not high enough to initiate softer states. Low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) are observed sporadically although as in normal outbursts of transient black holes, monotonic evolutions of QPO frequency during both rising and declining phases are observed. From the TCAF fits, we find mass of the black hole in the range of $7.5-11~M_\odot$ and from time differences between peaks of the Keplerian and sub-Keplerian accretion rates we obtain viscous timescale for this particular outburst $\sim 10$~days.