The reverberation lag in the low mass X-ray binary H1743-322

TL;DR

This study analyzes X-ray reverberation lags in the black hole binary H1743-322 across multiple outbursts, revealing consistent lag amplitudes at similar luminosities and highlighting differences with other sources, informing disk-corona geometry models.

Contribution

First comprehensive analysis of X-ray reverberation lags in H1743-322 across different outbursts at similar luminosities, comparing with other black hole binaries.

Findings

Detected a ~60 ms soft X-ray lag likely due to thermal reverberation.

Lag amplitude remains consistent across observations at similar luminosities.

Differences in lag between H1743-322 and GX 339-4 suggest source-to-source geometric variations.

Abstract

The evolution of the inner accretion flow of a black hole X-ray binary (BHXRB) during the outburst is still a matter of active research. X-ray reverberation lags are powerful tools to constrain the disk-corona geometry. We present a study of X-ray lags in the black hole transient H1743-322. We compared results obtained from the analysis of all the publicly available XMM-Newton observations. These observations were carried out during two different outbursts, happened in 2008 and 2014. During all the observations the source is caught in the hard state and at similar luminosities ($\mathrm{L_{3-10\ keV}/L_{Edd}\sim 0.004}$). We detected a soft X-ray lag of $\sim$60 ms, most likely due to thermal reverberation. We did not detect any significant change of the lag amplitude among the different observations, indicating a similar disk-corona geometry at the same luminosity in the hard state. On the other hand, we observe significant differences between the reverberation lag detected in H1743-322 and in GX 339-4 (at similar luminosities in the hard state), which might indicate variations of the geometry from source to source.