Doughnut strikes sandwich: the geometry of hot medium in accreting black hole X-ray binaries

TL;DR

This study investigates the geometry of hot and cold media in black hole X-ray binaries, showing that a truncated disc with overlapping hot plasma and seed photons from cyclo-synchrotron emission best explains observed spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a modern energy-conserving reflection model and identifies the favored geometry of truncated discs with hot plasma and hybrid electron seed photons, challenging previous models.

Findings

Static corona models are incompatible with observations.

Truncated discs with hot plasma and seed photons from cyclo-synchrotron emission fit observed spectra.

Large-radius truncated discs with hot flows produce spectra that are too hard.

Abstract

We study the effects of the mutual interaction of hot plasma and cold medium in black hole binaries in their hard spectral state on the value of the truncation radii of accretion discs. We consider a number of different geometries. In contrast to previous theoretical studies, we use a modern energy-conserving code for reflection and reprocessing from cold media. We show that a static corona above a disc extending to the innermost stable circular orbit produces spectra not compatible with those observed. They are either too soft or require a much higher disc ionization than that observed. This conclusion confirms a number of previous findings, but disproves a recent study claiming an agreement of that model with observations. We show that the cold disc has to be truncated in order to agree with the observed spectral hardness. However, a cold disc truncated at a large radius and replaced by a hot flow produces spectra which are too hard if the only source of seed photons for Comptonization is the accretion disc. Our favourable geometry is a truncated disc coexisting with a hot plasma either overlapping with the disc or containing some cold matter within it, also including seed photons arising from cyclo-synchrotron emission of hybrid electrons, i.e. containing both thermal and non-thermal parts.