Component of energy flow from supercritical accretion disks around rotating stellar mass black holes

TL;DR

This study uses advanced simulations to explore how black hole spin affects energy outflows from supercritical accretion disks, revealing that higher spins enhance energy efficiency and alter the nature of emitted power.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the dependence of energy flow on black hole spin in supercritical accretion disks using general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations.

Findings

Energy outflow efficiency increases with black hole spin.

Magnetic forces become significant at high spin values.

Objects with high kinetic-to-isotropic luminosity ratios may host rapidly rotating black holes.

Abstract

By performing two-dimensional axisymmetric general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations with spin parameter $a^*$ varying from -0.9 to 0.9, we investigate the dependence on the black hole spin of the energy flow from supercritical accretion disk around stellar mass black hole. It is found that optically and geometrically thick disks form near the equatorial plane, and a part of the disk matter is launched from the disk surface in all models. The gas ejection is mainly driven by the radiative force, but magnetic force cannot be neglected, when $|a^*|$ is large. The energy outflow efficiency (total luminosity normalized by $\dot{M}_{\rm in} c^2 $; $\dot{M}_{\rm in}$ and $c$ are the mass accretion rate at the event horizon and the light speed) is larger for rotating black holes than for non-rotating black holes. This is $0.7\%$ for $a^*=-0.7$, $0.3\%$ for $a^*=0$, and $5\%$ for $a^*=0.7$ for $\dot{M}_{\rm in} \sim 100L_{\rm Edd}/c^2$ ($L_{\rm Edd}$ is Eddington luminosity). Also, although the energy is mainly released by radiation when $a^* \sim 0$, the Poynting power increases with $|a^*|$ and exceeds the radiative luminosity for models with $a^* \geq 0.5$ and $a^* \leq -0.7$. The more the black hole rotates, the larger the power ratio of the kinetic luminosity to the isotropic luminosity tends to be. This implies that objects with large (small) power ratio may have rapidly (slowly) rotating black holes. Among ultraluminous X-ray sources, IC342 X-1, is a candidate with a rapidly rotating black hole.