Neutrino-dominated relativistic viscous accretion flows around rotating black holes with shocks

TL;DR

This paper models neutrino-dominated accretion flows around rotating black holes, revealing that shocks can form and significantly contribute to the energy output, potentially explaining gamma-ray burst phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent model of relativistic, viscous NDAFs with shocks, incorporating neutrino cooling and black hole spin effects, to better understand GRB energy sources.

Findings

Shocks can form in NDAFs under certain parameters.

Maximum neutrino luminosity reaches 10^{51-53} erg/s.

Maximum neutrino annihilation luminosity reaches 10^{48-52} erg/s.

Abstract

We investigate the relativistic, viscous, advective, neutrino-dominated accretion flows (NDAFs) around rotating stellar mass black holes, incorporating neutrino cooling. By adopting an effective potential to describe the spacetime geometry around the rotating black holes, we self-consistently solve the governing NDAF equations to obtain global transonic accretion solutions. Our findings indicate that, depending on the model parameters, namely energy ($\varepsilon$), angular momentum ($\lambda$), accretion rate ($\dot{m}$), viscosity ($\alpha$) and black hole spin ($a_{\rm k}$), NDAFs may harbor standing shocks where the Rankine-Hugoniot shock conditions (RHCs) are satisfied. Utilizing these shock-induced NDAF solutions, we compute the neutrino luminosity ($L_{\nu}$) and neutrino annihilation luminosity ($L_{\nu \bar{\nu}}$) across a wide range of model parameters. We further calculate maximum neutrino luminosity ($L_{\nu}^{\rm max}$) and neutrino annihilation luminosity ($L_{\nu \bar{\nu}}^{\rm max}$) resulting in $L_{\nu}^{\rm max} \sim 10^{51-53}$ erg s$^{-1}$ ($10^{48-51}$ erg s$^{-1}$) and $L_{\nu \bar{\nu}}^{\rm max} \sim 10^{48-52}$ erg s$^{-1}$ ($10^{42-49}$ erg s$^{-1}$) for $a_{\rm k}=0.99$ (0.0). These findings suggest that shocked NDAF solutions are potentially promising to explain the energy output of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We employ our NDAF model formalism to elucidate $L^{\rm obs}_{\nu \bar{\nu}}$ for five GRBs with known redshifts and estimate their accretion rate (${\dot m}$) based on the spin ($a_{\rm k}$) of the central source of GRBs under consideration.