The high energy spectrum of hot accretion disks

Details The high energy spectrum of hot accretion disks The high energy spectrum of hot accretion disks

Jul 1983

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1983aipc..101..353e&link_type=abstract

AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 101, pp. 353-353 (1983).

Physics

Black Holes, Radiation Mechanisms, Polarization

Scientific paper

One possible thermal state for matter accretion onto a black hole is the two temperature (Ti>>Te) model of Shapiro, Lightman and Eardley (1976). This state may arise if strong ion heating and strong radiation electron cooling combine, and if the ion-electron coupling is due to Coulomb-type processes. In such a case, extremely high ion temperatures are predicted for optically thin accretion onto a Kerr black hole. We investigate the high energy particle and photon spectrum such a flow would produce. Proton-proton reactions lead to primary electron, positron and γ ray production; the primary electrons (with E ~100 MeV) interact with the accretion flow to produce secondary X and γ rays. We model the flow with the standard spatially and optically thin Kerr accretion disk with α-viscosity and sub-Eddington accretion flow. We find that ion temperatures 1012K<~Ti<~1013K (in which range the ions are just subrelativistic) are reached in these models with mass accretion rates M/M<10-9α yr-1. Spectrum calculations for ion temperatures in this range result in a fraction, on the order of ten percent, of the total disk luminosity emerging in hard x rays and γ rays. We also find that the high-M/M models are optically thick to γγ pair production. While full transfer/cascade calculations have not yet been done, we expect this scattering to degrade the >~MeV photon and particle luminosity to <~ 1 MeV.

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