Radiative Efficiency Enhancement by Electromagnetic Energy Dissipation in Strongly Magnetized Supercritical Accretion Flows around Kerr Black Holes
astro-ph.HE
Submitted: 2026-09-03
Updated: 2026-09-03
Comments: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in ApJ
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: We investigate how black hole spin and the amount of magnetic flux affect electromagnetic energy dissipation and radiation transport in supercritical accretion flows.
Terminology
Abstract
We investigate how black hole spin and the amount of magnetic flux affect electromagnetic energy dissipation and radiation transport in supercritical accretion flows. For this purpose, we perform general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of MAD and SANE accretion flows with different black hole spins. In the high-spin MAD model, we find that a fraction of the electromagnetic energy extracted by the Blandford--Znajek mechanism is dissipated near the disk surface in the vicinity of the black hole. This dissipation significantly contributes to the generation of radiative energy and enhances the luminosity. The time-averaged radiative efficiency reaches η rad=0.60, which is much larger than 0.088 for the non-spinning black hole case and 0.21 for the weak-magnetic-flux case, corresponding to the SANE state. As a result, the effective trapping radius, defined as the radius at which the outward radiative luminosity becomes equal to the inward radiative luminosity, is r trap=2.5r g, comparable to the ISCO radius. This value is significantly smaller than 12r g for the non-spinning case and 8.5r g for the SANE state. These results suggest that the amount of magnetic flux accumulated on the black hole can affect the radiative properties of supercritical accretion flows and should therefore be considered, in addition to black hole mass, spin, and mass accretion rate, when interpreting observed luminosities and spectra.
Sources
- Black Hole Binaries
- Acceleration of wind in optically thin and thick black hole accretion disks simulated in general relativity
- A Novel Jet Model: Magnetically Collimated, Radiation-Pressure Driven Jet
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