Ab initio simulations of accretion disks instability

We show that accretion disks, both in the subcritical and supercritical accretion rate regime, may exhibit significant amplitude luminosity oscillations. The luminosity time behavior has been obtained by performing a set of time-dependent 2D SPH simulations of accretion disks with different values of alpha and accretion rate. In this study, to avoid any influence of the initial disk configuration, we produced the disks injecting matter from an outer edge far from the central object. The period of oscillations is 2 - 50 s respectively for the two cases, and the variation amplitude of the disc luminosity is 10^38 - 10^39 erg/s. An explanation of this luminosity behavior is proposed in terms of limit cycle instability: the disk oscillates between a radiation pressure dominated configuration (with a high luminosity value) and a gas pressure dominated one (with a low luminosity value). The origin of this instability is the difference between the heat produced by viscosity and the energy emitted as radiation from the disk surface (the well-known thermal instability mechanism). We support this hypothesis showing that the limit cycle behavior produces a sequence of collapsing and refilling states of the innermost disk region.Comment: 11 pages, 15 Postscript figures, uses natbib.sty, accepted for publication in MNRA

Higgs mediated lepton flavor violating tau decays τ→μγ\tau \to \mu \gamma and τ→μγγ\tau \to \mu \gamma \gamma in effective theories

The size of the branching ratios for the $\tau \to \mu \gamma$ and $\tau \to \mu \gamma \gamma$ decays induced by a lepton flavor violating Higgs interaction $H\tau \mu$ is studied in the frame of effective field theories. The best constraint on the $H\tau \mu$ vertex, derived from the know measurement on the muon anomalous magnetic moment, is used to impose the upper bounds $Br(\tau \to \mu \gamma)<2.5\times 10^{-10}$ and $Br(\tau \to \mu \gamma \gamma)<2.3\times 10^{-12}$, which are more stringent than current experimental limits on this class of transitions.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure