274 research outputs found
New Analytical Formula for Supercritical Accretion Flows
We examine a new family of global analytic solutions for optically thick
accretion disks, which includes the supercritical accretion regime. We found
that the ratio of the advection cooling rate, , to the viscous
heating rate, , i.e., , can be
represented by an analytical form dependent on the radius and the mass
accretion rate. The new analytic solutions can be characterized by the
photon-trapping radius, \rtrap, inside which the accretion time is less than
the photon diffusion time in the vertical direction; the nature of the
solutions changes significantly as this radius is crossed. Inside the trapping
radius,
approaches , which corresponds to the advection-dominated
limit (), whereas outside the trapping radius, the radial dependence
of changes to , which corresponds to the
radiative-cooling-dominated limit. The analytical formula for derived here
smoothly connects these two regimes. The set of new analytic solutions
reproduces well the global disk structure obtained by numerical integration
over a wide range of mass accretion rates, including the supercritical
accretion regime. In particular, the effective temperature profiles for our new
solutions are in good agreement with those obtained from numerical solutions.
Therefore, the new solutions will provide a useful tool not only for evaluating
the observational properties of accretion flows, but also for investigating the
mass evolution of black holes in the presence of supercritical accretion flows.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical
Journa
A Note on the Slim Accretion Disk Model
We show that when the gravitational force is correctly calculated in dealing
with the vertical hydrostatic equilibrium of black hole accretion disks, the
relationship that is valid for geometrically thin disks, i.e., constant, where is the sound speed, is the Keplerian
angular velocity, and is the half-thickness of the disk, does not hold for
slim disks. More importantly, by adopting the correct vertical gravitational
force in studies of thermal equilibrium solutions, we find that there exists a
maximally possible accretion rate for each radius in the outer region of
optically thick accretion flows, so that only the inner region of these flows
can possibly take the form of slim disks, and strong outflows from the outer
region are required to reduce the accretion rate in order for slim disks to be
realized.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Ap
Model for Relaxation Oscillations of Luminous Accretion Disk in GRS1915+105: Variable Inner Edge
To understand the bursting behavior of the microquasar GRS 1915+105, we
calculate time evolution of a luminous, optically thick accretion disk around a
stellar mass black hole undergoing limit-cycle oscillations between the high-
and low- luminosity states. We, especially, carefully solve the behavior of the
innermost part of the disk, since it produces significant number of photons
during the burst, and fit the theoretical spectra with the multi-color disk
model. The fitting parameters are \Tin (the maximum disk temperature) and
\Rin (the innermost radius of the disk). We find an abrupt, transient
increase in \Tin and a temporary decrease in \Rin during a burst, which are
actually observed in GRS 1915+105. The precise behavior is subject to the
viscosity prescription. We prescribe the radial-azimuthal component of
viscosity stress tensor to be ,
with being the height integrated pressure, and being the
parameter, and and being the total pressure and gas pressure
on the equatorial plane, respectively. Model with can produce the
overall time changes of \Tin and \Rin, but cannot give an excellent fit to
the observed amplitudes. Model with , on the other hand, gives the
right amplitudes, but the changes of \Tin and \Rin are smaller. Although
precise matching is left as future work, we may conclude that the basic
properties of the bursts of GRS 1915+105 can be explained by our ``limit-cycle
oscillation'' model. It is then required that the spectral hardening factor at
high luminosities should be about 3 at around the Eddington luminosity instead
of less than 2 as is usually assumed.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Why Is Supercritical Disk Accretion Feasible?
Although the occurrence of steady supercritical disk accretion onto a black
hole has been speculated about since the 1970s, it has not been accurately
verified so far. For the first time, we previously demonstrated it through
two-dimensional, long-term radiation-hydrodynamic simulations. To clarify why
this accretion is possible, we quantitatively investigate the dynamics of a
simulated supercritical accretion flow with a mass accretion rate of ~10^2
L_E/c^2 (with L_E and c being, respectively, the Eddington luminosity and the
speed of light). We confirm two important mechanisms underlying supercritical
disk accretion flow, as previously claimed, one of which is the radiation
anisotropy arising from the anisotropic density distribution of very optically
thick material. We qualitatively show that despite a very large radiation
energy density, E_0>10^2L_E/(4 pi r^2 c) (with r being the distance from the
black hole), the radiative flux F_0 cE_0/tau could be small due to a large
optical depth, typically tau 10^3, in the disk. Another mechanism is photon
trapping, quantified by vE_0, where v is the flow velocity. With a large |v|
and E_0, this term significantly reduces the radiative flux and even makes it
negative (inward) at r<70r_S, where r_S is the Schwarzschild radius. Due to the
combination of these effects, the radiative force in the direction along the
disk plane is largely attenuated so that the gravitational force barely exceeds
the sum of the radiative force and the centrifugal force. As a result, matter
can slowly fall onto the central black hole mainly along the disk plane with
velocity much less than the free-fall velocity, even though the disk luminosity
exceeds the Eddington luminosity. Along the disk rotation axis, in contrast,
the strong radiative force drives strong gas outflows.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Super-critical Accretion Flows around Black Holes: Two-dimensional, Radiation-pressure-dominated Disks with Photon-trapping
The quasi-steady structure of super-critical accretion flows around a black
hole is studied based on the two-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamical (2D-RHD)
simulations. The super-critical flow is composed of two parts: the disk region
and the outflow regions above and below the disk. Within the disk region the
circular motion as well as the patchy density structure are observed, which is
caused by Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and probably by convection. The
mass-accretion rate decreases inward, roughly in proportion to the radius, and
the remaining part of the disk material leaves the disk to form outflow because
of strong radiation pressure force. We confirm that photon trapping plays an
important role within the disk. Thus, matter can fall onto the black hole at a
rate exceeding the Eddington rate. The emission is highly anisotropic and
moderately collimated so that the apparent luminosity can exceed the Eddington
luminosity by a factor of a few in the face-on view. The mass-accretion rate
onto the black hole increases with increase of the absorption opacity
(metalicity) of the accreting matter. This implies that the black hole tends to
grow up faster in the metal rich regions as in starburst galaxies or
star-forming regions.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ (Volume 628,
July 20, 2005 issue
Dynamics of spin correlations in the spin-1/2 isotropic XY chain in a transverse field
Dynamic xx spin pair correlation functions for the isotropic spin-1/2 XY
chain are calculated numerically for long open chains in the presence of a
transverse magnetic field at finite temperature. As an application we discuss
the temperature dependence of the spin-spin relaxation time in PrCl_3.Comment: 2 pages, latex, 2 figures, abstract of the paper presented at Ampere
Summer School ``Applications of Magnetic Resonance in Novel Materials''
Nafplion, Greece, 3-9 September, 2000, partially published in J. Phys. A:
Math. Gen. 33, 3063 (2000
Quantum Fluctuation-Induced Phase Transition in S=1/2 XY-like Heisenberg Antiferromagnets on the Triangular Lattice
The selection of the ground state among nearly degenerate states due to
quantum fluctuations is studied for the S=1/2 XY-like Heisenberg
antiferromagnets on the triangular lattice in the magnetic field applied along
the hard axis, which was first pointed out by Nikuni and Shiba. We find that
the selected ground state sensitively depends on the degree of the anisotropy
and the magnitude of the magnetic field. This dependence is similar to that in
the corresponding classical model at finite temperatures where various types of
field induced phases appear due to the entropy effect. It is also found that
the similarity of the selected states in the classical and quantum models are
not the case in a two-leg ladder lattice, although the lattice consists of
triangles locally and the ground state of this lattice in the classical case is
the same as that of the triangular lattice.Comment: 15 pages, 35 figure
Photon Trapping Enables Super-Eddington Growth of Black-Hole Seeds in Galaxies at High Redshift
We identify a physical mechanism that would have resulted in rapid, obscured
growth of seed super-massive black-holes in galaxies at z>6. Specifically, we
find that the density at the centre of typical high redshift galaxies was at a
level where the Bondi accretion rate implies a diffusion speed of photons that
was slower than the gravitational infall velocity, resulting in photons being
trapped within the accretion flow and advected into the black-hole. We show
that there is a range of black-hole masses (M_bh ~ 10^3-10^5 solar masses)
where the accretion flow traps radiation, corresponding to black-holes that
were massive enough to generate a photon trapping accretion flow, but small
enough that their Bondi radii did not exceed the isothermal scale height of
self-gravitating gas. Under these conditions we find that the accretion reaches
levels far in excess of the Eddington rate. A prediction of this scenario is
that X-ray number counts of active galactic nuclei at z>6 would exhibit a
cutoff at the low luminosities corresponding to black-hole masses below ~10^5
solar masses. At low redshifts we find photon trapping to be unimportant
because it could only occur in rare low spin halos, and would require
black-hole masses in excess of expectations from the observed black-hole - halo
mass relation. The super-Eddington growth of ~10^5 solar mass seed black-holes
at high redshift may have provided a natural acceleration towards the growth of
super-massive black-holes at z~6-7, less than a billion years after the Big
Bang.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to MNRA
Vertically Self-Gravitating ADAFs in the Presence of Toroidal Magnetic Field
Force due to the self-gravity of the disc in the vertical direction is
considered to study its possible effects on the structure of a magnetized
advection-dominated accretion disc. We present steady-sate self similar
solutions for the dynamical structure of such a type of the accretion flows.
Our solutions imply reduced thickness of the disc because of the self-gravity.
It also imply that the thickness of the disc will increase by adding the
magnetic field strength.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrophysics and Space Science
From Capillary Condensation to Interface Localization Transitions in Colloid Polymer Mixtures Confined in Thin Film Geometry
Monte Carlo simulations of the Asakura-Oosawa (AO) model for colloid-polymer
mixtures confined between two parallel repulsive structureless walls are
presented and analyzed in the light of current theories on capillary
condensation and interface localization transitions. Choosing a polymer to
colloid size ratio of q=0.8 and studying ultrathin films in the range of D=3 to
D=10 colloid diameters thickness, grand canonical Monte Carlo methods are used;
phase transitions are analyzed via finite size scaling, as in previous work on
bulk systems and under confinement between identical types of walls. Unlike the
latter work, inequivalent walls are used here: while the left wall has a
hard-core repulsion for both polymers and colloids, at the right wall an
additional square-well repulsion of variable strength acting only on the
colloids is present. We study how the phase separation into colloid-rich and
colloid-poor phases occurring already in the bulk is modified by such a
confinement. When the asymmetry of the wall-colloid interaction increases, the
character of the transition smoothly changes from capillary condensation-type
to interface localization-type. The critical behavior of these transitions is
discussed, as well as the colloid and polymer density profiles across the film
in the various phases, and the correlation of interfacial fluctuations in the
direction parallel to the confining walls. The experimental observability of
these phenomena also is briefly discussed.Comment: 36 pages, 15 figure
- âŠ