An accretion disc-corona model for X-ray spectra of active galactic nuclei

Abstract

The hard X-ray emission of active galactic nuclei (AGN) is believed to originate from the hot coronae above the cold accretion discs. The hard X-ray spectral index is found to be correlated with the Eddington ratio, and the hard X-ray bolometric correction factor L_bol/L_x increases with the Eddington ratio. The Compton reflection is also found to be correlated with the hard X-ray spectral index. These observational features provide very useful constraints on the accretion disc-corona model for AGN. We construct an accretion disc-corona model and calculate the spectra with different magnetic stress tensors in the cold discs, in which the corona is assumed to be heated by the reconnection of the magnetic fields generated by buoyancy instability in the cold accretion disc. Our calculations show that the magnetic stress tensor αp_gas fails to explain all these observational features, while αp_tot always leads to constant L_bol/L_x independent of the Eddington ratio. The resulted spectra of the disc-corona systems with α(p_gas p_tot)^1/2 show that both the hard X-ray spectral index and the hard X-ray bolometric correction factor L_bol/L_x increase with the Eddington ratio, which are qualitatively consistent with the observations. We find that the disc-corona model is unable to reproduce the observed very hard X-ray continuum emission from the sources accreting at low rates, which may imply the different accretion mode in these low luminosity sources. We suggest that the disc-corona system transits to an advection-dominated accretion flow+disc corona system at low accretion rates, which may be able to explain all the above-mentioned correlations.

7 pages, minor changes to match the published version in MNRAS

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