X-ray spectropolarimetric signature of a warped disk around a stellar-mass black hole

Abstract

Black holes in X-ray binaries are often assumed to be rotating perpendicular to the plane of the accretion disk and parallel to the orbital plane of the binary. While the Bardeen-Petterson effect forces the inner part of the accretion disk to be aligned with the equatorial plane of a spinning black hole, the disk may be warped such that the inclination angle of the outer part is different from that of the inner part. In this paper, we identify a possible observational signature of a warped accretion disk in the spectrum of the polarization degree of the continuum. Such a signature would provide direct evidence for the presence of a warped disk and, potentially, even a measure of the warp radius, which, in turn, could be used to infer the viscosity parameter of the disk.

10 pages, 9 figures. v2: refereed version

References in corpus (7)

• Global General Relativistic MHD Simulation of a Tilted Black-Hole Accretion Disk
• A code to compute the emission of thin accretion disks in non-Kerr space-times and test the nature of black hole candidates
• On the Bardeen-Petterson Effect in black hole accretion discs
• The evolution of misaligned accretion discs and spinning black holes
• Attempt to find a correlation between the spin of stellar-mass black hole candidates and the power of steady jets: relaxing the Kerr black hole hypothesis
• No Evidence for Bardeen-Petterson Alignment in GRMHD Simulations and Semi-Analytic Models of Moderately Thin, Prograde, Tilted Accretion Disks
• X-ray spectropolarimetric measurements of the Kerr metric

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Polarization of X-rays from Warped Black Hole Accretion Disks
• Polarized radiative transfer modeling of warped and clumpy dusty tori
• The Iron Line Profile from Warped Black Hole Accretion Disks
• Tilted Accretion Disks
• Polarization Signatures of Quasi-Periodic Oscillations in Simulated Tilted, Truncated Disks