Interference as an origin of the peaked noise in accreting X-ray binaries

Abstract

We propose a physical model for the peaked noise in the X-ray power density spectra of accreting X-ray binaries. We interpret its appearance as an interference of two Comptonization continua: one coming from the up-scattering of seed photons from the cold thin disk and the other fed by the synchrotron emission of the hot flow. Variations of both X-ray components are caused by fluctuations in mass accretion rate, but there is a delay between them corresponding to the propagation timescale from the disk Comptonization radius to the region of synchrotron Comptonization. If the disk and synchrotron Comptonization are correlated, the humps in the power spectra are harmonically related and the dips between them appear at frequencies related as odd numbers 1:3:5. If they are anti-correlated, the humps are related as 1:3:5, but the dips are harmonically related. Similar structures are expected to be observed in accreting neutron star binaries and supermassive black holes. The delay can be easily recovered from the frequency of peaked noise and further used to constrain the combination of the viscosity parameter and disk height-to-radius ratio $\alpha (H/R{)}^2$ of the accretion flow. We model multi-peak power spectra of black hole X-ray binaries GX 339$-$4 and XTE J1748$-$288 to constrain these parameters.

10 pages, 6 figures, ApJ accepted

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• Chasing the break: Tracing the full evolution of a black hole X-ray binary jet with multi-wavelength spectral modeling
• Physical constraints from near-infrared fast photometry of the black-hole transient GX 339-4
• The Evolution of Rapid Optical/X-ray Timing Correlations in the Initial Hard State of MAXI J1820+070
• Accretion geometry of the black hole binary MAXI J1820+070 probed by frequency-resolved spectroscopy
• The nature of an imaginary quasi-periodic oscillation in the soft-to-hard transition of MAXI J1820+070
• Evolution of the truncated disc and inner hot-flow of GX 339-4
• A rapid optical and X-ray timing study of the neutron star X-ray binary Swift J1858.6-0814
• Machine learning application to detect light echoes around black holes
• Probing black-hole accretion through time variability
• Broad-band noises in GX 339-4 during the 2021 outburst observed with Insight-HXMT and NICER