Pair Drizzle around Sub-Eddington Supermassive Black Holes

Abstract

Electron-positron pair creation near sub-Eddington accretion rate black holes is believed to be dominated by the Breit-Wheeler process (photon-photon collisions). The interacting high energy photons are produced when unscreened electric fields accelerate leptons either in coherent, macroscopic gaps or in incoherent structures embedded in the turbulent plasma flow. The latter type of acceleration results in a drizzle of pair production sourced by photons from the background radiation field whose energies are near the pair-production threshold. In this work, we use radiation GRMHD simulations to extend an earlier study of pair drizzle by Moscibrodzka et al. We focus on low-magnetization (SANE) accretion onto supermassive Kerr black holes and consider radiation due to synchrotron, bremsstrahlung, and Compton upscattering processes. We confirm that pair drizzle in M87 is sufficient to keep the magnetospheric charge density orders of magnitude above the Goldreich-Julian density. We also find that pair production peaks along the jet-disk boundary.

arXiv comment14 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (21)

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• First Sagittarius A* Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Testing Astrophysical Models of the Galactic Center Black Hole
• Radiative reconnection-powered TeV flares from the black hole magnetosphere in M87
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