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.

14 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (11)

• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. I. The Shadow of the Supermassive Black Hole
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. V. Physical Origin of the Asymmetric Ring
• Numerical Simulation of Hot Accretion Flows (III): Revisiting wind properties using trajectory approach
• Electron and proton heating in trans-relativistic magnetic reconnection
• Magnetorotational Turbulence and Dynamo in a Collisionless Plasma
• The Radiative Efficiency and Spectra of Slowly Accreting Black Holes from Two-Temperature GRRMHD Simulations
• Higher Order Terms of Kerr Parameter for Blandford-Znajek Monopole Solution
• Modelling the black hole silhouette in Sgr A* with ion tori
• Bremsstrahlung in GRMHD models of accreting black holes
• The Origin of Matter at the Base of Relativistic Jets in Active Galactic Nuclei

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Radiation GRMHD simulations of M87: funnel properties and prospects for gap acceleration
• Magnetic Reconnection in Black-Hole Magnetospheres: Lepton Loading into Jets, Superluminal Radio Blobs, and Multi-wavelength Flares
• Implications from the velocity profile of the M87 jet: a possibility of a slowly rotating black hole magnetosphere
• Pair-Regulated Klein-Nishina Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection with Applications to Blazars and Accreting Black Holes
• PATOKA: Simulating Electromagnetic Observables of Black Hole Accretion