The Bardeen-Petterson effect in accreting supermassive black-hole binaries: disc breaking and critical obliquity

Abstract

The inspiral of supermassive black-hole binaries in gas-rich environment is driven by the presence of an accretion disc and viscous interactions tend to align the spin of the black holes with the orbital angular momentum of the disc. Recent work introduced a new iterative approach to describe the alignment process and the resulting non-linear evolution of the surrounding warped accretion disc. Their model predicted that black-hole spins reach either full alignment or a critical obliquity where solutions to the warp equations cease to exist. In this paper, we show that this critical region corresponds to the disc breaking phenomenon, where the disc is disrupted into two or more discrete sections. We use 3D hydrodynamical simulations to (i) recover the predictions of the semi-analytic model and (ii) unveil a richer phenomenology where the disc exhibits either unsuccessful, single and multiple breaks. We additionally identify hydrodynamic effects such as spiral arms that are able to stabilise the disc against breaking beyond criticality. Our results show that when disc breaking occurs, the ability of black holes and disc to align is compromised and in some cases even prevented as the binary inspirals.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 15 pages, 11 figures. Movies of the simulations in this paper can be found at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVCh7-wtOgbJ_NOMDJ3JYOgEAAr0LsJNy

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• Self-lensing flares from black hole binaries I: general-relativistic ray tracing of black hole binaries
• Disk Tearing Leads to Low and High Frequency Quasi Periodic Oscillations in a GRMHD Simulation of a Thin Accretion Disk
• Self-lensing flares from black hole binaries II: observing black hole shadows via light-curve tomography
• Cosmic evolution of black hole-spin and galaxy orientations: clues from the NewHorizon and Galactica simulations
• Dynamics and spin alignment in massive, gravito-turbulent circumbinary discs around supermassive black hole binaries
• The Bardeen-Petterson effect, disk breaking, and the spin orientations of supermassive black-hole binaries
• Probing AGN jet precession with LISA
• Numerical modelling of the lobes of radio galaxies -- Paper V: Universal Pressure Profile cluster atmospheres
• Secular Spin-orbit Resonances of Black Hole Binaries in AGN Disks
• Disc breaking and parametric instability in warped accretion discs
• Disc breaking through forced eccentricity growth
• Parsec-scale jet precession and a putative supermassive binary black hole system in the blazar AO 0235+164