The NICER "Reverberation Machine": A Systematic Study of Time Lags in Black Hole X-Ray Binaries

Abstract

We perform the first systematic search of all NICER archival observations of black hole (and candidate) low-mass X-ray binaries for signatures of reverberation. Reverberation lags result from the light travel time difference between the direct coronal emission and the reflected disk component, and therefore their properties are a useful probe of the disk-corona geometry. We detect new signatures of reverberation lags in 8 sources, increasing the total sample from 3 to 11, and study the evolution of reverberation lag properties as the sources evolve in outbursts. We find that in all of the 9 sources with more than 1 reverberation lag detection, the reverberation lags become longer and dominate at lower Fourier frequencies during the hard-to-soft state transition. This result shows that the evolution in reverberation lags is a global property of the state transitions of black hole low-mass X-ray binaries, which is valuable in constraining models of such state transitions. The reverberation lag evolution suggests that the corona is the base of a jet which vertically expands and/or gets ejected during state transition. We also discover that in the hard state, the reverberation lags get shorter, just as the QPOs move to higher frequencies, but then in the state transition, while the QPOs continue to higher frequencies, the lags get longer. We discuss implications for the coronal geometry and physical models of QPOs in light of this new finding.

29 pages, 21 figures

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• Dual-Corona Comptonization model for the Type-B Quasi-Periodic Oscillations in GX 339-4
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• A NICER look at the jet-like corona of MAXI J1535-571 through type-B quasi-periodic oscillations
• The hard to soft transition of GX 339-4 as seen by Insight-HXMT
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• Investigating the impact of vertically extended coronae on X-ray reverberation mapping
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• X-ray/UVOIR Frequency-resolved Time Lag Analysis of Mrk 335 Reveals Accretion Disk Reprocessing
• Black holes: Timing and spectral properties and evolution
• Fast transitions of X-ray variability in the black hole transient GX 339--4: comparison with MAXI J1820+070 and MAXI J1348-630
• An Electron-Scattering Time Delay in Black Hole Accretion Disks
• A broadband spectral-timing study of QPOs in the bright black hole X-ray binary Swift J1727.8-1613
• Wavelet spectral timing: X-ray reverberation from a dynamic black hole corona hidden beneath ultrafast outflows
• Time Evolving Photo Ionisation Device (TEPID): a novel code for out-of-equilibrium gas ionisation
• The origin of long soft lags and the nature of the hard-intermediate state in black hole binaries
• Probing black-hole accretion through time variability
• Evidence for a dynamic corona in the short-term time lags of black hole X-ray binary MAXI J1820+070
• Revisiting the galactic X-ray binary MAXI J1631-479: Implications for high inclination and a massive black hole
• Impact of reflection Comptonization on X-ray reflection spectroscopy: the case of EXO 1846-031
• Evolution of QPOs in GX 339-4 and EXO 1846-031 with Insight-HXMT and NICER
• Comptonization by Reconnection Plasmoids in Black Hole Coronae III: Dependence on the Guide Field in Pair Plasma
• Reverberation lags viewed in hard X-rays from an accreting stellar-mass black hole
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