How Spatially Resolved Polarimetry Informs Black Hole Accretion Flow Models

Abstract

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has successfully produced images of two supermassive black holes, enabling novel tests of black holes and their accretion flows on horizon scales. The EHT has so far published total intensity and linear polarization images, while upcoming images may include circular polarization, rotation measure, and spectral index, each of which reveals different aspects of the plasma and space-time. The next-generation EHT (ngEHT) will greatly enhance these studies through wider recorded bandwidths and additional stations, leading to greater signal-to-noise, orders of magnitude improvement in dynamic range, multi-frequency observations, and horizon-scale movies. In this paper, we review how each of these different observables informs us about the underlying properties of the plasma and the spacetime, and we discuss why polarimetric studies are well-suited to measurements with sparse, long-baseline coverage.

arXiv commentSubmitted for Galaxies Special Issue "From Vision to Instrument: Creating a Next-Generation Event Horizon Telescope for a New Era of Black Hole Science"

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• Key Science Goals for the Next-Generation Event Horizon Telescope
• Reference Array and Design Consideration for the next-generation Event Horizon Telescope
• Using Machine Learning to Link Black Hole Accretion Flows with Spatially Resolved Polarimetric Observables
• Polarimetric Geometric Modeling for mm-VLBI Observations of Black Holes
• Impacts of radiative cooling on the images of a black hole shadow and extended jets in two-temperature GRMHD simulations