H-AMR FORGE'd in FIRE I: Magnetic state transitions, jet launching and radiative emission in super-Eddington, highly magnetized quasar disks formed from cosmological initial conditions

Abstract

Quasars are powered by supermassive black hole (SMBH) accretion disks, yet standard disk models are inconsistent with many quasar observations. Recently, Hopkins et al. (2024) simulated the formation of a quasar disk feeding a SMBH of mass $M=1.3\times 10^7{M}_{\odot }$ in a host galaxy that evolved from cosmological initial conditions. The disk had surprisingly strong toroidal magnetic fields that supported it vertically from gravity and powered fast accretion. What radiation and feedback can such a system produce? To answer this, we must follow the gas to the event horizon. For this, we interpolated the accretion system onto the grid of the general-relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics code H-AMR and performed 3D simulations with BH spins $a=0$ and $a=0.9375$. This remapping generates spurious magnetic monopoles, which we erase using a novel divergence cleaning approach. Despite the toroidal magnetic field's dominance at large radii, vertical magnetic flux builds up at the event horizon. This causes a magnetic state transition within the inner $200$ gravitational radii of the disk, where net vertical magnetic flux begins dominating the accretion flow. This powers strong winds and, if the BH spins, relativistic jets that can spin-down the BH within $5-10\mathrm{Myrs}$. Sometimes, vertical magnetic fields of opposite sign reach the BH, causing polarity inversion events that briefly destroy the jets and, possibly, the X-ray corona. The disk powers accretion at rates $5\times$ the Eddington limit, which can double the BH mass in $5-10\mathrm{Myrs}$. When $a=0.9375$ ($a=0$), the energy in outflows and radiation equals about $60\%$ ($10\%$) and $100\%$ ($3\%$) of the accreted rest mass energy, respectively. Much of the light escapes in cool, extended $\gtrsim 1300\mathrm{au}$ photospheres, consistent with quasar microlensing and the ``big blue bump'' seen in spectral energy distributions.

33 pages, 18 figures. Accepted to ApJ

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• Evidence for Low Universal Equilibrium Black Hole Spin in Luminous Magnetically Arrested Disks
• Thick Disks, Thin Hopes: Suppressed Capture and Merger Rates in AGN
• A general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics extension to mesh-less schemes in the code GIZMO
• Early Stages of Dusty Tori: The First Infrared Spectra from a Highly Multiscale Quasar Simulation
• Spacetime in motion: an evolving relativistic binary black hole metric for GIZMO